Caudle Paper for Machinations of the Space Princess and other RPGs

Over at his blog, the Alexandrian, Mr. Alexander has recently waxed philosophical about coinage in RPGs.  He opines that the sweet spot is three to four different currencies:

So why track three or four currencies instead of two or ten or forty? In my experience, that’s generally the sweet spot where you get the benefits of flavor and logistics before hitting diminishing returns. What you’re generally looking for is: A poor currencyOne or two currencies in the range of what the PCs typically useA rich currency denoting unusual wealth or powerWith those relative values, you’ve gained the bulk of the semantic/narrative meaning to be milked from currency. In D&D that’s copper, silver, gold, and platinum. In a campaign where the PCs are drug dealers, it’s the scale from garbage bags full of dirty $1 bills that need to be laundered to flashing Benjamins at the club.

Machinations of the Space Princess has but a single currency: the cleverly named grams, palladium (aka GP).  It is, of course, easy to divide such things into fractions of a gram, and Desborough mentions such divisions, as well as larger coins.

But there’s no romance in that.  So I’m adding two new common units of currency to my Machination’s campaigns. 

The first is a common psychoactive drug that simultaneously induces euphoria and sedation.  It’s commonly produced in thin, translucent, square paper-like sheets roughly 7 cm on a side (slightly smaller than a post-it note).  Because these squares are the color of cinnamon bark, it’s sometimes called cinnamon paper, but its proper name is caudle paper for its regenerative properties (aka, CP; see, I can play this game too! ;D ).  Nobody will be shocked to hear that the common price for CP is 100 sheets for a GP.

Smoking a CP will restore a single hit point.  No additional hit points can be regained this way within the same hour.  Hedge-witches and back-alley medics are rumored to have techniques to boost the restorative powers of a CP, but strange side-effects are common.  You can also find CP holders and pipes that claim to boost the effects of smoking CPs.  None of these claims have been verified, though they do make you look more elegant. 

Still need to figure out what my PPs are going to be…

The Implied Setting of Alpha Blue

By popular demand: an analysis of the implied setting for Alpha Blue.

Well, ok, Venger demanded it. 

Just remember, as you read this, that he literally asked for it.  In just about every sense of that phrase. 😉

Unlike Machinations of the Space Princess, Alpha Blue has a pretty thoroughly described setting: the mobile space station (wait, doesn’t that make it a ship?) Alpha Blue itself.  However, there are some comments about the larger universe I want to touch on, primarily as they differ from Machinations.  Largely because, in many ways, Alpha Blue is the anti-Machinations. 

For instance, where the universe of Machinations is ridiculously (and accurately) huge, the universe of Alpha Blue is fairly small.  Galaxies are treated as roughly analogous to continents.  On page 39 we’re told, “The vast majority of this universe has been explored - some of it quite thoroughly.”

This is reinforced by two other facts.  The first is that humans (and humans with face bumps) make up the vast majority of sentients in this universe.  Where Machinations looks very much like the cantina scene in the first Star Wars movie, Alpha Blue looks like everywhere else in the Star Wars universe: humans and human-like beings as far as the eye can see.  There are aliens, but they’re very much in the minority, and don’t come in nearly the variety or volume of aliens in Machinations. 

The second thing of note in this universe is that it is dominate by tyrannical jerks.  Again, in direct contrast to Machinations’ universe, where chaos is the norm and order is limited to (relatively) small pockets that wax in wane like mayflies against the backdrop of deep time on an astronomical scale, the Alpha Blue universe is gripped in the neurotic and up-tight control of a number of intergalactic factions.  Some are religious (the principle religion of the universe appears to be apocalyptic), others are simply autocratic.  There are mind-controlling Brain Bugs, cyborg legions chanting “Servitude or Death,” and the mega-corp conglomerate Micro McDonald Disney Walmart Cola “which owns approximately one-tenth of the known universe.”

This makes the Alpha Blue not-a-station (It moves around!  It’s a very big spaceship!) an oasis of chaos in an uptight, prune-faced, abusive universe.  Being a rare example of a place where people can let off steam, it’s metastasized into a carnival of prurient excess. 

So that’s what Venger has given us overtly or casually alluded to in the text.  I’m more interested in picking at what the rules tell us about this universe. 

First off, Venger’s original intention was not to provide rules for Alpha Blue.  Instead, it was supposed to be a system-neutral setting to drop into whatever sci-fi game you were playing.  About halfway through the project, Venger shifted gears on that and created a system to go with it.  His intention was to craft a character creation process that set the tone. 

I’m not going to comment on how well he accomplished his goal here.  I’m only after what the system he devised implies about the setting.

First of all, this is an insanely rules-lite system.  So rules-lite, your character doesn’t even have stats.

No, I’m serious, no stats.  Not even a sort of half-assed Skill, Stamina, and Luck thing you’d expect from a Choose-Your-Own-Adventure-with-a-Combat-System-Glued-On sort of thing we used to see all the time in the ‘70s. 

