Month: April 2021

Planar travel: Ringwalking

Work on my pocket-planes addon has gotten some core portions committed to words. Yay!

One of those is ringwalking; in other words, how all this dimensional-planar-world travel is actually happening a lot of the time.

(not all the time, of course, because there’s still plenty of place for mysterious arches and exactingly-wrought spells and magical doodads that just need twisted and poked in the right way)

Do your characters like collecting patterns and brushing up on calligraphy and illo work by any chance?

Ringwalking

To ringwalk across the planes, one must be taught; and then, one must have learned the pattern of the ring of ghostly sigils that needs to be inscribed (on a surface or even in empty air, though that’s certainly more difficult) in order to open said ring and walk on through to the other side ~

  • Inscribing a ring requires two successful tests, one of Alacrity and one of Psyche. Failing the Psyche test means that the ring fails to ignite at all; failing the Alacrity test means a flaw in the pattern of sigils, and you wind up somewhere other than the intended destination, and the greater the failure of the test the farther out you find yourself.
  • 1 advancement point may be spent to indicate the memorization of a specific pattern to the point that no rolls need be made barring extreme circumstances.
  • Inscribing a ring will take at least a few minutes, even if the pattern has been memorized. (2d6 is a nice roll.) Conditions at the time may add to that!
  • Some patterns are easy to inscribe, the plane familiar (like one’s home) or easy to reach, and give a bonus (+1 to +3) to one or both attributes; similarly, others are fiendishly tricky, or the plane is distant, tenuously connected, barricaded by gods or dragons or wards, or otherwise a complication.
  • It’s possible to find patterns that have been written down! Of course, whether enough information is also there to say anything about the destination is a trickier question, and so is the accuracy of any such information — or the accuracy of the sigils themselves, for that matter. More than one ringwalker learned a broken ring from physical records and found themselves walking into very unexpected terrain indeed.

Bolt-on mecha (and random tables)

I like mecha. I like mecha a lot, from personal power armours to towering colossi, sci-fi to fantasy and everything in between; Gundam to Escaflowne, Tekkaman to Xenogears. So of course I get the itch to add mecha to my games, settings and most everything else.

That itch meandered its way back and forth across my hindbrain and eventually stumbled over a small passage I wrote for my still-unfinished spacehack concerning fantasy spaceships and fighting them — and so here we are, because I also don’t feel like bolting a massive new system onto anything to get my death machines going, lol.

Back-of-napkin Mecha Rules

To add mecha to an existing rpg, rules-wise (how you add them into a setting/story is entirely up to you and well~ outside the scope of this little project, lol), try this:

  • Mecha use the exact same sort of stats as other potential antagonists.  So, monster statblocks with Hit Dice in many many games, the antagonist rankings in my pocketrpg, shorthand NPC statblocks from Shadowrun, etc etc.  Reskin as desired.  

What’s the notable difference?  The following:

  • Mecha deal damage to other mecha (or mecha-equivalents) normally.
    • They will obliterate a squishy target such as your average adventurer outright; a person is not surviving getting even broadsided by the backwash of a beam sabre. Or being stepped on. Depending on the situation a save or test to get the hell out of the way might be allowable though.
  • Under most circumstances, the average living body with typical weaponry is not going to damage a mecha.

But!  All is not lost, because adventurers gotta adventure and also Sabin Figaro and Master Asia exist.  So to the above, if desired, add the concept of [antimech] — renamed appropriately for setting and campaign, if it has a name at all — which is a fancy way of saying “deals normal damage to mecha targets”.

Some ways to make antimech abilities available:

  • Make it an intrinsic trait of some character (types); say, all Fighters can damage mecha, for example
  • Make it an acquirable trait, whether replacing an existing ability or as a purchaseable trait in games that use those
  • Some spells, psychic abilities, or magic/tech/special items may have the ability to damage mecha
  • You could also assign broad damage types as antimech; biomecha might be vulnerable to flames or to poison or necromantic energies, for example.

Please note that being able to damage a mecha doesn’t mean it won’t still turn Ixion Iron-Thewed into a bloody smear if he gets stepped on by it.  Gauge risk and rewards accordingly, lol.  Some special equipment/magic/etc might mitigate some or all damage from mecha attacks, though!

