Gaming Wants: #RPGaDAY2020 10

Today's #RPGaDAY2020 prompt is

Want

What do I want? (GAMING when do I want it a reasonable portion of my time)

This prompt has me thinking about what I actually want out of gaming. Kind of as a companion piece to an earlier post about how my approaches to gaming have changed in the past, maybe this one is about looking to the future. So, unordered:

A weekly game. There's something about the regularity, of meeting with the same friends in the same world week after week, that builds into something marvelous. And maybe this is only with a long-running campaign, or maybe weekly one-shots would work just as well. I think it's the high frequency that matters--I don't think its something that can be captured with an occasional pick-up game, or monthly. Maybe bi-weekly. Too bad that it's impossible to find a time that works for everyone as adults.

A healthy discourse. There was rpgnet and then G+, there was the Forge and Storygames, there's always been twitter (feels like), now there's the discord and The OSR Pit, but there's still no sensible critique, no teaching, no professionally-run recognition (did you see the ENnies??). This is an indie scene, people swirling around the same ideas and disagreeing, sometimes violently, and while that has advantages with a low barrier to entry and punk/zine/DIY aesthetic it also means that it's too easy for toxicity to just fester and for poison to spread and for good ideas to get lost and forgotten. There is building-work coming out tho, in multitudinous forms (did you see Anti-Sisyphus?? and the RPG Design Zine is so cool). I dunno, building a scene is hard. Ask me about magicians some time.

Interesting stories. There's a lot of different ways to get these, and I'm not sure I have a preference. Shared narrative control is just as cool to me as emergent story from gameplay, so OSR ideas can overlap with weird GMless improv exercises and both with everything else like bennie systems to Fate-ian aspect-calling. And what about baking the story into the system through genre-specific actions like PbtA playbooks or mechanics like Dread or even hard-coding characters and plot like Lady Blackbird? There's more than one way to bind a book.

Players who want to try new things. I think conditions have to be right for this, and they all involve the above three things. People who meet regularly, built trust together, and maybe want variety. Players need to feel they're not trying something too esoteric or toxic or otherwise off-putting, and maybe have a vague familiarity with alternate systems. And the game needs to be worth playing, by the resulting stories being fun/memorable/engaging.

What do you want?

Under A Ruined Mall: Weird Occultronic Flora and Candlesnuffers

Planning out the dungeon for Gygax 75 Challenge using the weekend prompts from #RPGaDAY2020:

SHADE & light

The dungeon is the underground structures below where the mall used to be, amidst the ruins of the cyberpunk dystopia. A bunch of these steps are not done but that's fine, the Gygax 75 booklet specifically says that unfinished stuff each week is ok and you just move on and come back to it later, citing Hemingway's technique of ending writing sessions in the middle of a sentence so it's easy to start up again when you come back to it.

Tasks:

i. "Describe the entrance to the dungeon in 7-10 words".

Collapsed ramp into parking garage overgrown with metallic thorns.

ii. "Set aside at least one page of your journal for a point-to-point map."

I did this as well as drawing a quick sketch of the overall structure for myself just to keep the relative locations of things straight in my head. Also I'll probably run it as a pointcrawl anyway.

iii. "For each level, include d6+6 rooms/areas and connect them"

iv. "Include d3+1 ways up or down per level"

v. "Come up with three themes (one per level). Roll d3+2 for each to generate a budget"

So each level has some randomly-determined numbers. I rolled em all and kept track in a table:

Dungeon Level:	Parking Garage	Subway	Sewers and Undercity
Rooms/Areas:	12	9	10
Exits:	3	2	2
Theme Budget:	3	5	3

The themes for each level--if this is an introductory dungeon in this setting then I want it to explore some of the core aesthetics of the setting.

Level one: the parking garage. Theme: cursed vegetation. The occult calamity did all sorts of weird things, but one of the most omnipresent is the fusion of electronics with nature. Wiresnakes, electric berries, metallic thorns. The parking garage, being the level closest to the surface, will have the most contact with the "natural" world above and so will be overgrown and infested with weird occultronic flora and fauna.

Level two: the subway. Theme: technocultists. This is a way to explore the "occult" part of the setting. There is opportunity for some truly strange imagery, not just hooded figures and electric devil skeletons but also rituals and bargains and maybe an actual evil computer. Plus maybe the cultists are in the subway area because the connection to "transit" is important--are they trying to get somewhere else? Bring something here? Change something?

Level three: the undercity and sewers. Theme: shade and light (ha, there's the #RPGaDAY2020 prompts!). I'm basing this on my memory of the Seattle Underground Tour, of the city underneath the new one built on top. A cyberpunk dystopia absolutely would have layers of old buildings at the bottom. This idea of a huge futuristic neon world sitting on top of the ruins of the past literally left in the dark is very evocative. I was thinking things like areas of magical darkness, and bottomless pits, and will-o-the-wisps-but-they're-tiny-drones, and some kind of creature called a "candlesnuffer".

vi. "Make a list of 11 different monsters and place them".

TODO but for a start, there's: wiresnakes, technocultists, electric devil skeletons, candlesnuffers, wispdrones, rats, sewercrawlers, underdwellers, memory ghosts, empty spines, and man-eating plants.

vii. "Spread d6 features throughout the dungeon."

I rolled 4.

viii. "For each room/area, note whether there is treasure."

TODO

ix. "Name three wondrous items and locate them in the dungeon."

What kind of stuff can I pull from the source material to use here?

x. "Spend any remaining theme budget adding detail."

What kinds of sensory details fit into the areas of this map? And specific things to see?

Extra Credit:

"Map out all three levels on graph paper."

No that's hard let me just do a pointcrawl.

"Create a wandering monster table."

11 slots, probably different from the ones I stocked the dungeon with in step vi. WELP time to reskin a bunch of random monsters from the old books.

Lots of things to come back to!

Crooked Considerations: #RPGaDAY2020 7 - Couple

I've been doing the #RPGaDAY2020 daily blogging prompts, which this year come in the form of a dungeon map:

Today's prompt is

Couple

On and off over the past decade or so I've run a one-on-one game for my partner. I think the way an rpg plays with one GM and one PC is really fascinating and still an underexplored space. I've taken to calling them "duets", after a series of articles by Kirk Johnson-Weider on RPGnet several years ago.

