Category: Fluff/Inspiration

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The Land of Nonesuch

I’ve been working a bit on the setting for my game with the kids, which is also my backup game for the Bumblers, possibly a play-by-forum game in the future if I get my act together,  and finally an example setting for the system (tentatively titled The Majyc System).  So it needs a name, and possibly a hook.  I’m a little leery of the “elevator-pitch” approach to game settings; too often they end up sounding like something out of They Fight Crime: “He’s an all-American white trash shaman haunted by an iconic dead American confidante She’s a beautiful antique-collecting femme fatale from a secret island of warrior women. They fight crime!”  On the other hand, there’s certainly something to be said for being able to succinctly state what the game is about, and give the players an expectation of the tone and kind of adventures they’ll be playing.  And bog-standard dungeon bash doesn’t sound all that thrilling, even if you’re confident that playing it will be a blast.

For now, I’m calling it the Land of Nonesuch, and working on the premise that (unknown to the current crop of characters) they’re inhabiting a land described in a book of odd and somewhat macabre fairy tales called The Land of Nonesuch, by the mysterious George Jester.  Both the book and the author appear both in our world, and in the land the book describes.  My overall plan, if something so vague and inchoate can actually be called such, is that this setting will let me scratch several itches that I’ve had for quite a while now: running a game in a setting inspired by The Book of Weird, and by the Oz books; getting some use from various cast-off pieces of prior settings (such as the settings of the games with the Three Paladinos, and the one-shot To Rescue the Sun) and swiped from other people’s settings (like Thool, or Dwimmermount); to do some bottom-up setting design, where I haven’t worked out a whole map of the setting and a thousand years of history before I begin; and finally, putting that all together, to do some gaming where I haven’t systemetized everything and there’s not a way that magic or religion works, and I’m not pinging the players with info-dumps.  Naturally, I have ideas on things I want to see in the setting, and spring on the characters, but I want to be much more encouraging of letting the players make up crazy stuff too, and just rolling with it.  I want to recapture, at least for some of the time, some of the much more free-wheeling GMing I did in my youth, where a lot of stuff was decided on the basis of either “Yeah, that sounds good!” or “roll a die, high is good.”

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Unlucky 13

I generally like the idea of fumbles in games, being both true to life and literature, although they can be a problem if they’re too frequent or severe.  A fair number of published systems would have a tenth or more of an army incapacitating themselves over the course of a battle. Another thing that I think is a problem, albeit a minor one, is that most systems tie fumbles into failure, so it’s impossible to both succeed at a task but have something go awry.

Here’s the system I’m currently using in my D&D-esque game:  whenever rolling a d20, a roll of a 13 means something unlucky potentially happened.  Roll a Luck save (luck is a Stat in this system, but you could substitute some other sort of save).  Success means nothing happened, failure means something bad but relatively minor or recoverable (weapon twists in your grip and you can’t attack next turn, sun gets in your eyes, etc.).  A second roll of 13 means something quite unfortunate happened, such as dropping your weapon or falling down.  Roll again and keep rolling if 13 keeps coming up, making the result more severe the more 13’s you get.

Obviously you can adjust just how bad it is to taste; I feel that dropping a weapon one in 400 times is probably bad enough, but you might prefer that to be the result of failing the luck save, and have the roll of a second 13 be more spectacular, such as a broken weapon.  You could also make it more severe, so that e.g. a weapon breaks on a failed save after the initial 13, if you want things to be more chaotic; I lean against that, in part because in most RPGs that sort of thing can really make the PCs seem like klutzes.  During a campaign players tend to make many times more roles than any individual NPC they encounter, so a 1 in 20 or 1 in 40 shot may well turn up for each character at least once a night; if the failures are particularly memorable that can be a problem.  1 in 400 is more like once a session or less for some PC or NPC…enough to add flavor without being overwhelming.

I like this because it’s an easy mnemonic, which can be important for something relatively rare.  It’s a pain to have to, say, check each roll to see if it missed by more than X if it’s only going to really matter 1 in 400 times.  I also like it because it makes it possible to both succeed (if 13 was good enough) and still have something untoward happen, such as hitting a target but having your weapon stick.

