After the first couple months of play, I’ve updated and revised the player’s guide for FKOS. I’m actually kinda surprised by just how top-to-bottom the revision is. Pretty much every page has had some kind of significant tweak to the rules. Fundamentally it’s mostly the same stuff, but I’ve added a lot of little refinements that I think will improve play quite a bit.
In the dorsal half of the Kingdom Galactic’s fourth spiral, there is a planetary system officially designated “Sugarplum 6”. Modern records of the system begin about 500 years ago, when it was surveyed by one Grig Sullat; a somewhat notorious figure in the history of galactic cartography. The dozens of celestial objects he named after his granddaughter (both literally and euphemistically) led directly to major revisions in the Naming Rights code. Colloquially, the planet has come to be known as Sugar6.
Few will have heard of this remote system, but it is well known to butchers and eccentric gourmands across the galaxy as the only source of Green Steaks. It is a delicacy even the poorest will have heard of, though in their entire lives most people will never handle enough money to afford even a single bite.
The meat is harvested from Nogrols, a kind of bird native to the Sugar6 system. They’re massive things. An adult can grow to be as large as a starship, with a wingspan to match. They spend most of their lives sunbathing in the space between Sugar6, and its moon, though they migrate down to the planet to mate, and to die; and they migrate to the moon to lay their eggs. How the creatures create thrust in a vacuum is something of a mystery, which sciences seems unlikely to solve anytime soon. No lab in the galaxy has budget enough to purchase even a single Nogrol for dissection.
Norgol beaks are purely defensive adaptations. Any digestive tract the creatures may have had, has long since been discarded by evolution. Norgols subsist entirely on nutrients gathered from the sunlight. Even with the massive surface area of their wings to aid in the process, it is a relatively small amount of energy for such a large creature. This makes Norgols singularly indolent, which in turn leads to meat so tender it practically falls apart in the mouth. Their chlorophyll-infused blood gives the meat the green color and grassy flavor that has made it so renowned.
Hunting Norgols is strictly regulated. Their population is so low, and demand for their meat so high, that they could be made extinct within a month if conservation efforts are not carefully maintained. Hunting licenses are given out one kill at a time by a bureaucratic office stationed in geosyncronous orbit between the planet and its moon. Poaching is exceedingly rare. Anyone discovered to have purchased Green Steak from an unlicensed vendor is sentenced to be cooked alive, and their meat served to discerning cannibals while they still live. Green Steak is said to be among The King’s favorite dishes, and her government takes the crime of endangering the King’s pleasure very seriously.
If anyone were able to figure out how to breed the Norgols in captivity, they’d have fortune enough to join the 36,000 families.
Regarding the pre-industrial cultures developing on the surface of Sugar6, the most substantive record comes from Grig Sullat’s survey.
Human-like, of apparently recent vintage. Sugarplum 6 may have been seeded as part of a forgotten scientific endeavor.
Briefly, the Norgol Office of Preservation and Hunting Association (NOPHA) entertained a proposal to relocate or eradicate the human populace of Sugar6, to prevent any potential threat they may pose to the Norgol population. But, given that the two species utilized completely separate continents, it was deemed an inefficient use of funds at that time, and the project was shelved.
On the 24th of Fructidor, 31,612 YK, a post-coital herd of Norgol was coming up from the planet. One of these was lagging behind, and appeared to be injured. A bidding war began for the hunting license, which was won by an independent butcher named Andru. As she maneuvered her ship into a position where her bolt lancer could spike the animal’s brain, the Norgol unexpectedly lurched forward. It struck Andru’s ship with its beak, and sent the little ship careening off course.
By the time Andru had righted her vessel, the Norgol’s belly had opened up, and human figures were leaping out. Each was wrapped in furs, and encased in a translucent bit of Norgol intestine. Andru and her crew were so baffled by what they were seeing, it never occurred to them that they were in danger until the figures had latched themselves to the canopy of the butcher’s vessel, and started pounding their primitive picks into the hull.
A few minutes of video record exist of this attack. Once she realized the danger, Captain Andru opened a vidcomm channel to NOPHA station to request help. In this video, it is apparent that the men from the planet below are frighteningly strong. Despite the primitive nature of their weapons, they were able to breach the cockpit, and eventually, make a large enough hole to climb their way inside. They lashed their prize to the corpse of the Norgol they had somehow flown up on, and towed it back down to the planet below.
NOPHA station put out an emergency call to the nearest garrison of the King’s Loyal Soldiers. They did their best to emphasize the urgency of the situation, but the KLS are busy, and how much of a threat could some pre-industrial locals with a rancher’s vessel really pose? It was a few days before a pair of ships were dispatched; one enforcer, and one light troop transport.
They arrived on the 4th of Vendemiaire, and hailed the NOPHA station to receive an update on the situation. When the station didn’t respond, the KLS ships performed a thorough scan of the area, and realized that it was swarming with two dozen Norgol corpse-ships, each one of which had a bolt lancer mounted to it. Presumably salvaged from some of the destroyed butcher vessels that littered the area.
The transport held back and comm’d for help, while the enforcer moved in show the primitives what an armed and armored vessel could do. It blasted through the corpse ships with ruthless efficiency, but the primitive pilots were fearless. They swarmed both of the KLS vessels, piercing their hulls with the bolt lancers. More than half the primitive force was destroyed, but in the end they were victorious. The intruders were slain, ever more corpse ships were being prepared on the surface, and now they could salvage some real weapons. Moreover, they could salvage a pair of hyperlight star drives.
And so, the Kingdom Galactic came to know the scourge of the Garrr.
Men say they climb mountains ‘because they are there,’ but it’s not true. Men climb mountains for profit or glory, not simply because the existence of an obstacle is intolerable to them.
The Garrr do abhor obstacles to that inhuman degree. They do not experience fear or avarice in the same way we do, but there is something about impossibility which motivates them like a mix of the two. If it seems as though something is beyond the grasp of a Garrr, they are compelled to prove that it is not.
Because of this biological quirk, the Garr do not understand failure. They will almost never make statements of intent, because they do not believe they can truly know their intent until they witness the results of their actions. If they strike their thumb with a hammer, or break a vase, or die in battle, then those must have been the actions they were pursuing.