Part of what is really interesting about duets is the close relationship you build during play. The focus is always on the PC--there are no other players to share the spotlight! It demands full engagement from the single player throughout, and a singular focus from the GM. It is very easy to build attachements to characters when the player-GM relationship is that close, and that leads to some difficulties when gameplay is stopped by PC death or other incapacitation. I think it's what I was trying to capture when I wrote guiding principles for developing Crook and several started with "there is only one player". If the PC dies, there is nobody else to continue the adventure. Even if the player rolled up a new PC on the spot, how would that new PC get involved in an adventure that was driven by the unique narrative of the previous PC?

Most systems assume that there will be multiple PCs. This is a big deal when play is assumed to be heavily combat-based or co-operation based--D&D for example, but really in most RPGs that aren't narrative-led. One way to account for this is to simply adjust the difficulty level. D&D 3 and up has CR calculations that can help; the OSR has Scarlet Heroes' clever way of translating ranges of damage into single digits based on hit dice. It also has the "fray die", which essentially gives the PC a way to taking out low-level baddies each turn for free. This generalizes into giving the PC extra powers, or increasing their power level. Heck, you could just "cheat" and give the player multiple PCs to control, or hirelings and henchmen.

But what if you don't want to change the power dynamic of the PC compared to the game world? I think in general, out of an instinct for self-preservation, most PCs that are on their own will try to avoid combat or difficult team-based challenges. Solo PCs will avoid situations where they could be taken out of play through death or otherwise. And that's not just out of self-presevation, that's to keep the duet game going!

Now that's not to say that the threat of death can't still be omnipresent. Foolish actions can (and if you're playing in an OSR style, should) still lead to dire consequences. But if the PC will be avoiding mortal peril, how else can you bring conflict into the game? I think it can come from risk-reward decisions, moral choices, and consequences for actions which lead to new adventure opportunities. Situations where it's unclear what might happen, and where potential outcomes drive the story further. To borrow from several modern rpg systems, we want the PC to fail forward: failure shouldn't throw up a wall that stops them from continuing, but it could throw up an alternate, more difficult, path.

I think (to clarify my own thoughts here explicitly), I'm saying that "you die" is the same kind of play-blocking as "you fail to pick the lock".

So for Crook, I want to have something that avoids blocking, something that has specific rules for failing forward or success by degrees/with consequences. Something in the realm of games Powered by the Apocalypse and its progeny (Blades in the Dark for sure), or Mouse Guard. Fate Accelerated is quite good for this too! NB these are games where the player is given some more narrative agency over things external to the PC, but I don't think that's strictly necessary to have a mechanic that avoids blocking play upon failure.

SO: In Crook, failing means that things don't go the way the PC wanted (whether that's slightly or catastrophically), but the PC can die only if they really deserve it AND if the player agrees to it.

/\/\U%2D00/\/\: #RPGaDAY2020 6 - Forest

Today's #RPGaDAY2020 prompt is

Forest

I've been doing the Gygax 75 and have been developing a post-apocalyptic post-cyberpunk setting. The challenge guides you to flesh out a dungeon map after making a general local area for your PCs to explore, but I wanted to flesh out another area of the map. Here's the description I wrote before:

Malfunctioning Solar Forest South edge of map. I read somewhere that in the future we'd have fake trees covered in solar panel leaves that rotate to face the sun, atop trunks full of filters that remove CO2 and toxins from the air and produce algae. This forest's broken though. And full of wiresnakes.

This leaves us with a couple of key questions we can use to flesh out this area:

Why is the forest malfunctioning?

In principle, the solar leaves themselves could still function. However, the servos that rotate them toward the sun have rusted through due to lack of maintenance. Also, wires and connectors have come loose to to scavenger, animal and occult activity. And some of the trees are just engulfed, ironically, in real vegetation. The vast majority of the batteries that store charge from the solar trees have been looted or broken. The air filter and algae pool systems have also failed.

What are the consequences?

Clouds of toxic gases hang in the forest like mist, and the algal bloom has gotten so out of control that there are areas of noxious slime. Some of them are corrosive. Some of them, perhaps, sentient.

Many of the wires here became wiresnakes after the occult calamity. They lie dormant, hungry for energy. Other creatures live in this forest, eating the algae and the twisting metallic vines and electric berry shrubs that have reclaimed and integrated with the artificial forest. Things like rats and pigeons and cyberowlbears. Predators too: lazerhawks and wild dogs.

What can people do here?

It's a place to gather resources. The various kinds of algae probably have uses, as do foraged foods(?) like electric berries. It'll be hard to find any charged batteries, but some might not have been looted, especially deeper in the forest. The solar leaves themselves are absolutely still usable. And if you had some unfathomable use for a whole bunch of wiresnakes, this forest has got you covered.

It's also a place of power. As one of the locales where the natural world has fused most completely with occult computing, technocultists and reality-hackers come here to perform rituals and commune with the Web.

Why would the PCs come here?

Here's some hooks and rumours:

1. Technocultists kidnapped an old man and took him to the solar forest.
2. The old control centre in the middle of the forest still has fully charged, giant power cells.
3. Young Fila swears they saw an owlbear climbing a solar tree.
4. Doc needs 20 live wiresnakes for a thing. Don't ask.
5. A reality-hacker calling herself /\/\U%2D00/\/\ is offering a way to jack into the Web without getting a virus, by hooking up to a specific solar tree.
6. On the summer solstice, all the solar trees wake up again and everyone can charge their batteries--but the creatures are all really agitated.

Artifical forests with cyber-occult wildlife are cool.

The Barbarian Must Write A Poem: #RPGaDAY2020 5 - Tribute

Today's #RPGaDAY2020 prompt is

Tribute

It's always interesting for a character to have to give something up in order to continue on their path.

Now that could be something physical that they're carrying--for example to make room for treasure because otherwise they'll suffer encumbrance--but what about other things they could give up?

Say they are travelling through land controlled by an entity that demands tribute. And this faction has resources enough to be nonplussed by bags full of gold.

Perhaps the despotic ruler demands that the PCs swear fealty to his rival kingdom. Or wants them to proclaim something publicly that the PCs might not agree with. Maybe they're a religious leader and want the PCs to worship a specific deity.

