quick combat for Mosaic Strict

This is a MOSAIC Strict-compliant variant of something I posted earlier- one that leans into "combat as war" in that combat represents risks that can be managed and prepared for, but there are few tactical decisions once you enter into it. You may also like Emmy Allen's system. 

(Ismail Inceoglu)

0) Like any other Mosaic subsystem, don't open up this minigame when it doesn't make sense. If the outcome isn't in doubt, then you don't need it. If players want something tactically interesting, give them something tactically interesting instead.

1) At points this system refers to Combat Capability, or CC. When it becomes relevant to determine a character's CC, add up the following, or throw in what makes sense to you:

• If you're not sick, +1.
• If you're not tired, +1.
• If you're not injured, +1.
  
• If you're armed with something improvised (including magic not purely useful for combat, like ice magic or something), +1. If you're armed with a real weapon (or have some kind of martial arts training), +2. If you're armed with a cool magic weapon, +3 or more.
• If fighting is the main thing your character does for their background, +1. 
• If you're, like, super big, +1 or more.
• If you have a mount that you're trained in and fits the terrain, +1.
  
• If you're a cold killer - the sort where people can see it in your face and don't trust you - that's also +1.
  
• If another PC has died by your side in combat, +1.
  
• If you've lost a battle on this terrain before, +1.
• If another PC has died by your side in combat on this terrain before, +1.
• If you've lost a battle to these kinds of opponents before, +1.
• If another PC has died by your side in combat against these kinds of opponents before, +1.

For monsters, make up a CC that makes sense. 

2) When combat begins, everybody chooses Morale - a number from 1-12 - secretly passing them to the GM if desired. 

3) Roll 1d6. This represents the decisive factor in battle. If you're fighting under particularly bad conditions (in an avalanche, in a flooding dungeon, in the stomach of a tarrasque) roll a bigger die and interpret everything above a 6 as 6.

1. Numbers: whichever side has fewer combatants loses.
2. Might: whichever side has lower average CC loses.
3. Cohesion: whichever side has lower average morale loses.
4. Leadership: whichever side has the best single combatant - as defined by Morale + CC - does not lose, but rather the other side loses.
5. Positioning: whichever side has worse circumstantial advantage loses. If in doubt, the defender loses, unless they are defending a fortified position, in which case attacker loses.
6. Mutual Ruin: both sides lose.

If no side has a clear advantage on the rolled decisive factor, add up each side's raw Morale + CC total. The side with the lower total score loses, unless the scores are equal, in which case both lose.

4) Each combatant on the losing side rolls 2d6. If they roll over their Morale, they ran away (or are captured if escape is impossible and the enemy takes prisoners - or they successfully played dead, or whatever). If they roll under or equal to their Morale, they're dead (or also possibly captured, &c, depending on the circumstances).

(Note that losing combat is a mechanical condition while winning is not. You "win" if making your opponent lose accomplishes whatever extra-combat goal you happened to have.)

5) Regardless of whether your side won or lost, if you didn't die, roll 2d6 (one red die, one blue) and compare it to Morale again, or Morale + 3 if you lost. If it's under (not equal) to your Morale, you sustain injuries. Unless there's something interesting about the kind of injuries an opponent can give you (as with a basilisk or a vampire), but by default consult the red die rolled and the following chart:

1. Just a scratch.
2. If you had a shield, light armor, or heavy armor, you're fine. If not, roll 1d6 again.
3. If you had heavy armor or a shield, it's shattered. If not, roll 1d6 again.
4. You lost a hand, an eye, or something else useful.
5. You have a deep wound and are grievously injured. You cannot exert yourself for the next day and will need to be under care.
6. You are mortally wounded, and though you can move around, you will need to seek treatment in a center of civilization within 1d12 days (referee rolls secretly) or you will die.

the Shaking Empress: the demon-queen who invented morality

(This is a Nietzschean myth about the invention of morality; I also have a Kantian one. Nothing says they can't both be true, even in the same setting.) 

stage 0: egoist eden

Once upon a time there was no morality. All gods were demons and all men were knaves.

The world wasn't a guignol of horror: people loved their friends and families, they feared revenge. Far-sighted princes would pass laws saying we'll kill you if you kill someone else, and sometimes the guy who backstabbed his way into power after that would keep the law around (while carving an exception for themselves.) Neighbors often cooperated, both because it's more pleasant and less dangerous than the alternative. The rich might feed the poor, the same as you might feed some ducks, and the poor might feed the rich, same as you might feed a tiger. People told the truth often enough - to maintain a reputation, to economize on memory - that there was some evidential value to listening to them, under most circumstances.