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Random Exotic Traits Table

  1. Is a Shape-shifter
  2. Is a Were-Creature
  3. Inherited 1d10 * 100 times the usual starting money
  4. Has Random Magic Item
  5. Has an Unusual Pet
  6. Has a Magical Power
  7. Inherited a Noble Title
  8. Gets one Wish,which may be used before the start of play or saved
  9. Never fumbles (ignore rolls of 13)
  10. Savant: automatically has rating of 6 + 1d6 in starting Talent

You’re allowed to roll for an Exotic Trait if you have no Stats above 11 and at least one stat less than 9.  This is inspired by Mac’s campaign, where she has a similar rule where you can be a shape-shifter if you have no stats other than Charisma that are higher than 11.

Shape-shifters roll a d100 on a table of random animals, ranging from aardvark to zebra.  Were-creatures have the standard immunities to weapons except silver, and so on, but it’s a genuine curse, complete with attempting to eat people when the moon is full.  In both cases clothes and equipment don’t shift.

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My Appendix N

via The Omnipotent Eye (among others), here’s a quick list of the literary influences on my earliest RPGs:

  • Alexander, The Prydain Chronicles
  • Burroughs, John Carter, Warlord of Mars
  • Byfield, The Book of Weird
  • De Camp, The Complete Enchanter
  • Dickson, The Dragon and the George
  • Eager, Half Magic
  • Goldman, The Princess Bride
  • Heinlein, Glory Road
  • Howard (et al–back then his imitators and rewriters were all mixed in with his work), Conan
  • Lanier, Hiero’s Journey
  • Leiber, Fafhrd & the Grey Mouser
  • Lewis, Narnia
  • McCaffrey, Dragonriders of Pern
  • McGowen, Sir MacHinery
  • Moorcock, The Chronicles of Corum, Elric of Melnibone
  • Nesbit, Five Children and It, The Phoenix and the Carpet
  • Norman, Chronicles of Gor (only the first three, and I was way too young to get the sex parts, which apparently got more and more blatant as the series went on)
  • Norton, various, but particularly The Beast Master and Star Man’s Son
  • Tolkien, Hobbit and Lord of the Rings
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The Monstrous Majyc

Well, the meme bug has bitten, and Ravyn asks

Doesn’t everyone sometimes wonder what they’d be if they were an RPG-style monster? I did, as part of a coordinated RPG Blogger Bestiary… and I ended up with this.

Well, no, the thought hadn’t really crossed my mind before.  But now that you ask.

The Majyc

Monster Rating: 95 (typically found on dungeon level 1)
Combat Dice: 10d6+48  WIZ 95
Special Abilities: Mirage – cost 0, can cast once per 10 minutes when not in combat.  Port-a-Vision – cost 0, can cast once per 10 minutes when not in combat. Mystic Visions – cost 0, can be cast once per combat turn.  Wall of Stone – can be cast once per 10 minutes for 0 cost when not in combat, or at normal cost (47) Omniflex – cost 0, once per party, only if captured.  Wink Wing – cost 0, as per Leprechaun ability.  Blow Me To – cost 0, once, after casting Omniflex.

The Majyc is singular, only one is ever found in a dungeon.  It is a small semi-translucent humanoid, about the size of a fairy but without the wings.  It is hard to spot (SR5 vs Int) if it’s not moving.   It will tend to gravitate towards libraries and collections of books, if the dungeon has any, and then use its powers to divert and distract both adventurers and monsters from the area it’s inhabiting.  It will only fight if cornered.  If captured, it will offer to cast Omniflex on one party member; after casting Omniflex it is teleported via Blow Me To to another dungeon entirely.

The Majyc is fond of combining its spells with architectural features of the dungeon in order to discourage and confound trespassers. For instance, it might create the illusion of a pit just in front of a real pit, while concealing the real pit with the illusion of a floor, so that creatures attempting to jump the visible pit fall into the real pit (or vice-versa, so creatures seeing the illusory pit will approach the edge to investigate and fall right into the real one), or put an illusion of a corridor over a Wall of Stone.  It will not, generally speaking, harass creatures that are heading in the proper direction (away from its lair) or attempt to finish them off.  It never possesses treasure of its own, though it is possible that it has established itself in a library that contains rare and valuable items.  It will not take a room that’s an obvious treasure-vault for its home, since that is just inviting trouble from adventurers.  If it can’t find a suitable book-filled area, it will attempt to create one by pilfering books from other parts of the dungeon.  If the dungeon doesn’t have any, it will leave.

