Better Not Die, ‘cuz PCs Don’t Go To Heaven

Oversaturated screenshot of Meryl Strife from the Playstation 1 Metal Gear Solid game, lying on the ground in a pool of blood. Text over the image reads "Time to roll a new character. Unless…?"

When your character drops to 0 hit points¹ in On A Red World Alone, two things happen:

You must roll on the permanent injury table.
I remind you that the next hit will kill you dead.

That’s it. The character’s ability to take actions is not inhibited in any way beyond their specific injury, and their own desire to avoid character death. This always surprises and slightly confuses new players, who expect having no hit points to restrict their options more severely. It even surprises and confuses old players who haven’t been at 0 hit points in awhile. (Which, as an inattentive player myself, I totally understand.)

I’ve been running games this way for many years now, because it creates an interesting choice: What risks are you willing to take when you’re one knuckle sandwich away from certain death? To me that choice is made so much less interesting if you’re also inhibited by moving at half speed, or rolling with disadvantage, or especially if the only action you’re allowed to take is “roll to stop bleeding.”

If the injured character escapes immediate danger, they are faced with another interesting choice: do they move to the back rank of the party and continue on their quest, or do they find somewhere to hunker down and heal? Healing requires 8 hours of rest², in which time whatever task they’re pursuing will definitely become more challenging in some way. Doors will be locked, traps will be laid, their enemies will be reinforced, or rival bands of plunderers will arrive to compete for loot.

¹ I don’t fuck with negative hit points. If you’ve got 3hp, taking 3 damage and taking 30 damage have identical results. I have toyed with the idea of a catastrophic injury rule where damage that would reduce you to -10 is instantly lethal, but at present I’m not doing that.

² You can restore 1hp by finding a corner to hide in for 8 hours. Or, if you’re fortunate enough to rest somewhere with a bed, food, and leisure activities, you may roll your hit die to determine how many hp you recover.

Roll on the Permanent Injury Table

My permanent injury table is more bark than bite, since only half its results are permanent.

Gain a cool scar. Roll a new Boon. (In games other than ORWA, I replace this with +1 to a random Ability Score.)
In shock. Automatically fail saving throws for the rest of the session.
The most precious item the character has with them is destroyed.
Roll a die type equal to half your HD (d6 HD -> roll d3). Reduce your maximum HP by the result.
A randomly determined skill is reduced by 1 rank. (In games other than ORWA, I replace this with -1 to a random Ability Score.)
Severe bodily trauma. Your (1-2: arm, 3-4: leg, 5: eye, 6: lung, 7: kidney, 8: face) is destroyed.

I believe these entries are fairly clear, though the last one may require a bit of additional explanation.

Losing an arm prevents a character from holding two things, losing a leg prevents them from standing or moving normally. In both cases I’d roll a d% to see how much of the limb was destroyed. Losing an eye penalizes their ability to aim. Losing a lung penalizes endurance. Losing a kidney is my catch-all for digestive organs and makes them vulnerable to poisons. Lungs and kidneys are both particularly bad if you happen to lose them twice, since you can’t be alive anymore. Having one’s face destroyed penalizes social rolls.

You could get a lot more granular with different bits of the body, and the disabilities that would result from their destruction. For many years I used a huge table with over 200 grisly entries, and enjoyed it very much. I only switched to this because a smaller table is easier to keep at hand and thus faster to use. And until recently I included the possibility for characters to lose their ability to talk, smell, or hear, but I personally find those conditions challenging to enforce at the table, and so have opted to remove them.

In all cases, the nature of the injury can be tailored to whatever caused it. A swinging sword, a falling rock, a venomous bite, and a blast of fire can all destroy a person’s arm, but the particulars will differ.

Death

A character at 0 who takes another point of damage is dead. Depending on the method of death I may allow them some brave last words, or a spiteful final riposte, but then it’s time to roll a new character. Unless…?

On a Red World Alone is set in what I call a Saturday Morning SciFi milieu. Characters returning from the dead in some horrible altered form is a genre staple that I cannot deny to my players. So long as a dead character’s body isn’t completely obliterated, and their friends are able to recover it, then the player may opt to revive their character as either a Cyborg, an Undead, or a Mutant.

Cyborg resurrection has the fewest strings attached if you happen to be absurdly wealthy. For the low-low price of 9000cc + 1000cc/level, the finest scientific minds on apocalyptic mars will replace your most mangled body parts with chrome. If you don’t happen to be absurdly wealthy, worry not! The billing department has already filed the paperwork to garnish half your XP gain until the debt is paid.

Undead resurrection is a bit of a melodramatic term. Sure, your soul was forced back into its fleshy husk by the power of eldritch sorcery which makes you repellent in the eyes of God. But your heart pumps blood, your lungs pull in air, and you don’t smell any worse than you used to. To all appearances you look as good as if you’d never died at all, but necromancers must be paid—and they place little value on plastic. Choosing Undead resurrection places the resurrected under a Geas they must complete. The nature of the Geas will depend on the goals of the magician who performed the resurrection. A wizard’s goals are rarely wholesome.

