The Hearth of Secrets

What makes a good spell? Utility, open-ended design. An interesting effect that could be used in a lot of creative ways. Avoiding straight up damage or pigeon-holed effects, like Bless +1 AC. Preferably it would change something about the environment, like a puddle of water turning into very soft clay.

Here's my attempt at making a spell list. There's four circles with eight spells each. Knowing just one spells would make you somewhat notable. Life story somehow bends around the spell. A hedgewitch with a single spell isn't a "1st-level caster", they're "the woman who can persuade milk not to spoil" or "the ferryman who can speak with rivers". A person who knows even one secret would be remembered in local legend. A mage endowed with four or five spells would become the subject of song, rumor, or royal attention.

How many times a spell can be cast depends on the setting. By default you can cast a number of spells equal to your level. All spells require one spell slot to cast, regardless of the circle it comes from. However, in order to learn a spell above first circle, you need to know a spell from each intervening circle. So to learn a fourth circle spell, you need at least one spell from first, second, and third circle. etc.

Alternatively, spells are like special preparations. You gather the requires materials, perform a special ritual, and generate a relic which you can then use to cast the spell. For a simple spell, like Asking Salt, you might need to burn the skeleton a cat to ash and mix it with silver power and sea salt. More complicated spells may require more complicated preparations. Kinda like making spell scrolls, but more involved.

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First Circle - of Hearth Secrets
Magic of cottages, pilgrims, and village cunning. 

1. Borrow the Hearth
For one night or until dispelled you carry the flame of a torch, lantern, or fireplace in your hand. It gives light normally but refuses to ignite anything unless set free.

2. Asking Salt
Scatter a handful of salt upon a surface and ask a question. It crawls towards the answer. For example, it can show the nearest hidden thing intentionally concealed by human hands. It does not distinguish treasures from corpses.

3. Quieten the Beast
Speak softly to an animal. For one hour it loses fear and aggression and behaves positively towards the caster. However, it remains itself; wolves are hungry, geese are curious.

4. Walk the Honest Path
As you walk holding an object aloft, the road beneath your feet subtly favors the shortest route toward its rightful owner. The spell cannot cross bodies of water.

5. Borrow Warmth
Take heat from a nearby fire. One touched creature becomes comfortably warm and at ease until sunrise regardless of the weather.

6. Knot of Sleep
Tie three knots in a cord while naming someone sleeping nearby, they cannot awaken naturally until the knots are untied or dawn arrives. Pain still wakes them.

7. Mend Clay
Repair pottery, brick, plaster, earthen walls, or fired ceramic as though never broken. Wood, metal, and glass are unaffected.

8. Final Spoken Word
Touch an object, it repeats a conversation uttered in its vicinity up to a duration in the past specified by the caster. The conversation is converted into a language comprehensible to the caster.

Second Circle - of Roads and Ruins
Magic of wanderers, monasteries, forgotten shrines, and crumbling towers.

1. Dancing Rope
A single length of rope behaves like a snake for an hour. It climbs, coils, knots itself, or lowers people where directed. It cannot attack directly.

2. Invite Silence
An area no larger than a cottage becomes perfectly silent. Speech, footsteps, thunder, and spellcasting all vanish. The silence lasts until someone bleeds or the sun rises.

3. Wake the Lock
Touch a lock. In a voice only you can hear it tells how it is intended to opened. Broken locks can only weep.

4. Shelter Beneath the Hills
You and your friends may step inside a standing stone, boulder, hillside, or cliff. Within functions as a simple and rustic lodging, complete with beds and a hearth. You emerge at dawn, perfectly rested. From outside, you're perfectly hidden. Nothing may enter without permission.

5. Borrow a Face
Touch a sleeping person. Until the following sunset, strangers mistake you for them unless given reason to doubt. Friends recognize you immediately.

6. Ashen Resurrection
Burn the corpse completely. An undead simulacrum rises from the ashes. It remembers everything except the moment of death. In seven days it returns to dust forever.

7. Refuse Burden
One object no heavier than an ox weighs almost nothing for one hour.

8. The Widow's Candle
Light a red candle. Anyone within the light cannot die from blood loss or illness until the candle goes out. They can be, and remain, debilitated if applicable.

Third Circle - Hidden Laws
Magic known only to the ancient lineages and a few court magicians.

1. Convert Iron to Wood
For one hour iron in the vicinity becomes workable with ordinary woodworking tools. Otherwise it remains just as strong.

2. Exchange Shadows
Two creatures swap shadows until nightfall.  During this time they always know the location and general disposition of each other. Some spirits identify beings by their shadows.

3. The Hungry Coin
Enchant one coin. Whoever accepts it willingly is driven by an unceasing thirst for more wealth. The curse lasts until the coin changes hands.

4. Call of the Thunder Beast
Every thunderstorm contains one. You invite it down and attempt to make a pact with it. You must offer a tempting exchange. When finished, it returns to the clouds.

5. Sympathetic Magnetism
Two visible objects are pushed together or pulled apart as if by some irresistible force.

6. Flee from Memory
For one hour, everyone meeting you forgets you within one minute of looking away.

7. Invite Roots
Plants erupt from soil and stone, quickly growing into a tangled mass.

8. Untie Fire
One torch or hearth-sized fire separates into d8 floating flames, each no larger than a candle. They move independently wherever directed and can be hurled as d6 damage darts.

Fourth Circle - the Crown Mysteries
The greatest workings of an age. Kings wage wars to obtain a single one.

1. Malefic Binding
Compel one demon into a prepared vessel, weapon, idol, or construct. It lends its powers according to its nature, but spends every waking moment seeking release.

2. The Deathless Slumber
Create a black poison, enough for a single recipient. Anyone affected by it falls into a coma resembling sleep and cannot be awakened except by the caster, a last heir, or true love. Neither hunger, thirst, pain, or time disturb it. Ideal for preserving the dying... or imprisoning rivals.

3. Writ of Blood
Write a single law upon parchment with your own blood. Anyone willingly signing it becomes physically incapable of breaking its terms. The contract ends only when every signer agrees or dies.

4. The Faithful Double
Over the course of a fortnight, create an exact duplicate of yourself. The double shares your goals, memories, and obeys your spoken commands. Only one double may exist at a time. If either dies, the other inherits everything the first experienced.

5. Divide the Sea

Any a body of water no wider than a mile parts into two towering walls for one hour, exposing the ground beneath. Ships and creatures within are swept aside unharmed. When the spell ends, the waters return with irresistible force.

6. Raise the Stone Giant
Touch a building no larger than a manor. For one day and a night per caster level it awakens and moves at your command. It becomes a mobile fortress, with arms and legs like a giant golem.

7. Impenetrable Portal
Choose one doorway, bridge, tunnel, harbor entrance, mountain pass, or city gate. No creature may cross without your express permission. It lasts until the next new moon.

8. Faithful Resurrection
Provided the soul has not willingly departed beyond recall, restore life to a dead body. All wounds vanish and missing limbs return. The resurrected remembers everything up to the point of death. Every turning of a year and a day they must pass a saving throw or return to dust. The spell can never restore the same person twice.

Adventures in Prepping

Lately I've found myself struggling to stay motivated on some of the nitty-gritty bits of running an ongoing campaign. I need a system for taking notes, staying organized, and making effective use of prep time. Often when I sit down to prep for a game, I hit writers block. Rather than being worried about the game being 'good', I suspect it's really about feeling overwhelmed and directionless about what I should be working on.

To correct this problem I've decided I should sit down and pick my own brain for answers.

To help myself and others sift through this rambling I'll notate each section with "$ Philosophical:" for when I'm rambling about things you think, and "+ Applicable:" for when I'm suggesting an practical thing you do. Then, at the bottom of the post I'll distill down the essence for ease of reference.

$ Philosophical: Why Prep?

My playstyle is typically improv-heavy but rather than throwing on tables and making stuff up as I go I find it helps to have something a little more structured to riff on. The continuum from prep-heavy to full-improv is a gradient, and I think I'm only slightly more towards the improv side than in the middle. What I really need is a cohesive head-canon of ideas to draw on, so I'm not just grasping at straws.