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Obligatory St. Patrick’s Day Post

Just want to point out that Leprechauns are one of the five “common” Kindred in Tunnels & Trolls.  Their modifiers are:

STR 0.5
CON 1
DEX 1.5
INT 1.5
LK 1.5
CHR 1
WIZ 1
HT 0.25
WT 0.33

Leprechauns are automatically Wizards, and they have a natural Wink-Wing (teleportation) spell that they can do without magical training or cost (though that means that they can’t pump extra WIZ into it for more distance).

So play a Leprechaun today!

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Announcing Rollon!

I am pleased to announce that after countless hours in my secret underground labs, I am ready to release my creation on an unsuspecting world!

I give you…. Rollon!
Rollon Plugin – a plugin for rolling randomly on tables

The goal of Rollon is to make creating and rolling on tables as easy as editing a wiki, or cutting and pasting from a blog or web page.

Rollon is a TiddlyWiki plugin designed to let you roll randomly on tables, such as you might find in roleplaying games. When we talk about “tables” in Rollon, we don’t mean an HTML <table> , just a list of entries such as a Wandering Monster Table or Treasure Table might have. To Rollon, any tiddler containing a list is potentially a table, whether the list is an unordered list, an ordered list, a dictionary list, or even just text where each line starts with a number. This gives you a great deal of freedom in designing lists, or cutting and pasting them into your TiddlyWiki from other sources.

The basic idea of Rollon is that you create a very simple table of results, just a list really, and give it a name.  In TiddlyWiki terms, it’s just a tiddler.  Think of it as a page in a wiki, or a 3×5 card, if you will.  Most of the time creating a table is as simple as cutting and pasting from a blog post, web page, or other document, or just typing in a bunch of numbered lines.

You can then create a button in another tiddler (wiki page/card) just by typing <<rollon “The Table Name”>>.  When you save that, it will create a button in that tiddler.  When you press that button it creates a new tiddler, with a random element of the list.  Every time you press it, you get a new tiddler of the result.

But that’s not all!  If the line of the table you created itself contains a rollon macro, <<rollon “Some Other Table Name”>> then if that line is chosen, a random result from that table will be returned.  That means that you can have tables that refer to sub-tables… but more than that, you can have tables that contain text, where part of the text is a look-up into another table.  This lets you do things like :

<<rollon “Character Names”>> has <<rollon “3d6 * 10”> GP, and  <<rollon “Magic Items” 1d2>>

and so forth.

There are various parameters you can pass to roll multiple times, to roll different dice, to prompt the user for input, to change the separator character, and so forth.

Rollon requires TiddlyWiki, which I’ve mentioned before, but all that means is that you have to download an HTML file containing TiddlyWiki and the Rollon plugin to your local disk.  If you already have TiddlyWiki, perhaps because you’ve been using Uncle Bear’s TenFootWiki or World Building 101, then you can just import the Rollon plugin and go.

The version I’ve hosted at TiddlySpot includes instructions, and example tables such as the Powers and Perils Special Events table from Jeff’s Gameblog, the Grim’s Swords & Wizardry Random NPC chart, and A Rust Monster Ate My Sword’s Captcha-inspired Character Names. Rollon itself is licensed under a the Artistic 2.0 license.  That means it is free.   Free!  You are free to copy it, use it, distribute it, alter it and distribute that (with certain provisos about credit and naming), whatever.  (The example tables are copyright their respective authors, and are linked and credited in the examples.)

So what are you waiting for?  Check it out!  The link is to a live version that you can play around with (though you can’t save it back to the web, you can save it to your hard-drive).  Let me know what you think, and whether you find any bugs or can think of enhancements that you’d like.  Planned enhancements include some helpers for capitalization, pluralization, number and gender agreement, saved variables and things to make text read more consistently (e.g. you could make is so that it would correctly say “1 Orc” or “2 Orcs”), as well as a more lenient format for tables that contain ranges (something like 1-2 Nothing, 3-6 A monster, 7-9 A monster and a treasure, 10 treasure currently has to be formatted as a dictionary list; it would be convenient for it to also just accept that if the start of a line looked like number-number it was a range and the rest of the line was the entry).

I’ve set up a Google Group for discussion, help, and to share tables you create.

Google Groups
Rollon Plugin
Visit this group

Randomness Rules!  Get Rollon today!

update: note that I changed the license from the CC 3.0 NC-SA to the Artistic 2.0 license…entirely because in order to use Google hosting for the bug-tracker I had to use one of their approved licenses.  The major difference between them is that while you can now charge for distributing Rollon (good luck with that), if you want to distribute modifications you have to fork or send me the changes to include in the core.

