The Tools of Others

Like most people, I use a ton of other people's ideas and tools to make my games run better, or just to get a bit of inspiration. So, here are a few tools and compilations I've made recently to facilitate my use of other people's tools.

First up, since it's currently trending, is +Arnold K.'s Career Paths character generation. If you haven't seen it, look at it - it's a cool hack of regular 3d6-based attribute generation that creates a bit of vague history, and it's a lot more elegant than some of the crazy Excel-formula-based versions I've seen, and a lot less involved than Beyond the Wall's analogous approach.



Click me!

What I did was make a bunch of cards to make the Statistically Anal method of generating your character's adolescence significantly less anal. Instead of rolling a d15, you just cut this out, place the cards face down, and everyone picks one. I used a bunch of Telecanter's silhouettes on the reverse side to add a bit of Rorschach-ish psychology to card selection. A few questions are edited a bit here and there so they could all come out the same size.

I didn't do the Careers section mostly to save time and to leave starting PC's with a bit more blank space. So, instead of rolling 1d6 for each stat during Adolescence, I'll have players roll 2d6.



Right here.

Next is the Peddlers of the Deep Dark table from Aeons and Auguries. Basically, it's a pretty cool (if die-roll-intensive) underground trade caravan generator. Unfortunately, bits and pieces of it are scattered all over JD Jarvis' blog, so I put it all in one place.

I included all of the Peddlers info, the Dungeoneer's Cache generator, and information on all of the unique items in both tables - that includes the Magic Ropes, Candles, and Footwear posts. Plus a bit of organizational tweaking.


Finally, Justin Alexander's Node-based Design has been pretty much the guide for running my campaigns, and the Three Clue Rule a great tool for coming up with plots on the fly, in a way that the players can meaningfully interact with. But, as I've mentioned before, I'm a visual thinker, and outline's just don't do it for me - so I set up two on-the-fly node sheets, for the Layer Cake and Loop models. Each node has its clues listed, with a bit of space to describe the node, and each of the clues leading to the other nodes.


You know the drill. The Layer Cake one is here.

Addictions of the Flame Princess

I really like LotFP's presentation of diseases, as it provides a simple statblock that easily differentiates between diseases, but makes it easy to handle them on the fly. Since drugs tend to be extraordinarily popular among my players (for some reason they are considerably less excited by diseases) I decided to try to apply the same approach for drugs. (EDIT: I just remembered that I got the threefold addiction model from Telecanter's Receding Rules. That blog's awesome.) I universalized the rules for dependency and withdrawal, which admittedly makes some drugs considerably more dangerous than their real-life models, but that's why you Just Say No.

The saves are specific to my homebrew - Might maps to Fortitude, or to Poison, while Will maps to Paralyzation.

Drugs are basically poisons with enough positive effects that some people want to ingest them. Like poisons, drugs take 2d6 rounds, modified by CON, to take effect. Drugs have two effects: Dose and Overdose. Dose effects are cumulative – but each time you take an extra Dose, you have to throw a Might save or suffer an Overdose. Dose effects last for the listed Duration, but Overdose effects are permanent. Recovery is how long you must abstain from the drug in order to try and quit it – at the end of each recovery period, you may reduce your addiction level by passing a Will save.

Additionally, each time you take a drug, you must pass a Might save or start becoming addicted to the drug, The first failure makes you Habituated, forcing you to take that drug once a week or suffer withdrawal. The second failure is Addiction, and you have to take the drug once a day. The third failure is Dependency, where withdrawal kicks in an hour after the drug wears off - though on the plus side, you can’t get any worse.

During withdrawal, you require double the normal amount of food and water, and must sleep 12 hours per night. If Addicted or Dependent, you also wake up each morning with a random ability score reduced – by -1 if Addicted, by half if Dependent. Also, since drugs are BAD, no drug-related Might saves can increase your Might score.

ALCOHOL (1)
Duration: 1 hour
Dose: +½ CHA & CON, -½  DEX
Overdose: Lose memory, -1 WIS & CON
Recovery: 2 months

PIPEWEED (5)
Duration: 2 hours
Dose: +½ WIS, -½ Wile
Overdose: -1 INT, -1 CHA
Recovery: 1 month

OPIUM (15)
Duration: 2 hours
Dose: +1d6 HP, 1 stone exhaustion
Overdose: Suffocation
Recovery: 2 months

PEYOTE (30)
Duration: 6 hours
Dose: Hallucinations, +1 INT
Overdose: -1 Might & Will
Recovery: 1 week

SOMA (7)
Duration: 1 day
Dose: +1 DEX, - ½ CHA
Overdose: double water needs
Recovery: 2 weeks

KHAT (2)
Duration: 2 hours
Dose: +1 CHA, constipation
Overdose: -1 CON, diminished sex drive
Recovery: 1 week

Other drugs may be discovered in the game world or can be modeled as combinations of the above – for example, Bhang (15) is soma and pipeweed, Mezcal (30) is alcohol and peyote, and Absinthe (10) is alcohol and pipeweed.