Another element that's important is having well-structured, concise play reference. Traditionally this is tabbed DM folder. The older I get the more I find that routine and structure is very important for my well-being. This is something I think is innate to all humans, but how it's best expressed is a learned behavior. It's going to be slightly different for everyone according to acculturation, experience, and temperament. Having a sensible structure takes a huge mental burden off, as a lot of your thinking is done ahead of time. When you don't have structure your brain is required to work double-time at solving problems over and over again. Without fitting those solutions into a framework you end up treading old ground, coming up with novel solutions each time. Routine and structure reduces mental load and stress, freeing up brain space to focus on newer, more interesting and meaningful tasks. This extra bandwidth increases enjoyment, flow, and satisfaction by allowing you to be more mentally present.

In the same vein, taking notes during game is a huge boon. That way you have a record of previous games to refer to when doing prep, and to jog your memory of past actions. DMs have a lot of hats to wear and jobs to juggle, in and out of the game. A simplified, planned system of note taking expediates this process.

My current system is an unstructured pile of notebooks, a jumble of half-finished dungeons, important prep, in-game notes, asides, doodles, and scratch. It's a headache to sift through.

...

+ Applicable: What do you need when you sit down to play?

World Map - a hexmap of the region play takes place in. Players generate their own version of this as they play. This gives you an overview of nearby locations and environments.

Maps of Expected Locations and Dungeons and Keys - All the nearby. locations you expect the players to visit this session, mapped out on graph paper and efficiently keyed

Encounter Tables - For said adventure locations and regions, including relevant wilderness and dungeon areas.

Relevant Generation Tables - Random tables, but just the most important and immediately useful ones.

Note-Taking System - Could be a spiral notebook with a planned system of how to take notes that you stick with. That way when the players defeat a monster or get a quest, it triggers a thing in your brain to write it down.

Adventure Hooks - A list of potential adventure hooks, and active quests, and where the players stand on them. Probably two sheets: active potential hooks (ones the player could trigger right now), and ones that have already been triggered with a sentence or two about where the players are with it. Update this each session, removing ones that are no longer important.

Notes on Current Adventure - Where the players are right now. You might keep a separate set of notes distilled from past adventures, just the key points. The current adventure notes are the insider view on what the players said they're working on, or what you expect them to be doing for the present session.

+ Philosophical: Two Kinds of Prep

There's two kinds of prep: Creation and Updating.

+ Applicable: Creation

This is what you do when you're making new stuff. If you're sitting down to start a fresh sandbox campaign, it's all creation. This is the fun joy part of the DM's job. 

Don't let it take over your life! I find that creativity happens better when you encourage yourself to do it at specific times. Daydreaming is unhealthy. If you train your brain to daydream it'll start throwing things at you when you're supposed to stay on task. Living a distracted life increases your mental load and stress.

Instead, train yourself to be creative when you sit down to be creative. Do this by shifting attention away from daydreaming when you notice it (I like to turn my attention to my breath for a moment). That way you save up that mental energy for when it's time to prep (DM solo play). Then you're less stressed in your daily life you'll have more energy and creativity when it comes time, because you haven't been squandering it all day. Mental energy is finite, like mana, use it well!

+ Applicable: Updating

This is when you add to, remove, or change things that you've created previously.

You refer to old notes, previous sessions, and change things in your current prep. You might keep a previous record of old, no-longer-important updates and retire them to the trash after a certain period. Maybe perform a routine housekeeping at the end of each month, only keeping the very most important beats for later reference.

Just forget about everything that goes in the trash or it'll continue taking up that precious brain space. The older I get the more useful I find it to be strict about stay trim and austere in this regard.

$ Philosophical: The Psychology of Writer's Block

This is where I hit that motivation wall. It's good to learn yourself well enough that you can identify why you hit a wall. There's a reason why for everything you do, and often we get stuck and frustrated when we don't let ourselves figure this out.

Often we hide the truth from ourselves by creating stories in our heads about "why", but the real answers are always Feeling and Needs. Here's a little bit of earned wisdom for you to take home. Frustration as a Feeling is always related to the need for Effectiveness. If you can connect with the Need for Effectiveness and create a Request for yourself of how to meet that Need, the Feeling gets dealt with. That's what I'm doing right now by writing this - I'm fulfilling my own Request.

It's obvious how to make a Request of others, but when it comes to DMing and writer's block, dealing with self, it can be a little sticky. You have to learn to empathize with and understand self effectively. If you're Anxious about prepping it's because you have a Need for Acceptance. Don't fall for the trick of thinking you want Acceptance from people who Aren't Right In Front Of You Actively Not Granting Acceptance!! You want the game to be good and your friends to like you, but YOU'RE the one not Accepting YOU! So rather than prep you procrastinate because you're unconsciously trying to avoid Accepting your own little self. Oh the webs we weave!

The only way to deal with this trap is to Give Yourself permission to be a regular, normal, flawed human. Really, being regular, normal, and flawed is the most beautiful, most perfect way you can be. Why? Because it's what you really, truly, actually are. The image you have in your head of being great, shining, and admired is a fantasy - it's really an inverted fear. People want to be Great because they don't want to be Alone. Luckily, there's plenty of middle ground and you have no choice but to Actually Live There. So just Live There.

The other form of writer's block is Frustration. Frustration, as I said, comes from the Need for Effectiveness. It's not that you Want to achieve your goal, it's that you think you're actively Not achieving it. If you stop to analyze the situation it becomes obviously absurd: Instead of actually Doing the Thing, you're sitting there stumped, frustrated, caught up in this fear of Not Doing The Thing. You're caught in another psychological feedback loop: I'm frustrated because I'm not doing the thing, and because of this frustration I feel stuck, and because I feel stuck, I can't do the thing, therefore I'm frustrated about not doing the thing...etc etc

The only way out is to switch gears and start doing something. You have to push through a wall of pain to do that. Therefore, make the wall of pain as small as you can. Get out some scratch paper and just start writing word-association style. ORC DRAGON CAKE SWORD COIN WITCH until you start getting momentum

Admittedly, my technique is often to get on Discord an complain about what I'm thinking. Someone inevitably chimes in to give me advice and it usually clears up immediately. Now I'm no longer stuck in a feedback loop of frustration problem, instead my brain is now working on the problem of criticizing their advice and thinking up better advice. Once I'm giving myself Better Advice I've broken the psychological chain and I'm free to start working, with the added benefit of having Better Advice. Human brains are weird.

Is that Chaotic Evil of me? Hell no, kill the demiurge!

+ Applicable: Okay But What Do I Actually Prep Though (Elements of Game Prep)

Below is a Food Chain ranked in order of data complexity. Things closer to the top are made out of things lower down.

Adventure Hooks - This is where you extract fragments of data from your keys and convert it into exciting tidbits that players want to investigate. Despite being extracts from lower levels of data, these are actually the most energetically complex element because they fractally compress a web of data in a small space. Hand these out like candy and keep the list updated. You might have different adventure hook lists for different regions, locations, or settlements. 

World Map - This is the highest level instrument. It correlates all data lower in the system in graphical form. This is your hexmap or gridmap or pointcrawl map or whatever map. It's a chart of symbols for orienteering imaginary space. It's the table of contents of your Shared Hallucination.

World Key - This is the Words that explain what the symbols mean.

Adventure / Dungeon Maps - A zoomed in graphical overlay of bits of your World.

Adventure / Dungeon Key - Corresponding Words that explain the Adventure / Dungeon Maps.

State of the World - This is the factsheet for over-arching adventures you have sort of planned out. This exists, though you might not use it at the table, because it can be hard to parse out "Fazlod the Mage wants the Silver Sword from the Lady of the Lake, but it was Stolen from Her by the Goblin King, Only 3 dudes in different places know how to get there, there are 4 other NPCs that also want the sword, oh and the Hobgoblin army is marching thru the Goblin Kings territory, oh and wyverns are attacking the Hobgoblins etc" based on information scattered across your prep material. This can be as simple as a list of headlines of current events happening outside the view of the players, maybe with details for how they connect so you know how to look up the information you need. Think: WHO WHAT WHERE WHY COMPLICATION

Random Tables - Tables for adding life and color to the world. These have varying levels of complexity somewhere between Null and Adventure Hook. They can be anything from bits of fluff, to Monsters, NPCs, or entire Adventure / Dungeons.