Mutant resurrection is a gamble. Somewhat less than the finest scientific minds on apocalyptic mars will blast your corpse with strange radiation, pump it full of neon colored goop, and allow stray animals to bite it. On the upside: it does bring you back to life on the cheap. On the downside: you’ve developed a disadvantageous mutation. The process by which I manage this in my own game involves a d1000 table and a series of mental filters, neither of which can reasonably be shared here. Instead, here’s a table of d12 examples:

Allergic to Silver. Can’t touch it, and takes extra damage from it.
A gross little face is growing from where the wound was. It says rude things to people.
Skin glows very slightly. Not enough to see by, but enough to make it impossible to hide in darkness.
Mutant grows tight strands between fingers, hindering their manual dexterity. Reduce a finger-dependent skill by 1 rank.
Nose becomes large and hypersensitive. Must make a saving throw to avoid fleeing from strong smells.
Legs shrink. Normal movement rate is reduced by 25%.
If this mutant touches a wounded person, they absorb that person’s damage. They cannot control this ability, and cloth clothing isn’t enough to prevent touching.
The mutant’s body produces a stone which, if destroyed, instantly kills the mutant. The inverse is not true: the stone being secure does not prevent the mutant from any harm.
The mutant has absolutely no sense of direction. They cannot “go back the way they came” if they’re alone, and will fail any navigation checks.
The mutant is profoundly unpleasant to talk to. Try as they might, they’re always going to say stuff that’s boring, mean, or offensive. -1 on social checks.
Skin flakes off constantly, leaving an easy-to-follow trail wherever they go.
Weak little baby lungs prevent this mutant from holding their breath at all, for any reason.

In conclusion

A stranger once told me that they’d heard of my games through one of my players, and reported that this player’s favorite thing about playing with me is that death feels like an ever-present risk. This surprised me. It is lovely to know my players speak well of me, but I don’t think of my games as being particularly deadly. Certainly I don’t intervene to prevent death from happening if that’s how the player’s choices and the luck of the dice land, but in practice PC death doesn’t happen often. Most of this post has been about the ways players can survive when they ought to have died!

I think the operative word in this second-hand performance review is “feels.” Death feels like an ever-present risk in my games, because when players get close to it the game changes. They’re faced with decisions that have clear life-or-death stakes, and if they manage to survive the experience still leaves its mark on them.

Fuck the King of Space: Post Mortem

We played the last session of Fuck the King of Space on December 29th, 2018. The game ran for about a year, with a total of 23 sessions played.

I decided to end the campaign for a few reasons. The biggest of which was just my available energy. I said during my original campaign pitch that it was a stupid idea for me to agree to run a second campaign, and I was right. I already struggle to find enough time to make ORWA a good game. I never managed to devote much at all to FKOS, and play suffered because of that. Within just a few months the game went from weekly to biweekly. That helped a lot–and thanks are due to Chris H. for offering to run during my off weeks!–but even with that help I wasn’t keeping up.

There were other factors as well. My intent had been for FKOS to be vastly different from ORWA. I wanted some variety on my end. In practice my work wound up being pretty much the same. Not because ORWA’s back end systems were a good fit for FKOS, but because I never worked out what FKOS’s own back end systems should look like. There were also interpersonal conflicts, personal tragedies, and lots of folks being seriously overworked, which made it difficult to get enough people together for a session during the latter half of 2018.

That’s not to say it was a bad campaign; all good things must end. We enjoyed 23 entertaining sessions which I was mostly pretty happy with. That said; campaigns never end because of what did work about them. So now is as good a time as there will ever bo to look back over what didn’t work so it can be improved if I ever attempt the game again.

There’s Too Much Space in Space. I never realized before running FKOS how much of a blessing ORWA’s intensely confined spaces are. When the entire game takes place within a 6-mile dome it makes sense to run the world like a megadungeon. Of course there’s some weird new thing lurking around every corner, behind every door, and beneath every manhole cover. The world is built on that kind of density, and I’ve come to rely on it for how I run my game.

That doesn’t work in space, but I did it anyway. Players constantly stumbled across lost planets, weird phenomena, other starships, and it always felt hacky. I failed to leverage the gameplay to communicate the setting. Space shouldn’t be empty–we are playing an adventure game after all–but it shouldn’t feel crowded either.

When the players have an interstellar space ship with an advanced FTL drive, it makes it difficult to:

Communicate the scale of the distances traveled.
Have them encounter the unexpected.

The first point can be mitigated somewhat with fuel consumption, but “You expend 30 fuel getting there” still feels like hand waving. Perhaps ships should need to refuel more often, thus forcing the players to interact with environments along the way. Alternately, “Travel Turns” might be added as a sort of limited version of the Haven Turn. The players have a lot of downtime, but their resources are limited to whatever is with them on the ship.

Encountering the unexpected during travel might be something I need to mostly give up on. It could still happen now and again, but I don’t think it ought to be a primary driver of play. Instead of using random encounters as a way of hooking players into adventures, I could use similar tables to generate rumors and job offers at various ports. It’s less interesting to hear “there’s a dragon over that hill” than it is to simply bump into a dragon while you’re in the hills, but it’s probably a better fit for space.

Even with my later revisions, Space Ships did not work. As I always do I started out with something that was way more complicated than it needed to be, and over the last year have learned how unnecessary most of it was. It’s a habit I need to break myself of. Writing complicated rules I’ll never use is not an efficient use of my time.

Turning “Space” and “Power” into resources was more trouble than it was worth, and I could never figure out how to make either into an effective limit on the player’s desires. Hull points offered too much protection between the party and any real danger to their ship. The codified modules were just…too much. I really should have known better.

If I were to redesign the system there’d be no hull points. Each hit in combat would reduce the ship’s functionality in some way. Many of the things on the modules list would become assumed parts of the ship (cockpits, engines, crew quarters), and modifications like adding a science lab would be handled in a more ad-hoc manner.

Weapons didn’t work in kinda the same way Space Ships didn’t. I had an over-complicated approach. Unlike Space Ships, the downfall of the system is that I never codified fukkin’ anything. The players were walking around with weapons that supposedly had quirks and special purposes, but neither they nor I had any idea what those were. Like I said above, I just never had the energy to give this game the attention it deserved. I still think the idea of restricting all weapons to d6 damage is a good one. I’ve certainly seen it work. I also still like the idea of differentiating weapons through their secondary properties, but like space ship modules I think that ought to be handled as an ad-hoc consideration. Your axe doesn’t have the “Also chops trees” special ability. It’s just an axe, and you know how axes work, so if there’s a tree to be chopped down you can say “Hey, I have an axe, can I get a bonus?”