To humans, it may seem like a childish attempt to protect one’s pride. “I meant to do that.” But this is narrow thinking. The Garrr are hardwired with a consequentialist epistemology. They have no concept of “bad deed,” or “incorrect choice.” Whatever happens is the right thing to happen.
Six years ago, the Garrr defeated the sky, and conquered the weaklings who lived beyond the sky. They have since spread to several nearby planets. All who have faced them have fallen, save for those lucky enough to face Garrr who had decided it was time to die. The KLS has proven powerless to stop them so far, but the King’s supply of Green Steak is running low.
There’s more to crafting a memorable dungeon than the room descriptions. To be really great, it should be an interesting space to move through on its own merits. The way the rooms connect to one another, and to the outside world, is a fundamental part of any dungeon’s character, which I have too often ignored in the past.
I’m no Dyson Logos or Stonewerks. My maps are best described as “serviceable.” And while I doubt I’ll ever share their artistic acumen, I’m trying to do better for the sake of of giving my (amazing) room keys nicer homes to live in. To that end, I’ve set myself the goal of having 3 architecturally interesting elements in every dungeon I put together. Things that give the dungeon space an inherent complexity for the players to struggle with, or manipulate.
It is essential to note, that complex room shapes are not interesting dungeon design. They are a lazy way to make a map look interesting, without actually being interesting. Unless the shape of the room has some particular impact on play, more-or-less squarish spaces are all you need.
1. The entrance to the dungeon is in the center, with rooms radiating out around it. Rooms might interconnect freely, or form distinct “wings,” with only occasional connections between them. The player’s options are maximized from the start, and if they are stymied in one direction, they can easily try another.
2. The entrance is perilous, preventing quick egress. Perhaps getting in and out requires climbing 100′ of rope, or slowly wiggling your way through a narrow crevice in the wall. The players are thus limited in what they can bring in or out, and will not be able to flee to the safety of the outside world if they are being pursued.
3. The main flow of the rooms form a ‘figure 8’ pattern; meeting in the center, and forming two distinct loops. This is a nice simple way of making the player’s path through the dungeon nonlinear, without making the rooms overly interconnected. Each loop, of course, could and should have little offshoots.
4. A river of water, lava, or just about anything else flows through the dungeon, intersecting with multiple rooms. Not only does it serve as a point of reference, and as a way to make the individual rooms it passes through more interesting; it could also be an alternate way of moving through the dungeon.
5. A space from which another space is visible, but not obviously accessible. When keying, this latter space would have some interesting feature the players would want to interact with, but be barred from doing so until later. This could be accomplished with bars, with a sharp change in elevation, through unbreakable windows, walls of force, large uncrossable lava pits, etc.
6. Connections which are spatially impossible. Doors that lead to the other side of the map, or hallways that loop back on themselves without ever turning. This need not be presented as a “gotcha,” where the players explore for a long time before realizing what is happening. Reference points set early in the dungeon could clue them in very quickly, and give them an opportunity to use the dungeon’s geometry to their own advantage.
7. A room which vertically intersects multiple dungeon levels. Perhaps with bridges spanning back and forth across it, allowing players to reach other parts of the dungeon by finding some way to get up to a higher bridge, or down to a lower one. Or perhaps the room is filled with water, and players have to swim through it. Or any number of other possibilities.
8. Areas on one level, which only connect to one another through a different level. So, for example, the first floor might have 10 rooms, but only 5 are immediately accessible. To reach the other 5, you’ve got to go up to the 2nd floor, adventure through those rooms, and discover stairs back down to the other half of the first floor. Vertical movement is often unexplored in dungeons. Usually, there’s only a single stairway between one floor and the next. Rather than the players making interesting decisions about their movement in vertical space, this method basically creates multiple dungeons strung together end-to-end.
9. Combining natural and crafted spaces. This is already done with a lot of maps, where the dungeon is built on top of caverns. This particular arrangement, though, has become a little cliche. It’s more interesting to have a walled garden, open to the sky; or have a crafted corridor that opens out into a natural cave, where the players can choose between a few natural and crafted exits.
10. Secret doors which do not lead to secret areas, but rather, lead to other areas of the dungeon that could be easily accessed conventionally. This was actually much more common with dungeon cartography in the ’70s and ’80s, but is not as common anymore. Which is a shame! Yes, rewarding players with secret treasure is good, but it’s also good to reward them with secret connections they can use to move about the dungeon more sneakily.
11. The dungeon lacks any foundation. Perhaps it is flying, or suspended over a chasm by chains, or floating on a fantastically buoyant sea. The floor of the various dungeon spaces have frequent openings, which serve as hazards for navigation, a means to dispose of any foes the party encounters, and perhaps even as a secondary form of navigation if the party is bold enough to try and cling to the underside of the dungeon.
12. The dungeon is moving. Getting in is a challenge, as you either need to find some way to catch up to it, or you need to predict its route and jump on with perfect timing. And, once it’s time to leave, you have no idea where you’ll be. Such a dungeon could take the form of a castle-on-wheels, a giant walking robot, a structure carried on the back of a titanic beast, or carried in the talons of a massive ancient bird.
13. That a dungeon should have multiple and varied entrances is advice I remember hearing years ago. But it’s still good advice, and I so rarely see it followed. Multiple ways in and out of a dungeon offers a lot of interesting gameplay. For example, if multiple entrances are known, players can investigate both, and make a choice about which they want to explore further. If the extra entrances are hidden, players may discover them from the inside, creating a natural sort of “save point,” now that they can return to town, and re-enter the dungeon further along than they started. Dungeons may also exit out into new areas: vast caverns beneath the earth, mysterious forest groves, surface temples, or deserted islands.
14. The players cannot get out the same way they got in. Perhaps the door seals behind them, or perhaps the entrance to the dungeon is a trap door down a slippery shaft. The crawl takes on a sense of urgency when it’s no longer possible to leave at your own choosing; and resources normally taken for granted–food, water, light–are transformed into timers, counting down how long the players have until their work becomes exponentially more difficult.
15. The dungeon has some internal means of rapid conveyance. Perhaps there is a train, or a set of color-coded teleportation pads in the first room, or a pipe which–when touched–causes a person to merge with it and flow forward until they will themselves to separate.
