Month: October 2021

Creating a 16th Century Philippines-inspired D&D World – The Karakoa and The Galleon

by goobernuts

I read a paper about how Filipinos of centuries ago built boats from nailless planks. I don’t really have much experience or knowledge of boat-building, so I had to google a lot of terms while reading. Please, don’t hesitate to correct me if I got something wrong about boats, hahaha.

I talked about karakoas in a previous blog post about naval vessels, but I only had what details my W.H. Scott’s Barangay had. So this will be sort of an extension of that post.

Here’s what I’ve learned, and how I can possibly use them for running a game in this setting.

The Karakoa

The karakoa was the precolonial Filipinos’ most prestigious naval craft, their man-o-war. Datu superiority was based on capability of their Barangay to build and launch these warships, for how else could they raid other Barangays.

A medieval Chinese author described plank-built boats like the karakoa like so:

“They make boats of wooden boards and fasten them with split rattan, and cotton wadding to plug up the seams. The hull is very flexible, and rides up and down on the waves, and they row them with oars made of wood, too. None of them have ever been known to break up.”

The karakoa were ships with low freeboard and light draft (basically means it lays shallow on the water), a keel (sort of the backbone) with one continuous curve, one or more tripod masts (instead of the huge singular masts of european ships we’re more familiar with) with square sails, double outriggers made of bamboo, and raised platforms from which warriors let loose projectiles at enemy ships.

They were steered with quarter rudders, and banks of paddlers sit on the outriggers and paddle with their legs and lower bodies right on the water, giving it boosts of speed.

“The fact that the caracoa was double-ended made it extremely maneuverable in battle: its paddlers could back it down as rapidly as drive it forward simply by turning around in their places and shifting the helm to the other end.”

One of my favorite details is that warriors on the boat itself could act as extra paddlers on the ends of the outriggers, giving it extra speed and maneuverability when needed.

The optimal number of crew for a karakoa seems to be more or less a hundred men. There are larger versions of the karakoa called joangas that can carry up to 300 men, but these are said to “have reached or exceeded the optimum point between manpower and deadweight.” Maybe it’s a power projection thing.

The crew is split between paddlers and warriors. Warriors make up around a quarter to a third of the crew, and the rest are paddlers who were said to be able to paddle from sunrise to sunset. At sea, the warriors attack enemy ships with arrows and bamboo spears while the paddlers, well, paddle. On land, the paddlers join the fray as fighters also. Paddlers who show valor and bravery in raids can be promoted to the warrior elite.

The karakoa must have looked very flimsy to sailors of Spanish galleons or Chinese junks. A Spaniard even remarked that “a caracoa was a boat that could be sunk with one oar of a galley.”

The truth is, the karakoa is specially designed and built for purposes different from something like a Galleon.

The Difference between the Galleon and Karakoa

Ships like the galleon were designed for crossing the high seas. They had to withstand wild weather, store provisions for a large crew, enough for months without land in sight, and they needed to be able to carry large amounts of cargo for trade and artillery for engagements at sea. For this, their large masts, deep keels, and other specifications are perfect.

The karakoa, on the other hand, is specialized for speed and maneuverability in coastal waters.

“Rather, they were intended to carry warriors at high speeds before seasonal winds through dangerous reef-filled waters with treacherous currents on interisland raids-”

Rather than flimsy, the karakoa’s hull is actually made flexible to distribute blows from under the water, like from reefs. Nails that hold a galleon together would come loose from these blows, but the karakoa’s rattan lashings can be tightened again or even replaced.

The karakoa’s outriggers prevent the boat from rolling, add bouyancy, and receive the forces of the high seas first. They also serve as handles to carry the ship up from and down to the shore.

The karakoa’s shallow and curved shaped makes able to resist the currents of the Philippine seas and channels, “which were the constant bane, and frequent undoing, of Spanish galleons.” It also gives the Karakoa a very hydrodynamic design. It’s said that with the wind behind it, the karakoa’s speed is “probably twelve to fifteen knots to a galleion’s five or six” – two or three times faster than the galleon.

How Will I Run Karakoas in my Setting?

I have a couple of ideas.

I’m thinking of running naval combat with a mix of Into The Odd and Whitehack’s rules. Ships will have stats like Into The Odd’s: HP, Armor, and Detachments. Roles (navigation, detachments, other features) will be divided between the player party like in Whitehack.

A karakoa will have less HP and Armor than a galleon and will have two bow detachments, upgradeable to musket detachments. As per ItO rules, any weapon weaker than a cannon will have no effect on a ship’s HP. Players are forced to aim for enemy detachments to render enemy ships helpless.