I wonder if part of the issue here is that I tend to work through my problems by writing about them, and I have certain expectations for how long a piece of writing should be, which leads me to over-solve my problems. Something for me to think about.

Magic Words oddly enough, did not work well in this game. It’s a system I’ve used successfully for years, but FKOS put it to a whole new kind of stress test with two highly skilled and efficient players both running as magic users. My sketchy draft for Magic Words 2 was partially written in response to this problem, and I have yet newer ideas I hope to discuss soon.

Finally, The Setting didn’t work, which is again a matter of how little time I was able to spend on it. I’ve got notes somewhere about how the universe breaks down into several factions that all nominally work for the King, but are at odds with each other. There was going to be a powerful university structure called “The League of Distinguished Academics.” “The King’s Loyal Soldiers” were going to be this monstrous military machine without enough enemies to fight. The fact that I can’t remember all six (six?) factions off the top of my head is testament to how poorly they were communicated through he actual play of the game.

This is real disappointing for me. Figuring out how these factions worked with and against one another was what made me most excited about the campaign, and now they may well never be put to any use.

I hope one of these days I have the opportunity to give Fuck the King of Space the attention it really deserved. C’est la vie.

Discovering Dungeon Moon: What is a God?

Most of my games share a nebulous theology. There are vague deific entities who feed on human devotion. They perform miracles as a way of planting seeds for later harvest. I don’t put energy into crafting gods as agents in their own right because that pretty much never comes up. I do often create new religions for each game, because religion is a human foible, and something that will inform the world around the player characters. Those religions do not describe a metaphysical reality. It’s just people making shit up trying to understand the world around them. Deific entities then play into the expectations set by these religions so they can get their devotion fix.

(I’ve written before about Neve Canri, who is something of an exception to this rule.)

Dungeon Moon is a notable exception to that pattern. The gods of dungeon moon are not distant metaphysical entities. Divine power is neither so mysterious, nor far reaching. To be a god on Dungeon Moon one must be present on Dungeon Moon. Gods can be met, spoken to, touched. They are two steps removed from mortal existence, but no more so than that. They are weird, but comprehensible.

There is the Pale Jaguar, a cat larger than an elephant with forgotten knowledge inscribed on each strand of hair. It forbids any procreation by its adherents except by a ritual so complex that it must be personally overseen by the deity.

The Rot God is a fetid heap of decay which consumes life at a touch. It is bound to a pit by ancient holy magics. Fools throw it offerings of fabulous goldworks hoping to ward off disease and death. Their offerings sink into the god’s oozy body, ignored and unappreciated. The fly folk are its only true servants.

Shai wraps himself in a tattered brown blanket. The light from his eyes is blinding, giving visions of the true past to any who look into them. He fancies himself a “good” god, but is cautious to excess. He weighs options and ethics until it is too late to take effective action. He inserts himself everywhere as mediator, and his decisions carry the force of godly might–until his back is turned.

“Blender Head” is an impolite way to refer to That God Who Insists Names Are Beneath Their Dignity. When not enacting their own will, Blender Head moves so slowly that they might be mistaken for a statue, save for the constant creaking from their metal body. Their followers have a sort of roaming tent city with their god always at the center, moving one row of tents each day from the path behind the god, to the path before of the god. When compelled to act, Blender Head is faster than fast.

Mother Long Legs discovered a little town without its protective runes, filled with cowering peasants. She positioned herself over the town, with her eight legs around its edge, and set her spider-headed children to wrapping a wall of steel web from leg to leg, completely encircling the town. There is no kindness in her protection. She is omniscient within the town. She personally involves herself in the minutia of people’s lives, playing with them like dolls and devouring those who can’t be molded.

Corpse Seeker is a many-armed thing with a sense for where to find the dead. It interrogates corpses, and passes judgement over their lives. It has no power over what happens to their souls, but it wants them to know whether they have its approval or not. It may be convinced to ask slightly tangential questions if the answers would aid the living in a goal it approves of.

The gods of Dungeon Moon are not omnipotent. They are not omniscient. They can even be killed, though they have no hit points. Each god’s mortality is guarded by a trick. Some seemingly harmless non-sequiotor of an action which will destroy them. Like robots that can be rendered immobile when presented with a logical paradox; or aliens defeated by the common cold. Sometimes their weakness is ironic, other times it’s just random. It’s always a secret.

Discovering Dungeon Moon: Base Camp

The surface of Dungeon Moon is divided into six mile hexes. This is a literally true thing in the world of the game. Characters can travel to the little 3 foot walls which divide each hex from its neighbor. Unlike a natural planetary body with a gradually curved surface, Dungeon Moon is visibly “hinged” at the boarders to each hex.

By default the surface of each is a blank desert of grey flagstone, but six out of every seven hexes were zoned for development. Any of the moon’s many resident wizards could apply to The Neverborn for permission to alter these, and The Neverborn rarely refused. It would not be uncommon to have a lush rainforest on one side of a 3′ wall, and an arid desert on the other.

(In its original iteration, Dungeon Moon was constructed by “The Motherless Warlock,” for reasons which no longer seem quite as clever to me as they did in 2012. I’m taking this opportunity to rename them “The Neverborn.”)

The center, seventh, hex of each group (together referred to as a “hectare”) was set aside as a place where the moon’s many human workers could make their homes. A handful of these grew to the size of cities before The Neverborn abandoned his sphere. The vast majority, though, are little more than hamlets, housing about 100 families each. Regardless of size, each of these worker settlements shared a few features.

Decor: Dungeon Moon is the low-magic aftermath of a high-magic apocalypse. At its height, when The Neverborn still resided on the sphere, it was garishly opulent. Every town was adorned with marble statues. Every building had frescoed walls. Even the folks who emptied chamber pots dined beneath golden chandeliers.