Some further considerations and ruminations:

  • Hit Dice/challenge tiers/etc correspond to a given mecha unit’s capabilities but not necessarily its size, any more than they do in “mundane” encounters.  That relatively shrimpy machine might be a top of the line prototype bristling with pain-dealing weapons and unusual systems!
    • “Power Armour”: Similarly, if you want a power armour-like unit that is basically a fancy suit for a person but conceivably can be damaged by a person, just go the [antimech] route — the machine can be damaged by routine sources, but its own attacks damage mecha (and may or may not instant-splatter other targets, depending on the suit’s power).
  • A mecha isn’t a perfectly impenetrable barrier just because it’s a death machine.  If something can still specifically target the pilot — mindprobes, curses, and so on — it’s going to still work.
  • Repair rates are largely going to be up to individual tables as well as the base system being used; maybe something along the lines of using base “healing” rules, doubled if swarmed by techs or using hyper-mending abilities of some sort, halved if no one familiar with maintenance is available or if supplies are poor, etc.  Healing magic isn’t going to work (unless the mecha is biological, perhaps ~).
  • It’s best to establish a baseline for mecha in a setting, especially if making specific mecha traits purchaseable or assignable to a unit.  Do typical machines have open cockpits/are they ridden, like FFVI Magitek Armours, or enclosed cockpits, like a Gundam?  Is flying standard or is it a special feature?  How about aquatic capabilities, or sealed cockpits/internal environments?
    • If average mecha have open cockpits, then an enclosed one (with its added protection) is worth making a special feature to acquire, especially if its capable of being a sealed environment.  Flight is a big thing, if mecha are normally ground-based.  And so on and so forth.
    • Of course an absolute free-for-all is also on the table if you want it ~
  • Themes are also good.  Are mecha in your world entirely mechanical?  Are they metal, or crystal, or biological?  Plant or meat?  Solidified light?  Solid thought?  Animated bone?  Uncountable porcelain petals held together by blood ritual channeled through amber focus-studs?  Does it vary by culture?

And now random tables, because random tables

Need some quick inspiration to help reskin that statblock or conjure up a new one? Here’s some ideas to get the ol’ creative mecha juices no, not Protoculture flowing —

Composition IComposition IIAesthetics IAesthetics II
01. Common metal01. Exotic alloy01. Sleek01. Asymmetrical
02. Bone02. Ivory02. Ponderous02. Jagged
03. Ceramic03. Stone03. Attenuated03. Angular
04. Chitin04. Shell04. Bulky04. Bulbous
05. Crystal05. Soulstuff05. Crude05. Corded
06. Mundane wood06. Plasm06. Delicate06. Chiseled
07. Precious metal07. Glass07. Jury-rigged07. Squamous
08. Living flesh08. Dead flesh08. Militaristic08. Organic
09. Hard light09. Petals09. Minimalist09. Bladed
10. Concrete10. Solid thought10. Baroque10. Halo’d
11. Pearl11. Plasteel11. Predatory11. Inscribed
12. Marble 12. Rare wood12. Mass-produced12. Banner’d
mix and match for best and most hilarious results; some more suitable for fantasy than others, lol.
using a roll on both Aesthetics tables gives nice shorthand descriptions.
FormPower SourceControlsWake it up with …
01. Humanoid01. Biojelly01. Reins & spurs01. Bond-brand
02. Piscine02. Fighting Spirit02. Ship’s wheel02. Skinprint
03. Bipedal walker03. Lightning shards03. Paired joysticks03. Circuit medallion
04. Quadruped04. Harvested souls04. Steering yoke04. Soul scanner
05. Avian05. Reactor core05. Thoughtgem05. Eye reader
06. Centaurine06. Radiant prism06. Empathetic skinsuit06. Blood sampling
07. Serpentine 07. Manastones07. Pulse-point pearls07. Sung command
08. Arthropod08. Refined fuels08. Enclosing shell08. Tuned chime
09. Amorphous09. Energy cells09. Body harness09. Answered riddle
10. Cephalopod10. Solar generator10. Gradient keyboard10. Inscribed code
11. Vehicular11. Steamworks11. Thinking cap11. Button sequence
12. Hybrid (roll twice)12. Heartjewel12. Uplink jack(s)12. Inserted prism
yes, yes, “vehicular”, because Dairugger XV exists damnit and also the Guntank is hilarious
Features IFeatures IIWeapons AWeapons B
01. Extra armour01. Long-distance flight01. Beam02. Shot
02. Generates nutrition02. Amphibious02. Razor02. Pulser
03. Life-supporting cockpit03. Barrier-generator03. Monoline 03. Blade
04. Weapon supercharger04. Network transmission node04. Banishing04. Wing
05. Magic channeler05. Cockpit sub-mecha05. Frost (Cryonic)05. Sabre
06. Psychic channeler06. Linked drone(s)06. Flame (Pyretic)06. Fang
07. Self-regeneration07. Weapon absorption07. Souleating07. Bolter
08. Flight08. Damage immunity08. Plasma08. Whip
09. Bits/dragoons/weapon drones09. Burrower09. Repeating09. Cannon
10. Transformation10. Soul-storage of pilot10. Corrosive10. Claw
11. Mana/psychic/comms jammer11. Cloaked11. Thunder11. Disrupter
12. Unusual sensor suite12. Holographic projector12. Hardlight12. Hammer
do please use both Weapons tables simultaneously! “Thunder Pulser”, anyone?