The parenthetical to the right of each drug’s name is its cost in coins. Spending each type of coin obtains different quality drugs – ‘vanilla,’ average quality versions are priced in silvers, and high-purity drugs must be bought with gold, while spending coppers will net you ‘street-grade’ versions. High-purity versions apply a +2 bonus to save vs. overdose, but a -2 penalty when saving vs. addiction. Street-grade drugs aren’t always what they’re claimed to be – roll on the following table.

Street Drugs (1d6)
1	Snake oil – it’s worthless!
2	What did they put in this thing? Might save vs. immediate overdose!
3	Recycled – drug works fine, but its infected with a random disease (ignore if alcoholic)
4	Something similar – acts as normal, but doesn’t count as a dose for addiction or withdrawal
5	Not quite right – hung over with -1 to a random ability score
6	The real deal! No ill effects.

 

Veil, a Cubic Dystopia

Once upon a time, there were many deities.

All were equal, though some, of course, were more equal than others. As with any power structure, the weak soon aligned with the strong, or with each other, creating alliances and pantheons in competition for the souls and riches of the world below. They warred.

Constantly.

Eventually, when the sky was filled with fire and smoke, the land smashed and broken, and the seas choked with holy power, the war met its end. Few mortal creatures survived, and those that did were irrevocably scarred with the terror and pain of generations of divine battle. It was plain to see that the world was in its death throes, and such constant hostilities might soon cause even gods to perish. Without an end to the war, there would be nothing but blood, and dust, and Void.

So the gods convened. A truce was formed, and the task of rebuilding the world begun. The gods called into existence a great Veil, one that no sight nor sense could pierce. The Veil concealed all knowledge of each god's ultimate whereabouts in the new world, hiding from them nothing except their own ultimate place in the world's foundation. With the Veil in place, there could be no hierarchy, no intrigue, no sabotage - every god, save the insane ones, would naturally desire a world where none among them would risk annihilation, or deprivation, or injustice.

So, in the final phases of the world's construction, they decided to merge. There would be but one God, they said, intrinsic to the structure of this new existence, and there would be no rivalries, no contention, nothing but an eternal Peace. And as the dissenters felt their powers drawn inexorably into this thing, this singularity of energy, they broke the agreement.

There was a pop, and a tear, and the Veil tore, and the new earth wrapped itself around the old, and all the old idols crumbled with the shock of rebirth. Dissenters, malformed and shrunken, fled to deep and hidden places. A new Humanity rose up and began slaughtering all the creatures from Before. And there God stood, and saw it was good, and said, "Ashes to ashes, dust to dust."

The new Deity could be called the Primarch, they decided. He - she - it - had dominion over all the beasts of the land and air, the strange creatures of river and sea, and the weather, and the rocks, and everything between and beyond. It could be prayed to, but would not respond except in whispers, or subtle signs. And it wished nothing more than the killing of those "traitors," hidden everywhere in Veil. These demons, it said, were weak and atrophied, wanting nothing more than the plunging of the world into brutal Chaos, or to enslave it a grip of iron, or imprison it in soulless Order.

It was nothing if not vague.

As the Faith spread, adopting nonhumans and barbarians under its wing, it changed, then flexed, then split entirely. Now there are three Faiths, each with their own great city, and client kingdoms, and millions of worshippers.

The Western Faith believes that the forces of evil will bide their time, gathering strength and plotting a single, crippling blow against all holy order in a coming Armageddon. In the fires of the Last War and among the tsunamis of gore will be born an Anti-God, an avatar of nihilism, and the cosmos will return to the hell that was Before. So followers of this Faith hone their blades, building tall fortresses of stone and faith, stockpiling food and gold, all to serve as bulwarks against the Reckoning.

The Eastern Faith instead wishes to fight fire with fire, and use the tools of the Enemy against it. Their great Prophet, Aloysius the Tall, was even an accomplished diabolist, who habitually summed great Terrors only to bind and destroy them, so as to always be practiced at the art. Eastern priests are well-known evangelists, everywhere using the power of negotiation and commerce to bring new lands into the fold. Many Eastern holy sites are built atop known ruins of the old order.