Three generations of absence have led to a lot of decay. Pillows, carpets, fine clothes, shoes, candles; anything consumable has been worn away to nothing. The fine works of metal and stone mostly remain, though some have been smashed in anger, or reforged into more useful tools.

Dining Table: The centerpiece of each community is a stone dish which once produced grand and varied feasts three times each day. Without maintenance these have mostly deteriorated. Now they merely produce a flavorless gray paste. It has a sticky texture, and a yeasty smell, but imbues a body with all the nutrients it needs to survive.

Most folks haven’t eaten anything other than this degraded slop for a generation or more.

Circle of Protection: The moon is a safe haven for boundless magical experimentation. As such, even when The Neverborn was present, the moon’s surface teemed with dangerous creatures. To protect their workers from attacks (and to control any expansion or migration of peoples), The Neverborn laid in a glowing circle of runes around the boarder of each town.

Only residents of the town are able to cross these barriers freely. No trickery or magic has yet found a way to circumvent this abjuration. Teleporting doesn’t work. Burrowing or flying doesn’t work. Throwing something across the barrier doesn’t work. Attempts to damage the runes from the outside don’t work. Which isn’t to say that every Circle of Protection remains intact, merely that those which have been destroyed were destroyed as a result of the residents making a mistake.

Residency in a town was originally handled by The Neverborn’s bureaucracy. Since this has ceased to function, immigration to a new settlement is now completely impossible. Thankfully, anyone born within a given settlement is automatically made a resident of that settlement.

Each town does have a type of “draw bridge,” which can temporarily interrupt a section of the runes to allow a non-resident to cross the barrier. The danger in doing so is limited, since visitors can no more attack the runes from the inside than they can the outside–though they could operate the drawbridge.

Descent: Each settlement has a passage down to the interior of the moon. These may take the form of staircases or elevators, and generally lead down between 4 and 12 levels. Access to these passages is sealed with a force similar to that of the runic circles.

I’ve got quite a bit more to say about how base camps work, but this post is starting to run a bit long and my time is definitely running a bit short.

The essential purpose of the towns is to give the players a safe place to return to at the end of each adventure, and a place which they can improve over time. I’ll talk a little bit more about how that works in the next post.

Developing a Setting: My Trouble with Dungeon Moon

In my experience the success of a campaign is inversely proportional to how much thought I put into the setting before play begins. When I’m gearing up for session 1 of a new game I have two basic priorities:

To come up with a central conceit which is wild enough to be memorable, and open ended enough to accommodate any sort of adventure I want to run in it.
To do as little work as possible justifying that conceit.

On a Red World Alone is a good example of this approach:

Game is set in a post-apocalyptic biodome city on Mars. There’s mutants and magic and factions squabbling over territory.
The apocalypse was so long ago that nobody understands or has access to technology. That way we can still use the LotFP equipment lists.

It’s a cheap attempt to have my cake and eat it too. I wouldn’t accept that sort of shallow setting design in a published product, but it’s a good way to get a new campaign off the ground. As the game progresses tweaks and retcons can be made here and there to develop the setting into a more well rounded whole. Anyone perusing ORWA’s play reports will see that technology has been a prominent part of the game for awhile.

Which is a very roundabout way of introducing a question that has been floating about in my brain for years now: what do I want to do with Dungeon Moon?

For the uninitiated: Dungeon Moon is a campaign I ran back in 2013~2014. It was set on an artificial moon built by a wizard who had decided a mere tower was beneath his dignity. Eventually the wizard disappeared, and the inhabitants of his flagstone moon were left to fend for themselves. The PCs are the great grandchildren of his cooks and gardeners and such. They live in communities surrounded on all sides by horrible monsters and evil experiments. They venture out of the magical barriers that protect them in search of whatever comforts they can bring back to their community.

Dungeon Moon has all the makings of great setting. It’s the first time I really nailed it in making something “wild enough to be memorable.” The plan was always to develop the setting further, and eventually make it into a book. My problem is that Dungeon Moon was (and is) an absolute mess. Every campaign is a mess, but Dungeon Moon was particularly bad. Realistically the only salvageable thing I have from that campaign are the ideas it was based on. Everything I actually developed was trash.

I was in the grip of some really stupid ideas at the time. I had this obsession with creating complex areas described down to the color of the drapes. I had fat stacks of graphing paper that were dense with rooms, cross referenced a dozen different ways, and none of it was done clearly. Remember my old Deadly Dungeons posts? Imagine that, but for every single room. The information was too dense to use at the table, and writing it was too time consuming to keep up with the player’s rate of exploration.

That same obsessive over-documentation prevented me from making all the little tweaks and retcons that have allowed ORWA to develop beyond its early flaws. ORWA has no secret 30,000 word bible that I’ve bled and sweated over; which has allowed it to be agile in a way Dungeon Moon never could be.

I’ve actually made two attempts to fix Dungeon Moon. The first was in 2014, shortly after I stopped running the campaign, and is still burdened with many of the flaws that weighed down the first iteration. The second, in 2016, led to a fun few sessions, but wound up getting pushed aside in favor of other projects. It did result in the development of Flux Space though, which I still think is the best way to model the idea of a moon-sized dungeon.

I think what I’m going to do is spend the next few P&P posts exploring the individual ideas that made up Dungeon Moon. I want to figure out what the setting needs, how to approach it and make it the fun and playable and shareable setting it always ought to have been.