Faction Profiles - the egregore of a collective of NPCs. Includes similar data to an NPC, but from a corporate level.

NPC Profiles - Mobs, critters, denizens. This includes data sheets for NPCs as well as monster stat-blocks. A picture, name, statblock, profession/background, cute details/quirks, motivations, likes/dislikes, resources, allies/enemies, whatever. This could be as simple as a blackbook entry like "Orianna Flux, 24F,  Human, Gloaming Spire, Tinker's Guildmaster. Love: Technology, Hates: Orcs".

Treasure Tables - Shinies.

Background Lore - This is actually the lowest level of data because it's basically the white noise at the base of everything. These are the deranged scrivenings you make when you're dreaming up shit and writing it down. Later you go back and extract stuff, combine it with Structure, and add it to one of the higher-level data sets. Make sure you don't let this stuff stick around too long or you end up with reams of notebook you don't even want to look at.

So that's basically what you need to play the game. Maps, Keys, Hooks, Factions, NPCs, Random Tables, and something explaining How This Stuff Connects Together and What's Going On. Maybe a shame-inducing notebook of Ideas or Background Lore.

I like to use folders and notepad files or google docs to track all this stuff on a grand scale, and copy into a DM folder for using at play. It's nice to keep a digital archive so that updating is easier. Only pen and paper can be messy unless you're very disciplined.

+ Applicable: Taking Notes

It can be hard to know which game elements to trigger for a note. Often I just don't even take notes because I'm busy playing and I don't want to stop to write. I suppose this is a Need I should investigate. Maybe it's related to Acceptance: I want Acceptance that the game will be fun and my players won't be bored while I stop to take notes. My players can't give that to me, only I can give that to me. If they're not having fun because I stop for 5 seconds every so often to write something down maybe I need new players.

So what things trigger a note?

Meeting an NPC, PC / NPC Death, Monster Encounter, Monsters Slain, Adventure Hooks Received, Locations Visited, Treasure Obtained, Faction Moves, Important Events. What's an Important Event? Anything that conceivably be a headline or a diary entry. Keep each note under d12-ish words. Maybe shoot for a VERB NOUN format, like a MUD.

ENTERED GREEN VILLAGE

MET WIZARD MIKE

KILLED WIZARD MIKE

GOT 1000GP AND WIZARD MIKE HAT

RAN FROM GUARDS

RAGNAR DIED

NEW QUEST: REVIVE RAGNAR - LADY OBELISK HAS MAGIC DOODAD

+ Applicable: Organizing Reference Folder

Okay this post is getting long and I'm tired. Let's wrap this shit up. This where I'm gonna overview.

Reference Folder is a fancy way to say DM Folder.

It should have tabs and a ream of notebook paper and graph paper in the back.

Each tab should correlate to an Element of Game Prep. I think this might be a good arrangement:

1. Adventure Hooks

2. State of the World

3. World Map / Key

4. Adventure / Dungeon Maps / Key

5. Faction Profiles

6. NPC Profiles

7. Encounter Tables

8. Treasure Tables

9. Random Tables (d4caltrops.com)

10. Scratch Paper

- Notes in its own Notebook so you can keep it open in front of you while flipping thru DM folder

- Background Lore in its own Notebook so you're not wrestling with it while playing

Creation Work Flow:

- Draw Map

- Create Encounter Tables for Region

- Generate Starting Settlement

- Populate Settlement with NPCs

- Generate Starting Dungeon (1-3 floors if you do that thing)

- Populate Dungeon with Monsters and Treasure

- Generate d6 Adventure Locations close to the Starting Settlement

- Connect stuff, make Factions w Goals, allies/enemies

- Generate d6 Adventure Hooks

Update Work Flow:

- Refer to notes

- Update Adventure Hooks

- Fill out Area players are heading to

- If they discovered a new site, prep it out

- Populate new profiles (expanding on NPCs, factions, events you made up during game)

- Recall the hooks and Whispers and Lore you Spouted during the game and add those things to your World

- Drink water, get good sleep, meditate

- Comb through your stuff and cut out half of what you wrote. Try to condense things down. Music is made by the spaces between the notes. When there's room to breathe you also have room to imagine. Don't paint yourself into a corner. Only prep 1-2 games ahead of the players. 

- Update the State of the World factsheets so you don't get lost.

Sekrit Santikore 2024 surreal science fantasy adventure seeds & more

I got kirt dankmeyer's curt and dank prompt "d20 surreal science fantasy adventure seeds, the weirder the better. Optional: A micro-setting that would tie them all together" for the OSR secret santacorn this year. 

This marks the second santicorn I've participated in in which I've gotten a scifantast prompt, which is fine by me. anything i write i gonna go that direction. the previous one was an o'neill cylinder hex crawl which grew into an entire hexcrawl setting generator and took me nearly a year to finish. 

now that my adhd is under control i have no more excuses for my derangement. i apologize in advance. please consult your doctor before on

Micro-Setting: The Splintered Kalpa

In the last gasp of a dying universe the remnants of time and space are tearing themselves apart. Fractured by aeons of misuse, the "Great Mechanism" that holds existence together sputters and leaks, spilling reality mutating fluid in great emerald rivers across the rocky barren landscape.  

What remains is a nightmare mosaic of quantum fragments: ancient ruins that shouldn’t exist, alien bio-machines from other dimensions, sentient time-locked cities, eldritch entities drawn to feeding on the cacophony and spawning unstable pocket realities from their festering asses. The very laws of the universe are corrupted: gravity bends in spirals, time loops and skips, the dregs of star-faring species have unravelled into schizophrenic diversity. Cultists worshiping the putrifid chrome ichor of dead gods stalk openly for live sacrifices, mutated humanoids of every possible incarnation scrape by scavenging relics of what once was/will be. The only thing edible is meat. Those born blind are considered Saints for they've never been tainted by the sight of this discarded hell.

The Splintered Kalpa is not merely a location but a state of existence: an endless landscape of decayed glory and cosmic madness feeding endlessly upon its own unraveling. The wise seek escape, the bold seek riches, and the stupid seek answers. 

d20 Surreal Science Fantasy Adventure Seeds

1. The Tower of Singing Suns

An obsidian tower hums with a thousand discordant voices: at its peak is a "living sun”, imprisoned and bleeding great lashes of magnetic energy. Touching it grants terrifying visions of other realms but permanently alters the viewer's form.

The Sun-Eaters, a cult of blind devotees, scour the landscape searching for sacrifices to "feed the sun’s hunger”. They believe the sun must never be freed, fearing its light will burn away reality. They refuse to acknowledge their efforts are actually destabilizing the sun's malfunctioning containment field.

2. The Fossil Womb

An enormous, fossilized animal fetus looms over a desolate plain, cracked open to reveal a glowing, organic core. Inside, embryonic monsters swim in a pouch of viscous fluid, mutating, growing, regressing, dissolving, perpetually exploring the infinite possibilities of evolution in hyperspeed. Any creature removed from the womb attempts to escape and multiply.

The Pale Remnant, a dying alien parasite, once fed off the living form of the fetus but became trapped millions of years ago when its host died. It feebly emits signals begging for rescue, promising access to immense power in return, but its true goal is to spread dominion and feed on souls. It will say and do anything to manipulate others into breaking containment.

3. The Ship of Falling Stars

A ship constructed from the bodies of ancient gods crashes into the desert. Its corridors are alive, pulsating with celestial ichor. The ship whispers the true names of those nearby, drawing them deeper into its heart, where an alien star is trying to be reborn.  