Your Alpha Blue character is defined more by what they know than who they are.  Normal human characters get to roll (or pick) two careers, which define their areas of expertise and knowledge.

Careers come in two flavors: Respectable and Scoundrel.  Already, the uptightness of this universe is making itself known.  The Respectable careers include: Scientist, Technician, Pilot, Explorer, Medic, Diplomat, Interior Designer, and Space Priest (aka Templar). 

The Scoundrel careers are: Bounty Hunter, Mercenary, Pirate, Gambler, Con Man, Assassin, Pimp, and Smuggler.  You potentially get more starting cash with each Scoundrel career, but you also have to roll on a table which dictates how much trouble you’re in with the law.    

You can forego one of your careers to pursue one of three other options.  These are playing a mutant, playing an alien, or having a “Special.”  The Specials are: psionics, being a Zedi Master of the Way, being a noble, or being insanely lucky. 

I find it interesting that these are mutually exclusive.  There’s a strong implication that psionics is weird, as rare as becoming a Master of the Way or being born a noble.  Also, that nobility is tied to neither of the other two.  The Federation might sound like Star Trek, but it operates more like Star Wars with its princesses, counts, and gran mofs. 

Or, instead of rolling once on the Special table, you can roll three times on the Mutation table and play a mutant.  Mutations include things like letting your spirit roam about, spying on people while you sleep, having brittle bones that doubles the damage you take, eidetic memory, sterility, recovering all hit points when you eat a brain, being invisible to machines and robots, being unable to digest solid food, and being able to magically enhance objects and people. 

And using the word “magically” is not me being snarky.  Venger uses the word a few times in the mutations table. 

Finally, if none of those options appeal, you can be an alien.

The alien options are, well, pretty out there.  While you’ve got your “Humanlike, but a strange color” there’s also a lot of stuff like “incorporeal, like a shadow,” “geometric shapes,” “flame,” “thought-form,” and “something totally bizarre that human beings can’t conceptualize.” 

While some of the aliens you can create might be the stuff of the Star Fleet Academy graduating class of 2265, honestly, this is more the stuff of a fever dream.  There’s no attempt to make these things make sense or suggest how a player might actually play “something totally bizarre that human beings can’t conceptualize.”

But we’re not done generating our alien yet, because you also get to roll on the alien’s size (from as small as a rat to as large as an elephant, plus the chance that size might change “depending on stress, food, sex, intoxication, etc.”).  And then you roll on the Alien Mannerisms, Customs, and Quirks table.  This gives us a range of results from the physical (“Molting, shedding, constantly peeling skin.”) to the moral (“The sacrifice of another cannot be greater than

one's own.”) to the social (“Carry their coffins around with them wherever

they go (usually by chains). 'If I didn't, where would you put my body when I die?'”) to the just plain quirky (“Intentionally mispronounces words that he finds distasteful.”)  There are options on this table that might also make your alien more physically distinctive, such as having eyes in the back of their head, extra appendages, or a protective shell. 

So you can totally roll up a gaseous alien the size of a dog who is certain “that even numbers are unlucky and will go out of their way to avoid them.”

And has a foot fetish (because of course there’s a table for fetishes you can roll on as well.)

This is one of the most fascinating aspects of the setting for Alpha Blue: that it’s a nonsensical dreamscape.  It’s not intended to make sense.  Try to understand this universe and it will break your brain.  There’s a strong implication that these horrible, uptight, controlling factions are correct and proper because if people had to deal with the reality of the universe in its raw form, they’d probably go mad. 

And there are little dribs and drabs of setting detail that reinforce this.  Remember those Templar space-priests I mentioned being an apocalyptic faith? 

Yet, all have agreed that this 23rd century represents the seventh age. Prophecies state the seventh age is when spiritual turbulence will split the universe into seven pieces and each shall, in its turn, be devoured by some nameless and all-powerful divinity from beyond the stars.

Throw in some direct references to Cthulhu and Co, and you end up with the Alpha Blue universe being the shiny Brave New World to 40k’s 1984. If you find yourself living in this universe, pray the sleeper never wakens. ;)

Implied Setting of Machinations of the Space Princess

Yeah, more about Machinations.  One of the things it does really, really well is implied setting.  There’s enough there to work with, but not so much there it’s going to feel like you’re guessing what the truth really is.

So, how does MotSP do implied setting?

OVERT

Sometimes, it just out-and-out tells you.  There are a few short paragraphs about the fall of the Urlanth Matriarchy and the 99 space princesses battling for the throne.  The same page mentions mega-corps and guilds and criminal organizations rising to fill the void, while entire star systems go rogue or rebel.  It’s described as “a chaotic whirl of violence and opportunism.”