Some topics to cover:

Town generation, management, and development. Dungeon Moon is very much a setting where the party will have a home base they return to and improve over time.
What is treasure? One of my biggest regrets is that I stuck with traditional treasure in a setting where pillows and meat should have been valued more highly than gold or silver.
Culture and faction development. It’s a longstanding conceit that human life is cheap and cannibalism is commonplace on Dungeon Moon. What other weird habits and communities have developed given the oddity of this particular apocalypse scenario?
A lot of ink has already been spilled on the subject of megadungoen design, but I might waste some time retreading old ground just to figure out what exactly it means to effectively expand the endless chambers of Dungeon Moon specifically.
History and cosmology needs to be explored in greater depth. Aside from a few details about the wizard who built the place, I never really explored the context in which Dungeon Moon exists. That would help provide some direction to the way the setting is developed. For example: what world does Dungeon Moon orbit?

Final Fantasy 7

When the idea that I might want to make tabletop games first wormed its way into my brain, I set myself two goals. I wanted to make an RPG based on Metal Gear Solid; and I wanted to make an RPG based on Final Fantasy 7. Neither of these projects ever went anywhere, as is typical with the wild aspirations of youth.

Recently, a thread Dan D posted on G+ set me to thinking about this for the first time in years. I’m surprised how many ideas I have. I want to let them pour into my keyboard. Let loose with an unmoderated stream of consciousness and see where things go. I make no promises about the quality of this post, or how many follow up posts there’s going to be. This might become The FF7 Fangame Blog, or I might never mention the thing again once I’m done here. Depends on where my heart goes.

The first question that needs to be answered is: what do I want out of an FF7 game? The PS1 original was a jumble of bland gameplay strung together to justify a poorly written melodrama. It’s not the sort of game I’d like to make, or run, or even play in. If I’m rejecting the core essence of the original game, what is left to play with?

Looking back on the game 20+ years after its release, there are a few elements that still speak to me:

The juxtaposition of high and low technologies.
The phenomenally underrated art of the backgrounds.
The music, obvs.
Exploring the destructive impact of capitalism not just on the environment, but on the very idea of what it means to be human.
The grand sense of scale. Starting out feeling insignificantly enveloped by the megacity of Midgar; then seeing Midgar disappear over the horizon as you set out into the wider world.
The feeling that these characters had real agency (even if I, the player, was on rails). They subverted my expectations. They changed their circumstances. They strove, and overcame.

That sense of being an agent of change in the world needs to be the core of the game. It doesn’t matter whether the players are a force for good, or for evil, or just for some obscure personal cause. What matters is that they strive to make their will manifest in the world.

Which leads nicely into the next question that needs to be asked: what rules need to be different from the way I normally play D&D? I have no intention of reinventing any wheels that can be avoided. Attacking by rolling a d20 against your foe’s armor rating works just fine. I see no reason to change it.

However, gaining experience points for treasure or for killing monsters makes no sense to me in this game. Seven isn’t a megadungeon, nor is it a hex crawl. It’s something different from what I’ve done in D&D before. The best term I can come up with for what I’m thinking is Political Sandbox. As in: it’s a world full of people and communities and systems, and the job of the player is to enact their will to power. I’m not 100% happy with the term, but it’ll do for now.

What I’m driving at is that players should get experience points as a reward for the change they create in the world. They might affect their change in any number of ways: they could employ persuasion, or trickery, or bribery, or brute force. So long as the world is altered to suit their will, the players get rewarded.

It’s not something I’m going to be able to figure out in this post, but I’d like to systematize this somehow. I don’t want the referee to be completely responsible for arbitrating what works and what doesn’t. Perhaps any change has a very low baseline chance to go the way the players want? The players then need to accomplish tasks and put assurances in place that will raise the chance that the player’s desires will be carried out?

That feels like it could be made at least as easy to manage for a referee as treasure is.

Regardless of the specifics, I think I ought to actually be able to use the Simple XP system I wrote way back in 2011. I wrote that thing in literally the first month that I took blogging seriously. It’s among the most popular posts I’ve ever written, and it’s kinda cool for it to be relevant again.

Okay, I wrote a lot about how experience gain will work. What else needs to change from how I normally run D&D?

There’s some irrelevant stuff we can get rid of to free up space for increased complexity elsewhere. This isn’t a game about managing diminishing resources, so most of the bookkeeping I normally insist on can be relaxed. Encumbrance can be a vague “whatever feels reasonable.” Nobody will need to worry about rations. Ammunition is inexhaustible.

It’s tempting to wildly inflate health and damage numbers to better emulate the feel of a Final Fantasy game. It’d only be fun for about 10 minutes, though. Eventually all the 4-digit calculations would get tiresome. I’ll stick with d6s for most stuff, I think.

Materia are a vital part of the setting. Bits of congealed souls which grant the character wielding them special abilities. Not only will this need to be the magic system, but in the original game it’s also how characters gained mundane abilities like “Steal.”

I’m thinking that materia should not only replace the magic system, but should replace character classes as well. The PCs are all 1hd shmucks without their materia. When the players earn experience points it doesn’t make them any inherently better. Instead, the players spend their experience points to decide which materia they want to advance.

I don’t know what will determine how many materia a character can equip simultaneously. I don’t like the idea of just slotting them into weapons and armor. Maybe characters have to swallow their materia? It’s inside your body, part of you. If you swallow too many of them you get sick and can’t function. If you want to swap one materia out for another, it takes a couple days to get everything sorted.

Materia would be used to cover even very basic advancements. Early in the game players would be able to acquire a Vitality materia, which they could level up to improve their health beyond its starting value. Other materia might grants common class abilities, like bonuses to attack, or sneak attack damage.

There’s no need for MP. Materia which allows their user to cast magic spells can be used a number of times per day according to their level. So, when you first get the Fire materia, you can cast Fire once. If you put experience points into it and get it up to level 2, you can cast Fire twice. There’s no need for more advanced fire spells (Fire 2, Fire 3), because we’re keeping everything limited in scope.

I realize there’s a lot of potential for exploitation in letting people mix-and-match class abilities, but it sounds fun, so I say try it.

