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.

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.