The Southern Faith is composed of the Primarch's Chosen, every one of them, in the flesh. People of other faiths are, of course, welcome to their doubts, and welcome also to live and work in southern lands. Of course, they are obviously unqualified to hold office, or lead armies, or cross any borders or travel long distances.  Southerners believe that their souls, Chosen as they are, can never leave the world - usually, they are recycled as newborns in families of loyal Chosen, but sometimes they appear far afield, in foreign lands known not to the men of Faith.

There are, of course, a few things all three Faiths agree upon:
That there is but one true God.
That It has a Plan.
That It hates the traitor Demons.
That those Demons have many tricks and many disguises.
And They could well appear to be Prophets of the Faith.

Gravity, and Disaster Gameplay



Gravity is, in the words of Zak S, good and shit. It's an amazing disaster movie, that squeezes everything out of its setting. The dangers are so confoundingly simple, (the principles of momentum, and the clockwork orbits of the debris field, for example) and so much more dangerous because of it. Alfonso Cuaron's signature long takes (probably eased by the fact that 90% of the film is insanely photorealistic CGI) draw you directly into the action. The subtext is also hauntingly profound - the characters are utterly powerless, despite commanding what is arguably mankind's most powerful tools, and the images of disintegrating space hardware, and a drifting, derelict Space Shuttle were especially evocative. And it was excellent to see a female lead who really succeeds on her own terms. Also, everything from here on out will be SPOILERS if you haven't seen the film.

So of course we want to figure out how to put this stuff in the game.

Obviously not directly (though I do sometimes run Eclipse Phase) but thematically. Disasters, and the struggle to survive them, crops up a ton in fiction, and can be just as exciting (or more, in Gravity's case) than combat. Arguably, some forms of combat (like battling a titan) have more in common with surviving a disaster than swinging a sword. Of more immediate interest, to me, is the possibility of inflicting monsoons and tsunamis on hapless river travelers in Qelong.

So what do we do?

Surviving a disaster, as opposed to just weathering it, is a complex process dependent on both physical and intellectual skills, as well as the more esoteric quality of grit. Disasters are differentiated from simply difficult conditions by the fact that they represent an existential threat to the character, rather than simply some difficulty or penalty. In this way, they are like combat - if nothing is done, the ork will kill you, just like that oncoming avalanche will.

Luckily, ability scores already suggest a system for handling disaster. Wisdom and Intelligence speak to a character's ability to accurately perceive a situation, and plan or improvise from there, respectively. Strength and Dexterity speak to a character's capacity for manipulating objects. Constitution represents the physical endurance needed to withstand trauma. I have always interpreted Charisma to be much more about self-control and emotional intentionality than physical beauty, and under this interpretation is easily read as a character's mental endurance.

The basic mechanic would be "endurance" style checks, which isn't my idea, but rather something I picked up from somewhere I can't remember along the blogosphere. The idea is, each round that your character faces a hazard, you roll 1d6. You do that the next round, too, if you're still facing the hazard, adding it to the total of all the previous rounds, and so on and so forth. So if I have STR 10, and I'm holding up a portcullis from closing, I can do that for as long as my total is under 10 - and if I roll a 1, a 6, and a 4, I drop it at the end of the third round.

Much hay can also be made of the amount you end up exceeding your ability score by (though, not every roll requires this). The third roll in that example put the total 1 higher than my STR score - so that could mean, either 1 HP of damage as the portcullis slams down on me, or perhaps 1 round of being stunned for the same reason. Reset the counter whenever this happens.

The "endurance" mechanic is really well suited to disaster gameplay because it emphasizes the idea that a disaster is about managing hazards, rather than avoiding them - your characters WILL take damage or lose other things, and it's just a question of how much they lose.

So, using a Gravity example, Dr. Stone has to roll a d6 every round she's clambering outside of a space station, and once the total exceeds her STR score, she has to rest for a number of rounds equal to the difference. Every time she navigates between orbital points, she rolls a d6 - once that total exceeds her INT, she's spent too much time calculating, or she's moved too slowly, and now the debris field hits. Running out of oxygen? Dr. Stone can stave off panic as long as her endurance total is below her CHA. Once she's out of luck there, she starts a new endurance track, this time rolling against CON - and once she exceeds it, she passes out for a number of rounds equal to the difference.