I don’t think the game would need any kind of skill system, just a simple resolution mechanic for handling skill-based tasks. A baseline 2-in-6 or something. If the character wants to be really good at a skill, they’ll want to seek out an appropriate materia.

I am out of ideas for now. Thank you for indulging me.

20 Tidbits About My Games

A little bit ago, I was looking for sources on a post I was writing, and I stumbled on this challenge issued by Kiel back in 2015. Essentially, it’s a call for referees to revel in self-indulgence by writing up a bunch of details for their setting that players probably won’t care about. I never saw this at the time, but after 3 years I think we’re long past due to try for it again.

And since this is one of those dumb “tag three people” things, I have chosen Red Flanagan, Chris H. and Tore Nielson to follow my bad example and post their own self-indulgent campaign world exposition. I’ll turn each of those names into a link when the associated person answers the call.

Since I have two big active campaigns–On a Red World Alone and Fuck the King of Space–it only seems appropriate to perform this exercise for both of them. But I will not punish you by spreading this out over two posts. Below are 20 random facts about my campaign worlds, 10 from each active campaign.

On a Red World Alone

1 – Penelope the Seleucid is older than anyone realizes. Old enough that her name is an accurate and literal description of her. She was one of the few magicians who had mastered the craft prior to humanity’s transplantation to the red world. She predicted that mars would bring about a revolution in wizardry, and even encouraged some of her contemporaries to join her in emigrating, but only she was will to abandon her existing power structures on the dubious promise of increased access to magic. By the time anyone realized just how profoundly mars impacted the abilities of magicians, Earth was a field of rubble in space.

Penelope has fostered generations of apprentices in the dome, and guided the magic community into its current form. She is well known and respected by the highest class of wizards, but rarely spoken of since she retreated from public life some 150 years ago.

2 – Most working technology is due to the efforts of Techno Priests. This strange sect have a series of rituals based on tech support manuals. Acolytes first learn to check if a thing is plugged in, and to turn it off, then back on again. The most learned priests carry soldering irons like scepters, and can perform rudimentary circuit board repairs with them. Even the highest ranking among them, however, don’t actually understand why what they’re doing works. It’s just rote ritual to them.

3 – Occasionally, a form of mutated human will become consistent enough that it could be called a species unto itself. Morthuks were one such mutation. Slime-skinned things, with soft bones, and overall too sensitive harm–physical and emotional. They were deeply distrusted due to their moderate ability to plant suggestions in people’s minds. Sixty years ago, after a rash of suicides were blamed on them, they were subject to a series of pogroms which were thought to have wiped them out.

When the Internet came into existence, they made a point to gather up every specimen still extant; those living in the depths of the sewers, or in the private menageries of various Wizards and Redstone Lords. They managed to collect a breeding population of 12 of the things, but were never able to make use of them in any meaningful way. The creatures were eventually forgotten about and–recently–escaped.

Using their ability to make suggestions, as well as by espousing a platform of Mutant Supremacy, they were quickly able to establish a sizable little territory for themselves, which they dubbed New Morthuka.

4 – When Mongrel the Magician was killed by The Breakfast Club, the many ape-men he had created to be his servants didn’t have anywhere to go, but knew they wanted to stick together. They made their way out of Comet Caller territory (where they would doubtless be dissected by someone eager to learn Mongrel’s secrets), towards the edges of Outsider territory. There they constructed a barricade wall for themselves, turning the center of a 5-way intersection into a private encampment they dubbed “Ape City.” The locals hate them for their travel-disrupting walls, but the Outsiders themselves are loathe to get involved. It is really on the outer edges of their concern, after all. Besides, they have a certain respect for the ape men’s resolve. The Highlander actually quite interested in how the Ape Men might be put to use to serve Outsider interests.

5 – The sewers beneath the dome are bizarrely labyrinthine. The Dome is, after all, a planned settlement. The first brick was not laid until the whole thing had been thoroughly diagrammed in every aspect. Why, then, do its sewers snake back and forth in maddening patterns?

The truth is, the ‘sewers’ were already present when the surveyors first arrived on Mars to scout out a suitable location to build. Everyone who knew about this considered it fortuitous. Think of all the money they’d save! For unknown reasons, it never occurred to anyone who knew this fact to consider how strange it was for these sewers to be there. But it did seem obvious that their presence should be kept secret. I mean, right? Finding mysterious structures on an uninhabited world just seems like the sort of thing you don’t share with people.

6 – There are a number of space stations in orbit above Mars. One was meant to serve as port for ships to come and go from, to limit the number of vessels that had to do the expensive work of dropping down onto, and coming up from, the Martian surface. Others housed communication, observation, and operation facilities. With no ready source to replenish their fuel, these were abandoned within a few years of the catastrophe that destroyed earth, with only robots left up there to man them.

The signal codes meant to command those robots have long since been discovered and used by the Internet, to no avail whatsoever. If the machines are still operating up there, they’re no longer listening.

7 – The Internet, as an official organization, has existed for roughly 15 years. It was originally founded as a sort of non-aggression pact between rival wizards. Among those working to understand technology and become Techno-Wizards, the _Brain Drain_ spell became an endemic problem. Every year, promising researchers were found with their minds drained of all knowledge by some rival.

When the constitution of the Internet was signed, there were only two immutable laws put down. First, _Brain Drain_ was banned completely, regardless of subject. Even having the spell inscribed in your library was forbidden. Second, it was decided that no one outside the Internet’s control should be permitted to understand technology.

Unbeknownst to the Techno Priests, Internet conspirators have worked to inject several doctrines into their faith. Most notably, it is heresy to try and understand technology without strict adherence to the rote memorizations of the support manuals.