16. The rooms, when mapped together, form some kind of shape. This shape is a clue to solving one of the dungeon’s mysteries. As a simple example, perhaps there is a set of buttons in the shape of a circle, square, and triangle. Pressing the right one opens the door to the treasure room, pressing the wrong one kills you. The correct one is the triangle, which the players can guess based on the fact that the dungeon is a triangle.
17. The dungeon has an open-air layout, with sections of it being completely physically separated from one another, despite having internal continuity. Players can enter any room of the dungeon they wish, but some rooms can’t be fully realized until other rooms are investigated.
18. A specific calamity which has changed the dungeon’s layout. Many dungeons have bits of crumbled wall creating openings here, and collapsed corridors creating walls there. More interesting, I think, is to determine an event which caused structural damage to the dungeon, and allow that event to alter the whole layout, rather than just a corridor or two.
19. Puzzlebox dungeons, with big moving parts, where whole wings are locked off until some challenge is resolved. Something like a big cog or water wheel, which the players must discover how to turn; or a button they must weigh down. These, in turn, cause a statue’s mouth to open, and more rooms to become accessible. This is the sort of thing commonly found in video games, which would be all the more interesting for being presented in a situation where the players have real agency.
20. A dungeon which serves as the habitat for large groups of some benign creature. Preferably, one with some notable effect that will have an impact on how the players navigate. Perhaps the creatures can be ridden, or perhaps they screech loudly when they see light, or maybe they create an anti-magic field around themselves, or they cause magic to be amplified, or they produce weird results when eaten.
I enjoy playing board games. One of these days, I’d like to make one, and possibly even publish it. I’ve tried to do so a few times now, but every attempt has fallen apart pretty early in the process. I have plenty of ideas, but I don’t have the skills to turn those ideas into something fun to play. I don’t even really have a good idea of what those skills are, or how to develop them.
I’ve long thought that part of the reason for this is that I don’t spend time thinking about board games the way I think about RPGs. I’ve spent the last 7 years of my life writing this blog; using it to tinker with D&D, and to build an understanding of RPG design. Before the blog, I wrote and ran adventures for my friends, made up new rules, new classes, and even attempted a couple entirely new games. With board games, by contrast, I just…play them.
That’s why, every few years, a post about board games sneaks its way onto this site. Those are my attempts to use the blog as a way of learning about board games. But, it’s a tricky thing. My bread and butter is writing about tweaks and extra content for D&D. That’s easy to do, because everybody who reads this blog either plays the same game I do, or they play a game similar enough that whatever I write could be easily converted.
If I do the same sort of tinkering with a board game, how interesting will that be to someone who hasn’t played that game? I could easily write some new races for Smallworld, or some new scenarios for Damage Report, but if you’re not familiar with the game I’m writing about, those posts will just be dead air to you.
That leads me to try writing about the games in a more generally accessible sense, avoiding the technical gobldygook that would only be interesting to someone who had played it. Realistically, that means I just end up writing reviews.
I don’t want to write reviews. They’re not interesting, they’re explicitly against the rules I’ve set for myself as a writer, and they don’t help me accomplish my goal. I want to learn how to make board games by tinkering with existing ones. Reviews don’t accomplish that.
I’d sincerely be curious to hear what other people think about this. On the one hand, part of me thinks “Fuck it! It’s my blog, it should serve whatever function is most valuable to me!” On the other hand, though, I put immense value in the readership I’ve built here. If posts where I tinker with board games would drive some portion of that readership away–(which would be totally fair)–I don’t think I want to do that. Perhaps the answer is a kind of reverse Joesky Tax. If I want to write some mini supplement for a board game, I first have to write a little review of the game to give context to people who haven’t played it.
Also, holy shit! This started as the opening to another post, but it has kade turned into a whole huge…thing all its own. I suppose I’ve been bottling up these thoughts of awhile. Now that I’ve put them into words, I feel obligated to share these thoughts, but this is too bloated to serve as an introduction to another post, and too skimpy to really stand on its own.
How about a practical experiment with that reverse Joesky Tax idea? Lets talk about Kingdom Builder!
Kingdom builder is one of my favorite board games. The base gameplay is very simple: you’ve got a hex map with various terrains on it. Every turn, you draw a card which specifies one of the types of terrain. You then place 3 settlements on that terrain type, trying to maximize your points within whatever limitations you’re dealing with.
That simplicity makes it easy to pull out and play, even if you have to teach new players, or if it’s been awhile since you played it yourself. But it’s not so simple that it’s ever boring. Indeed, I often have to study the board carefully for a good few minutes before I know where to place my pieces.
My favorite thing about the game is that it is incredibly modular. Everything can be swapped in and out with different pieces to change up the experience. The board is made up of 4 hex maps, placed next to each other in any arrangement you like. My set (The “big box,” which contains the base game and 3 expansions) has a total of 16 boards. Considering all the ways they could be arranged and flipped, you’ve got more possible layouts than I know how to calculate. And each board allows players to earn different special abilities, so that your moveset will change depending on how you set up the game.
Best of all is the game’s deck of 13 “Kingdom Builder” cards, which each have a different scoring mechanism on them. At the start of each game, the players draw 3 of these, which determine what their goals will be for that playthrough. So every time you play, you have to adapt to a new set of goals, finding synergies between them on-the-fly.
Given the modular nature of the game, it seems like a perfect place for me to start my tinkering.
Water Bridges
Rules as Written: In some places, the art depicts bridges crossing over water hexes. These are never mentioned in the rules, so they seem to have no purpose aside from being decorative.
House Rule: Any hex which shares a side with a water bridge hex may be considered adjacent to any other hex the water bridge shares a side with. This works both for settlement placement, and for scoring.
If the rule is in play, using the water bridges is an option for players. They may choose to exercise it or not on any given turn. This rule does not extend to bridges over canyons, since it is possible to build settlements there.
Random Locations
Rules as Written: Each board has two identical location icons on it. During setup, four tokens matching the location are placed on the board, divided betwixt the two spaces. Players who build settlements adjacent to a location may take the token, granting them the corresponding special ability on subsequent turns.
House Rule: During set up, all location tiles the players wish to use should be set aside in a bowl, or small bag.
The first two players to build settlements adjacent to any location hex may draw a random token from this supply, gaining its ability on their subsequent turn as normal. If a duplicate ability is drawn, the player may replace it and draw again.