The next page mentions a few themes the game was designed around.  The first is that the universe is ridiculously huge.  Desborough throws around the numbers, and they’re the sort that make the mind of normal folk glaze over.  One death is a tragedy; a million is a statistic.  But the billions upon billions of stars, each with its attendant constellation of planets, moons, comets, meteors and what-not?  Even as statistics, they are too colossally huge to do anything useful with.  The universe isn’t infinite, but there’s room for just about anything you and the players want to stick in it.  Hell, our galaxy is probably big enough for that, with three-hundred billion stars in it, and there are another one-hundred-and-seventy billion galaxies that we’ve seen so far. 

In short, feeling crowded isn’t something the Machinations GM should feel.  You’ve got more than enough room to toss in everything, the kitchen sink, and whatever else the players come up with that might strike your fancy. 

This Machinations universe, like our own, isn’t just ridiculously big, it’s also ridiculously old at over 13 billion years.  Where Machinations might deviate from the real galaxy is in the amount of intelligent life.  Like the Star Wars universe, the universe of MotSP is teaming not just with life, but intelligent life, and this life isn’t so alien that the different species can’t communicate, trade, and come together in polyglot empires.  As Desborough says,

There is plenty of time and space for empires to rise and fall, for many different intelligent species to take their turn hauling ass out of the primordial muck and having a go at being interstellar traders and empire builders fora while and all without necessarily bumping into each other. The universe may be full of these kinds of goings on, but it’s also so massive as to allow for backwaters where primitive planets go unmolested and pocket empires of several stars cling on, thinking themselves to be masters of the universe.

PLAYFUL HINTS

There are also these little one or two sentence snippets at the bottom of every page.  These are things like:

The two-headed asp of Belton-3’s heads are actually antennae. Its brain is in the trunk. 

Evolution moves slower than technology. Get your instincts corrected surgically! 

Proot the Unkillable moves from planet to planet and slaughters their populations. 

Gamma ray bursts have increased on the fringes and seem to be coming inward. 

Far from any star the Dark Tower imprisons the ancient gods in a matrix of orgone. 

Xanak worker caste were biological robots, until some bastard uplifted them.

In short, a collection of local color, GM inspiration, and adventure hooks.  Nearly every page has one of these at the bottom.  Most of the topics referenced (like Proot the Unkillable) are never mentioned again.

THE RULES

But the technique I find most interesting is how the rules build the setting.  Unlike Yoon-suin, there are few random tables allowing you to build locations, organizations, or individuals.  But that doesn’t mean there isn’t implied setting.  There’s actually a TON of implied setting in the rules. 

The most obvious place is the race creation rules.  This is a universe full of varied life.  Sure, humanoid is the default, but it’s not the only option.  We’ve got rules for ammonia-based floating bags that live in the cloud layers of gas giants; rock-encrusted, radiation-loving boron-based lifeforms; poison-guzzling chemosynthetic races; beings of pure energy; steamy metal-oxide based life; petro-swilling methane-based life; and two versions of silicon-based life.  You can be a parasite that lives in other organisms, a cyborg, an AI, an emergency medical hologram, or even deceased!  Plus, we’ve got all the classics: cat-people, dog-people, plant-people, bat-people, insect-people, gestalt swarm people, psionic space elves, fungus-people, octopus-people, noble warrior races, resolute pacifist races, spiritually enlightened races, barbaric races, and pretty much all the other sci-fi clichés you can think of.  

And with space being so ridiculously, impossibly big, your wonderfully bizarre snowflake of a race might be from some distant corner of this, or some other, galaxy. 

Or even another universe altogether!

But it actually starts with the stats.

MotSP adds Comeliness to the traditional six.  Now, on the face of it, this is the last game that should use a Comeliness stat.  Especially when you look at the race-creation rules.  Combine the two, and what you end up with is a universe where an ammonia-based lifeform that looks like a giant jellyfish can appreciate the beauty of Monica Bellucci.  And a universe where plain ol’ human you can appreciate the ammonia-based lifeform that looks like a giant jellyfish’s version of Monica Bellucci.

This is a universe where potent enough beauty crosses not just cultural but species lines, where Captain Jack Harkness is seducing everything with a pulse (and some things without) as he hip-thrusts his way across the galaxy. 

In a game that encourages everyone at the table to go absolutely gonzo with creating new and bizarre alien races, you’d be completely justified in questioning the idea of a universally applicable Charisma stat.  Machinations of the Space Princess scoffs at your pedantry and doubles down with Comeliness. 

The most blatant bit of rules-describing-setting is force fields.  They come in two flavors.  One basically increases the difficulty of hitting you while the other absorbs a certain amount of damage per combat (recharging basically at the end of each fight).  In either case, they only work against ranged attacks and do nothing against melee attacks.  And they’re cheap!  You can get a +1 to your Ranged Defense (effectively your AC vs. ranged attacks) for a mere 5 gp.  Money well spent!  Especially since they never run out of charge or the like.  Your forcefield defense is good forever.

This, of course, is why swashbuckling about with swords (lazer or otherwise) makes sense in the MotSP universe.  You can plink a lot of shots at someone from a distance and have them deflected harmlessly away, but that won’t happen when you poke them with a sharpened stick.  Ranged weapons also potentially suffer running out of ammo/charge/whatevers.  How often you need to reload is based on a saving throw you roll for the weapon at the end of every fight.  

