The Reanimator (Class)

De Humani Corporis Fabrica

A psychoanalyst in touch with the esoteric. A too dedicated nurse. A budding geneticist or biologist with uncanny vision. A mutant whose cells only want to hug. A mother who can’t bear to lose another one. A child in the backyard with a scalpel and a quiet dog.

You can heal an ally from the Slow condition caused by Critical Damage.

At Level Two, you get Cure Dice (starting at 1d6, +1d per level), and can roll or take the median result to heal stat damage during a delve or mission. You recover these at downtime, one every two days. Describe what cure looks like. A psychoanalyst might heal STR and DEX by convincing or reminding the target of unusual theories about the becoming nature of the body-mind, or readressing their fundamental humors; a nurse might restore CHA with great bedside manners and support, or soft, non-intrusive head trauma.

When improving your stats during level-up, you can state to the GM that, besides studying, you played with yourself. Say what you did according to the improved stat (a small extra eye or experimental stimulant for DEX, a replacement finger or changed metabolism for STR, vocal surgery or induced heterochromia for CHA etc.)

Once every four months, you can do dedicated research in downtime to improve one of your allies (use the Electric Bastionland or Cairn Scar table.)

Notes:

Oddlikes describe that standard Critical Damage reduces the character to crawling. I’m assuming a character that suffers it is Slow for movement purposes; the Reanimator as class exists to safeguard against this resource depletion in the crawl structure, as well as other depletions. This also means that the Reanimator is an easy target and must be protected.

I’m assuming the level-based progression from the original Into the Odd, requiring therefore that the Reanimator takes an assistant or apprentice to keep evolving; I will probably also require monetary investment into a clandestine clinic.

Tags: into the odd, tools, urban fantasy

Glaugust: Doomed Fighters

(Old notes I’ve found of years prior, back when running a freeform thing. Typed up unaltered for Glaugust HPless combat prompt)

Damage takes two forms: Wound and Doom. Assume:

A character can take one Wound. A second wound becomes Doom.
Damage causes a Wound, not direct Doom, unless something is known to be Dooming by itself (the roar of a monster, fighting while heartbroken, swearing your life in the next stroke)
Referee and players can establish new things that are Dooming during play. Write them down.
It takes a resource and time to heal from a Wound. It takes a miracle in short-notice to recover from Doom.

Tags: tools

Proposals for Player Conduct

Organizing my Conduct of Play section on a campaign document, I realized I’ve never talked here about it. Players are often advised to Ask Questions, Play Their Characters Well, Take Notes and Be Collaborative, but not how to improve at these fields. Reading the required rules and campaign primer is obviously a given for a good player. I also find Havoc’s post about joyful play to be important.

Spreadsheet Prep and Organization for RPGs

Writing is a continuous process, not segmented into easily contained steps but a molecule that takes pride in amorphous shapes as new connections emerge. One of the ways we keep pace with that molecule is finding the most pleasurable ways of following it, as pleasure breeds focus and the levity we need to change with it without losing sight of why we do it; without pleasure and joy, it is nothing. One path to joy in writing has been the use of analog measures: a good pen, a good notebook or binder, a small notepad with me everywhere and right besides my bed as the mind winds down from the day into the night realms and as the doors open, small fragments of light pass by and demand to be half-defined before I’m finally lost.

So a lot of my TTRPG writing is first done in paper, without distractions. As time goes by, I prefer to digitalize that material in spreadsheets instead of word documents. I have a fairly developed folder and document discipline, but the spreadsheet is a staple in organization for good reason. When I’m writing notes for a fictional story or similar, no matter how well organized they are, I’m writing them to internalize their logic while I work through the compositional drafts, and occasionally refer to them during my rewriting. Notes for TTRPGs are constantly referred due to the mental tension of running the game and communicating that logic to others in real time.

What a Horrible Night to Cast a Curse

Curses are the foulest of arts. Curses are speeches against life, a winter breath coming from the cold, dark night of the soul. In some worlds, a sorcerous practice, studied by only a few alienated occultists. In others, omnipresent in daily speech, as eldritch forces, genius loci, cruel fae or some inexplicable law of the land hear baleful promises by an angered individual and turn them into weird fate. Curses can be either the spite of the powerful or the last resource of the downtrodden victims.

Even in worlds where everyone may cast a curse if their fury is powerful enough, people won’t curse each other for every slight, or even for every heinous act, both because curses are themselves very risky for the caster and because of cultural reasons. To partake in profane words and states of mind is both an indictment of existence and a sin against oneself by degrading your own person by stepping so low. In some cultures, worse than the one that violates the other is the one who violates themselves.