Fortified – Builds settlements around location, castle, or nomad spaces. At the end of the game, players earn 6 gold for any such space which only they are adjacent to.
Highly Specialized – At the end of the game, each player should determine which of the 5 terrain types (Grass, Forest, Canyon, Desert, and Flower Fields) they have the fewest settlements placed in.
Start with 20 gold, and subtract 1 for each settlement on that terrain type the player has. The remainder is added to the player’s final score.
Wide Ranging – Each contiguous set of hexes which share an identical terrain type is counted as a single biome. This includes cross-quadrant adjacent hexes.
At the end of the game, players earn 2 gold for each biome they have a settlement in.
Guardians of the Land- At the start of play, each player draws a terrain card, and places it face-up in front of them for all to see. At the end of the game, they will receive 1 gold for each settlement that is adjacent to, but not on that terrain type.
Part of the difficulty with modifying board games is making a physical artifact that is suitable to play with, This is particularly important for any component that needs to be part of a random choice, but even ignoring that, the physical artifact plays a substantial role in making a board game engaging and fun.
On the back of each of the 16 game boards, there is a scoring track printed. This is very nice, but the game hardly needs 16 different scoring tracks. It might be possible to use Hex Kit to make a board with a unique layout, print it out, and glue it over the top of some of the scoring tracks, making the boards double sided.
They’re slightly larger than an 8.5 by 11″ printer sheet, but using multiple sheets it could be possible to make a reasonably attractive play surface.
This bonus post is coming to you courtesy of my Patrons! If you’d like to join them in supporting quality games content like this, I’d really appreciate it! Even $1 helps me to build a more stable, sustainable patreon campaign.
Around the time the first year of ORWA was wrapping up, I wrote a bunch of tools for myself. Stuff that would help me run the game more easily, like tables of encounters, tables of locations locations, a timeline of big events, etc. By then the tone and content of the campaign were firmly established in my mind. Enough so that by using these tools, I’ve been able to run the game for a little over a year with remarkably little week-to-week prep work. A map here, an encounter there, simple stuff.
Now the game is over two years old. It doesn’t seem set to end anytime soon, but it has started to feel a bit stale. It’s time to evaluate, update, and rewrite my tools. One of my goals in this process is to make the world feel more active, rather than reactive.
At low levels, it’s easy to have an active world. The players are weak and poor, the world is dangerous, and they’ve got to do whatever they can to get by. That experience of being the underdog is a big part of why low levels are so popular, and why so many campaigns start to falter once the player characters are more well established.
When the party reaches mid-levels, there is novelty in being the ones directing the action. They’ve been living in the shadow of big scary monsters for so long, it’s edifying to be a bit of a monster themselves. Plus, you can never be so high level that a savvy referee can’t scare you.
But as the players reach higher levels, the world gets less and less scary, and the novelty of being scary themselves starts to wear off. If a level 15 characters wants to do something, there’s not much that can stop them. The world bends to their will and, as a consequence, the world reacts to the players, rather than the players reacting to the world.
Part of the solution is a shallower power scale, which is what I’m already doing with Fuck the King of Space. But it’s too late to change ORWA in such a fundamental way, even if I wanted to.
Another part of the solution is the “always a bigger fish” school of thought. Your party may be level 15, but the level 30 wizard who lives up on the hill is not impressed. This is a valid tactic, and I employ it myself, but alone it’s insufficient. This isn’t just about creating a challenge for the players. That’s easy. This is about making the world feel alive, the way it did when any mook the party met on the street could potentially be a real danger to them.
And to be clear, this isn’t about fixing something that is broken, it’s about adapting to an altered circumstance. There’s a lot of potential fun in having the players be hyper-capable relative to the rest of the world, and they’ve earned the chance to explore that. We just need to find some new ways for the world to push back.
Before each new adventure, roll a d6 on the table below, and use the result to develop a suitable event. Once you’ve determined your event you should also deduce some reasonable consequence that might be avoided by player intervention.
Exactly what the consequence will be should usually follow pretty obviously from the details of the event. For example, if a PC’s favorite hireling has been kidnapped, failing to rescue said hireling will result in them being hurt or killed. The important thing is that the consequence exists, and will definitely occur without player intervention.
Players are free to attempt to resolve, or to ignore these events as they see fit. Many will not be quite so pressing as a kidnapped hireling. Likewise, events will vary in terms of the time investment they require to resolve. Some may be sessions-long adventures, while others might be small detours that only take part of a single session, and still others may require no time at all. Perhaps the players can resolve some events merely by throwing part of their vast fortunes at it.
In a way, it doesn’t matter how much of an impact the events have on gameplay. The important thing is that they perceive the world as being less passive, less predictable, less under their control.
Roll 1d6
1. An Agent Becomes Active
I’ve discussed before how I record interesting NPCs my players meet onto a table; and that anytime they roll a 7 while determining the result of an encounter, they bump in to one of these “Recurring Characters.” It’s one of my better ideas. But, after playing with it for 18 months, I’ve got too many characters, and not enough 7s to go around.
From here on, recurring characters will be divided into two lists. The first, “Encounter Characters” will be treated the same as they always have been. When the players roll a 7, I’ll randomly determine one of these for them to bump into while out and about in the world.
More ambitious characters, on the other hand, will be added to the list of Agents. These are the NPCs with distinct long-term goals. People who want to take vengeance on the party, or fellow adventurers who view the party as friends. In other words: people who might actively seek the party out at some point in the future.
Anytime this result is rolled, the referee should randomly select one of the game’s active Agents. The time has come for the PCs to become relevant in that agent’s plans.
2. A Questgiver has Work for the PCs
Anyone can offer the players a quest. In most games, though, there are one or two NPCs who make a regular habit of it. It’s all-around helpful for everyone when the players attach themselves to someone who can reliably give them paying work. It gives the referee a simple way of introducing adventures, and it gives the party a simple way of getting paid.
As the game develops, questgivers usually become less relevant. But it never hurts to keep them around, so they can toss a little straightforward adventuring in the player’s direction now and again.
If your players are so inclined, this result could also include petitioners. People who have heard of the party’s mighty deeds, and have come to plead for aid.