RANDOM TABLES

There aren’t as many as you’d think.  They’re all big.  The first is a d100 table the Psion class characters roll on to generate their witch mark, some strangeness caused by the character’s deviant genetics or possibly the source of their unusual powers.  Some are baleful, others beneficial.  (Shockingly, there’s no “overcharge” mechanic that forces Psions to roll again for pushing their powers too far.)  The results range from eh to potential coolness.  The results are things like:

Mushtool: You are infested with a psychicfungal symbiote which covers you in faintly glowing growths and tendrils. -1 Com. 

Inedible: You are poisonous, anything biting you or tasting your blood or flesh must make a Toughness Save or suffer d6 damage. If you’re already poisonous step up the damage by a dice type. 

The Fog: Your body surrounded you with a fine mist that obscures you from direct view.+1 Ranged Defence. 

For the Birds: Instead of hair you havefeathers like a bird. -1 Charisma. 

Omnomnom: You are covered in tiny mouths that chatter and whisper blasphemies, lies and the occasional hard truth. -2 Cha and Com.

There’s also a d100 table of cool adventure hooks happening on a planet:

The planet produces a unique mineral/resource/drug. 

The planet is a suspiciously calm and gentle utopia. What’s going on? 

Look out! Space locusts! 

A postphysical entity on the world demands sacrifices. 

The planet is only just making first contact with greater galactic society. Hijinx ensure. 

The space navy is in ‘town’ with thousands of astronauts and space marines on leave on the planet. 

Zombies.

And finally, there’s a random table for planets that’s very Star Wars, as it includes: Desert World, Plains World, City World, etc. 

There’s a bit more set-dressing stuff about star colors, asteroid belts, moons, etc.  Basically, these things exist, as you’d expect.

It’s kind of interesting how little Machinations does with random tables, considering how much use they get in Lamentations’ stuff.  So many of the ideas in the unweighted d100 tables are never going to be seen, and so much of it is pretty standard sci-fi TV show fare, the sort you’d expect from an episode of Star Trek or the ‘80’s Buck Rogers, that it just reinforces what’s already there. 

CONCLUSIONS

Instead, the real world-building is in the rules that are going to come up repeatedly.  And I could discuss more, especially all the broad range of stuff that falls under the Scholar skills which is likely to make characters with what amounts to post-graduate skills extremely rare in the game (and how many of those skills are one-upped by psionic powers). 

The fun thing is all the handles this gives you when designing your campaign.  You can easily narrow down the options for races; you can remove personal shields to make guns more potent; you can replace space ships with star gates without breaking a thing.

Though I’m not sure why you’d want to, honestly.  As is, Machinations gives you a great little set-up for classic rollicking space opera shenanigans.  Much better, I think, to do a Session Zero and pick out the themes your players are most interested in and design characters and adventures that focus on those.

Machinations of the Space Princess: What it Is

For reasons I don’t really recall, I was recently reminded of Machinations of the Space Princess, “Grim” Jim Desborough’s science-fantasy remake of the Lamentations of the Flame Princess RPG. 

So that makes it a remake of a remake?  Yeah.

First off, this would not exist but for Raggi’s attempt to do a shotgun spread of new projects on Kickstarter lo these many years ago.  Originally, Machinations was intended to be a single adventure.  But the shotgun spread idea backfired; with so many cool projects, I think only two got funded.  The rest diluted the pledges too thinly, and Machinations was one of those that didn’t get funded.

So Desborough teamed up with Satine Phoenix and took his tin cup to Indiegogo where he asked for a cool kilobuck US to make it happen.  He got over $4k and so we got a game full of full-color art by Phoenix.

I heard something about this via the G+, but I didn’t pay it much mind at the time.  Partly because I didn’t really realize what Desborough was up to.  While I wasn’t expecting a one-to-one port of LotFP to sci-fi, with lazer swords and plasma crossbows and psion-elves, I was at least expecting MotSP to keep what I saw as the coolest innovations and themes of Lamentations.  This included the character-sheet based encumbrance system, the strong focus on human characters, the weird and disturbing magic, and a general theme of survival horror that is the hallmark of LotFP adventures.

That is (mostly) not at all what Desborough and Phoenix created. 

I was expecting Saturn 3 and ALIEN and Pitch Black and the ’72 Soviet Solaris.  Not really my bag beyond one-shots and the like (though I do rather enjoy the Free League ALIEN RPG, much to my shock).

But that’s not what we get.  What we get is something more like Buck Godot: Zap-gun for Hire meets Barbarella meets Flash Gordon meets The Sword’s Warp Riders. 

And that is totally my thing.