8 – Legally, the Dukes of the Dome are not a single territory. They’re a confederation, united by a mutual defense pact against the larger territories that surround them. In practice, only the Dukes themselves care about their individual microterritories anymore, some of which are little more than a single building. The common people tire of the squabbling between dukes that occurs whenever there is no external threat. They have a strong shared culture, and a unification movement is growing in strength. Particularly now, after so much territory was lost in wars against The Redstone Lords, Technotopia, and New Morthuka in the last two years.

Some of the more powerful dukes are quietly courting the movement, believing their own power might be increased. The weaker dukes are fiercely opposed, believing that unification for them will be no different from outright conquest.

9 – In the last days of Earth, retro technology was all the rage. Everybody had an old Apple ][ or IBM 486 to play with. (All retrofitted with modern cold microfusion power sources, of course). As a result, technology in the post apocalyptic dome is wildly anachronistic. USB Flash Drives exist, and they’re great, but sometimes all a person is going to be able to find to store their data on is a CD, or floppy disk. And with no new computers being manufactured, sometimes that’s got to be good enough.

10 – Nearly everyone in the dome was raised “Beneath the Black.” It’s the dominant religion, though there are a number of others (including the TechnoFaith).

Preachers Beneath the Black tell us that the black sky above is a benevolent blanket of protection, holding back the white hot fires of destruction that wish to destroy all life. What we call “stars,” are holes pierced that have been pierced through this protective curtain by the sins of man.

Fuck the King of Space

1 – Distant Tumon is the god worshiped by The Most Reverent Faithful. The church wields significant power in the Kingdom Galactic, with an entire bureaucracy existing alongside the King’s. Only the lowliest priests are not members of the 36,000 families, and those who aren’t see an instantaneous leap in their status within the Kingdom.

For millennia, the King was also the Ur Flamen of the Church. However, “independence for the priesthood” was the pretense under which Kulga “Bloodfist” Osbert waged the wars which brought the current Osbert dynasty to power. Thus, the Most Reverent Faithful have a vested interest in maintaining the legitimacy of the crown–though they are aware that if the crown is ever too discredited, some future warlord might start a war to “return the office of the King to its traditional religious dignity,” or some such thing.

Given how terrible a King Bassiana Osbert is turning out to be, the Church has been forced to walk a political tightrope these last few years.

2 – A few hundred years back, some schismatic nobles lost their bid to establish some change that nobody remembers, and went into a self-imposed exile. They made a big to-do of finding the first world–Earth–and building their castles there. No one much cared at the time, and after so many years, the only ones who even know about it are those descendants still living in the castles of earth.

3 – The King is a classic Tiberius figure. She’s checked out of the day-to-days of her kingdom, indulging her own hedonism and leaving the busywork of rulership to more interested men and women. As such, the de facto highest authority in the Kingdom Galactic is the Table of Invested Citizens, a group of the 11 wealthiest Nobles alive.

4 – Every unit of the King’s Loyal Soldiers (KLS) has one former criminal in it. These criminals have had parts of their brain surgically removed, and replaced with lab-grown grey matter, which makes them unfaltering loyal to the King. The idea is that this will ensure no unit can easily turn traitor, since any which tries will have a strong core of loyalty either to dissuade them, or report on their plans.

In reality, these hyperloyals are easy to spot, easy to avoid, and even easier to fool. Soldiers learn how to manage their local nark quickly, just to facilitate the normal lapses in discipline common to any military unit. The program is thus completely ineffective, but it plays well with conservative, out-of-touch nobles.

5 – It’s something of a popular myth that the 36,000 families or an organization of merit. It’s the Great Galactic Dream: if you work hard, fight hard, and make hard sacrifices, someday your family may be elevated to join their ranks. It’s a myth that’s easy to perpetrate, as there are too many families for most people to keep track of.

In truth, nearly all 36,000 families derive their position from ancient bloodlines, meticulously traced back further than most reliable histories are able to go. Only the lowest 300 ranks of the nobility are any kind of meritocracy, and those are not granted for hard work, great sacrifice, or heroism in war. They are sold to the highest bidder, and held for only so long as a family remains prosperous enough to afford them.

6 – Bluesidian is a teal mineral. It’s brittle like stone, but can be melted down and forged like a metal. It has little practical purpose, and thus is used almost entirely to create artistic displays of ostentatious wealth. It is also occasionally used in transactions where Darics are too trivial a currency to bother with. A loaf of bread or a space ship can be purchased with Darics. If you want to buy or sell whole worlds, you deal in bluesidian.

7 – The galaxy is full of countless alien species. Unfortunately for them, none managed to develop space travel before they were discovered by the rapidly expanding human race. Or, if they did have space travel, they were too peaceful, or too weak to put up much of a fight when Humanity decided to show them who was boss.

At first, humanity dominated these ‘rivals’ with superior technology. The implemented one absolute law for non-humans, which stands to this day: they can never settle off their world of origin, save by the explicit permission of the king. The punishment for disobedience is genocide.

In modern times, the difference in technology between humans and non-humans is much less pronounced. Though, aliens are legally barred from access to the most modern high technologies. However, millennia of the One-World policy has led to a different sort of imbalance. Humanity as an inconceivably overwhelming advantage in numbers. If every non-human were counted together, they would amount to less than one third of the galaxy’s human population. The KLS alone outnumber the entire population of any dozen races taken together.

8 – “Magic” is the word used to describe anything that completely defies the scientific method. Magic cannot be repeated. Each time a spell is cast, it has to be done slightly differently. It’s not really accurate to describe a magician as “knowing” a spell. Rather, a magician becomes familiar enough with the feel of a spell, that they gain an intuition about it. In a given moment, at a given galactic position, they can work out what needs to be done to make that spell work. But what they did could never produce the same result again, no matter how identical the material conditions were replicated.