Galleons have more HP and Armor, and two cannon detachments. This means a galleon can attack a karakoa’s HP directly and sink everyone in it.

It is not supposed to be fair. Karakoas really weren’t a match against a galleon’s superior firepower back then. Which means the players should be more wise in engaging these ships.

Escape through shallow waters and channels where galleons couldn’t give chase. Lead the colonizers towards reefs that will damage their keels and hulls, or towards currents that they will not be able to fight against. Maybe even use the weather against them?

Perhaps the players should also be given the ability to order their detachments to become emergency paddlers, enabling them to make difficult maneuvers at the cost of less attacking power. Perhaps I should also let them upgrade weapons to cannons instead of bows and muskets, but decreasing the number of detachments to just 1 because of the weight.

I’ll need to think more about this.

Releasing: Mangayaw, a Classical Filipino Fantasy Tabletop RPG

by goobernuts

Or at least, an early version of it. The game has had no playtesting yet, so I’m sure I’m gonna have to tweak stuff later on. I’m gonna have to host a few games for that, which I’m psyching myself up for. Anyway, without further ado…

You can find the game here! No PDF version yet so I can edit it easily. I’ll work on that later on.

Let me walk you through the game.

It’s like, 80-90% Cairn, really. I replaced a lot of game terms with ancient Filipino terms. The Game or Dungeon Master is called the Mangaawit, which means singer. Most Filipino storytelling before Spanish colonization was through song and poem, orally performed and taught instead of written, so it’s a beautiful term for a Game Master in a Filipino game. I can’t take credit for coming up with it, because I copied it from makapatag’s Gubat Banwa.

Player characters are called Binmanwa, pertaining to people who know how to survive in the wilds. It doesn’t push roles onto players, but still describes their innate capabilities.

The Principles of the World is supposed to be a guide for the Mangaawit and players about the common sense and values of natives in the world, because they are supposed to be natives who grew up on the islands, not foreigners discovering a new culture. It’s still lacking some details, but it should do for now.

Character Creation is almost like Cairn’s, but with Ancestries from my setting. I didn’t attach any mechanical aspect to them, just a few words about each one’s nature and tendencies. Should be useful in fleshing out a character, I think?

The General Rules are mostly unchanged. Combat Rules have some added and replaced stuff.

Initiative is replaced with one that has modifiers based on players’ armor. Basically the less armor the party has, the more likely they will act first in a turn. It feels a bit inelegant compared to Cairn’s rules, but I added it there to push players into wearing less armor, just like ancient Filipinos. If I can think of a more elegant initiative rule, I’ll replace it.

I switched movement from exact measures to abstract ranges like in The Black Hack, but feel free to switch it back. I also added in rules for ships and naval combat from Into The Odd. You need ship rules in a game set in an archipelago!

The sorcery and magic rules are what needs the most playtesting. I wanted one that feels like Filipino sorcery from what I’ve read. I knew I couldn’t use Knave and Cairn’s 100 levelless spells, since there is a clear and wide difference in power between spells in Filipino sorcery.

So what I came up with is 6 categories or schools of magic that a Binmanwa has to linearly advance through. Casting spells have fatigue costs just as in Cairn, with the most powerful spells taking up 3 inventory slots.

Advancement is inspired by Weird North, QZ, and the Black Hack.

And lastly, I stat-ed up some NPCs, natives and folks, monsters and colonizers based on the ones in my setting. I’m not that familiar with the nuances of Cairn NPC stats yet, but it’s a start.

And there you have it. Mangayaw is very much unfinished and I want to see it in actual play before I make big edits. For that to happen, I have to host it for people on the internet, which I haven’t done before. So I’ll have to prepare myself for that.

How Filipinos interact with the supernatural and how I can use that in my setting

by goobernuts

A few weeks ago, I had a friend read my setting draft. I wanted to get some feedback on it, so I would know what it lacks and what not. After reading a portion of it, he asked something to the effect of “How do the natives react to the more supernatural elements of the setting?”

To answer that question, I went reading. I had recently bought John P. McAndrew’s “People of Power: A Philippine Worldview of Spirit Encounters”. It was just what I needed.

The book has modern accounts of spirit encounters; modern sensibilities and Catholic beliefs have been mixed in with animist beliefs, so it’s not gonna be entirely accurate to how it was in precolonial times. However, if I learned anything from this book, it’s that folk’s beliefs are hard to change. They adapt, use different symbols and iconography, but they keep the beliefs passed down to them. So I think this book is a good basis, at the very least.