Scavenger-lords from the Blistered Iron Band have already claimed part of the ship, setting up traps and killing intruders. They will trade artifacts from the ship for survival gear but are heavily armed and paranoid. They seek desperately to find a way to harvest the ship's celestial energy for their interdimensional war machines.

4. The Black Pyramid

A towering black pyramid appears at random intervals, hovering over the land, insidiously rewriting the landscape anywhere its shadow falls. At its apex lies a single switch labeled "RESET." An echo of the pyramid exists in a parallel timeline, and actions in one affect the other. Temporal Knights patrol both versions, erasing any anomalies they deem dangerous (including the players).

Goal: Preserve their version of reality at all costs.

5. The Pale Caravan

A caravan of emaciated figures trudges across the wastes, carrying massive bone relics on their backs. They trade memories for protection. Following them reveals a hidden fortress where an immense skeleton sits upon a throne, awaiting tribute. 

A group of violent stim-addicted scavengers called “the Gravediggers” track and harass the caravan attempting to steal their relics. They are led by Hollow Garan, a skeletal figure in scavenged funeral garb, a cracked and scorched ceremonial burial mask welded to his face. Garan was once a mortal soldier who perished in the ruins of dying starship but was resurrected by the cursed Pale Caravan. He is driven for vengeance against the Pale Caravan for his undeath. Hollow Garan and his cadre may work with players or turn on them if the opportunity arises.

6. The Flayed Cathedral

An organic cathedral made from flesh and bone grows slowly outward, absorbing anything it touches, inhabited by choirs of skinless priests perpetually chanting the mantra of their god, the Flesh Cyclone.

The Flesh Cyclone is a mindless swirling vortex of human and alien body parts which roams the cathedral, assimilating those it touches. Survivors claim the cyclone whispers secrets of immortality, but the only way to hear it is to get dangerously close.

A wandering merchant-priest called the Skin Broker offers maps to treasure housed in the cathedral in exchange for a strip of the players’ flesh. If cheated, the Broker summons flayed assassins to relentlessly hunt the party.

Goal: To construct a skin suit for the giant skeleton in Seed #5. the skeleton doesn't want it.

7. The Machine That Dreams

A massive, partially buried machine dreams of an alternate timeline. Interfacing with it allows players to temporarily access "ghost echoes" of themselves from the past or future. But the machine’s dream is unstable and sometimes mixes up the identities of those it's had contact with in other dimensions.

Dream Thieves, a group of desperate refugees, already inhabit the machine, addicted to using it to continually rewrite their past. They’ll do anything to protect their sanctuary from intruders.

Goal: Prevent anyone from waking the machine. The machine considers them parasites but its mind is imprisoned in perpetual stasis.

8. The Glass Serpent

A titanic crystalline serpent sleeps, coiled around a ruined city, its body refracting chaotic beams of light from invisible suns. Inside its translucent body glitters artifacts from consumed worlds. Pieces broken off from the serpent form into dopplegangers who sleep until prey comes within scent. 

Goal: to sleep and digest undisturbed.

9. The Crimson Spill

A river of blood flows uphill, leading to a source deep underground: a colossal, beating heart. Eating a piece of the heart grants random mutations but marks the eater for an unknown predator that stalks the night.  

The Red Sisterhood, a coven of blood mages, guards the heart of the river. They demand seekers submit to replacing their own hearts with an alien biomechanical parasite in exchange for admittance into the main chamber, but curse those who refuse with uncontrollable bleeding.

Goal: Resurrect the Blood Titan.

10. The Cosmic Chain

An enormous golden chain hangs from the sky, descending into the horizon. Climbing it leads to a void realm where figures frozen in agony float in stasis. It is said they guard a secret to escape this world into a new, infant universe.

A group of ragged ascetics called the Chainbound attempt to climb the chain endlessly, muttering prayers of salvation. They attack anyone who tries to pass them, believing only they are worthy to ascend.

Goal: Reach the chain’s end and ascend to godhood.

11. The Laughing Moon

A moon-sized, skeletal face leers from the night sky, laughing audibly. Its teeth occasionally fall to earth as immense structures carved with alien figures that pulse with necrotic energy. Touching them grants knowledge of eldritch rituals but risks drawing the moon's attention.  

The Laughter Cult worships the moon, seeing its falling teeth as sacred relics. They interpret the players' interest as heresy and seek to silence them or steal back any “stolen” knowledge 

Goal: Feed the cult's leader to the moon to gain its favor.

12. The Clock That Eats Time

A monstrous clockwork mechanism embedded in a ruined tower ticks backward, erasing seconds, minutes, and memories. At random intervals it disgorges piles of objects from forgotten eras which are slowly erased. Turning it off requires entering its gears.  

Chrono-Wardens, time-manipulating warriors, arrive claiming any intruding presence has already caused dangerous paradoxes. They seek to protect the clock and anyone tampering with it.

Goal: Maintain temporal stability at any cost.

13. The Bone River

A riverbed made entirely of bones stretches for miles. Some bones emit soft whispers when touched, revealing half-truths or riddles about the seeker's fate. The foolhardy seek answers from the bones and attempt to scavange truths. At night, the river animates and flows uphill.

Bone Reclaimers, a hive-mind colony of skeletal constructs, rise from the river at night, collecting anything they perceive as "misplaced bones." They’ll hunt the players only if provoked.

Goal: Rebuild their long-dead Bone King atop the Prismatic Ziggurat.

14. The Choir of the Hollow

Deep in a ravine, a choir of hollow, faceless figures sings a haunting melody that causes listeners to weep blood. Each song reveals hidden passages within the ravine, but singing along risks losing one's face.  

The Veil Dancers, cloaked figures immune to the choir’s effects, seek others to join their ranks. They trap victims in the ravine to harvest their faces for their own use.

Goal: Maintain control over the ravine and build their army of slaves. Cover the world in song.

15. The Veil of Hungry Stars

A shimmering curtain of starlight appears once per month. Passing through it allows travel to distant realms but leaves behind pieces of the traveler.

a faction of desperate exiles patrol the veil, demanding payment in memories for safe passage. They secretly plant seeds of paranoia among groups to control them.

Goal: Hoard enough memories to construct a new identity for their leader. Use the virulent implanted memories to construct a secret cabal of mindless soldiers and spies.

16. The Well of Shattered Skies

A bottomless well emits light of shifting colors. Dropping objects into it causes them to reappear elsewhere in the world, altered and corrupted. The well’s guardian claims to be an avatar of a dead sun and demands offerings.  

the Herald of the Abyss, spectral entity who traps the minds of those approaching it, forcing them to relive alternate lives endlessly. It uses these alternate lives to work out “the perfected universe”.

Goal: Use the well’s power to unmake reality.

17. The Iron Forest

Metallic trees hum with static, their leaves sparking with eldritch energy. Deep in the forest, a humanoid figure made entirely of rusted gears sits frozen, clutching an orb that distorts gravity.  

A rogue druid named Rustblight has claimed the forest as a sanctuary. It sends metal beasts to kill intruders, believing them to be agents of the old gods.

Goal: Preserve the forest by assimilating all organic life into metal.

18. The Whispering Chain

A sentient, endless chain wraps around a crumbling tower, its links engraved with alien symbols. Studying the engravings grants access to alchemical secrets but slowly calcifies the examiner's body from the inside.

A group of corrupted alchemists called the Chainwrights seek intelligent, magically attuned prisoners they can compel to study the chain for them. Prisoners are strapped into beds and hoisted up the tower using complicated machinery. They used the gained knowledge to produce powerful and addictive elixirs hoping to find the recipe for True Death. They're running out of prisoners and desire a formula to extend their lifespan.

19. The Dying God’s Blood

An ichor-filled crater faintly glows, filled with the decomposed ooze of a dead god. Drinking it grants fleeting power but causes the drinker to dream of a dying universe, their dreams erratically pulling spawning beings of pure entropy into this realm.  

Ichor-dripping spawn of previous imbibers haunt the wastes, having killed their birthers. They are guardians of the dying god’s essence, enslaved to enacting its final will. A cabal of wizards called the High Speakers are embroiled in an enternal rift: do they attempt to harness the power of the crater or find a way to destroy it?