Physical offerings can also be made more interesting and serve as adventure hooks. What if the tribute must be a fruit from a specific tree in the twisted woods to the south? Or a carved image of a false idol, made by a local craftswoman?

What resources do the PCs have other than their stuff? If it's a domain management game, maybe they need to give a share of their crops to the king, or a portion of their population to join the army. Or they have to round up some monsters for the parliamentary zoo.

Hell maybe they are actually called to pay tribute at a special event to soothe the ego of the egotistical queen so she doesn't pull out of a peace treaty. The bard has to write an ode to her; the barbarian must fight in the ceremonial gladiatorial tournament. Or the other way round!

Make your PCs pay tribute in a way that can't be solved with a bag of gold. It'll make for a better story.

Laservision and Squeeze Focus: #RPGaDAY2020 4 - Vision

Today's #RPGaDAY2020 prompt is

Vision

I hate vision mechanics.

What's the difference between infravision and darkvision? Or low-light vision? How does dim light affect combat? What about fog, or magical darkness? What if my character is blinded? How far does my torch cast light? Is there an aura of dim light around that? What if I move during an enemies turn and change the lighting condition they're in? How far can I actually see? Which creatures have which kind of vision?

Et cetera, et fucking cetera...

There are -too many interactions- for there to be rules for these things. This is the clearest case I can think of where "rulings over rules" makes literally everything easier for both the GM and the players. Nobody wants to look this stuff up in play and nobody is going to remember all the different multi-dimensional Venn diagrams of overlap and superceding rules.

If it's dark, you can't see unless you have a light source or your species can see without light. Everything else is subject to ruling by the GM. DONE. (If you want infravision because it works in a weird way and exlains why old monsters have red eyes GO NUTS you don't need rules for that)

OH and like, the party where everyone's a dwarf or elf and can see in the dark but there's -one- human so they all have to use a torch? It means that in 90% of circumstances the see-in-the-dark ability just doesn't matter and the other 10% of the time it's just sending someone ahead to scout outside of the torchlight. It's a pet peeve and annoying (just like the party where everyone can move 30ft but the halfling only moves 25ft so -everyone- has to slow down, and this especially fucks the player who took an option that doubles their move speed), but I guess it can lead to some interesting inter-party conflict or tactical decisions. However I think it would be better to find differentiation between species like Arnold K suggests for the GLOG, with active abilities rather than passive ones. Or giving them an interesting trade-off.

Like:

Laservision: You can cause your eyeballs to shoot lasers that bounce off things and return to you carrying distance and temperature information, functioning over the length of a huge underground cavern. However, this causes your eyes to glow red, which can be noticed from a good distance away, and also there is a 1-in-8 chance your eyes overheat, causing you to go blind for 1d8 hours.

or

Squeeze Focus: By working your orbital muscles you can shift the liquid in your eyeballs to give you the ability to see miles further than usual, with perfect acuity. However, this gives you incredibly blurred vision for anything near you. This effect lasts for 2d4 rounds.

I think these would be immensely more fun to play with than just plain "60 foot darkvision".

Hanging by a: #RPGaDAY2020 3 - Thread

Today's #RPGaDAY2020 prompt is

Thread

Some years ago for the 200 Word RPG competition I came up with a mythologically-themed game called Strands of Fate, where the main resolution mechanic was two people each hold opposite ends of a length of string, pull sharply til it breaks, and compare the two halves to see who won.

I still think this is cool as hell and I want to learn how to lay out a nice PDF so I can put it up on itchio.

Some changes I'd make for clarity or to make it easier to play:

• a set of d12 tables of deity-concepts, to give the players guidance of what sort of concepts to use. Note the deliberate omission of Good and Evil:

d12 Deity Concepts:	Abstract	Worldly	Elemental
1	Love	Household	Fire
2	Honour	Agriculture	Water
3	Death	Hunting	Earth
4	Secrets	Sun	Air
5	War	Moon	Light
6	Life	Pain	Dark
7	Inspiration	Feasting	Thunder
8	Lies	Cooking	Slime
9	Peace	Healing	Void
10	Chaos	Fertility	Ice
11	Law	Craftwork	Magnetism
12	Revenge	Storms	Metal

• guidance for deciding on your deity's concepts:

"Each of you is a deity, responsible for some concept. It could be something abstract, like Love or Honour. It could be something mundane, like cheese or doorknobs. If you aren't sure, roll a d12 once, or twice and combine."

• changes to who you control and how:

"[...] Deities each have two Chosen, mortals who are their pawns in a story of adventure, betrayal, magic, and secrets. A Chosen could be a legendary champion, or they could be a milkmaid. They could be born of the gods and aware of their destiny, or they could be entirely unaware that they have been touched by the divine. Your pawns are yours to carry out your will, and do what you decree unless your will comes into conflict with another deity. Give your Chosen names, so that it hurts when they fail."

• clarity on collaborative narrative and structuring play:

"[...] A deity chosen by fate offers a simple quest: an artifact must be found, a war brought to an end, a competition won... In turn, each deity adds to the quest a detail related to their concept. Then a deity is chosen by fate to be the antagonist, who will offer obstacles to success. The protagonist's deity attempts to help, and other deities choose their own paths, making bargains and threats as they see fit. Take turns describing what the Chosen attempt to do, or what is happening in the world."

The result might be longer than 200 words but a little more playable. Now I just need to learn how to design a nice one-page rpg pdf.

Mechanics Should Get Out of the Way: #RPGaDAY2020 2 - Change

Today's #RPGaDAY2020 prompt is

Change

A lot of my interests and involvement in the hobby have changed over the years. Or have they?

When I first started playing regularly, it was D&D 3.0. The longest campaigns I played in were 3.5, and I ran my urban fantasy homebrew The City for years in d20 modern. The sheer amount of options for characters were staggering. Skills, feats, prestige classes, a truly mindboggling amount of OGL sourcebooks--it was corpulent. Oh my god, that one Mutants and Masterminds game I ran... I assumed this was just how it worked. I -hated- prepping for the d20 modern campaign. Making balanced encounters around CR calculations, trying to create encounters specifically to challenge each PC ability, creating set-pieces and plots; when all I realy wanted to do (and kind of ended up doing anyway at the table) was just have an idea of how things might go and make up most of it as I needed it.