why did I write an rpg: some navel-gazing

At some point over the weekend — said weekend was cold, raining, and generally gross, which made work a grind and my brain search for distraction but fail to have energy to do much constructively — I had a somewhat incoherent train of thought that went basically like this over a day and a half or so:

“There are other setting ideas kind of rattling around aside from the plane-hopping one, and hell I’m practically admitting that the plane-shopping supplement is also basically a setting; should I post up somewhere a ‘generic’ version of the rules I use for my pocketrpg?”

->

“If I posted up a generic version of the rules somewhere, wouldn’t it make sense to add a ‘feel free to use these to make stuff’ note or something along those lines in case someone would like it?”

->

“An ‘SRD’ or a make-stuff note is kind of extraneous isn’t it, there’s piles of games that people would rather use/would get more out of/already tinker with and oh gawd the brainweasels are closing in”

->

“But doing a Whole Thing every time I might want to post another minisetting or whatever also kind of feels presumptuous? Or ridiculous? Or something?”

->

“Oh gawd I need this weekend to be over, I can tell I’m doing terrible things to myself here”

… and from there (by this point I was trundling around on Sunday evening), I wisely chose to divert myself away by indulging in the recording of the Pharaohs’ Golden Parade and hauling several comforting textbooks on dynastic Egypt to work, which did help. It also had me ruminating on a different-but-related topic by the time last night rolled around:

Why did I write an rpg/these rpgs/these rules?

I mean, the first answer is also the simplest: because I wanted to. All of the various iterations have boiled down to “because I wanted to”; so will the ideas I’m still nibbling away at, because this is a hobby for me and I like to create, and rpg things are one of the things I like to create.

The actual path for this pocketrpg thing went basically like this:

-Two summers ago(ish) I was at work and had a moment of “I wonder if I can fit a tiny system+enough flavour for an implied setting into a pocketmod?”, and proceeded to peck at the notion for a bit. Nine Black Jewel Moons was the result, which I then promptly also reskinned into a cyberpunk-with-psionics version (Neon Burning Skies) because why not. A few folks liked this, which was reassuring.

-Not leaving well enough alone, I made a companion pocketmod for NBJM with some magic items and more setting snips and a few ideas for rules additions. (originally I was also going to do a companion for NBS and I still have the scribbles, but to this day it’s never actually materialized …)

-About the first time it looked like Fantasy Flight was about to kill off L5R *bitter laughter* I tried my first take on “here is a different type of setting, please see NBJM for the rules” and wrote Steel Blossom Dreams, my little pocketmod take on what I got after shaking my fist at a lot of L5R’s … L5R-ness and hauling textbooks to work. (said books are probably why SBD owes as much or more to Heian as to later eras.) At the same time, I was experimenting with a setting-with-map-in-a-pocketmod, and in the end tried to sort of thread the needle to make Six Swords Rising usable with or without SBD, though the two were (tenuously) connected.