Now, this is not some giant stops-bullets book like Lancer.  This is a “mere” 240 pages in a 6” x 8” paperback format.  This is a construction-set of an RPG, very much like Star Siege or GURPS.  However, unlike those two games, Machinations doesn’t really give two flips for balance.  MotSP doesn’t pretend to know what your games are going to be about.  Your game could be about blaster-slinging space cowboys, a team of highly skilled mercs taking on the most challenging jobs in a galaxy dominated by heartless megacorps, swashbuckling radium-cavaliers living and dying for honor and love, tomb-raiders cracking open the trapped vaults of the Elder Races, or super-powered psions staying one step ahead of the Psi-Pstasi.  MotSP isn’t here to tell you how to play your game.

And so Machinations doesn’t lose much sleep in crafting a fully “balanced” experience.  It’s very Old School in this respect.  Sure, there are some nods towards niche protection, echoes from B/X D&D in what your character is good at and how quickly they go up levels and stuff like that.  But there’s nothing stopping you from cobbling together a Frankenstein’s monster of abilities and powers. 

Take, for instance, race creation.  There are dozens (maybe over a hundred) options for racial characteristics you can use to build your character’s race.  The list of race traits you can pick is 20 pages long and might be the longest single section in the book.  They’re organized by theme, but you don’t need to stick with the theme; there’s nothing to stop you from taking the blob-creature’s ability to rip off chunks of itself and send them scurrying about as miniature versions of you, and combining that with the ammonia-based life’s slow metabolism ability and the reptile’s scales. 

If you love lots of character options, this is your game.  Want to craft a team of bizarre creatures who band together to bring peace to a fractious galaxy?  Want the flexibility to build a tentacle monster with poor understanding of personal boundaries or a Space Pirate Amazon Ninja Catgirl who carves said tentacle monsters up into calamari?  Want the challenge of crafting the ultimate mechanical bad-ass by pushing the rules to their limit and then hurling your creations into the deadliest dungeon the GM can devise to see who emerges victorious? 

Machinations can do that.

And it doesn’t stop at race-building.  While there’s relatively little customization in the four classes (Killer, Specialist, Scholar, and Psion), everything else oozes with customization options.  For instance, each weapon category, from Small, One-handed Close Combat Weapons to Rifles/Shotguns is further divided in what amounts to a Small, Medium, and Large category.  On top of that, you can pile on the added modifications, from concealable to larger magazines to a selector for different damage types to “vicious” levels of damage.  In short, there’s no list of races with pseudo-clever names like Ignians and Reptiliods, or guns like ARES Predator Mk II or AK-97.  What we get instead is a fun tool kit you can use to build your own universe.

Want to build the ZF1 from Fifth Element with the net launcher, poisoned arrows, rocket, flame-thrower, and “all new ice-cube system?”  Yeah, Machinations can do that, too.

As you’d expect from something built on the LotFP chassis, the mechanics are a mish-mash of stuff.  We’ve got D&D 3.x’s d20-roll-higher for attacks, LotFP’s d6-roll-under for skills (of which there are many more in this game) 5e’s a-save-for-ever-stat and your choice of roll over or under for saves.  Your poor dice won’t know which way to go!

And on top of that we’ve got psionics (complete with a randomly chosen “witch’s mark” that can either be a (usually pretty weird) boon or bane), a wide array of cybernetics (which can cause psychosis if you take too many), and vehicles ranging from one-person bikes up to space battleships. 

What surprises is the stuff left out.  Most especially, encumbrance.  Not even mentioned.  Ditto for logistics; ammo is managed by saving throws (you need to reload when your weapon fails its save) and most tech doesn’t appear to need recharging of any kind.  The cigarette-pack standard-energy-clips of Star Frontiers are nowhere to be found here.  Because it’s Desborough, we do get some rules for dealing with exposure to vacuum or radiation (that doesn’t include a mutations table), but the guidelines for generating planets are all about what sort of adventures you can have on them, rather than orbital radius or axial tilt.   

The result is a rules-lite, cinematic game that you could go beer-and-pretzels with but has enough heft to it for long-term campaign style play.  Don’t play it if your group isn’t united in their goals; munchkins can craft real curb-stompers from the race options while your story-gamers will devise original and shocking personalities that are mechanically incoherent.

But do play if you’re looking for something flexible and not very demanding.  You can pick up all the mechanics in an afternoon and you can craft your first adventure over a lazy weekend (be sure to give yourself time to create gear and aliens and maybe a ship or two).  If you and your players love sharing world-building responsibilities, you’re going to love all the options available to you.  And if you instead want to keep firm control over the setting and factions, it’s easy enough to build a cheat-sheet for the players and some pre-made races and go to town.

In short, it’s as flexible as B/X and possibly even more rules-lite.  Character creation isn’t as quick but offers greatly expanded variety.  If you’re looking for a science-fantasy rules set to craft your own fun on, check this game out.

D&D Nibble: Trailing Ghouls

The great Erol Otus' ghoul.

This is a little thing I’ve been toying with for a while, at least since my old Doom & Tea Parties campaign.  I’m writing it up now because someone on Facebook running 5e was looking for a mechanic to disrupt the PCs taking short and long rests.  That’s never been a big deal for me.  I enjoy this for the horror movie aspect of it.  Either way…

Ghouls are, of course, attracted to dead bodies.  The more dead bodies laying about, the more ghouls you get.