20. The Library of Living Dust

A ruined library contains books filled with arcane knowledge which begin to dissolve into fine, animate dust when opened. Breathing the dust embues one with chaotic magical essence which slowly erodes their minds.

The Memory Keepers is a sect of librarians dedicated to maintaining the library. Once in a generation they grant access to it's kno

wledge for the duration of a single cycle. Otherwise they attempt to silence all who know of the library's whereabouts.

Species generator

roll d4, d12, d20

d4 body type

1 bipedal

2 quadrupedal

3 multi-legged (d20 if unsure)

4 floating/winged/limbless/swimmer (d4)

d12 lifeform

1 humanoid

2 reptilian

3 robotic

4 crustacean

5 plant

6 putrescence golem

7 undead or semi-undead

8 gaseous

9 prismatic 

10 elemental

11 humanoid and roll again to combine

12 roll d4 times and combine, ignore if re-rolled

d20 spiciness

1 mindless drone

2 exudes anti-magic aura

3 twin beings with hivemind

4 parasitic

5 breath/blood/plasm vitae highly toxic/corrosive

6 reproduces via budding

7 telepathic

8 transformation abilities

9 infected by noxious disease

10 aging backwards

11 limbs can disconnect and act independently

12 can produce small items from its bones

13 obsessed with pyramids

14 confuses creation and destruction

15 bionetic or cybernetic implants

16 multi-headed

17 ethereal/dimensional shifted form

18 worships rogue AI

19 this is just its larval form

20 feeds on inorganic material

d20 additional locations

1 vast sea of fuligin oobleck

2 plain pockmarked with craters, shards of satellites constantly rain down

3 honeycombed mountain so massive it juts out beyond the atmosphere, full of drone perpetually rebuilding machine cities 

4 a city built around an enormous glass orb showing ghostly forms within the most contained within

5 arcology pleasure-garden populated with hedonistic bat people

6 a gently rotating island in the center of a perfectly circular lake of motor oil

7 castle perched atop the back of a mountain sized tortoise

8 City built inside a whale skeleton

9 forest of humming crystal shards

10 village of shamans that hate technology beyond rocks and fire

11 field of skeletal limbs which grow like flowers

12 scattered village of mudhuts inhabited by an enclave of clones of the same person

13 crashed freighter starship inhabited by terrified space marines. inside the freight pod is an enormous human with perfectly smooth alabaster skin, sleeping

14 herd of sleek robotic unicorns sporting 6 foot air-powered harpoon horns

15 the shifting amber labyrinth, home to moth-men obsessed with dissecting human social constructs

16 a single sentient tree capable of telepathic speech, desires world peace

17 a star-fort of pterodactyl riders

d100 ways to become a werebeast

 i'm doing a thing where i'm trying to quit smoking cigarettes and in addition to using patches and nicotine lozenges i'm also writing d100 tables instead of smoking. also writing tables if i fuck up and smoke.

so get ready for lots of great tables

i'm taking suggestions for tables on the discord

cw there's some fucked up shit in here

d100 ways to become a werebeast

1. Kiss the beast

2. Get scratched by the beast

3. Get bitten by the beast

4. Consume a bit of the beast’s fur

5. Consume a bit of the beast’s blood

6. Yiff the beast

7. Look into the eyes of the beast

8. Walk through a doorway with some of the beast’s scat on your boot

9. Receive a curse from a witch

10. Piss off the gods

11. Please the wrong gods

12. Sacred pact with a vengeful spirit

13. Kill your parents

14. Practice cannibalism

15. Kill a man in cold blood by moonlight

16. Eat food prepared by a widow on her period without having it cleansed first

17. Curse the name of the ancestors

18. Eat the flesh of a deer whom you killed for sport

19. Wear your clothes backwards and circumambulate a temple backwards, chanting the compassion mantra backwards

20. Fail in a your promise to an ape

21. Sleep with the fingernails of a man hanging from a gibbet under your pillow

22. Don’t say “bless you” when someone sneezes

23. Steal from an orphan

24. Spit on a holyman

25. Eat a meal while others starve without offering to share it first

26. Sleep in an open grave during a thunderstorm

27. Break fast on a cross-quarter day that falls on a full moon

28. Bewitch three people into carnal favors

29. Poison a child

30. Drown a baby in a cesspit

31. Push an old man down a flight of stairs

32. Drink the blood of a virgin from a skull chalice

33. Laugh during funeral rites

34. Be put on trial for killing a family and get released from punishment despite being guilty

35. Poison a well

36. Hold a person accountable for a debt they can’t pay in such a way that their death results

37. Live with wild animals for one year and a day

38. Have the Zoanthropic ritual performed: a surgical procedure which destroys the frontal lobe in such a way as to render one a beastial lunatic. Usually performed on the criminally insane as a punishment, though occasionally voluntarily chosen.

39. Drag a man to death through the streets in full view of his children

40. Forcefully remove the dignity of an already humiliated person as they die

41. Kill someone in cold blood who previously saved your life

42. Desecrate a holy site of the Eight Great Saints

43. Enact a policy which evaporates the livelihood of an entire town for personal profit

44. Eat 84 ghosts

45. Entomb a man up to his neck in ice and set his hair on fire

46. Cut open a pregnant woman and strangle her with her own fetus

47. Have your brain implanted into a frankensteinian vessel

48. Transmutation by evil sorceries

49. Step into a teleporter and be fused with an animal

50. Live like such an animal for 101 days.

51. Be trapped in a cage and fed nothing but raw meat for a year and a day

52. Live in a sewer eating filth

53. Have sex with a severed head

54. Crush a child in a cider press and drink the remains

55. Tar and feather yourself with pine pitch and raven feathers, jump into a volcano, and live

56. Eat an entire 80 pound wheel of cheese

57. Break into every single house in a town of at least 100 residents and cut a piece of a hair from ever occupant, wear a pair of leggings woven from said hair while you set fire to a temple

58. Have yourself sewn into the corpse of such an animal

59. Dress as such an animal and kill one victim a night for an entire moon cycle without being seen

60. Be buried alive along with such an animal and survive

61. Petition the primal deities for intercession and refuse to pay when they come to collect

62. Have one piece of your body surgically replaced with an equivalent part of such an animal every year until complete

63. Have an entire platoon of captured enemy soldiers dipped one by one into molten gold

64. Exterminate an entire species of animal

65. Stuff a wickerman full of people, set it on fire, and run into the flames

66. Survive the spell “forlorn encystment” 4 times

67. Kill a saint

68. Execute an executioner with their own tool

69. Fart in a man’s face

70. Bake a baby into bread and serve it to her mother

71. Kill a man by tying him down and planting a tree in his stomach

72. Invert a goat

73. Attach wheels to everything you see

74. Murder a planet

75. Piss on a fairy

76. Eat an entire horse in one sitting

77. Trade skin with said animal

78. Swim to the bottom of the ocean and punch poseidon in the dick

79. Curse a gnome

80. Get cursed by a gnome

81. Eat the wrong kind of mushroom

82. Eat the right kind of cactus

83. Drink your own pee for 444 days

84. Drink sand instead of water for 444 days

85. Brew wine from the contents of 99 men and get totally wasted, barf, and brew that barf into wine and drink that

86. Cut your hand off, bury it, come back 33 years later, dig it up, and re-attach it. The new hand will slowly take over your body transforming you

87. Eat nothing but earwax and wood shavings while meditating in the desert

88. Chase the god of antelopes down in the tundra, tackle him, and drink his blood

89. Ask a werebeast nicely to please share

90. Commune with the fur deities

91. Try and fail to quit smoking cigarettes 44 times

92. Stop sleeping

93. Avoid seeing the sun for 666 days

94. Allow your fingernails to grow for at least ten years, cut them off, powder them, then eat them a tsp at a time for the rest of your life. As long as you eat the powder every day you can transform and continue to live. Whenever the powder runs out you die.