Animism and shamanism have an ecological and harmonious attitude towards the environment. Well obviously, if your religious beliefs tell you everything around you is alive and has spirit, you’re more likely to respect them. However, humans are still forgetful and selfish, and that’s where conflict starts.

People can remember spirits by being mindful of the areas where they live, or doing rituals and making offerings regularly. Forget the spirits and they might make people remember with drastic methods like sickness.

People have relationships with the spirits around them. Relationships with spirits are as varied and robust as human relationships. Shamans have spirits as friends and kumparis. These spirits grant their shaman friends power and knowledge; this is how shamans can heal. There are even accounts of people marrying spirits and having children with them.

If people and spirits can be friends, then there would also be enemies. There are accounts in the book about sorcerers with dark magic and curses. They are said to come from Satan, which is borrowed iconography from Christianity, but it goes to show there are hostile forces, not just friendly and helpful forces.

I think I could use this for my setting. Tawo, Aswang, Bantay Dagat, Umalagad, Diwata, and many more; they are all equally natives of the islands. There is compassion, there is indifference, there is conflict. There are allies, there are strangers, there are foes.

If there is conflict, what happens then? How do humans react? For this I think I can take pointers from how spirit healers do their job, as described by the book.

For spirit healers, illnesses are a disruption of harmony. To heal illnesses, you either strengthen and restore one’s power so they can fight through the illness, or you neutralize or expel the forces causing the disruption.

In RPGs, this kind of healing could be cause for quests. There is an herb deep in the forest that is needed by the victim to recover, go and find it! Or, if a party wants to take a more direct approach: someone in the Barangay is truly an Aswang and is eating the victim’s organs slowly, find them and destroy them!

It’s also common for healers to parley with the opposing party. This is good for the OSR style, where violence is better off as a last resort.

Illnesses in this context are directed towards one’s body, but I think you can also extend this to a community or even bigger contexts. If illnesses are disruptions of harmony, then couldn’t you categorize War, public disorder, or even natural phenomena like storms as disruptions, too? In a larger sense, isn’t colonization an illness as well?

This opens up a direction for players in my setting. Aside from participating in the zeitgeist of war and getting rich and powerful, they could be healers and problem solvers. Sort of the same job as witchers, now that I think about it.

Trying to make a Cairn hack

by goobernuts

If you’ve been following this blog for a while, you’d know I’ve been making a setting. It’s what I’ve mostly been writing about for the past few months. You’d also know that I aim to keep that setting system neutral. I like exploring a wide range of RPG systems, and attaching a system to my setting feels… restricting.

That’s about to change, but also not really.

I’m trying to make a hack of a lovely game by Yochai Gal called Cairn. Cairn is a game that takes principles from Into the Odd and Knave, both minimalist takes on OSR and D&D systems. The result is a full game system in 20-something pages.

What prompted me to do this was Zeruhur’s own quest to make his own Cairn hack, based on Greek mythology. I don’t know why, but that post made neurons in my brain activate and think “What if I did that too?”

So now I’m writing my own Cairn hack, dubbed Mangayaw, which means “to sea raid”. I still want my setting to be system neutral, but I am using what I’ve written there for Mangayaw.

Before I get into detail about this project, a little celebration.

RPGSEA Creator daw ako

I have difficulty putting myself out there, so this is big for me. Last week, I was added to RPGSEA’s list of Game Designers, which was affirming as heck, but also nerve wracking, hah!

I don’t want to make this too long, I just wanna say thanks for the recognition.

Mangayaw in the works

Mangayaw is an adventure RPG that is really mostly Cairn, but with Filipino terms and Filipino inspired houserules that are barely playtested. For example, instead of STR, DEX, and WIL, characters have LAKAS, LIKSI, and LOOB as abilities.

So far I have a draft of Character Creation, Equipment lists, General Rules, and War and Violence Rules.

I still have to work on Sorcery, NPCs, Advancement and the Principles for the GM, the players, and the world.

Sorcery is my biggest roadblock right now. Instead of Cairn and Knave’s 100 Levelless Spells, I think I want to do something more like Maze Rats’ magic system where players roll for two words and then discuss with the GM what magic effect these two words would have. But that’s not set in stone yet.

For NPCs, I’m gonna have to stat up some of the natives and folk in my islands. Cairn only needs a really minimal statblock for NPCs, so that’s a load off my shoulders.

I imagine the principles part would be something I’d struggle with, too, but I’ll figure it out.

Anyways, that’s just an update about what I’m doing right now. I’m still reading a book about Philippine shamans and spirit healers and sorcerers. Once I’m done with that, I’ll probably blog about it.