PCs generally leave a LOT of dead bodies in their wake.

The ghoul pack grows the more bodies the PCs leave behind.  Keep track of their kills and add ghouls as follows:

Every 4 Small corpses = 0-1 ghouls.

Every 2 Medium corpses = 0-1 ghouls.

Every Large corpse = 1-2 ghouls.

Every Huge corpse = 1d4 ghouls.

Every Gargantuan corpse = the pack abandons the PCs and just camps out inside the corpse.

 

For every 12 ghouls, add a ghast to the pack.

Whenever the PCs camp for an hour or more, they’ll notice the ghouls at the very edge of their vision, lurking and snuffling about.  Describe the furtive scuffling of their feet, the scrape of claws on stone.  As the pack grows, be sure to let the players know that there are more of them out there.  They grow louder as the pack grows as well.  If the pack comes to outnumber the PCs by at least 3 to 1, they dare to come closer.  They’ll howl at each other, get into fights with one another. 

But they won’t fight the PCs.  Not yet.  They’ll scatter as the PCs approach.  They flee if the PCs attack. 

Until the PCs take an 8 hour or longer rest.

The first time the PCs take a long rest AND the pack outnumbers them by at least 3 to 1, they hungry ghouls will attack about halfway through their rest.  The ghouls will flee when a third of their number have been slain.  And go back to shadowing the PCs. 

The PCs can prevent the pack from growing by disposing of the corpses.  Burying the dead only slows the growth of the pack, cutting additions to the pack in half (rounded down).  Poisoning the corpses does nothing; ghouls are immune to pretty much every poison known. 

Fully destroying the corpses with fire or acid is the only sure way to prevent the pack from growing.  Acid is quicker but both methods are time-consuming, especially if the PCs are trying to use cantrips alone to do the deed.   

Myths of the Rakshasa

So this is apparently a thing. 

First, no, Gygax wasn't the one who said rakshasa's had backwards hands. There's no mention of backwards hands in the 1e Monster Manual entry for the rakshasa. And a bit of experimentation with your own hands will reveal that Trampier's amazing art doesn't have backwards hands either. 

So where did that come from? The first reference I've been able to find to the rakshasa having backwards hands is from DRAGON magazine #84, from April 1984 (the not-foolin' issue that included the last Phil & Dixie comic until years later). Opening an article about rakshasa is a full-page illustration by Jim Holloway:

This illustration is accompanied by the following text: The rakshasa pictured above... resembles the creature described in Funk and Wagnalls Standard Dictionary of Folklore, Mythology, and Legend. This version of the rakshasa has a big belly, fingers that curve away from the palms of its hands, and claws that are said to be poisonous.

Funk and Wagnalls appears to have been a exactly what it says on the tin, and I can totally see such a book floating around the old offices of TSR.  Near as I can tell, this is the origin of the backwards fingers of the rakshasa in D&D.  The 2e Monstrous Compendium solidified the backwards hands thing and the feline thing (rather than the orangutan-looking thing created by Holloway).  I suspect that's due in large part to just how cool the Trampier art from the original Monster Manual was.

A Great Deal: Monty Haul #1

Monty Haul is a sweet little ‘zine written for 5e D&D but with its feet firmly planted in the Old School cool. It gives off a bit of an ‘80s DRAGON vibe but is a lot more friendly with a stronger personal tone. TL;DR: some neat stuff to make spell-slingers more S&S/Lovecraftian eldritch, plus other goodies worth checking out.

Disclaimer: I backed the Kickstarter and got a sneak peek at #1 so I could help with proofreading. More than that, Mark Finn is an awesome guy I used to hang out with every chance I had when I lived in Austin (which mostly meant seeing him at conventions like ArmadilloCon). He's a literal raconteur of exceptional skill. And his brother was my therapist for a while. I think Mark rocks on and off toast.

More importantly for this discussion, Mark is a widely recognized Robert E. Howard scholar. (And yes, Amazon gives me a kickback if you buy from that link). So when he talks about Swords & Sorcery, he knows whereof he speaks. And he worked for Chessex in the ‘90s. The dude has been around and he has some stories to tell.

So, what is Monty Haul? Mostly material Mark’s created for his home game: homebrew rules, world-building, monsters, and other fun stuff that isn’t what you’re finding elsewhere.