95. Get struck by lightning and live 13 times

96. Be born on Friday the 13th at 3:13 during a full moon

97. Piss off the rat god

98. Burn down an entire forest

99. Forget to apologize

100. Be a jerk one too many times

Simple Firearms

 The concern about adding guns to d&d is that they tend to change the game the same way guns changed combat in real life; it's even more deadly than it was before and heavy armor is less useful. Combat skill is a little less useful as anyone can point and pull a trigger and kill.

I see these effects as reinforcing what makes old school d&d fun - deadly, unpredictable combat, focus on diegetic problem solving rather than relying on stats and abilities, weighing risk/reward before getting involved in combat, with the default being to avoid a fair fight at all costs.

There's lots of things to talk about when it comes to how to integrate firearms into your campaign, but I'm not doing that today. Instead I'm going to offer simple mechanics for handling firearms in the game. We can talk about the intricacies another time.

Primitive firearms

These include all ancient or early black powder guns, mini-canons, arquebuses, flintlocks, muskets, blunderbusses, and cap-and-powder pistols. These are probably the ones most refs will be willing to include because their primitive nature offers a fair number of counterbalancing drawbacks.

Looks like 4d6 damage to me.

First, these things take a long time to load. The kind of muskets used during the revolutionary war could get 2, maybe 3, shots off per minute, if you knew what you were doing. At 20 seconds reload time per shot that's about three rounds to reload, if you're using 6-second combat rounds. During that time you have to be standing still like a doofus.

As you can see in the above gif from Princess Mononoke, Lady Eboshi has peasant women busy loading rifles in preparation to hand to someone else to shoot. This is a good use of unskilled henchmen, like porters or torchbearers, and seems like something clever players might come up with to avoid the drawback of spending several rounds reloading to get one shot.

another alternative is what Blackbeard the pirate was famous for. Having a bunch of wheellock pistols lit in holsters all over your body. Just draw and fire. In WWN you can have half your strength score in readied items on your body. Leaving a slot for a melee weapon that gives the average player maybe 4-5 pistol shots. 

Difference between Firearms

The main difference between different styles of primitive firearms is power, accuracy, reload time, and how susceptible the weapon is to being ruined by water. 

First: water. If the gun gets wet it's ruined. In Princess Mononoke there's a scene where Lady Eboshi and her men fight off some giant wolves in a storm. They have the weapons wrapped in waxed/lacquered paper and large umbrellas to protect them from the elements. I'd rule that any steps like these would be effective. Maybe if the non-combatants holding the paper failed morale and fled the weapons would be ruined. Ruined could mean anything from the black powder being soaked, to the weapons needing to be cleaned or even taken apart in a safe, dry location.

As for Power, this really depends on your campaign. Compare to similar in-game effects. To my thinking d6 represents the ability of a weapon to kill a man in one blow - the average HD being a d6 (OD&D rules). Somebody 

For pistols I'd do 2d6 damage. Rifles are 3d6. Really heavy duty stuff is more, maybe 4, 5, or even 6d6 for stuff as powerful as a fireball spell: like mortars or cannons.

Of course, in real life people often don't die from a single gunshot wound, especially if it doesn't hit any vital organs. If healing magic is prevalent in your campaign you might even assume anybody who survives the combat is likely to make a full recovery. Some of your own guess work is required here to see what works for you and your players. 

Then there comes the problem of armor. Anyone familiar with the history of firearms is aware of the arms race between firearms and armor until the point at which it made more sense just to get rid of the armor all together. In world war 1 they started experimenting with metal plates woven into gambesons again, and eventually to modern times there are effective armors against firearm.

In medieval times plate armor was "proofed" against firearms. That means that the armor maker would shoot the armor with a firearm at a certain distance after it had been completed "proving" that it was capable of deflecting a bullet at such and such distance. Of course the average soldier couldn't afford such state-of-the-art fully articulated battle plate, but they could probably afford a steel cuirasse and helm which would be proofed the same way.

Shock Damage from WWN is pretty cool, but I don't like the fuss of implementing specific shock ratings and minimum damage values for each weapon and armor. 

Instead we'll split them into basic categories. 

Firearms come in Light (2d6) Heavy (3d6), and Artillery (4d6 or more). Probably nothing short of enchanted armor could withstand the force of Artillery, so we'll mostly ignore those.

Armor is either proofed or unproofed. Unproofed armor is basically no armor against firearms: you have to make a successful saving throw to avoid. Wands/Rays seems like a good choice. If you successfully save you "dodged the bullet", otherwise take full damage.

Proofed armor offers some protection. By the way, this is gonna use Ascending Armor Class. If you insist on using Descending Armor Class you're probably use to doing pointless math, so I'll let you figure it out yourself.

AC11 is unarmored, roll 11 or better to hit. That gives a regular ole human (1hd, AC11, +0 to hit) a 50/50 chance of hitting another regular ole unarmored human. That AC11 represents your ability to dodge an attack without bringing armor into the mix.

Thus, the first 10 points of AC are just you. If you want to apply Dex bonus to this base AC be my guest, but I don't.

Every point after that is your Armor. If a firearm attack (d20+Dex+Ranged bonus) beats the proofed AC, attack successfully penetrated the armor.

If the attack was at least 11 but less than the AC of the armor, it was stopped by the "proofing" or bullet-resistance of the armor, you only take half damage (roll damage, divide by 2).

If the attack was 10 or less it misses completely or deflects off the armor harmlessly.

Light armor is rarely proofed. Its main components are textile or leather. Maybe if the armor is Kevlar, or is woven with mythril thread it'll be bullet proofed.

Medium armor can be proofed, that's the steel cuirasse mentioned before.

Plate armor is ye old standby of proofed armor.

Another alternative is to have "proofed" armor simply deduct its armor bonus from the attack on a successful hit, so Proofed Light would reduce the incoming damage by 2, Medium by 4, and Plate by 6. Might be enough to save your ass.

Accuracy. I'm not gonna muck about with different accuracies for different firearms. Instead you can go look up the effective ranges for different firearms. If the attack is further than that it automatically misses. Don't forget that a lot of weapon accuracy for old weapons is typically assuming the weapon would be used in formation, like a firing squad, and shot towards a large surface, like an enemy battalion. Combat in d&d isn't like that, it's usually man-to-man skirmishes. So if some old ass rifle says it was effective up to 400 meters or some shit, I'd be skeptical. They probably mean it's capable of hitting a barn at 400 meters, not a little mustachoed goon picking his nose.

Reload time

We already touched on this before: 20 seconds for a trained musketeer to reload a familiar musket. That's roughly three 6-second combat rounds. Double or triple that for big guns, halve it for small guns like pistols.

pew pew

hermetic inoculation - Buddhism / Morrowind OD&D

 taking a break from the Internet, except for writing work, blog posts, research, and music. not doing anything social. those of you who know me on the discord are aware i retreat into hermetic semi-seclusion 3-4 times a year. i probably won't be very active again outside this blog until after Halloween, potentially until after new year. we'll see how it goes. if you really want to contact me for some reason I'm sure it'll happen.

in the mean time I'm tinkering with system stuff. my goal is to set up a system which matches my playstyle, which lends itself to quick generation of game content. i prefer to rely on randomization to cut down on prep time and increase player agency, and encourage me (the GM) to take a more backseat role in guiding the game. i like each session to be as much a surprise and discovery as my players. i don't like pretending to be in control or guiding the experience.

y'know, the reason why there are so many rulesets is because, if you want to do something other than totally vanilla rules as written d&d, if you wanna do *anything* out of the ordinary, you need houserules. if you have houserules you'll need a document of some kind. then, in order to educate players as to which rules you're keeping and which you're changing, you almost end up needing to rewrite the entire rulebook to some degree. 

thus, for every campaign there's the potential for a modified rulset to take shape. since GMs spend so much time tinkering with their stuff they get attached to it, make it wanna look nice, and before you know it they've put enough work in that, heck, i might as well put it out there.

the reason there's so few adventure modules, comparatively, is that at table play tends to be a mix of published stuff, original content, and heavily edited published stuff, stuff copied from elsewhere and spliced in. most people's games are pretty ad hoc compared to their carefully articulated rulesets, they take poor notes on what happened in the game, and their keying structure is often just what they need to run the game.

so then you have it people don't release as much of their adventure material. they crossbreed other people's content with their own gibberish and slop, and so it requires much more work to go back and replace all the recycled material with OC so people don't call you a thief 

of course, you could just take honor in being a thief and publish it anyway, hint hint. don't try to make money off it. just make it zines and fan work. this is a hobby, after all 

I'm not gonna lie, i really like the idea of skill systems for taking some of the weight off. i explain what that means below. Morrowind has a nice skill system, as does Worlds Without Number. What would happen if we mixed these things with my two favorite systems, OD&D and Knave? I'll be tinkering with these ideas over the next couple seasons.