I played other games now and then, but it wasn't until I stumbled onto Spirit of the Century that I realized games didn't necessarily need to be so fiddly. Reading up on Fate really created a shift in perspective--not so much the shared narrative control, but that instead of making a shit-ton of hyperspecific classes and skill lists and character options, you could just... be the thing you wanted to be. The mechanics were there to -support- your idea, rather than having to implement some shadow of your idea through the mechanics.

Now of course this didn't always work in practice, and Fate still suffered some skill bloat (ever tried navigating the list from Diaspora?), but the absolute delight of Fate Accelerated Edition pretty much solved those issues and I wish I could play it more.

When I was living in England, the long-term campaign was just not an option. But there I found a community of designers who were always playtesting and trying out weird small indie games, and it was like I had walked through the doors of perception. Exposure to completely off-the-wall mechanics, one-page RPGs that didn't take themselves seriously, rules-light things that provided scaffolding for specific genres, games that generated histories and maps, the concept of ludonarrative dissonance, the crazy worlds of nordic larp, immersive theatre, and real-world games...

It was in this space, somewhere, that I also stumbled into OSR games. I knew nothing of the scene or people involved in it and mostly thought it was retroclones rather than a style of design and play. But some of the ideas I found, those that melded with other things I was learning from indie games, of stripping out and simplifying mechanics so that they get out of the way and just _letting players be who they want to be: oh that locked a change into the way I wanted to run games. I think it might have specifically been crystalized in an idea I saw in Kevin Crawford's Scarlet Heroes: characters get a background, and up to 3 points in it. They get to add those points as a bonus to any check they make that could reasonably be related to that background. It's so simple and transparent and doesn't involve like 12 different subsystems and I was like "why can't the whole thing be like this".

I've tended to like classless, rules-lite play ever since, with favoured systems being FAE, Maze Rats, and Knave. Ooo, I think running something in Risus would be good fun precisely for these reasons.

It's been interesting to see how the changes have been in knowledge and exposure rather than taste and attitudes. I kind of always knew what I wanted in rpgs, even if I couldn't express it, and managed to discover games that did those things. I'm kind of wondering now if I can codify some of those tastes in design decisions for Crook, or if they can just be things that hang out in my mind and I can keep finding ways of interacting with them via different games and systems.

What about you? How have your tastes and experiences in rpgs changed?

Restart: #RPGaDAY2020 1 - Beginning

Another year, another #RPGaDAY!

This year the daily blogging prompts take the form of words on a map:

Today's prompt is:

BEGINNING

There are more beginnings than ends.

Part of this is because I start a lot of projects and then never finish them (because other things capture my interest, or I run out of time, or I just don't want to do it anymore), but also I think in general the space of potential is much larger than the space of actual outcomes.

In this hobby, we think about how things start a lot. You all meet in a tavern. Setting expectations and rolling characters in session zero. Coming up with good adventure hooks. Looking into the shadowy dungeon entrance, lantern held high.

I wanted to get a sense of how I've been thinking about beginnings. Luckily I had the good sense to make "beginnings" a tag on this blog, so I'll review some of the things that come up on in posts I've tagged "beginnings".

The first post on this blog, obviously. Interestingly while I've mostly kept to intentions a b and d, I'd forgotten about c: "comment on and synthesize the work of other roleplaying bloggers". I have a bunch of text documents in my "Gaming" folder where I put summaries of stuff I find on blogs that all seems to fit together; for example a whole bunch of different guides on creating adventures. I think I convinced myself that nobody wanted to see stuff that was already elsewhere, but maybe that's not true? Especially if I grind it up into a paste and spread the result out.

There are a bunch of #RPGaDAY2016 posts that are tagged too. Things about getting the first session started off right, first experiences roleplaying, etc. I still love the story of how I just walked in and sat down to watch some people playing in the university dorm common room like some kind of creep and now they're awesome friends and I still play with them every week 12 years later.

There are posts about starting off game design projects, like the weird graveyard text adventure thing I started making for nagademon, and more recently my attempts to make a thiefy duet game in Crook and the Gygax 75 challenge I'm doing at this very moment.

The most-viewed post on this blog is tagged "beginnings": it's the list of Reasons to Do Gamethings which provides an occasionally-updated calendar of game jams, blogging prompts, design competitions and challenges. A whole bunch of potential beginnings!

There's also a post about the *DREAM Principles, which I think I saw as a new beginning for the OSR scene (LOLSOB especially now as I write this with loads of people leaving the OSR discord over TERF shit and opaque moderation). I actually have a draft post where I was going to look at another list of principles (the Dungeonpunk Manifesto from Sword and Backpack), and I think it would be interesting to do a series of posts about these lists of principles cause there's loads of them out there (like the Possum Laws of Gaming and the Principia Apocrypha and even the Dungeonpunk Counter-Manifesto which responded to Sword and Backpack's manifesto cause it wasn't punk enough!)

That's it for this review of previous beginnings. And whaddya know, it generated a few more beginnings. Let's see if they lead to any ends.

2d6 Electric Devil Skeletons: Gygax 75 Challenge Week 2

I've been working through Ray Otus' Gygax 75 rpg design challenge, making a post-apocalyptic setting where an occult calamity brought a cyberpunk dystopia to ruin (and it takes place about 150 years after the cyberpunk setting a friend's making for gygax75).

SPOILERS FOR PLAYERS

Tasks for Week 2:

i. "Get a sheet of hex paper."

I drew one by hand in a children's lined exercise book. 17x13 hexes, points to the sides. Will probably redraw on a different scale in Hex Kit.

ii. "One settlement of significant size."

The Dolmens. Central. Based on a dangerous area in Sean's gygax setting that features recently-built megalithic structures. Well several generations later they aren't recent anymore and the area isn't dangerous anymore--people just live in amongst these ramshackle stone slab lean-tos.

iii. "Two other settlements."

Trading Post. West edge of map. Situated conveniently between several large settlements, this village of tents and market stalls is a great place to arrange a meeting, get mods repaired, fill up on fresh water and greasy vendor food, and hear rumours from other parts of the world.