But compared to today, life was nastier, more brutal, and shorter.

stage 1: masochist mystery cult

Back in those days, no more people were motivated by pure nastiness than they are today. But among those who were was the Shaking Empress. Like other petty abusers, she liked to hurt other beings to feel powerful. Like some of them, she was already plenty powerful herself (a demon-queen, in fact.) 

Some such abusers offer a false pretense of love. Some offer power. The Shaking Empress offered - offers - nothing. She feels best when creatures grovel before her knowing they get nothing, zilch, nada in return. The Shaking Empress cannot hurt you if you do not pledge yourself to her, and if you do, all she gives you is hurt. Any deviation from making yourself as meek and pitiful as possible will result in you being tortured in your dreams, in your afterlife, and maybe even in your waking life.

If you hold yourself with pride and say you are better than the meekest worm - if you assert your power over the meanest churl - she'll hunt you down. Not because she disapproves of being prideful or cruel, but because she believes the supreme honor of these excellent things ought be reserved to herself.

None but a masochist would accept this offer. None but masochists did. At first.

stage 2: scale-dependent group selection effects

Places dominated by the cult of the Shaking Empress are not great. People are constantly getting attacked or forced to hurt themselves by the Empress themselves. There's a lot of pressure to engage in ugly self-criticism sessions. But her devoted are not likely to leave you for dead on the highway. Until they invent heroism (an advanced theological doctrine which the Shaking Goddess let out to defend her cult in a moment of weakness and has regretted ever since) they are easy to conquer and a positive delight to rule. Places with a bad case of the Shaking Goddess can, under some circumstances, become an enviable place to join, or to emulate.

stage 3: prison planet

I emphasized at the beginning that, before the Shaking Empress began her reign, people were not all nasty. But I emphasize this for a simple reason: to not pledge your soul to the Empress now is to mark yourself out as one who longs for nastiness. To be, yourself, proud and cruel, rather than offering those on up to the terrible demon-queen.

Even those who, in their hearts, reject her dominion, who do not sell themselves over to her - feign sleepless nights of being attacked, just so their neighbors know they are vulnerable. Some might feign being so meek that the Empress spares them - but few would believe that. Better to say you were under assault for lesser crimes, that no one could think you capable of greater ones. 

The Shaking Empress could not be more pleased. When whole societies worship her, they punish each other for not being meek enough. When societies stray from her, they punish each other by not being meek enough - driving themselves back into her cruel, clutching arms. From the depths of her pride and greed, she crows, in a few short aeons she will be the only enlightened, the only evil, being left.

Antinomian alignment

Here are some facts about the world (i.e., the world I just made up.) They aren't pleasant, but too bad.

First, you should know that alignment objectively exists; people are either Lawful, Neutral, or Chaotic - or if you want to be pretentious about it, Nomian, Anomian, and Counternomian. They are so from birth and this cannot change except for your Helm of Alignment Change and so on; notably, behavior cannot in any way affect alignment. 

Secondly, the basic personality and motivational structure of people is completely orthogonal to alignment: people in each have your normal spread of selflessness, selfishness, Dunbar's number dynamics, that kind of thing. 

Thirdly, if you were born with a Lawful soul (about 5-20% of the population), you'll go to heaven if you acted benevolently in life and hell if you acted malevolently in life, and you Know this, but not where the threshold is. If you were born with a Chaotic soul (about 1-5% of the population),  you Know just the opposite - that some indeterminate about of badness will damn you up to heaven and goodness will bless you straight to hell. If you're Neutral you don't Know shit.

a fool sees not the same tree

If you're Lawful or Chaotic, you can speak an alignment language. Alignment languages contain concepts that cannot be grasped in other languages, but speaking them doesn't feel any different from speaking your other languages. 

Moreover, hearing an alignment language, if you speak it, just sounds normal. If you don't speak an alignment language, it tends to sound like vague mystical patter, or people describing ineffable mystic concepts, which in fact they are - ineffable to you, anyway; they can be perfectly well effed by native speakers.