For a more D&D-style example, we can use a party sailing along the Qelong river during a storm. The steersman will navigate into a rock or other minor obstacle each time he fails an endurance roll against WIS - and the difference counts as damage to the ship. The fighter can keep bailing water until she fails an endurance roll vs STR, and then must rest out the difference. The thief can lash down loose cargo until she runs out of DEX - and each failure means something else has been swept into the waters.. And each time a deckhand goes overboard, everyone adds to their CHA counter - failure means you're paralyzed by grief or despair. The system is pretty versatile - maybe you're channeling magic to close an alien demon gate, which requires rolls against WIS - and each time you fail, something breaks free and the rest of the party has to go deal with it.

Basically, the party survives for as long as they can manage the little losses that are bound to happen. Plan poorly, and these small failures add up and eventually the party is left without the tools and strength to face down the next challenge - plan well, and emerge scarred but unbowed.

Resource Management and Aakom Poisoning

The most complicated part of Qelong - as many have pointed out - is the system for handling aakom poisoning. The system handles poisoning in 1-2 point increments, but the symptomatic doses will be in the dozens, and differ for each character. This means that, until characters start reaching symptomatic thresholds, there will be be a lot of slow, detailed record-keeping, without tangible effects.

The point of this design choice is, of course, to evoke a feeling of Qelong's hostility - a slow corruption of the characters' bodies that might take a while to build up, but nevertheless inexorably forces them out of the province. Aakom will affect the player characters in basically the same way that it has affected the setting - nothing apparent at first, but with catastrophic effects and no way to easily recover. It forces the players to really integrate themselves into their environment, and experience the war and devastation as inmates, and not tourists. It turns Qelong into a negadungeon. For these reasons, it's taken me a while to figure out the best way to simplify the aakom poisoning rules, because their complexity is so important to their purpose in the module.

Part of the solution is in slightly realigning the module's structure. Qelong assumes a seasoned party, having had some adventures under its belt, traveling across the world and arriving here. The players will have established their own baseline, and they are strong and tough enough to weather the River's hardships for a week or two and come out unscathed. Of course, aakom should have started making things go awry by that point, and then the module sinks in its teeth. But even then, a way out is consistently within reach - just a plundered stupa, or a cardamom caravan, or a midnight raid on Sajra Amvoel away.

I'm going to run Qelong for a first-level party, and that means a lot of those assumptions won't be true. There's much less gear, magic, and hit points for the players to fall back on, making it commensurately more difficult for them to pull off a big treasure load to pay for a ticket home, or for a well-executed plan to actually allow them to capture the lich-garuda and fly to safety. There isn't technically even a home to return to, or at least a "home" that the players have tangibly experienced. Qelong's primary objective becomes survival, not escape and profit. And in a survival story, the main antagonist is resource management.

In the module, aakom poisoning is inflicted in these five ways: breathing air, eating food, drinking water, and taking damage. The last one is even more granular - there are four different ways of taking damage that lead to varying levels of aakom poisoning. Fighting the Naga faction is the most dangerous - every wound they inflict causes an equal amount of aakom contamination.

Most of these are easily conceived of as effects on resource management. Breathing air makes time spent in Qelong its own resource. Consuming food and water do this as well, though there are some ways to mitigate this. The damage effects are an additional cost to the existing resource trade-offs that occur in combat. Since a 1st-level party can be expected to be spending a lot of time in Qelong already, and mundane damage and disease are inherently more significant costs to the characters, I'd change the poisoning conditions to this:

• 1 point per water ration consumed (as normal) and 3 in 6 chance per food ration consumed, ignored for mountaintop springs or alpine plants
• Points equal to damage from Naga faction
• Snake poison adds 1d4 aakom for three rounds, rather than inflicting 1d4 HP damage

Now, time (measured by meals consumed) is a trade-off. The party can either move freely, at the cost of  aakom from the natural environment, or it can stay put in a mountain hex, avoiding aakom accumulation but not taking any actions. Since I'm running the four factions as active and dynamic groups, "staying put" can incur significant costs on Qelong's power situation. Survival in Qelong is thus about balancing food needs, water needs, and aakom contamination, with encounters and combat positioned as the opportunity cost of engaging in exploration or treasure-hunting.

The rest of the aakom rules stay the same, though with significantly less granularity due to a 1st-level party's lower HP totals.

Dungeon Robber

Great game. This happened:

Play here.

Fun

Finally, a post with labels that are precisely descriptive!

Last night, the gang returned to the junglified Caves of Chaos. They'd cleared out the goblin lair over the last two sessions, and were on the hunt for more gold. Everyone's still level 1, because of a TPK early on and a small platoon of mercenaries I gave them as a quest reward, which suck up XP even at half shares.


Entering the ogre cave, they attempt nonverbal communication, but nobody speaks Adrastian jungle ogre. So Benesek, the faithful mercenary, rolls a 74 on his death chart - losing his face and most of his jaw. Now he's Benesek the Ugly, who heroically took the ogre's 1 attack before the mob brought it down.

