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.