3. Conspiracy Event
Very recently, I wrote about how every game I run has conspiracies going on in the background. Secret goals pursued by hidden persons, which the players may or may not uncover before the conspiracy reaches its ultimate culmination.
When this is rolled, the referee should randomly determine one of game’s conspiracies (assuming there are more than one). Something happens that is relevant both to it, and to the players. Perhaps the plot takes a big step forward, with some public consequence that seems simple at first, but might reveal more upon careful investigation. Alternately, some small corner of the conspiracy could be uncovered, becoming public knowledge.
It is less important for these to have a direct consequence, since they are building towards a large consequence later down the line.
4. Something Happens to a Player’s Resources
Randomly determine a player. No doubt, that player has accrued some resources over time: they have a hireling, a personal citadel, a magic laboratory, a vault of treasures, and a sterling reputation.
When this is rolled, the player’s friends are assaulted, their possessions burgled, their fortresses attacked, or their good names slandered. Some resource of theirs is diminished.
Be very cautious in how this particular result is applied. It is not interesting for players to describe in detail the many security precautions they take to avoid being robbed. It is best, I think, to stick to attacking resources which might reasonably be outside the player’s ability to control.
“All your gold is stolen from your private vault!” is going to cause a lot of frustration, and probably lead the players to bore you with endless descriptions of the many traps and spells they use to protect their coin.
“One of your servants was mugged, and the entire month’s food budget stolen!” is a much more reasonable option.
5. Something Happens with a Player’s Goals
Randomly determine a player. Most likely, that player has expressed some kind of personal goal they want their character to pursue. A religion they want to discredit, a territory they want to establish, a device they want to build, etc.
Pick one thing that you know the player wants, then flip a coin. There is a 50/50 chance that this event is a setback, or an opportunity.
Setbacks are a threat to the player’s ability to accomplish their goal. If they want to discredit a religion, perhaps a miracle occurs which draws in hordes of new converts. If they want to establish a territory, perhaps the land they were looking at is seized by someone else. If they want to build a device, perhaps the government bans such devices.
Opportunities are a chance for the player to advance their goal more rapidly than they would normally be able. Using the same examples as above, this might be a religious sex scandal, a group of settlers asking the PC to help them find a new home, or some useful materials falling off the back of a truck.
6. World Event
World events are not directly related the the players. However, their results have enough impact on the environment that the players should be interested none the less. When a world event occurs, roll on the following table:
The Haven Turn
You may have noticed that there’s a lot of overlap between the system outlined above, and Haven Turn complications. Most notably, the list of World Events are literally copy/pasted from that post, and edited to reflect some differences in the rules.
Complications have become my favorite part of the game, and I want to bring them more to the fore. In my game, this system will replace the standard Haven Turn encounter check. But even if you don’t use the Haven Turn system, I think this method could be helpful to others running high level games.
Have I ever mentioned that I wrote a miniature RPG book to help me run On a Red World Alone? It’s not the prettiest thing in the world, but it’s a good 25 pages of setting information and rules that I’ve slowly patched together over the two years that I’ve been running the campaign. I’ve kept it private, because it was never meant to be anything other than a personal reference document. Who would be interested in that?
Well, based on the number of people who read ORWA’s play reports, far more people are interested than I might have suspected. And now that I’m starting up a new campaign, it seems like a good time to also start being more open about some of this behind-the-scenes stuff.
So, if you’re interested, here is the 21 page player’s guide for Fuck the King of Space. I’m taking this new campaign as an opportunity to implement a lot of shit I’ve been thinking about, much of which I’ve talked about on the blog before. The document is less interesting for its novelty than it is for taking a lot of my ideas, and putting them together into a (hopefully) coherent whole. Though, there is some new stuff in there, and almost all of the old stuff has been streamlined or revised.
There’s also a lot missing, and that’s another reason I never shared the ORWA Player’s Guide. These are living documents, updated and changed as the game evolves. If this sparks any interest at all, I’ll be sure to keep the blog updated with newer versions as I write them. (Though, future updates will be announced as bonus posts, instead of serving as the main weekly post.)
Enjoy!
When I was first coming into my own as a Game Master (back when I called it that), I developed a lot of bad habits. I made plans about how my game would develop, and was frustrated when my players didn’t fall in line. I was obsessed with over-preparing, and frustrated with myself when I couldn’t produce a polished adventure module every month. I knew which encounters I wanted my players to succeed at, and which I wanted them to fail at. I fudged dice, and hit points, and the fabric of the shared reality itself in order to bring about my desired results. Consequently, I didn’t have any groups that lasted for very long.
Eventually, I got better at running games within this fundamentally flawed style.I learned how to develop a Big Bad Evil Guy, how to create invisible walls that weren’t very obvious to my players, how to weave a narrative into a game while still giving the players enough freedom that they didn’t feel like they were being railroaded too much, even when they were. I was good enough to have run several long, enjoyable campaigns before meeting Courtney Campbell, and being shamed into developing some better habits.
Even as far as I’ve come, though; despite all my pretty talk of ‘agency,’ and the fact that I now use the correct term “referee,” I still secretly hold to one of the worst habits imaginable. My campaigns still have a BBEG, and I still keep an idea in my head of what the player’s eventual final encounter with that BBEG will be like.
Already I can hear people banging on my door, and it sounds like they have pitchforks. I suppose I’d better qualify that statement before I get kicked out of the OSR. Without a saving throw, if you know what I mean.
When I say my campaigns still have a BBEG, what I mean is that I usually have an NPC who is very powerful, and has a goal which the players will probably oppose. And when I say I keep an idea in my head of what the final encounter will be like, what I mean is that once the players have caught the attention of this powerful NPC, that NPC will begin to make plans for some eventual confrontation.
So, that’s not so bad, yeah? Can ya’ll take this noose off from around my neck now, and let my climb down off of this horse? Please?
I’ve taken to calling this element of my games “The Conspiracy.” An inscrutable plot, controlled by hidden actors, in the pursuit of unknown goals. It’s something that exists more for my amusement than for any practical reason, but they do serve a useful role in pushing the game forward, and giving disassociated game elements something to cohere around.