They search the cave for 20 minutes, after I accidentally say "There isn't anything you've found yet," instead of "There doesn't seem to be anything there" and discover the secret door. They take the staircase up to the hobgoblin caves, and kick down the door at the top, finding a large room and surprising the 13 hobgoblins there.

They kill one, win initiative, and kill another one. There's six goblins in melee combat with the mercenaries' front line. 5 hits, roll for damage.

Four sixes and a five.

The entire front line goes down. The PC's - a ranger and his warhound, a cleric, and a wizard, now have to pull swords and jump in. More mercenaries are incapacitated. One loses an arm - roll for % of arm cut off, starting from wrist? 0-0. A hobgoblin prepares to stab the dog, and the ranger opts to take the blow. I inform him that the goblin does 1d6 damage, he has 5 HP, and the dog has 7, but he does it anyway.

Max damage. Rolled a 95. Now his gray matter is really getting that chance to commune with nature. Not quite dead, but 50-100% memory loss. (By the way, the roll for additional memory loss? 0-2. Only 52%.) He starts rolling up a new character.

The party kills all but the last two hobgoblins, does triage, feeds two healing potions to the ranger, and then scrams.

First Level as Survival Horror

Some tangential thoughts prompted by a discussion at The 9 and 30 Kingdoms:

What I value most in a class system and rule-set are the principles of definition through play, and the ability to play with understanding as little of the complete system as possible. Though I'm currently using LotFP's class system with few modifications (save the magic system), I'm working on a three-class system with "specialist classes" that are sort of like prestige classes, but available after 3rd level and with no other requirements. Basic classes would be reduced to the three archetypes - fighter, mage, thief.

As it is, each class knows some of the elements of each of the other classes - thieves and mages know how combat works and can use some weapons and armor. Mages and fighters have a limited ability to find and disarm traps. Everyone's a little bit of a jack-of-all trades, enough to give a bit of leeway in adverse circumstances.

What if, instead, the only "combat system" available to a mage was, "The orc stabs you in the guts and you die?" Obviously, this would absolutely require the dungeon to be structured such that every problem lent itself to all three conflict-resolution systems, or at the very least, complete avoidance. The "obviously present" trap becomes paramount. And it would also require the GM to be open to players creatively forcing problems into their niche ("All I can do is attack? Well, I attack the trap mechanism!"). But if Amnesia: The Dark Descent could get away without letting the character attack the monsters, at all, ever, why can't a dungeoncrawl?

So far, I've been assuming only one player. A party composed of characters like this wouldn't be immune to the survival-horroresque problems faced by the single character - as each individual is still only capable of one type of action, and vulnerable to all the others. Teamwork becomes an absolute necessity. And, most of all, creative play becomes the only possible way to survive.

Drama and die size

For the past few sessions, I've been using the Good Hits and Bad Misses table, from Delta's D&D Hotspot for everyone's critical hits, and running handling death as no fighting at 0HP, bleeding out each round until -10HP, when you die.

I've noticed that the act of scrambling for percentile dice and looking up the result tends to add some drama to each critical or fumble - which is usually incommensurate with the fact that about 60% of the results are simply x2 or x3 damage. Which has made criticals and fumbles fairly anticlimactic.

On the other hand, death and incapacitation has been fairly low-key - the goblins and bats the PCs have been fighting never take more than a few rounds to kill, and it hasn't been difficult for someone in the rear of the party running back and stabilizing wounded individuals. Especially since I keep forgetting to keep track of people bleeding-out. I'm going to try to reverse these situations by using d20 tables for criticals and fumbles, and then using the Arduin Grimoire critical hit table as a 0HP "death and dismemberment" results table.

You roll a d20 on the appropriate table for crits and fumbles. "Special" results can be healed as a light wound, forgoing HP healing. When you hit 0HP, roll on the d100 table and apply the results. I reorganized the table so that, generally, worse effects are higher up on the list, allowing damage in excess of 0HP to be added to the roll. To my mind, this removes the need for an instant death threshold - the more overkill, the fewer merciful options available and the more likely it is you'll get Irrevocable Death. The tables are here.

Depending on the effect, I'll require a save vs. Paralyzation to retain consciousness, and since all the effects are actual injuries, I can leave healing/stabilization up to player decisions and creativity, in addition to my fading knowledge of First Aid merit badge.

Hopefully this retains the uncertainty and drama of crits/fumbles in combat that Delta discusses and makes hitting 0HP dramatic and terrifying.