=====

Attributes

Roll 3d6 for Strength, Dexterity, Constitution, Intelligence, Wisdom, Charisma

score (adj)

3 (-2)

4-7 (- 1)

8-13 (+0)

14-17( +1)

18 (+2)

Strength - Adjusts melee attacks, used for feats of strength.

Dexterity - Ranged attacks, speed, agility, reflexes

Constitution - Used to resist poison, illness, exposure. You can carry 1.5x this many slots. You can survive this many days without food.

Intelligence - You start with Int/5 languages. Languages include elements of cultural familiarity. Occultists start with Int bonus +1 spells

Wisdom - insight into karmic vicissitudes, intuition, ability to deal with spirits appropriately.

Charisma - Affability, charm, wit, leadership. Adjusts reaction rolls. You can have half your Charisma in followers.

Attribute adjustment

You may subtract 2 points from one attribute to add 1 to another.

Saving Throws

Fortitude - overcoming with strength, effort, endurance. Adjusted by the better of Strength and Constitution.

Reflex - overcoming with agility, dexterity, reflexes. Adjusted by the better of Dexterity and Charisma.

Warding - overcoming with spirituality, intelligence, esoteric science. Adjusted by the better of Intelligence and Wisdom.

Each saving throw starts at 15, adding or subtracting your best attribute adjustment for each. To make a successful save, throw d20 Equal or Over the relevant saving throw. Each level you can distribute 3 points between saving throws.

At level 2 Maghada the Wise distributes 3 points between her saving throws. Her saves are Fort 14 Reflex 15 Warding 16. She puts 2 points into Fort, reducing it to 12, and one point into Warding, reducing it to 15.

Skill System

Difficulty

Rating

Easy

7

Average

9

Difficult

11

Impossible

13

Roll 2d6 + Attribute + Skill Level

Without the appropriate skill some things are impossible, like casting magic. Other things you can still attempt, like Riding a horse in difficult conditions, but incur a -1 penalty when it's clear none of your skills or backgrounds fit the situation. Further penalties and bonuses can be applied for careful planning, appropriate or inappropriate equipment, less than ideal environments, timing, etc. this is worked out via conversation between players and GM.

Lots of people groan about skills in OSR games, so I’ve never tried using them. This system is lifted straight out of WWN. I’m wondering if it’ll take some of the guesswork out of dealing with niche situations and coming up with, and remembering, new rulings for every case. This way I can just assign a difficulty, we pick out which skill and attribute makes the most sense, and throw. In some cases, like Sneak, Speech, Perception, they’ll be rolled behind the scenes so you don’t know when you’ve failed. In some cases, different skills with both fit the situation and we’ll all have to figure out what makes the most sense. Shrug. That’s the game. If it sucks we can throw it out.

Skill List

Administer - Running an organization, handling bureaucracy, performing scribal duties, identifying incompetent or treacherous workers, analyzing records or archives. Handling anything an executive or middle manager would do.

Alchemy - Treat wounds, cure diseases, neutralize poisons, diagnose problems of body and mind. Produce potions and poisons using alchemical ingredients.

Athletics - Run, Climb, Swim, Jump, Labor for long periods. Strength, Stamina, Coordination.

Combat - Knowing the art of war, being skilled in hand-to-hand combat. Added to attack rolls. each time you take combat you put a point into blades, axes, polearms, or clubs. Warrior-types like Nomad Blades get two-for-one when they spend points in Combat.

Connect - Finding people who are useful to your purposes, know who to talk to for favors or services, calling on help or resources of an organization you belong to. Covers ability to find people you need, though convincing them to help may require more.

Craft - Craft or repair items / technology appropriate to PC’s background. GM is within their rights to prevent PC from building complex things outside their background and experience.

Dharma - Understand the fundamental cosmic underpinnings of the world, perform clerical and ritual duties, familiarity with daemons, saints, and taboos, identify iconography, understand local faiths and religious hierarchies.

Language - Speak and write in a language, understand the culture and context of native speakers.

Leadership - Inspire others to follow you and believe in your plans and goals. Manage subordinates, encourage loyalty and motivation. A successful skillcheck can prevent morale decay and route of followers.

Lore - Know matters of history, geography, natural science, zoology, and other academic fields appropriate to a scholar. Some might specialize in a specific field, otters may have a broad range of understanding.

Magic - Cast or analyze magic, know things about famous magicians or magical events. non-occultists with this only obtain intellectual benefits. there's like d8 schools of magic and you have to spend skill points for each style.

Marksman - Firing a crossbow, maintaining ranged weapons. primitive, black powder, hurlant.

Mercantile - Running a successful business, buying/selling, identifying the worth of goods/treasures, dealing with merchants, finding blackmarket, knowing smuggling law

Perception - Identify ambushes, hear distant sounds, notice small details or concealed objects, find secret doors or traps. Frequently rolled secretly as a result of PC actions.

Perform - Sing, dance, orate, perform impressively for an audience. Compose music, plays, writings, or other performance arts. Most have a field they specialize in, though polymaths may exist if PC’s background is appropriate.

Profession - Pick some mundane workaday job thing you did in your past life. Bricklaying, Blacksmith, Incense Roller, Midwife, Well Digger, whatever. Make something up or I’ll get a list.

Ride - Handling riding animals and beasts of burden, driving carts / wagons, carriage repair, judging a good horse, shoeing.

Sail - Sail or reair ship, build small craft, navigate by stars, read sea weather, manage sailors.

Speechcraft - Persuade a listener. The more implausible or repugnant the claim, the more difficult. How they act on their new conviction is up to them and their motivations, not always predictable.

Stealth - Moving silently, hiding in shadows, picking pockets, disguise, pick locks, defeat small mechanisms. Hack security bots?

Survival - hunt, fish, navigate by the stars, deal with environment, identify plants / wildlife, craft survive tools and shelter.

Technology - familiarity with hyper-advanced technology from bygone ages. may be able to identify, use, or even repair ancient relics.

Unarmed - Fighting unarmed. Pugilism, grappling.

The Use of Skills

 The function of skills is intentionally loose and open to interpretation. some of them overlap with each other to cover different bases. for instance, a character with lore and one with technology may both be able to identify an alien artifact, but the character with technology may have better odds since the specifics align more closely with his domain. on the flip side, a character with lore+4 may have better odds than a character with tech+1 for identification, history, and source of said object, but likely wouldn't know how to use or repair it, as lore is considered of a more scholarly than practical knowledge. 

Skills are intended to aid in making more consistent rulings and support diegetic play, rather than act as strict rules or replace at-table discussion. The GM is encouraged to pick the closest option and move on rather than stick a player with a -1 penalty for not having the right skill.