For example, I’ll use the conspiracy from my long-defunct ToKiMo campaign. From the player’s perspective, the world was in crisis because an ancient evil dragon had awakened, and was flying around causing havoc wherever it went. In truth, the dragon was a pawn. It had been enchanted by the kingdom’s princess, who also happened to be a naturally talented sorceress.
Her father, the King, had 20 years of life left in him. And even when he did die, male primogeniture meant one of her younger brothers would inherit the crown. She wanted to be rid of anyone with a clear claim ahead of hers, and to become so revered and powerful that convention would be forgotten in favor of her rule. Step one of that plan was putting the nation into a crisis that established power structures couldn’t handle, thus, the dragon. Step two was something about tricking a general into thinking that he was the one plotting a coup, I dunno, I’ve mostly forgotten the details. It was 6+ years ago.
Now, let’s assume I want to send the players into a dungeon to get a weird object. A wizard offers to pay them 500 silver coins if they retrieve a sack of Razorsilk from the great worms beneath The Forgotten Keep. Simple, timeless, classic adventure hook. It doesn’t need any further explanation, because Wizards be Wizards, ya’ll. But in my head, I connect it to the conspiracy. In my head, I know the Wizard wants these silks, because an agent of the Princess has hired them to perform a particular ritual.
More than likely, this will not come up in play. But, if the players get curious, I have the conspiracy to fall back on as a reason for just about anything that anybody wants. I can even drop a few clues if I feel like it. When the wizard receives the Razorsilk, they mutter something about how “this’ll finally get that pushy cigarette smoking man off my back.” The kind of thing that will be taken as fluff dialogue, and probably ignored. 10 sessions later, when another NPC mentions the cigarette smoking man, maybe they’ll connect the dots, or maybe they won’t.
In another example, let’s say the players have slain one of the big dragon’s children, and they’re looting its lair. They come across a luxurious suite of rooms meant to accommodate humans. It’s a weird detail. Maybe they investigate it, or maybe they don’t. The truth is that I never expected them to kill this dragon. I threw the lair together in 10 minutes while I was pretending to be pooping. Having this weird background detail of the conspiracy gave me something to riff of of: maybe the princess visits this dragon sometimes? And if she does, part of the lair would be suited for her comfort.
I think I’d be lying, though, if I claimed my conspiracies exist because they serve as a convenient backdrop to the campaign. They exist because I enjoy concocting evil plots, and imagining climactic showdowns that never come to pass. I get giddy when I think about how shocked the players will be when all is revealed.
But, of course, agency must be preserved. So, I drop hints, which is perhaps the most thrilling part of all. It’s like playing a game of chicken. How far can I go before everything is obvious? Was the thing that NPC said, or the title I gave that session report too obvious of a clue? Is everything about to unravel, and if it does, what exciting new developments will that mean for the campaign?
Players may never catch on to the conspiracy. My players never really pursued the dragon thing very much at all, preferring to push out into the wilderness. Nobody ever realized that The Motherless Warlock had created Dungeon Moon so he could watch over it like a mix between God, and Reality Television. The Ascendant Crusade group never knew that their favorite NPC was evil.
And what happens if they do figure it out? That has only ever happened to me once, when some first level scrubs decided they wanted to know why anyone in a post apocalypse would want a computer chip. When it did happen, I did my best to roll with the punches, and it wound up spawning the most successful campaign I’ve ever run in my life. (Complete with a second conspiracy layered on top, to replace the first one).
I’m curious to know if this is a common thing for referees to do. I suppose, if it is, they probably never mention it. Shit, am I revealing secrets?
What’s that pounding on my door?
I know this very smart guy, named Frotz, who loves clerics. They’re one of his favorite classes. I’ve enjoyed many long conversations with him about games, which have always been eye opening for me. Most relevantly, several of our conversations were about the pros and cons of the Cleric class. Two bits from those conversations got stuck in my brain, and have been percolating there for months.
“LotFP has one of the best versions of the Cleric class, because it’s explicitly positioned as the anti-magic user. Most notably with the way Dispel Magic works.”
“The Cleric is to the Magic User, as the Fighter is to the Specialist.”
With those thoughts in mind, I’ve put together a new version of the cleric that I’m honestly excited by. Something simple, but powerful, with a clear niche. Much better than my beloved, but admittedly overdesigned, Glory From God system.
There is a divine music to the universe. Before the fall of man, when we lived each day in the light of our creator, we heard this music always. But when we were cast out from the sacred garden, we lost the ability to hear. The music is still there, ringing out from every sphere in the heavens, but it is beyond us now.
Clerics are those who have–through diligent study of God’s word, and meditation on the divine–trained themselves to hear the faintest echos of that music. Hearing it changes a person. They experience reality the way God always intended his beloved children to experience it. All they want now is to hear more, and to hear better. Sin disrupts the music, and becomes hateful to the cleric. And there is no sin greater than the casting of magic.
Clerics have a d8 hit die. They advance and make saving throws as the default cleric class does. Clerics cannot cast any spells. If alignment is used in your game, clerics must be Lawful.
Beginning at first level, clerics have the following abilities:
Turn: The cleric confronts their foes with a brief glimpse of God’s might. When this ability is activated, the cleric identifies a single target, then rolls 2d6. The results are compared to the matrix below (borrowed from page 147 of the LotFP Rules & Magic book). (Note that while the table says “Undead,” this ability works against anyone the cleric deems to be their enemy).
If the cleric’s roll is equal to, or greater than the result required for their target’s hit dice, that foe has been cowed. They will flee from the cleric if there is an easy escape, or cower meekly if there is not. This effect will persist as long as the cleric takes no action aside from looking imposing, or turning other foes. The effect will also end if the target is attacked.
The cleric may turn as many times as they wish, so long as they are successful. If a turn attempt fails, the cleric cannot attempt to turn anything again for the rest of the day.
On the table, a result of “-” means turning is impossible. A result of “T” means turning is automatic. A result of “T*” means that any of the target’s allies with the same or fewer hit dice are also turned. A result of “D” means the target is destroyed by the unbearable glory of god, and that their allies with similar hit dice are automatically turned. A Result of “D*” means that the target, and their allies, are destroyed.
Dispel Magic: If the cleric wishes to snuff out any magical spell or effect, they need only reach out their hand, and will for chaos to be bent back into order.