Wind Farm. North northeast. You got to charge up your powercells somewhere. Rusty old blades spin atop patched-up towers. This is like a community garden--everyone maintains it because everyone uses it. Doesn't stop some people from trying to own it though.

iv. "One major terrain feature."

Malfunctioning Solar Forest. South edge of map. I read somewhere that in the future we'd have fake trees covered in solar panel leaves that rotate to face the sun, atop trunks full of filters that remove CO2 and toxins from the air and produce algae. This forest's broken though. And full of wiresnakes.

v. "One mysterious site to explore."

Memory Garden. East. This is like a graveyard, but there are no bodies and the markers are things. Old coats and handwritten notes, abstract sculptures and grafitti and bicycle wheels with candy wrappers tied on the spokes. Nobody knows how it started, but tradition dictates that visitors leave a memory for someone or some event gone by. The memory guardians ensure that the esoteric traditions are followed.

vi. "One main dungeon entrance."

Abandoned Parking Garage. Southeast. Amongst the ruins of a cyberpunk sprawl there's a way to get into the old parking garage system that served the downtown megamall and associated office tower blocks. It probably connects to sewer systems and old subway tunnels that haven't been used in over a century. Early survivors probably stashed things down there, but people and creatures and other, nastier, things have moved in probably.

regarding scale.

I drew it with 3-mile hexes in mind but the scale of things doesn't seem right so I'll probably redraw with the recommended 1-mile hexes.

extra credit.

"Pimp your map."

I didn't do anything to my physical map but I'll mess around with Hex Kit. I wanted more stuff on the map though I added another area:

The Dominos. An area of old residential towers that have collapsed in such a way that it reminds folk of tumbled dominos. Its surrounded by dunes of grey ash--the eroded remains of concrete and ashphalt. Somewhere in the grey wastes is an enormous abandoned arcology-pyramid with a huge spherical chunk missing out the side.

"Create a random encounters table."

Hell yeah. I used the old advice of "2 is always a dragon and 12 is always a wizard", interpreted through this setting lens.

2d6	Encounter	Description
2	Cryoleviathan.	Sleeping. It hoards power sources, and collects people. It puts them into the hundreds of cryogenic pods inside of its body.
3	Ritual circle.	Unholy computing stuff is wired all wrong. In the centre of the circle, someone is wearing a cyberhelm, jacked into the beyond.
4	Patrolling fascist drone.	Will beat anyone who isn't an upstanding citizen of New Haven (which stopped existing over a century ago).
5	Technocultists.	1d6+1 cultists on the hunt for materials. They need blood and power.
6	Wiresnakes.	2d4 hide somewhere they could be stepped on. Attracted to power sources: they want to attach their prong-teeth and suck them dry.
7	Travelers.	2d4-1 fellow survivors. Wary of strangers. Don't want no trouble. Will trade if reaction roll goes well.
8	Riders.	1d6+1 antagonistic folk. Probably on horses, though 1 in 6 might have an electric mountain bike. They don't believe in laws and want to take stuff.
9	Electric Devil Skeletons.	They want skin to cover their chrome. 2d6 skeletons lurk here.
10	Cyberghouls.	1d6+2 people who modded so much they've lost their minds.
11	An abandoned campsite.	They left in a hurry--stuff's still lying around. A corpse is in one of the tents; it's missing its blood.
12	Ritual hacker.	They're setting up equipment and aim to call a rogue AI for "favours".

Technoccult: Gygax 75 Challenge Week 1

A couple of months ago Ray Otus released the Gygax 75 Challenge, a 5-week workbook guiding one through making a small campaign setting based on the advice of an article Gary Gygax published in a zine less than a year after D&D came out.

It looks super fun so I printed it out and bound it with a pamphlet stitch and flipped through and saw a one-line suggestion that it could be a cyberpunk setting instead of standard fantasy. I shared my excitement about this with Sean Smith (creator of such wonders as Quarrel & Fable, Gully-Toads, and Exuviae), who it turns out had -also- decided to do the Gygax 75 with a cyberpunk setting.

WELL

I decided it would be fun to do a setting linked to his.  Mine takes place 100 years after a calamity destroys whatever cyberpunk civilization existed, and might even feature the same location as a ruin. Fuck knows if this will actually realize in that way but it's a hell of a good idea to start off running with.

What would the the post-apocalypse be like after a cyberpunk future?

Anyway, Gygax 75 Week 1:

i. "Get/create a notebook." This blog is it!  also the simplenote app on my phone. I did consider using a physical notebook and I might do that for maps, but I find it easier to capture ideas in text digitally.

ii. "Develop your pitch." So it's a kind of post-cyber-occult-pocalypse. Here goes:

    1. A century ago, the technologic future suffered an occult calamity.

    2. Humanity scavenges for survival in the ruins of a cyperpunk dystopia.

    3. Electric devil skeletons animated by technocultists lurk in collapsed arcologies and burnt-out server farms.

    4. There is a belief that if the dark ritual that caused the calamity can be discovered, it can be reversed. Not everyone wants this.

    5. Power sources are valuable because old cyber-tech still exists and can be repaired and run; batteries are sparingly traded for other goods; "if it runs a current it's currency".

    6. Forests of broken solar-panel trees snaked through with exposed wires; vast expanses of grey ash made of former office tower blocks.

    7. Technoccult magicks are accomplished through rituals that blend blood with computing; sorcery is just another kind of hacking; demons are indistinguishable from rogue AIs.

iii. "Gather your sources of inspiration." Not to be viewed by players, so close your eyes I guess.

    1. Mad Max series (George Miller). Post-apocalyptic settings full of freaks in gonzo costumes roaming around a ruined landscape owe much to Mad Max.

    2. Dangerous Days (Perturbator). The visual aesthetics of dark synthwave are just right on in general but Dangerous Days in particular--I mean there's one image that literally says "SATAN IS A COMPUTER"

    3. Polybius (urban legend). The idea of a satantic mind-control arcade game released as a psychological experiment in portland in the 80s is THE BEST. also other games where demonic forces bleed into the real world like Pony Island and Undertale

    4. The neon graveyard (Las Vegas). What would the bright neon cityscape of a cyberpunk dystopia look like post-collapse? I reckon it'd be like the vegas neon graveyard.