D20 Background (will flesh these out later)

1

Artisan

blacksmith, tanner, carpenter

2

Barbarian

savage, hermit, wildman

3

Carter

hauling goods, riding post

4

Courtesan

prostitute, geisha

5

Criminal

thief, conman, burglar

6

Hunter

trapper, recluse

7

Laborer

skilled or unskilled worker

8

Merchant

trader, peddler, shopkeeper

9

Noble

spare son, exile, black sheep

10

Nomad

raider, tribal wanderer

11

Peasant

Peasant farmer, rural laborer, serf

12

Performer

bard, dancer, singer

13

Physician

village healer, chirurgeon

14

Priest

monk, ascetic, holy hermit

15

Sailor

bargeman, fisherman, pirate

16

Scholar

Scholar sage, mage’s apprentice

17

Slave

indentured laborer, runaway

18

Soldier

bandit, mercenary, guardsman

19

Thug

ruffian, gang member, village bully

20

Wanderer

exile, explorer, traveler

though a few interesting details are nice, long character back stories are discouraged.at most a quick paragraph in broad strokes is plenty. if you need an exact number keep it at 5 sentences or less.

 the game is about facing difficult dilemmas, making the best of bad situations - more about how our values come into conflict with reality, and how the goals we achieve in the end often aren't the ones we set out after. How you change, and the world changes with you, for better or worse.

karma

a character's karma can be chaotic, neutral, or lawful. how this is interpreted is up to the player. karma has background mechanics invisible to the players which affects various situations. it's possible a PC's karma can change enough to warrant a shift in alignment, though this will likely be rare and you'll never be held accountable for sticking to an alignment designation - you're always free to change your ways at any moment. if you're unsure, just pick neutral.

Leveling up

all classes use the same XP progression. prime requisites offer extra features and better abilities rather than XP adjustments.

PCs earn XP by defeating enemies, showing mercy, upholding difficult vows, finding clever ways around obstacles, recovering valuable treasures, completing quests, restoring shrines, purifying corrupted areas, and making personal sacrifices for the benefit of strangers. 

100xp is average, though it can be more depending on the potency. XP is awarded at the end of the session. this is less about playing to your particular character concept and more about making meaningful decisions and development as a person in the world. don't ask “what would my character do?” ask “what would *I* do?”

1g = 10xp

treasure and XP is split between the entire party, including henchmen who each take a 1/2 share for themselves first, the rest divided between the players. some henchmen may make additional demands according to their personality, karma, and morale. henchmen tend to be scrupulous and may behave unreasonably if they feel cheated.

an easy way to figure this is to divide the treasure by twice the number of total people in the pot (PCs+henchmen) to get the value of a half share. multiply it by the number of hechmen to get their earnings, which is subtracted from the total pot. the remainder is divided evenly by players.

a party of 3 PCs and 5 henchmen loot 200g.

200 divided by 16 = a half share of 12.5. times 5 henchmen is 62.5 total paid to the henchmen

the remaining 137.5 is divided between the players for 45.8g each.

if you wanted henchmen to get a third share instead you could multiply the total number of party members by three and divide the treasure by that to get the henchman's share.

i used to avoid doing this because i thought math was scary, but it's a lot of fun to imagine the hechmen’s greedy faces, sticking out their tongues and rubbing their hands together, as they eagerly wait on the PC that can actually do basic math to divide the treasure.

thinking about separating class types into warrior, magician, specialist, or adventurer types, allowing them to get two-for-one when they put points in appropriate skills.

OR maybe they pick major, minor, and misc skills like in Morrowind.

whatever will be fastest. 

I'll probably come back and add some art later.

ruislip dissected

lol I did all this work for nothing, Luke already posted his hexfilling procedures on his blog go look at them and use them they're wonderful

I dissected the Ruislip demo of Luke Gearing's Wolves upon the Coast game to see what I could learn. I like the way the keys are written. It feels to me like it could have been generated using dice and random tables from something like OD&D, then fleshed out. I'm kind of enamored with the idea of randomly generating hexmap content, then going back and forming connection and loose reasons for things to be, and adding unstable situations for players to mess with.

the Ruislip map has about 46 hexes. Of that 27 are keyed (58.6%), 19 are empty (41.3%)

There's 9 towns (19.5%), 13 lairs (28.26%), and 5 set pieces (10.8%).

I'm counting a town as a mostly friendly place the players will come back to for rest, quests, equipment, resources. Lairs are places that are inhabited by enemies. Usually this means monsters, but I've included a few pagan settlements where they're acting like jerks and probably gonna be violent to the PCs. One of the lairs could also be used as a monster town if the PCs play their cards right. Set pieces are the other things - interesting locations with something to interact with that may or may not have treasure.

• You could get pretty close to those odds by by throwing a d6: 1 is a town, 2-3 is a lair, 4 is a set-piece, 5-6 is nothing (empty).

The Lairs are mostly one monster type. A few of them have 2 or 3 monster types. Some lairs have no treasure at all, but none of the sites have bullshit treasure (except the whale is a little bullshit, but it's a set-piece). None of the locations are really your typical dungeon delve where the players are crawling through a trap-infested pit, fighting different kinds of monsters and interacting with monster factions. The Orc and Goblin lairs come the closest to this, but those would be more heist-type or kill-em-all or deal-with-the-faction scenarios, not crawls. It's a classic 1975-style hexcrawl campaign, where the focus was on overland exploration and picaresque shenanigans Vs. traditional dungeon crawling.

of the 9 friendly human settlements 6 are villages (have less than 100 people) and 3 are towns (have people in the several hundreds). If you get a friendly settlement throw a d6, on 1-4 it's a village, 5-6 is a town.

It looks like village population was thrown on a d00 and town populations were d10x100.

Villages tended to have a higher combatant to villager ratio, around 24-30% of the population for each being soldiers.

Towns had comparatively smaller populations of combatants, about 12-15%, but they generally have fortifications.

Here's my notes on the hex keys:

02.05 Dunrick (set piece)
weird plant thing makes people sleep. turns them into wraiths

05.05 shoal (lair)
griffon nest, attacking griffon mama

01.16 burnt village (set piece)
a destroyed village with nothing

02.16 lair of sruthkin (lair)
dragon lair, treasure

03.07 ogre house (lair)
ogre lair, treasure

04.07 beached whale (set piece)
beached whale, some treasure

01.08 runestones (set piece)
fancy rocks with words

02.08 stamullen (town)
79 people, 15 skirmishers (18% combatants)
weird bee town with pagan influences. a situation to get involved in. a druid you could befriend and learn some spells from.

04.08 culemwardern (town)
600 houses, 40 footmen, 50 skirmishers, boats (15% combantants)
a situation involving griffons. druid influences, a few characters and their relationships

05.08 cloyne (town)
58 people, 19 skirmishers, 5 fishing boats (32% combatants)
pagan town, some situations

01.09 manticore cave (lair)
cool manticore lair and interesting situation, treasure

03.09 donenashoe (lair / monster town)
juggernaut, medusa, 198 goblins, some ruins and treasures.

05.09 belcarra (town / lair)
99 people, 80 footmen (80% combatants)
unpredictable pagan town

06.09 bitter druid (lair)
evil wizard lair, treasure

01.10 dorbog (town)
800 people, 50 armored foot, 50 skirmishers, boats (12% combatant)
some characters, leader, druids, situations, relations to other hexes, henchies

03.10 awoken king (lair)
mummy lair, a time-sensitive situation, treasure

05.10 stone circle (lair)
evil pagan wizard faction, spells and treasure to be had, a situation, a thread to some other hex and situation

06.10 pirates (lair)
pirates, a faction, some treasure

02.11 ogonnelloe (town)
80 people 24 skirmishers (24% combatant)
ruined fort, town, characters, a time-sensitive situation, a werewolf,

03.11 orc fort (lair)
80 orcs, orcs in vats, a fortification, treasure

01.12 st olham's monastary (town)
only monastary 96 monks, a faction, treasure, resource for PCs: sages / library

03.12 a dog (set piece)
cool a dog

05.12 blulach (town)
1000 people 20 armored foot 40 foot 60 skirmishers 20 horsemen boats (14% combatant)
fortification, market, alehouse, church, docks, characters with goals, relations to other hexes, quests, henchies, horse stables

06.12 barrows (lair)
ruined camp, hidden lair, wraith, zombies, treasure

02.13 nameless hemlet (lair)
abandoned town, merfolk, no treasure

04.13 gargoyles (lair)
gargoyles, no treasure, relations to other hexes

04.14 killucan (town)
43 people 5 foot 5 skirmishers 5 boats (23% combatant)
cattle town, fishing, a situation, relation to other hex, a mystery