When such an attempt is made, roll a d6. On a 1, the attempt fails. Otherwise, the attempt succeeds, and the magic is undone. If permanent magic is targeted, such as the enchantments on a magic weapon, the effect lasts until the object or location is next touched by moonlight. (Or, if you prefer, until the next day).
If a spell is cast in the Cleric’s presence, they may attempt to dispel it immediately, before it has any effect. Doing so consumes their next turn.
Each time a Dispel Magic attempt fails should be tallied. Once the cleric’s tallies for the day equal their level, they may not attempt to dispel anything further that day.
For every 2 hit dice a Magic User has above a Cleric, that Cleric’s dispel attempts are penalized by 1. So a first level Cleric would suffer no penalty against a Magic User of first or second level, but would suffer a penalty of -1 against an MU of the third or fourth level. Similarly a penalty of -2 against an MU of levels five or six, and so on.
Magics which are part of a creature’s innate abilities are more difficult to dispell, and will also fail on a 2. Other circumstances may prompt the referee to assign similar penalties to particularly potent magics. This should be done sparingly.
Identify: Thoroughly shutting down magic the way Clerics do requires them to have a profound understanding of it. Clerics can determine whether or not a thing is magical, what the effects of that magic are, and even obscure details like how long ago the magic was cast, and whether the caster was right or left handed.
This is not something a Cleric can do passively. They can’t walk into a room, and immediately point out all the magic items within. However, if they handle an object, look at it closely, smell it, taste it, and listen to it, they will gain an understanding of any magics attached to it. Doing so takes a 10 minute turn.
Spell Resistance: Clerics have a chance-in-twenty to resist magic, equal to their level. 1-in-20 at first level, 2-in-20 at second level, etc. Any time the Cleric would be the target of magic, before any saving throws or spell effects are rolled, roll a d20. If the result is equal to, or lower than the Cleric’s level, the spell passes harmlessly over them.
This does not mean the Cleric has any immunity to a fireball if it goes off near them. But, if they are the target of a fireball, their resistance may prevent it from going off in the first place. It is left to the referee to adjudicate what exactly it means to be a spell’s ‘target.’
This ability reaches its maximum at an 18-in-20 chance.
I’ve done something stupid.
I agreed to take over refereeing responsibilities for one of the games I play in. This means I’ll be running two games every week. The very idea of it is exhausting, and I’m honestly a little worried about how I’m going to hold up. If this blog ends up becoming even more of a word slurry than it already is, you’ll know why.
The first hurdle is figuring out what I should run. Should it be something I’ve already put a lot of work into, like Dungeon Moon? Or, I could run a second party through ORWA, and let the two groups see one another’s influence on the world. But both of those are post-apocalyptic settings, and I’d really like to branch out and do something new. I briefly considered running a game in a very traditional fantasy world, but as much as I do want to revisit that concept someday, it just doesn’t hold much appeal to me at the moment.
What I really want to do is run a game in space. And I want it to be the opposite of post apocalypse. I want it to be a galaxy of plenty. A society at its peak, but one with enough stark inequality that the players are hungry.
So, here’s my campaign pitch:
Faster Than Light travel is a technology so profoundly ancient, that it may as well be The Wheel. It’s prehistory, interesting only to the dustiest and most arthritic of archeologists. Commensurately, the whole of the galaxy–down to the tips of each spiral arm–was originally charted so long ago that many worlds have been forgotten, rediscovered, and forgotten again many times over.
Every star system of consequences is ruled by a member of one of the 36,000 families. Less consequential systems are nominally ruled by them as well, but usually by some minor relative who prefers living in a manse on a more cosmopolitan world, rather than moving to some backwater to govern it.
To say the hierarchies among the 36,000 families are complex, is akin to saying the galaxy is rather big. There are entire universities of scholars dedicated to understanding the finer minutia of who is in charge of what, and which person is subordinate to whom. But, bloated and directionless as the bureaucracy is, it all manages to muddle along under the guidance of the one supreme authority that is completely indisputable: The King of Space.
The current dynasty came to power four generations ago, in a series of ruthless wars pursued by Kulga “Bloodfist” Osbert. Her son, Ruldin, fought many of her later wars at her side, and was himself a powerful ruler in his day. His son, Trost, was competent enough for peacetime. The current King of Space, Trost’s daughter Bassiana, is a pathetically pampered creature with a cruel sense of fun. The only reason no one has usurped her yet is that dealing with her is slightly less terrifying than the prospect of succession wars.
None of that really has much to do with you, though. You’re just some dirt farmer who grows cantaloupes all year, then loads half of them onto a ship that transports them to some more important world you will never visit, where most will rot before anyone feels like eating them.
Or maybe you work in a factory, making fittings for mounting Repulsor Lift Dishes into Repulsor Lift Housings. You live in company housing, and every day you work a 16 hour shift at the conveyor belt, performing the same rote solder over and over again. Eventually, each fitting will be sold for 2 Darics, which is the same amount you make for every 100 you complete. So long as there are no defects.
Or maybe you’ve seen your share of the finer things in life, as you stood still and silent in some minor noble’s manse. Far enough away that nobody had to think about you, but close enough to respond instantly if any of them wanted a cup from the pitcher of wine you held.
The point is that you’re shit. You’re at the bottom of the pecking order, and always have been. But, recently, you resolved to change that. To take control of your life. With all your meager savings, you booked passage on an independent freighter that came through the local port. You hoped to disembark on some nicer world, and hopefully make a real life for yourself there.
Unfortunately, that didn’t pan out.
The Bozac
Two hundred years ago, The Bozac was a top-of-the-line pleasure cruiser, intended to ferry hundreds of passengers around in style and luxury. After many years of enduring more and more demeaning service, the Bozac was finally headed for the scrap heap, when an enterprising young fella bought it on the cheap.
Nine-tenths of the ship isn’t even pressurized. The remaining tenth is falling apart, but if you cram it full of people and cargo, it runs just well enough that you can call yourself an independent transport.
Things were going well enough, until the ship was ambushed by pirates. The crew and passengers of The Bozac never had a chance. If it had been one pirate with a marshmellow gun on a skateboard, they still would have been too fast and too well armed for The Bozac to get away. One shot crippled the ship’s engines, and one hour is all it took to steal all the cargo worth taking. The crew and passengers were herded into slave pens, and a few minutes after that, The Bozac was a deserted hulk drifting in space.