Monty Haul #1 is dedicated to spell-slingers, specifically wizards, warlocks, and sorcerers. Because he’s writing for 5e, this means subclasses. Because it’s Mark, they’re not the usual sort of stuff. For instance, he’s got a new warlock patron, the Yellow King, who gives your warlock the power to blast enemies with mind-jarring visions of Carcosa. There’s a new sorcery origin, eldritch ancestry, that allows you to pick from three different flavors of eldritch horror (the Black Goat, which is all about chthonic deities and tentacles, the Void Dweller who are all about warping time and space, and the Deep Ones with their aquatic powers). My favorite bennie for these comes at 6th level: whenever you take physical damage, your eldritch birthright boils out from under the thin shell of your ruptured flesh, allowing you to deal greater unarmed damage to your attackers. The more hits you take, the more wrongness erupts through the holes in your skin, and the more dangerous you become. There’s also a new school for wizards, That Which Man Was Not Meant to Know, that starts off giving you some AC bonuses (due to your extreme paranoia) and ends at 14th level where the simple act of casting your spells causes psychic damage to those who can see and hear you.

There’s also a trio of “monsters” designed to plague spell-slingers specifically. I put monsters in quotes because these things have no stats; if you can see them, you can squish them pretty easily. But each is a parasite that infests the body. The ear worm is a sort of anti-babble-fish, translating the words you hear into a random language you might not understand. There’s also the mind mite (aka the brain cloud) that eats spell slots.
If you’re not into spell-slingers, there’s still some good stuff for you, including a nifty melding of the TSR-era reaction table with 5e’s social skills that I’m now using in my campaigns.

My favorite section is probably the Design Notes for a Magical City. This is not a keyed map of a magical city, but instead ideas Mark has used to make one of the city’s in his homebrew campaign more magical. This makes them very easy to slap a new coat of paint on and drop into your home campaign.

Even better, the first section is Mark’s design notes for all the different sections, the why’s and wherefore’s of the choices he’s made. Since you know why he made the choices he’s described, you’re in a better position to judge how useful his work is for your campaign and how you might want to tweak it for optimal performance at your table.

You can get Monty Haul #1 at drivethrurpg.com as a .pdf. I’m not sure if there are options for getting it in dead tree form if you missed the Kickstarter (you might contact Mark directly if that’s something you’re interested in).

6e? Don't Hold Your Breath

Ran across this bit of 6e D&D prognostication recently.

Ugh… where to begin?

First, I do write for a living, so I totally get the burst of inspiration that combines the need to get something, anything, out and the desire to talk about my latest fascination. But there’s a lot of working-from-false-premises here. So let me lay a truth bomb on y’all:

WotC has no interest in ever publishing a 6th edition.

Zero.

Zip.

Nada.

Zilch.

In a perfect world, they would simply ride on 5e until the end of time. Why? Well, first, there’s the expense of hiring a team to craft the rules, do the writing, create all the art, etc. Second, there’s the risk, and it’s a bad one. According to Ryan Dancey in an interview with Fear the Boot, the publication of 2e basically split the D&D community in half. While a really good edition might bring across more than half to 6e, there will be a noticeable percentage of folks who will simply stay with 5e. (And note that 2e came out before any sort of OGL allowed people to do anything like Pathfinder.)

RPGs generally get a new edition when sales flag badly for the current edition. (Though the early edition changes, from D&D to AD&D to 2e were largely about corporate slapfights; 2e was created in some part to get Gygax’s name off the books.) Sales slump generally when the game gets too complex to easily welcome new players. This is usually the result of new rules that make the material in what’s supposed to be the flagship book (in D&D’s case, the Players’ Handbook) sub-optimal. Power creep leads players to disdain the original options and seek out new race and class combos. Suddenly, a game that once required a $50 book to play now requires two. Or three. As time goes on, the GM and players end up juggling a half-dozen large, coffee-table books to play the game.

But the folks at WotC have worked hard to avoid that fate for D&D. Since the publication of 5e, there have been no official new classes published. Just about all the new sub-classes and spells are in Xanathar’s. New races are in Vollo’s and Mordenkainen’s (and these are generally so simple you don’t need to reference them in the middle of a game.)

This has been a purposeful campaign to prevent the game from acquiring a crust of new rules and complexity that usually leads to sales collapse. Coupled with the explosion of interest in the game, and WotC is even less interested in publishing a new edition. Yeah, it’s been nearly six years since 5e came out, and yes there was only five years between 3.5 and 4th, and only six years between 4th and 5th, but again, the timing is not based on calendars. It’s based on sales.

And sales are still good.

Maybe if sales have collapsed during the Covid lockdowns we might see rumblings about 6e from WotC. But I doubt it. And I don’t doubt for a moment that everyone involved in D&D at WotC has a handful of notes about things they think need to be different in the next edition. But it ain’t happening before ’21.

And if WotC has anything to say about it, it won’t happen before 2025. If ever.

Trollsmyth Does the Borderlands

Yesterday, my wife and I were talking about choice in D&D, and that lead to a chat about dungeons. Apparently, she’d never experienced the classic dungeons. Her experiences with early D&D were largely of the cloaked-guy-in-the-tavern-sends-you-into-the-dungeon-to-retrieve-a-Maguffin-and-you-get-to-keep-everything-else-you-find sort. And where the monsters just waited patiently in their rooms for the PCs to kick in the door. That sort of thing.

And while I’ve played in campaigns like that, I’m not sure I ever ran one like that. My model was the Caves of Chaos. So I dug up my pdf of B2: Keep on the Borderlands and ran it for her.