(I am tempted to give SSR an overhaul and expansion, and maybe a different map, and probably lean even harder into being a fantasy setting not meant to emulate any specific thing, I freely admit. it would also make borrowing over the one thing I kept-ish from L5R, descriptive clan/family/whatever-you-like-in-your-setting names, both much easier and far less fraught.)

(… I also just really like pocketmods >.>;;)

-Hilariously, expanding past pocketmod-size was entirely prompted by my being thoroughly annoyed by several years’ development in a completely different arena — the Fire Emblem srpg franchise — and throwing up my hands and yelling fine I’ll make my own, then! … And then I did, if by “made my own” I mean “emulated the tropes common to FE characters with traits and equipment and then wrote another small setting from scratch while including a few nods to FE plot tropes here and there”. I’d use my mini rules (+ the companion bits) as a base and expand a tiny wee bit, and add a wee gazetteer, etc. And so, Lost Emblem Saga. Which also had a few folks like it, which was also reassuring.

Equally hilariously is this is where I actually started calling these things my “pocketrpg” because — this is 100% true — since what I wanted to do would never fit on one sheet, I would make something that once printed out, would be the size of the quarter-page handmade notebooks I make. Which conveniently fit snugly in the back pocket of my work pants.

Yes these are literally pocketrpgs and I am not even sorry.

*ahem*

-Some time shortly after LES, I started thinking I’d like to use its expanded rules (I’d elaborated on magic a little, among other bits), originally from NBJM/Jewel Moons, to actually expand out Jewel Moons itself into a similar pocketrpg. This was not so much prompted as a sort of “I think I’d like to do that …” and then I started tinkering. Oops?

What eventually because Wandering Jewel Moons took a lot longer to pull together, but there were more hurdles (even more pandemic brain; other ideas, like what became Wilusa, City Of Chains, itself spinning from my first ideas of the “mini-not!Planescape”; etc) to get past to do it. But I did. And a few folks like that also.

This is a lot of rambling to basically still say, at the end, I did it because I wanted to …

There are and were other games I’ve done. The Blue Lotus Hack (which is out there on the interwebs) is a flavour tweaking of The Black Hack 1e with a setting/bestiary/magic items selection attached, and I also used TBH 1e for a conversion of Final Fantasy (yes, the original; no, this one’s not out there on the interwebs) including the whole bestiary. Some day I might finish the “space hack”; sometimes I muse on seeing if I can switch it over to pocketrpg or pull what system it has out altogether.

But, it was nice to make a little game framework of my own? Even if, in my personal opinion, there are plenty of folks who do much better — and yes I can name quite a few without batting an eyelash — I wanted to make it, and it made me happy, and I can use it to be that framework for other things I write. I just need to keep taking a newspaper to the brainweasels over it.

I still want to make more things for the pocketrpg (which if I ever do pull up my britches and post a generic version, for folks to use or otherwise, probably needs some kind of name). I need to also keep on telling myself that that’s fine. This is a hobby, after all. I like to make things, and I like to make little notes about little worlds.

This has been a lot of babbling and if you’ve made it this far, congrats *lol* There’s no grand conclusion, alas, not to the babbling and not to the questions that kicked it all off. But sometimes, it’s like that –?

Fungus Among Us

A month(?) ago I said over in Twitterland I wanted to write some random tables for mushrooms, and some kind folks made encouraging noises. And then, after some speedbumps, I wrote the tables.

And then, because the universe continues to be utter pants, I never actually typed and posted said tables.

Oops.

So, here they are — not technically table-tables, because the formatting still hates me half the time and also these are (like a lot of my stuff) more numbered lists than anything else, but here. One for edible mushrooms, one for mushrooms with other interesting and not always entirely realistic (but sort of realistic!) uses. Some fun fungi for foraging characters, ha.