(What are these concepts? Unfortunately, I have a Neutral soul and can't tell you. But there are probably some spells and such you need them to grok.)

nor seeks to know / the law by which it prospers so

Lawful and Chaotic characters Know about their afterlife fates and Know their languages; they don't Know that alignment is a thing, or who has what, or that they're doing something unusual when they use Alignment languages, or that when people treat their alignment-talk as mystical nonsense or vague moralizing (n.b. many people like either or both of those things!) they're being anything other than just a bit dumb or lazy. People have to figure this out, and what they piece together is probably wrong.

Note that due to some perhaps obvious dynamics people of all alignments mostly grow up in societies where it's accepted that there's heaven for the good and hell for the bad, or one of the standard corruptions of this idea (living on in people's memories, heaven for the people who do the right rituals and hell for everyone else, rebirth into an infinite layer of heavens and hells around which this world is somewhere in the middle, whatever.) Chaotic souls Know this is incorrect but have a number of incentives not to say it out loud. Lawful souls Know it's true. Neutral souls hear everyone saying it and so, aside from a few village atheists, don't have a good reason to doubt consensus.

Magic that interacts with Alignment doesn't necessarily clear things up either. If you start using alignment detection spells, you'll get some interesting correlations, sure. You might even start burning people at the stake and feel good about it: the Universe is backing you up! There are scientific studies! But those correlations are going to miss out on a lot, and some of those Chaotic victims burnt at the stake are going to be, from any objective measure, good people who have passed the greatest of moral tests.

Cults of Chaos!

Chaotic souls often lead lives of quiet desperation and confusion, but they're especially likely to join weird cults. This has two basic reasons: one, they Know the dominant religious outlook is incorrect (the Chaotic outlook can almost never become the dominant one, outside of weird brief situations where a cult captures the state on some weird Chaos project), and two, they need one way or another to assuage their fears about the afterlife.

Remember, mind you, that Chaotic souls don't have inverted moral intuitions. They don't intuit that kicking puppies is good, they intuit that it's awful, just like you. But they also just intuit it's the kind of thing that gets them sent to Counternomian Heaven. 

Accordingly, Chaos Cults often really play up the aesthetics of evil, because it's the kind of thing that "feels" like it would damn you without inspiring actual guilt. Many Chaos Cults are just play-acting in this sense: they're made up of decent people who don't have what it takes for real-deal evil. Just shit on some holy symbols, gurgle the names of some demons, and call it a night: that should be enough, right? Right? 

Then you've got cults that are actually, efficiently trying to do as much evil in as short a span as possible. They've done the math. But note that in some way's they're often just as reluctant to descend into snuff-film stuff as the cosplayers: it's unpleasant, after all, and there are more efficient and less risky ways to make the world a worse place.

Sadistic jerks exist, of course. Neutral or Chaotic sadistic jerks often end up as the leaders of Chaos Cults for the same reason sadistic jerks end up as the leaders of cults generally. Base rates mean there are many more Neutral ones, so you’ll frequently have a Chaos Cult led by a jerk whose attempts to give religious explanations are pure gibberish. The speakers of the Chaos language will have to do some work kludging it into something workable.

Then there are the really ambitious ones. Some Chaos Cults, reasoning that everyone is like them, work to corrupt the rest of the world into permanent immorality to save as many souls as possible. Others form gnostic cells to overthrow an obviously unfair universe.

All of these can and are combined. 

feywild and shadowfell

If you like these, they might, potentially, work as Counternomian Heaven and Counternomian Hell, respectively.

two torches deep: OSRing PF2

Why would you do this? Well, why would you do anything? Games, like life, are an inherently stupid activity where you can do whatever you want. 

The following are quick fixes that don't require too much work. I certainly haven't playtested them. 

design PCs as NPCs

In-depth character build options, while arguably the main draw of this kind of game, make characters dying kind of a pain in the ass. So use the rules for generating NPCs of a given level for PCs. I recommend randomly rolling on a background table of your choice (make one for your setting, or use the careers from Finders Keepers) to determine what tasks you're high/moderate/low; feel free to roll also for race and class. 

Just so you can enjoy the character build minigame at least a little bit, give yourself a heritage feat, a archetype dedication feat if you're level 2+, and a class feat of your highest level.  

(Alternatively: get two archetypes at random, or one at random and the next on purpose. For each, get all its feats, plus an ancestry and its heritage feat. You're average at everything unless noted otherwise.)