    5. The Matrix trilogy (the Wachowskis). Specifically the real world outside the matrix with that wild underground city and giant vat-walls full of dreaming battery-humans.

    6. Blade Runner (Ridley Scott). What if this society collapsed? Those giant pyramids and video screens, dark and abandoned?

    7. the occult origins of personal computing (Al Robertson). This cyberpunk author has spoken on the idea that the pioneers of the internet, virtual reality, and mass technology were inspired by occult and psychedelic movements. Never mind if it's true or not, that idea's cool as hell.

extra credit. "Assemble a mood board" yes good

That'll do for now I think! Maybe a hack of Mutant Future could run this pretty good.

Crook: Fleshing Out Clients and Jobs

In Crook, the start of any story is our protagonist looking at their list of job offers and choosing one to pursue.

I have been thinking of this like a more focused version of the rumours a party of adventurers might hear while playing in a sandbox game. These are the hooks that lead them to interesting, potentially pre-prepared places (stocked dungeons, bounded explorable locations like forests or swamps, small towns with secret cults, etc). In Crook, because we're narrowing our focus to jobs that -patrons- offer, a way to still capture a similar sense of freedom, exploration and discovery like in a "true" sandbox game is to make a -really engaging- job board.

So what details make a job listing interesting?

The generator I detailed in a previous post provides details that allow the player to make some risk/reward decisions--the outcome literally tells you how risky the job is and what the reward will be--but aside from a very brief description of the type of patron and the kind of job, there are no evocative details to actually act as hooks.

I think the details that do the most work in this regard would include:

    -the patron: their profession/occupation, and their relationship to the crook and any factions (and potentially their personality quirks).

    -the job: the key people or objects involved, an interesting location, the obstacles, and a theme.

My instinct as always is to turn to random generators to create some inspiration for each of these factors that the GM can flesh out into details. However, that's not strictly necessary. In the same way that you can stock the rumour tables in your sandbox game with hooks leading to prepared dungeon crawls and encounters and other already-existing stuff, the crook's job board can have listings that would lead the crook to prepared adventures. Pretty much any "find this item" or "interact with this person" job can easily be fitted onto any existing adventure module.

BUUUUT it's pretty fun to create a whole adventure from just a few random prompts that then interact both the GM's setting knowledge and with the decisions of our motivated crook.

The structure I used as a starting point to make jobs for Penny was:

    patron-type occupation; descriptor descriptor place; job-type; risk; opposition; distance; reward

A lot of this is provided by the job generator: ie patron-type is criminal/noble/merchant/etc and job-type is theft/smuggle/escort/etc--risk, distance, and reward are settled too.

Sometimes I would use the "Sample Crimes", "Location" and "Potential Foes" tables at the back of Scarlet Heroes to generate some of these details, but those crimes are more for the PC to -investigate- rather than commit (the list includes crimes like "forced marriage", "treason", "dark worship", and "rape"--I'm not going to include those as jobs for the PC to do in my games and I recommend you don't either).

But mostly I'd generate the details from scratch using several different tables:

The patron's occupation came from a list of "101 fantasy jobs and professions" made by Ennead Games (now no longer available individually, though it -is- part of a $500+ bundle)--which I liked not only for the huge list of occupations but also because each one included a short hook this kind of NPC could offer (ie a gravedigger mentions that bodies are being dug up, a blacksmith needs a rare alloy for a special weapon, a teacher asks for help locating a missing child...).  This would combine with the patron-type from the job generator, ie "criminal lore master", "noble/merchant musician", and "military blacksmith". This provided a really good jumping-off point--you can already imagine the kind of work each of these combos might offer. The rest of the patron's details would come from numerous other generators that would provide personality quirks, names, ancestry/culture, etc.

The details of the job beyond just whether it's theft/smuggling/etc is a pair of descriptors, a place, and the opposition. Most of the time I would generate these using my favourite GM tool ever, Instant Game (another product that was -almost- not available anymore, as its creators and their publishing imprint Animalball Partners have vanished from the internet--but a copy of the original freely-available PDF is on RPGGeek). It had d100 tables for all the relevant categories and would result in evocative prompts like "gloomy ritual correctional system, opposition mythical legend", "steady tough government office, opposition mindless horde", and "awesome secret armoury, opposition invaders/outsiders".

These prompts about the job, in combination with the details of the patron, are enough to create a really evocative hook for our crook, and gets you about 80% of the way to what you need to run the session.

I would refine the results into a more specific job offer, using details of the world that were established through play in previous sessions.  For example "awesome secret armoury" was part of a job offer that turned into:

    "Maganak Five Names, elven diplomat, wants a wand delivered to a secret city defense armoury. but city is overrun by oozes. reward: some coin, and whatever you steal."

The city overrun by oozes was just an offhand comment in an earlier session of the game that I jotted down to keep for later.  Meanwhile "gloomy ritual correctional system" combined with other prompts to become:

    "Cotme Ower, halfling ferryman. smuggles contraband and people to/from island prison of Glama-worshipping cult of liars. wants help to con prison guards of a particular shipment. reward: standard fee and one set of enchanted armour"

Don't those sound like fun jobs to get involved in? Not only that but they give pretty clear direction for what the GM could prepare for the session if the crook chooses to do that job.

Now the question is, as I develop Crook into a Thing: should it have its own tables, or can I just recommend the use of these kinds of tables? I don't think I could do a unique job of filling a d100 table better than the tables I use, but also -none- of the tables that form the core of the job generator are widely available anymore. Should Crook include its own generators to provide prompts, or just include guidance on what makes a good job hook?

I haven't decided yet, and out of cowardice will put the question aside and work on something else entirely for the next several posts!

Guiding Principles for Crooks

It occurs to me that as I go forward trying to make the systems I've created to run a thief job duet game for my partner into something other people can use, it would be wise to come up with some guiding principles. Or at least, make concrete the ones I've been implicitly using.

***

Crook

A game where a lone scoundrel does unusual jobs for unusual people.

1. Player-focused preparation. There is only one player; the GM should focus on things -that specific- player is likely to be interested in.

2. Alternative challenges. There is only one player; it is not possible to solve every problem by hitting it.

3. Alternative consequences. There is only one player; removing them from play should be avoided, but bad things can and will happen to them.