9 – The CommNet is so heavily regulated and censored, that it can’t really be used for much of interest or import. Much more useful is the RatNet, (short for Pirate Network), maintained by a dedicated contingent of relay ship operators. They’re forced to constantly move about to stay ahead of the KLS, and CommNet Men, without ever leaving the sector their relay ship serves. It’s the closest thing that exists to an organized resistance to the established order on a galactic scale. Though, few running the RatNet has any such grandiose ambitions.

It’s always tricky to access the RatNet. A hacking check is required just to log in. And you never know how strong your connection will be, since your local relay ship might be close by, or it might be on the other side of the sector.

10 – A few centuries back, the Guild of Robot Craftspeople successfully lobbied to outlaw human slavery. Limited indenture is still a common punishment for many crimes, but only where a clear and feasible path out of indenture exists.

This is a great source of frustration to the Union of Sapient Machines, which doesn’t see why low-class humans deserve a special dispensation not afforded to low-class robots.

They Came from the Silver Wheel

A blinding flash, a sonic boom, and the Silver Wheel appears. Twelve feet high, perhaps a hundred and twenty across, the wheel is a perfect cylinder. Its surface is smooth, without any obvious rivet or seam. It is beyond cyclopean; a featureless catastrophe from unknown realms. Any thing or any one which occupied the space the wheel chose for itself is gone.

Some time after the Wheel appears, a door opens. People emerge. They have no recollection of what is inside of the wheel. No recollection at all of their lives since they last entered it. They do have a mission in the forefront of their minds, which is always the same on every world they visit: the Silver Wheel desires treasures. It is somehow fed by them, and has indentured these people to procure its sustenance. Once they have returned with enough valuables to sate the Wheel, it will shift again. When it does, an identically sized bit of another world will appear, displaced by the Wheel’s movement. Where that bit of a world once was, the Wheel now is, and soon it will release its servants to seek new treasures.

These servants of the Wheel are the Player Characters.

Background

“They Came from the Silver Wheel” is a campaign I intended to run back in 2014, but it never came together. Eventually, I gave up on the idea to focus on other things, and for some reason it only now occurred to me to use it as blog fodder.

The Silver Wheel is a framing device, meant to allow the referee to connect as many disparate adventures together in a single campaign as they want. There are too many interesting settings out there, and not enough time to run a whole campaign in even a fraction of them. Using the Silver Wheel, you can spend a few sessions in A Red and Pleasant Land, then warp to Greyhawk, then to some old campaign setting you ran back in high school, then–fuck it–why not appear in Star Frontier for a bit, before jumping to Scenic Dunsmouth.

The Silver Wheel allows a group to poke their heads into a ton of different adventures and campaign settings, and in so doing, preempts setting fatigue. The Wheel’s voracious appetite for treasure keeps the game focused properly, but skirts the niggling issue of what the players can do with all their money.

And, hopefully, the wheel’s many benefits will encourage the players not to abandon it.

Benefits of the Wheel

Servants of the Silver Wheel are well cared for. They are healthier, and more capable than other men. They are well equipped, and even allowed to keep those treasures which are useful to them–such as magical items. But, since those servants are also player characters, they have agency. If they wish, they can abandon the wheel at any time. Eventually, it will recruit new servants from this world. They will gather what it desires, and it will disappear, stranding the PCs on this world forever. They will lose all of the wheel’s many benefits, but they will be free.

So what are these benefits? Well, whatever happens to people inside the wheel must be good for their health, because whenever they level up, they roll a bonus from the following table, in addition to whatever benefits they would normally receive:

+1d4 hit points
A random save is reduced by 1.
1 skill point
A random ability score is raised by 1
Character gains +1 to attack rolls
Character’s speed is increased by 30′.

These benefits are permanent so long as the character returns to the Wheel regularly. If the Wheel leaves them behind, these boons will begin to fade. After each month of time the characters spends away from the wheel, randomly determine one of their boons for them to lose, until they have none left.

The servants of the Wheel also have access to special equipment. At the start of each new adventure, the players are entitled to any basic piece of equipment they can carry without becoming overly encumbered. Things like rope, iron spikes, 10′ poles, bear traps, etc. These must be identified at the start of play, and cannot be swapped out until the players are ready to jump to the next world.

Basic equipment from the Wheel is somehow better than standard examples of its type. The exact nature of the improvement is left to the referee, and may not always be the same, as the Wheel is fond of experimenting with new ideas.

By way of example, a short sword that normally deals 1d6 damage might be enhanced by microvibrators, causing it to deal 1d8 damage. Or, it might have a basic artificial intelligence to it, allowing it to adjust attacks of its own volition, increasing attack rolls by some amount. As another example, a rope might be programmable, so that it will twist itself into knots when a command is sent, or it might be able to crawl up to some desired position like a snake. Armor might brace the body in such a way as to increase the player’s carry capacity, or it might have built-in communications tools.

Whatever the improvement, these items are ephemeral. They depend on the energy that infuses them within the Wheel, and deprived of it for more than a month, they will cease to function.

It angers the Silver Wheel if any of its gifts to its servants are not returned. When players re-enter the wheel, their experience gain will be penalized by the base cost of any equipment they left behind, multiplied by 100.

Secrets of the Wheel

Within the Wheel is a creature of the mind. It is neither corporeal, nor fully incorporeal, but exists between these two states. It has a sort of gaseous body, but its essence is not strictly bound to that frame, and may be tangible or not at different times. The creature is an exile. The Wheel is its prison, the only place in our dimension with an environment it can endure.

The creature’s only source of amusement is traveling to different worlds, and experiencing the minds there. It tastes their conceptions, searching always for new flavors. Of particular use to it is the concept of value. This is the mother’s milk which allows it to perform the titanic feat of leaping instantaneously from world to world.

When the creature takes a gold piece into itself, and vaporizes it, the amount of power generated is proportional to how local minds value the object. So, on a world of plenty, an apple would be useless; but during a famine, an apple might provide significant energy.

The Infallible Garrr

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.

Fuck the King of Space

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.