Curses have Potency. Calculate Base Potency (more on Notes) and add for each of the following:

+3 if it’s considered harmful by a whole community instead of only by the caster.
+5 if it’s nearly universally considered heinous in most circumstances.
+1 for each person affected directly by the offender’s deed (max +3)
+2 for each thematically relevant task the caster might go through for casting the curse, such as getting a sympathetic fetish from the target’s hair, blood sacrifice, traveling to a specific place etc. Curses will be, most likely, spur-of-the-moment.
+2 if the curse is deemed suitably ironic considering the offense.

Reduce Potency by:

-1 if the offense was accidental.
-1 if the offender is properly warded against it.
-1 if the offender desires to be cursed for whatever reason, or if the curse targets someone related to the offender.
-2 if no foul action was taken against the caster, or if the effort the caster is putting into the curse seems disproportionate to the offense.

Determine Effect and Duration:

Effect: it’s an inconvenience injury (-1); it’s a deeply stigmatizing condition/debilitating illness (-2) [when in doubt, assume this Effect]; it makes social interaction or living within the world nearly impossible, potentially ruining a life (-3)
Duration: a week (-1); a month (-2); a year (-3); as long as hatred exists (-4)

Roll a number of six-sided dice equal to remaining Potency (min. 2) and take the two highest. Check the result:

6-: the curse backfires.
7-9: the curse is cast but the caster can’t fully control it. Roll a mishap.
10-11: the curse works as intended.
12: the curse works, but its power goes above and beyond as the caster gets lost on their hatred. Roll a mishap.

Notes

This is based on subsystems of freeform spellcasting common in World of Dungeons derivatives such as Streets of Marienburg, altered for my purposes.

Base Potency will depend on the campaign. Maybe it’s determined by PC Level, or by a fraction of an attribute, or by a skill score. For a levelless game, I’d suggest Base Potency to be 3. If using percentages, either for a related attribute or a Curse skill, I’d suggest Base Potency to be Percentage/10. You know your ruleset and your own list of magical mishaps.

Tags: tools

Twenty Demons Written in Twenty Napkins

1 – The Swan: an automata torso bound by a corset, somehow moves as if had legs. Wears a large birdcage as a royal gown. Noble in her own manner, the Swan has an affinity with avian creatures and knowledge of them. She commands the Imperial Gaze magic, which allows seeing through illusions.

2 – Hugo: an everyday boy of blue skin, shaved head and blank stare. Above him, a skinny raven with its claws driven inside his skull. The raven speaks with the boy’s voice about toys, trading cards and cartoons. He mixes those innocent interests with a deep knowledge and memory from far-off places, from the time he flew with his sibling at the call of a one-eyed sage.

Hit Dice to Tunnels & Trolls Conversion

Was brushing my teeth and came up with this.

Monster Ratings in Tunnels & Trolls are a stumbling block for some. As attractive as having a monster determined by a single value is, how to determine that value beyond vibes and experience seems hard. Especially if you are not doing a megadungeon game, using floors as indication. What about if you want to use OSR modules?

A conversion method: Take any OSR bestiary you like and check the monster’s HD value. HD*20 = MR. So a 1 HD monster has MR 20. Modifiers are multiplied by 10. If there’s a -1, subtract 10. If there’s a +1, add 10. AC as chain adds 10, AC as plate adds 20. Move and damage don’t need to be considered due to the nature of T&T combat.

That will be the base MR for a certain monster in modules or even a type. Adjust as needed for the fiction.

Tags: tools, tunnels and trolls

The Baker Street Campaign

OSR is many things, including a play style which can be performed with any ruleset (and of course each table will have their own play culture that mixes styles). It’s more commonly associated with the rules of old D&D for many reasons, and regardless of one’s positions about systems and their relevance, it’s fair to say that the expectations a text presents, especially a ubiquitous text and its rules, will influence discussion for better or worse. Hence, leveling discussions in the OSR.

Blog Scraps 6

Thoughts that didn’t feel like complete blogposts. On easy gonzo settings and having non-humans and wizards as only character types.

Skill Scores for Adventurers

(This is just a bit of system stuff. I feel better throwing it in a blog and letting it go than mustering on my files, especially because most of it ends never being used anyway)

Lots of discussion about keeping or removing ability scores. Personally, they don’t bring much to my games and I dislike asking for roll under a randomly generated stat unless as last resource (which feels like I failed to properly adjudicate the situation and took the easy way out to keep the game moving). Hell, I often prefer Searchers of the Unknown for that reason. But I’m still fascinated by the information they are meant to give the referee. I love opening an adventure and finding some small note about PCs with X in Y ability score automatically managing something.

While thinking about World of Dungeons, I often find myself wondering how each author from a hack imagined the difference between skills and special abilities fiction-wise, and how vague it looked. Some abilities looked like skills, or things that shouldn’t be gated behind a special ability. Parallel to that, I thought about how every BRP adventurer is presumed to have a base skill rating on everything. I got an idea (not tested):