Edible Fungi

  1. Fire Wings: Thickly ruffled scallops, orange and rust, growing on tree trunks; earthy scent, tastes like mix of hazelnut and fresh bread; best sliced and fried
  2. Meadowlime Cap: Small, ribbed trumpets, violet-grey to violet, sometimes hard to spot; no noticeable scent; citrusy taste, stronger when dried
  3. Pincher’s Spice: Horn-like, fleshy growths, pale grey to ivory; no noticeable scent; edible if of indifferent taste, but dried to powder gives taste of red pepper and sea salt
  4. Boarcap: Thick cap with pores instead of gills, broad stem, yellowy-tawny; acidic scent; does not preserve well, but when thickly sliced and cooked have the taste of and nearly the texture of pork
  5. Burning Shaggy: Clusters of purplish irregular growths, like shredded dough; faintly fishy scent; unexpectedly firey, excellent chopped in garnishes or sprinkled as fine dice over meat dishes
  6. Phantom Cup: Ghostly-looking, translucent crescents of rubbery consistency, up to palm-sized, growing from shaded wood; mild earthy taste, not exciting but add welcome bulk and body to sustaining soups
  7. Meadow Meat: Handspan-tall trumpets, tawny coloured and fleshy; slightly meaty scent; dry readily and reconstitute well, grow in large numbers and take on the flavours of anything they are cooked with
  8. Faerie Cap: Nondescript brown cap and stem, no more than an inch across; bleeds bluish when cut, bruises blue; sweet caramel taste, intensified by drying or salting
  9. Scholar’s Fingers: Tall slender white stems, tubular pinkish-white caps; sweet scent; unappealing when raw, retain firm texture when cooked and gain refreshing, slightly vinegared taste that pairs well with greens
  10. Traveler’s Truffle: Knobbly, greenish-potato-looking things, pebbled when cut open, size of a fist to nearly one’s head; cook up mealy and salty-nutty, dense; will keep for days without preserving; grow in patches; avoid when sporing
  11. Earthmilch: Dark, almost black and slightly sticky caps, reddish shank; earthy scent; inedible raw, if cooked with liquify and give a creamy, milky taste that adds to casseroles
  12. Landshell: Globular, solid growths, pinkish on the inside, mottled grey exterior, up to two handspans in diameter; sliced thickly, can be fried or toasted like bread, and tastes like prawns

Useful or Notable Fungi

  1. Wychlight: Nearly spherical, brownish brackets the size of a thumb-joint that grow in clusters on pebbly ground; glow greeny-gold in darkness, a double handful equal to a candle
  2. Kindlercap: Low-growing, flat cap broad as a saucer, grey webbed reddish; pulled into shreds, dries swiftly and makes good tinder
  3. Tippler’s Hedge: Nondescript, delicate, white mushroom; dries into a lacy bit of a thing; dropped into any liquor, will absorb the alcohol, five fruiting bodies to a pint
  4. Calfmercy: Golden brown, deeply wrinkled and furrowed caps, stout shanks; a handful can be used instead of rennet to curdle cheese, giving a smoky, nutty tang as well
  5. Flourisher: Soft, spongy, thin-fleshed, conical cap of off-grey; the flesh will liquify within an hour of being plucked or cut away, being usable as shockingly bright purple ink
  6. Flourishing Deceiver: Closely related to the above, with white gills instead of grey — and if written with on parchment specifically, the ink will fade to nothingness after a day
  7. Gladepouch: If carefully peeled away without tearing, the outer, greenish skin of this double-fist-sized fruiting body can be used as a food casing when fresh, or a storage pouch when dried
  8. Fawn Balm: A knobbly-capped, brown, white-spotted specimen; bruises rust and oozes an orange, sticky fluid when cut that can clean and seal minor wounds
  9. Smithy-Cap: Not useful in and of themselves, these copper-blue, dense trumpets grow where metals have been buried under earth, loose stone or even plaster
  10. Crawlerbane: Amorphous lumps studded with gelatinous, oily spherules across their rusty flesh; piercing the spherules produces a fluid that repels insects
  11. The Cleanser: Ruffly clumps, orange and yellow, growing amongst mosses just about anywhere; crushed and rubbed against the skin (or anywhere else), act just like soap
  12. Bonfire Cap: Stout, thick growth, golden brown with cap covered by a thick, gelatinous pink layer; peel away the soft outside and pores, and the dense core will shockingly easily strike a flame (combine with x for even better results)

*please remember these are imaginary mushrooms. do not forage for mushrooms in the real world unless you are very very certain you know what you are doing.*