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Alliterative Alphabet

Reposted from Trollhalla, because I’m rather proud of it, my entry in today’s “most popular letter alliteration”:

Letter D:

Dungeon dinos dine dangerously, drooling, devouring desperate Dwarves, dainty delicate damsels, deadly Deodanths, dark Drow, downy ducks, deciduously decolletaged dryads, droning dowagers, demonic dholes, dashing debonair dandies, deceptive doppelgangers, deranged demons, damned devils, dry desert dervishes, dire drakes, dead dragons, delicious donuts (dessert)…decidedly done, drooping dragging denwards, dropping, dozing dreamily.

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We Belong Dead: Monsters That Should Never Be

GROGNARDIA: My Least Favorite Monsters beat me to it, but here’s a list of my 10 monsters that I never want to use or see in a campaign:

  1. Ear Seekers.  Despite my abiding affection for things like the Rust Monster, Ear Seekers cross the line between challenging the player and punishing smart play.  Even if the dungeon is stocked by a mad arch-mage intentionally seeking to thwart explorers, this kind of thing is just a reason not to play.  Whether to risk listening at the door is not the kind of decision that a GM wants to emphasize.
  2. Drow. I tried to read R.A. Salvatore’s Drizzt trilogy, I really did.
  3. Krenshar. A big cat that can peel the skin of its face back, so that… what?  I’m not getting it, either in evolutionary or mad wizard design terms.
  4. Troglodytes.  Why did cavemen become some wierd lizard creature?  And why aren’t lizard men and reptilian kobolds enough?
  5. Tarentella. (a spider that has a bite that not only causes the victim to dance, but makes onlookers save vs. dancing)  Even I have a limit to the pun-inspired game features I can take.
  6. Girallon.  To be honest, I’ve never actually seen or heard of these used, but adding an extra pair of arms to a gorilla and calling it a new monster was not anybody’s finest day.
  7. Deathbringer.  Now they’re not even trying.
  8. Gem Dragons.  Scraped right past the bottom of the barrel there.
  9. Jermlaines.  What purpose do these serve that kobolds don’t do better?
  10. Forest Sloth.  So…it’s a sloth.  With lightning fast reflexes, that can move along the ground or climb through the trees faster than a human can run.  Why exactly is it a sloth, again?  So that when the GM just says the name instead of describing what the characters see, they can get fooled for a moment into thinking they’re facing something slow?

My thanks to Ed Bonny, Jeff Grubb, Rich Redman, Skip Williams, and Steve Winter, without whose Monster Manual II this list would have had to stop at number 5.

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Monsters I Have Loved

Following the lead of Monsters and Manuals: Top 10 Monsters, here are my Top Ten D&D Monsters, in no particular order:

  1. Gelatinous Cube:  I love these guys.  They’re creepy as all get-out, particularly when they’ve got a partially digested skeleton or something suspended in them, they’re not so dangerous as to be unfair and they’re the perfect accoutrement for that oubliette….
  2. Purple Worm:  It’s a worm big enough to swallow you whole.  It can come at you through the dungeon wall. And it’s purple.  What’s not to love?
  3. Umber Hulk: I just like the look of them, back in AD&D 1e.  Mandibles are scary.  The 3rd edition version just looks like a bug missing some legs. I can take or leave the Confusing gaze.
  4. Cockatrice: Stoning is an awesome ability, but I’m not a huge fan of gaze weapons, so I like this guy better than the basilisk.  Did I ever tell you about the time I used Telekinesis to hurl a black pudding at a cockatrice?
  5. Troll:  One troll on the wall, on the wall, one troll on the wall,
    if one of those trolls should happen to fall, Two trolls on the wall on the wall….
  6. Green Slime: it’s a horrible way to go, and a really useful weapon against other monsters.
  7. Golem: they come in a wide variety, and they can stand there century after century waiting to bash in the head of the next adventurer to come through the door.
  8. Liche:  I never actually used these that often, but the fear of them was so strong that I once had an orc with a couple of faintly glowing gems held in front of its eyes bluff a party into retreating by advancing on them from the down the dark corridor.  For the rest of the campaign, players would tease each other by making a holding gems in front of their eyes gesture and saying “Run away! Run away!  I’m a liche!”
  9. Balrog: for some reason Balrogs, and not dragons, were the ultimate bad-ass monster in D&D to me.
  10. Dinosaurs: Breathes there the man with soul so dead
    Who never to himself hath said,
    “I’m fighting a dinosaur! With a Sword! Coooooool!”