Deserted, except for a handful of player characters who managed to hide well enough to be left behind. Now all they’ve gotta do is find some way to get the ship moving again, before the life support system gives out.
Gameplay
My hope is that the players find some way to repair The Bozac, becoming its de facto crew. From there, the game would unfold as a sort of open-ended hex crawl, with the ship playing dual purpose both as the facilitator of their adventures (by allowing them to move around the Galaxy), and a lodestone around their neck (constantly eating up resources for fuel and repairs). Over time, they could customize the ship, or just buy or steal a better one.
Of course, the game could develop in any number of directions, and I don’t want to presume too much about how the players will solve their first set of problems. If they don’t end up with a ship of their own, they can always adventure on a single planet for awhile, and book passage on freighters whenever they want to move to a new one.
I’d like to put together a rules document before play begins. Nothing terribly fancy, mind you. Basically just the same rules I’ve been using in ORWA, but with some of the modifications that my ORWA group wouldn’t let me get away with.
A variety of alien species exist, but humans are the dominant race. No alien species has settlements on more than a handful of worlds, and the galactic nobility and monarchy are exclusively human. Player characters are assumed to be human unless some alternative is negotiated in advance. Classes are fighter / specialist / magic user, but I’m open to whatever weird class the players found on a blog somewhere, if they want to play it.
This mid-week bonus post is here by the good grace of my generous Patrons. Thank you!
On a Red World Alone has a way of bringing out the weird in people. To some extent that’s true of all D&D, but ORWA strikes a chord with people. It makes them want to go out of their way to be weird, just for the sake of fitting in with all the weirdness around them. It’s one of the things I love about the setting.
Recently, one of my players had the opportunity to make a wish. He said “I wish that anytime I successfully flip over someone’s head, something happens.”
That’s it. Just…”something happens.” He went on to explain that he didn’t care how I determined what happened, and could use whatever method I deemed appropriate. He did suggest that I could write a table if I wanted (this is something my players have come to expect from me), but added that he would be just as happy to have me make up the results on the spot. In fact, he insisted that if I did make a table, he wanted at least one of the entries to be “referee improvises something.”
For a few weeks after the player made this wish, my game prep time was pretty lacking, so that’s basically what I did. I just improvised something that felt appropriate each time he flipped. Like the time I caused flowers to grow out of the ground all around where he landed, or the time I had a nearby door slide open. I’ve wanted to make a table, and now that I’ve got a little more time that’s what this post was originally going to be. But the player uses this ability several times each session, so I worry that even a d100 table would get stale more quickly than it would be worth. And anyways, I like making these unpredictable effects relate specifically to the situation the players are in, which a table cannot easily accommodate.
So, rather than create a table with explicit entries, I’ve decided to use a reaction roll to determine how good or bad the result of a flip should be, then fiat from there. So, whenever this player flips over someone’s head, 2d6 are rolled.
On a 2, something terrible happens. Like…a nearby vase explodes, filling the room with flying shards of glass shrapnel.
On a 3-5, something somewhat unfortunate happens. Like…the flipper’s personal gravity is reversed, causing him to fall up to the ceiling.
On a 6-8, something weird and neutral, but potentially exploitable, happens. Like…smoke starts pouring out the flipper’s ears until it fills the room.
On a 9-11, something pretty good happens. Like…an encounter that was going poorly resets, so the party can make a new first impression.
On a 12, something great happens. Like…the flipper gains a temporary invulnerability.
There’s still a lot of fiat involved, which is what we wanted here. That will allow the flips to have context-based results, and prevent the ability from starting to feel stale. But, I’m not in complete control. The dice are still a deciding factor, which was important to me.
That begs the question, why? Why don’t I want to be in control? OSR referees have a reputation, in some corners of the greater RPG community, for being control freaks. We want the power to make ANYTHING happen in our games, without regard for the player’s desires. We want to create the whole game world ourselves, rather than let players have any input on what the world is like, etc. etc. etc.
And it’s true, I do want that power when I run games. Honestly, I require that power. If the group wants to play a game where the referee’s role has been neutered, I may be willing to participate, but I wouldn’t be willing to run. Without the power to bend the world in whatever direction I deem correct, being the referee seems kinda pointless to me.
But that power is always supposed to be used in the service of the world. The idea is not that the referee gets to go on a power trip. That’s just juvenile, and not a game anybody would stick around in for very long. The idea is that we’re all playing in a shared imaginary space, and because we’re all different people, we’re going to perceive that space in different ways, and thus need an arbiter to resolve disagreement.
If a room is described as having a pillar in it, one player might imagine a classic roman pillar with vertical grooves and decorative marble filigree at each end. Another player might imagine a crude length of wood. Most of the time, it doesn’t matter, because the pillar is just set dressing. But, part of the fun of RPGs is that anything can become important at any time.
To continue with the same thought experiment, one player says they use their daggers to climb the pillar. Because that player is imagining a column of wood, this seems totally reasonable to them. Another player, though, was imagining stone columns, and is mystified as to how this dumbass thinks they’re going to stick their daggers into it. Who is correct?
The referee is correct. That’s their job. The way they imagine the space is the ‘right’ one, and when some as-yet unspoken detail of the world becomes relevant, the referee can describe what they were imagining.
Of course, sometimes the referee wasn’t imagining anything. Sometimes a player does a flip, and “something happens,” and the referee is responsible for describing something they weren’t planning.
Here’s the thing. As a referee, I do my best to impartially communicate the world to my players. But, I also like my players. They are my friends, and I like it when they have a fun time. I want to be nice to them. So if it’s up to me to just…pick something, I’m going to err on the side of making them happy. It’s not something I aim to do, it’s just something that happens.
But players shouldn’t always be happy. Sometimes, bad things happen to them. Bad things cause conflict, and conflict is the core element of interesting events. Even when good things happen, it may not be the good thing the players wanted, or expected, and that can be interesting too.
It’s a less important consideration, but the dice also help avoid choice paralysis. “Something Happens” is a pretty big mandate. “Something bad happens” or “Something great happens” is much more manageable. Creativity thrives on limitations.
And that’s why anyone who has ever criticized the OSR for anything, ever, is a big dummy.