4. Rulings over rules. In the OSR/DIY sense: don't use a rule where you can make it work well on the fly.

5. Be permissive. Yes, and/but. No locked doors without stakes.

***

Thoughts on what these mean for making decisions when designing Crook:

1: What sorts of things is our crook going to be interested in?  The people who offer them jobs, and the nature of those jobs (I've been working on a job generator for this). The people and things that can help them accomplish those jobs. Something that they can do or work towards with the rewards from those jobs (are they paying off a debt? are they atoning for their past? do they want to prove themselves to a specific person? this likely should be a key trait established in when the player makes their crook). Organizations they can be part of, influence or be influenced by that will affect the other things they're interested in (thieves guilds, town guard, noble families, merchants, gangs, etc).

It's also important to tailor to the specific tastes of the player in your duet. Do they like dungeoncrawling more than courtly intrigue? Do they run off their mouth and start fights? Have they trained for years to become the perfect silent assassin? The jobs they're offered and the challenges they face should reflect the tastes of the player-as-a-person.

2: Combat shouldn't always be avoided, but there should be a focus on solving problems in a way that doesn't get the crook killed or incarcerated. This is important in all kinds of roleplaying adventure games, but I feel it's especially important in a duet. Ingenuity, insight, and non-linear thinking can be encouraged by giving the crook non-combat tools: immovable rods, vials of grease, and 1/day misty step as opposed to flasks of alchemists fire, acid arrows, and enchanted daggers (though if such standard combat items are given sparingly, that will encourage their use in creative ways).

This also can be reflected in environment design. Firey laterns swinging on long chains; precarious boulders above the narrow pass; loose bricks around the other side of the house. Traps that can be reset or redirected. Multiple paths in and out, and ways to manipulate the environment totally--what if there's a button on a pedestal that turns all the liquid in a 20 ft radius into blood? What if the inscription on the ceiling, when translated, teaches a chant that blocks out the sun for 2 minutes and then you forget the chant forever?

3: Preventing your one player from doing what they want to do by killing them or otherwise taking them out of play only serves to stop the game. Instead, have things break, or lost, or be stolen. Have important other people die. If a brutal combat does occur, have the crook be scarred or lose a limb or an eye. Or perhaps the baddies choose not to kill: it's always fun to have our protagonist hogtied and left to die in the desert--or perhaps thrown into a barrel, which is then chucked into a river heading toward a waterfall.

4: This is as much a reminder to myself to pare down rules wherever I can as it is guidance for running the game. That said, while making systems for Crook, I can and probably will go overboard, with full knowledge that I'll have to cut away all the cruft later. A rule of thumb I like for this is from Goblin Punch: "only write a rule when it is better than what you could come up with on the fly". And "better" can be defined in a number of ways as detailed in that post.

5: Others have been far more sophisticated than I with this, but nothing annoys me more than a locked door that is hard to open and if you fail there's no consequence other than not getting through the door. At least put some time pressure on: is the guardian automaton searching for the crook? Is a boulder rolling down the hallway towards us? Or give consequences for failure: the lock breaks and now you've made a wall. Or picking it sloppily triggers a visible blowdart aimed at the lock, or releases acid into the font of healing mineral water you're trying to get to. NO LOCKED DOORS WITHOUT STAKES.

If they want to do something and there's no consequence for failure, they do it! If you really want it to hurt for your Crook to try doing something mundane you can roll to see how many tries it takes and make them lose some spare change down a chasm each time they stumble (and I hope it's clear that that kind of pettiness is precisely what should be avoided). This goes for -abstract- doors especially. If our crook has a hunch about what kind of liquor the gang leader likes to drink as a digestif, they either can find out by asking the GM if they know or can do something interesting to find out (like sneaking into the leader's office and reading their diary, or bribing the manager of the member's-only bar, or beating it out of a lackey)--it should -not- be locked behind a knowledge roll that can be failed.

I think that'll do for now.

OH WAIT one thing I like about the name Crook is that it reminds me of "by hook or by crook" which is exactly the way in which our protagonist should try to accomplish things.

Another Job for Penny: Detailing Jobs for Thieves, Interpreting the Value of Favours, and the Concept of Notoriety

Last time, I wrote about how hacking a sci-fi OSR mission generator for a tabletop duet game led to discovering a recursive random table that alters itself.

This time I want to flesh out in more detail how several random tables combined to generate interesting jobs for Penny the thief, and try tweaking the way some of the tables work.

The results of rolling on the job tables gives you only this information: a type of patron, a type of job, and its risk, distance, and reward. The patron table was detailed last time, but I'll include it here with the other tables (which I hacked from the sci-fi generator):

***

Thief Job Generator 0.2

Patron: 1d6
    1-2: criminal
    3:  noble/merchant
    4: government
    5: military
    6: former patron

    (if 6, roll on Former Patrons subtable. every time a job is accepted from a new patron, they're added to the Former Patrons subtable.)

Job Type: 1d10 (criminal: -1 to roll; military or government: +1 to roll)

   

    1: piracy

    2: theft

    3: confidence scam

    4: smuggling

    5: bizarre

    6: bounty

    7: escort

    8: delivery

    9: rescue

    10: disaster relief

Risk Level (ie; Number of Encounters/Challenges): 1d6

    1-2: three

    3: four

    4: five

    5-6: six

    (add Notoriety level to the roll)

Distance from Current Location: 1d6

    1: current location

    2: nearest village

    3: nearest city

    4: 1 weeks' travel

    5: 2 weeks' travel

    6: a months' travel

Reward: 1d6 & based on Risk & Distance rolls & Notoriety of thief:

        X = (risk+notoriety)*distance

    1-2: wealth worth X*40g

    3-4: favour (proportional to X)

    5: gear worth X*60g

    6: add 1 to Notoriety and roll again

***

There's a couple of things I want to point out and work on:

Changing the range of results on the Patrons table so that "criminal" happens on 1 and "former patron" happens of 5-6 would make jobs from existing patrons more likely, which can allow fleshing out those characters from interacting with them more often--which seems like it would be pretty fun.  In practice when using the table, sometimes a new patron would be generated that seems similar to an existing one, and so I'd just make it a job from that existing patron.