Since these include the benefits of permanent magic items, GMs should only hand out consumables and Weird Shit as far as magic items go.

reaction rolls

Unless circumstances dictate a particular reaction, newly-met NPCs and monsters roll 2d6 start with the following conditions:

• 2-3: Hostile
• 4-5: Unfriendly
• 6-8: Indifferent
• 9-10: Friendly
• 11-12: Helpful
  

morale

Each round of a fight, if the PCs are winning, monsters (who aren't immune to the Frightened condition) roll Will vs. 10 + party level. The DC of this increases by 5 for each level of Frightened the monster possesses, so don't hesitate to spend an action Demoralizing the enemy!

xp for gold

Use chart 10-10 on p. 511.

On the interpretation of dreams, or, the rumor table under your pillow

This isn’t about using your own dreams for inspiration -  though I am obviously in favor. (Jennifer Dumpert’s Liminal Dreaming is a fun manual for getting more juice out of that side of your brain, if that’s what you’re looking for.)

These are rules for dreams and dream interpretation by PCs, and presume that such things are, as they are in many human cultures, a relatively ordinary part of the mystical experience of the world.

(I believe these also meet ISO compatibility standards for MOSAIC Strict, and issue all necessary declarations to that effect.)

The dream roll

Make this pertaining to one PC's dreams each time there’s a long rest and either a player is curious about it or the GM wishes. (Or if there’s deliberately induced hypnosis, whatever.) GM rolls 2d6 secretly.

On a 2-5, the dream is random bullshit, albeit random bullshit PCs can read into.

On a 6-8, the dream is random bullshit, unless you’re in an area with Deep Emotional Resonance, or being observed by scrying entities, or surrounded by invisible spirits, or have some other particularly good reason to have your subconscious invaded from without. If you're sleeping somewhere that Something Happened, you get visions pertaining to that; if someone's scrying on you, you can talk to them. If something wants to talk to you, for some reason, they can.

On a 9, at least one unknown but real threat or opportunity appears in the dream in coded form.

On a 10, the dream lies to you. This is different from bullshit; a skilled interpretation will reveal actively false or dangerous intelligence. 

On an 11, at least one unknown but real threat or opportunity appears in relatively uncoded, direct form.

On a 12, you get a vision full of relatively straightforward, useful information. A vision of the villain's evil plans, or where something is, or what God wants you to do, or whatever. There's a dressing of confabulatory bullshit around it, but the core is real and straighforward.

Narrating dreams

Dreams are naturally confabulatory, i.e., we make them up as we go along. This makes them perfect opportunities for characterization, by prompting things like “what’s something you’re afraid of?,” “what was your childhood home like?,” “who’s the one who got away?” and so on. Regardless of whether it’s a true dream or a false dream, do a mix of asking for these confabulations and throwing in seemingly arbitrary details. If it’s a true dream, then at least some of it (both basic emotional cues and surrounding odd details) points to true stuff.

If you’re lazy, just do this with remembering one emotionally cued element with one arbitrary additional detail. 

Interpreting dreams

If the dreamer’s willing to share with someone else, the someone else can try to interpret. As with the dream roll itself, the GM rolls 2d6 secretly.

If it’s bullshit, then on 2-5 you suggest a false conclusion, and on anything else you’re stumped.

If it’s not, then on 2-3 you get a mistaken conclusion and on 9-12 you get an accurate, but likely incomplete, one.

(Note that false dreams are distinct from bullshit ones. Bullshit dreams are all noise so any signal you get from them is coincidental or imposed, whereas false dreams, accurately interpreted, will give you dangerously false information - just as if, if I write down a lie and cryptographically encode it, an accurate decryption will yield a lie.)

Obviously anyone can speculate beyond this, but that’s what rolling per se will get you. You can’t roll to interpret your own dreams.

Bonuses on these sorts of rolls

I’d advise the GM to figure out what bonuses characters get on these, if any. If you’re playing 5e, then perhaps Wis, being a Sorcerer or Warlock, and having a chaotic alignment increase the chances of significant dreams, while Int, being a cleric, and proficiency in Insight improve interpretation slightly. Or you could just make a guess about how dreamy and intuitive each character is. Either way I suggest not telling players the formula; let it be as mysterious to them as dreams are to us. Perhaps your GM is just pretending to roll and it’s all bullshit? One can never know.