Shifting the range of outcomes on the Job Type table by just adding or subtracting 1 from the roll to make the extremes unavailable is a cool idea. I wonder what it would be like if it was a roll with a "normal" distribution like 2d6?  That would be a way to make certain types of jobs more likely and certain types of jobs more rare. I might do this and set "theft" to the centre of the distribution at 7 to make it the most likely kind of job.

You could make certain types of jobs -only- offered by certain patrons by assigning them an outcome outside of the normal range and using the +1/-1 trick. For example, 2d6 can give you outcomes ranging from 2 to 12. If you want only criminal patrons to offer an assassination job -and- make it really rare, you can assign that to an outcome of 1, and give the criminal patron a -1 roll modifier on the Job Type table.

The Risk Level can be interpreted differently based on the type of job. If it's a dungeon delve to retrieve an item, then the number of encounters could be the number of "interesting" rooms in the dungeon (ie a fight, a trap, an environmental challenge, etc). If it's a mission involving navigating the treacherous relationships between a number of gangs, then it could be the number of parties involved. It could be the number of locations that must be visited to collect parts of a document.  The Risk number could even be more abstract and refer to increasingly dangerous random encounter tables (ie; if it's Risk 1, roll on the Basic Encounter table, 2 roll twice, if it's 3, roll on the Challenging Encounter table, 4 roll twice, 5 roll on Deadly Encounter, 6 roll twice--or something like that). Note that the roll is added to the thief's Notoriety level--more on that later.

The Distance table is interesting. I adapted it for the kind of travel scale that made sense for a game where a thief goes from place to place doing jobs for patrons. This encourages travel from point to point on the world map, and this travel can either be abstracted away entirely, made into a ration-using navigation minigame, or turned into a full hexcrawl, as per the preference of your duet.

The Reward table needs tweaking to help with interpreting the results. I really like that it's based proportionally on the Risk and Distance results (and Notoriety--we'll get to it!). This is easy to understand for wealth and gear worth some multiple of the number, (and this multiplier should be set sensibly for the currency of your game: probably some fraction of the cost of a sword or potion, or of the debt your thief is paying off) But what does it mean for "Favour Owed"--the most interesting result on the table?

Before tackling that, I wanted to understand the way the results work. The result of multiplying Risk by Distance ranges from 1 to 36, but it's skewed--the most likely results are 6 and 12 (rather than the 18 you'd expect from a balanced distribution). On a graph, the peak is to the left and there is a long tail to the right.  This means that our thief can regularly expect low-to-middling value rewards but allows for a wide range of surprises to occur. You can get a little as 40 g, which is a job a thief probably wouldn't take just for the money, or as much as 2160g worth of gear, which could completely re-outfit our thief--but most likely you're looking in the 200 to 900 g range. However, a bunch of results just aren't possible to get, because you're multiplying two d6 rolls--you can't get 35, or 19, or 7... this results in less round numbers for currency value rewards, which is great for avoiding round numbers. Why offer a reward of 250 g when you can offer 240 g? And if you end up with 480 g worth of gear, some if it will be fun weird filler stuff because most equipment lists cost round numbers.

The question then becomes how to interpet this result as the value of a favour. An easy way to get around that is to treat it just like wealth or gear, but delayed or specific to certain context. Ie; the patron can pay off a bounty on your head worth X*50g, or source a special potion you need, or get you a specialist hireling for job you're doing, or a place worth that much to use as a safehouse, or perhaps a permanent discount at a particular merchant.

But the thing that makes favours interesting as a reward is their potential non-monetary value and their flexibility.  You can forsee our thief calling in a favour to arrange a meeting with an elusive clan leader, or to get safe passage through a warzone, or to hide in the secret basement of the shop when the royal guard is sweeping the town, or store something in the count's personal vault. And the thief will certainly come up with unexpected favours to ask of their patrons. Ultimately it might not be possible to "quantify" the value of such a favour, so probably the best we can do is ballpark the range of outcomes, provide some examples and leave it to the GM's discretion.

Lets say for now we carve out the range thus:

  

Patron Favour Value:

    1-6: Small Favour

    7-19: A Favour

    20+: Extraordinary Favour

This is probably the thing that needs the most work. It would probably be easier to just add Risk+Distance and centre this on a normal 2d6 distribution. OR I could just collapse it entirely! A result of "favour" is exactly that, no monetary value considered, and it's up to the duet to figure it out.  I kind of like the simplicity of that, but maybe there's an equally elegant way of still using the Risk*Distance number.

Finally: Notoriety.  Notoriety was my way of figuring out what "Reward Risk" meant in the original sci-fi mission generator I hacked for this. The really interesting recursive result on a 6 to "roll again and add 1 to Reward Risk for all future missions" felt like an abstraction that could be made specific and meaningful in the world of thiefy adventuring. We could take that number and store it separately from the Reward table and make it matter elsewhere. My solution was to make it a kind of reputation mechanic: as the thief does more jobs throughout the world, their Notoriety increases. As they become more Notorious, the jobs that patrons offer are more dangerous--and more rewarding. Not only that, but successfully completing a job gives a chance of Notoriety increasing, as part of the reward!

There is scope for Notoriety to interact with other game mechanics. If there are morale checks, perhaps rando bandits are less likely to stand their ground against a notorious thief. If there are recognition checks, perhaps merchants are more likely to provide a discount, or share the secret menu--but so too are town guards more likely to see through a hasty disguise. Depending on the amount of record-keeping you want, Notoriety can vary in different regions of the world based on where jobs are completed.  Perhaps certain patrons no longer want to offer jobs to a thief that everyone has heard of. And of course, depending on your particular thiefy exploits, GM fiat can award a point of Notoriety as the result of doing something particularly public. There's even the opportunity for the thief to do things to -lower- their Notoriety because it's making things difficult for them.

It turned out to be quite a meaty way to use a single number!

Anyway: here's a sample set of outcomes from rolling on all these tables:

> criminal, piracy, risk lvl 6: six encounters, two weeks travel, gear valuing 1800g

> noble/merchant, bizarre, risk lvl 5: six encounters, next village, +1 Notoriety and a favour

>noble/merchant, theft, risk lvl 1: three encounters, current location, a small favour

These starting points leave quite a bit of fleshing out to do. Who actually is the patron, and what is the specific nature of the job?

Next time: MORE TABLES