And I still can’t quite say she’s experienced a classic D&D dungeon. Not quite.

We played with 5e rules; could have done my old mish-mash of B/X and 2e, but we had 5e books at hand. She made a half-elf wizard with an entertainer background. Her character was headed to the borderlands to get a jump on his wizarding skills by searching for long-lost treasures of the ancient and wicked empire of Acheron (because yes, I’m totally up to stealing from R.E. Howard when asked to DM at a moment’s notice). Feel free to skip down to the end for my final thoughts if you want to avoid spoilders, because SPOILERS FOLLOW:

So with some favorite name-generators from the internet and a meh-quality pdf of the adventure pulled up on my laptop, I started her character off outside the keep. He was soon at the tavern (which I’d combined with the inn to make a single establishment called the Tipsy Cockatrice), negotiating a deal with the owner to perform in the evenings to defray some of the costs of room and board. He then wandered around the outer bailey, hearing about the strange monk (Gimha) and caravans that had gone missing, noticing the shops, and the temple to Astarte. At the fountain, he encountered a half-orc warrior whose sword bore marks of ancient Acheron.

Now, while I’m totally willing to forgive B2 its unnamed Castellan and innkeeper, because it’s easy enough for me to name them myself and give the keep the character I want it to have (in this case, a wee bit Howard’s Aquilonia), all the featureless +1 swords do start to get on my nerves pretty quickly.

So the sword I gave this half-orc warrior named Lagakh was fashioned from a variation of my old weeping iron. (This version was just like that except it was weeping steel because I’d forgotten which I’d called it originally.) Tindomé the half-elf wizard was intrigued and asked about it. Lagakh let on that she and a warlock had plundered a before-now-undiscovered ruin and found the blade there. Lagakh was now hurting for money because she’d spent her coin to refurbish the grip and scabbard, so she was willing to lead Tindomé to the ruin in exchange for half of whatever treasure they recovered, or 10 gp if there was no more treasure to be found.

While I was inventing an Acheronian enchanter named Ilerius whose mark was on the blade (but who probably hadn’t actually made it, because the blade didn’t have Ilerius’ trademark soul-stealing enchantments on it), I realized that I was inviting Tam’s character to go on adventure I didn’t have prepped. Now, coming up with a ruin that had a secret portion that Lagakh and her companion hadn’t found would have been easy enough, but the idea here was to introduce Tam to some classic dungeons. And I don’t think I’d ever run the Moathouse from Temple of Elemental Evil. Which was perfect; nearly two-thirds of the dungeon under the moathouse is separated from the rest by secret doors and it has its own exit to the outside world. So it was a piece of cake to say that Lareth the Beautiful was a priest of Apophis in league with the priestess running things in the Caves of Chaos. And because old-school D&D is so wonderfully simple and easy to run, it took me a half-hour to find my copy and prep it.

So Tindomé and Lagakh went to the ruins of the Moathouse, which I repurposed as a final-days-of-the-Empire Acheronian fort. That meant aging everything outside the secret area by about a thousand years, but that wasn’t a big deal. I got rid of the brigands, said Lagakh had already slain the spider, and left the snake in its room (which Tindomé and Lagakh choose to ignore). A very high roll on a history check revealed the secret door in the “Black Chamber” where the brigands were to have holed up. I also removed the zombies, ogre, and captives from the area in front of the secret portion.

The first inhabitants of the place encountered by Tindomé and Lagakh were the gnolls who were feeling ill-used. A reaction roll said they were wary, but considering their feelings on their situation and relationship with Lareth, they were hesitant to get into a fight. Tindomé said they were here to meet with “the New Master” (I forget how he came up in the conversation) and the gnolls, disappointed, pointed them to where the New Master could be found (and warned them about the trapped doors, though they did not explain how those traps worked). After wandering about for a bit and finding some orichalcum I’d placed in the mechanism of the trap, as well as the guards protecting the passage to Lareth’s quarters, they then found the secret exit. There they discovered a bit of a torn sack that had contained barley with a mark on it that made it likely it was from a missing caravan. One the way back, they discovered even more: one of the caravan’s wagons, abandoned with a broken axle and still holding four sacks of flour. They returned to the Keep with the sack and requested an audience with the Castellan.

What they got was an audience with the Bailiff of the Outer Bailey, Arus Dun. He brought in the Priestess of Astarte to discuss the situation. Arus pointed out that bandits raiding the caravans almost certainly had spies, probably at the Keep if not at the other end of the route. Tindomé mentioned that they’d walked in with Lagakh lugging the sack of flour over her shoulder; it was likely word of their find and what it meant were all of the Keep by now. He suggested they lock down the keep, do a quick census to see if anyone had fled, and then use Zone of Truth and his own Detect Thoughts to root out any spies.

This dragnet of course caught Gimha and his two acolytes. They nearly killed the Priestess of Astarte with a snake staff and multiple sacred flames, and did manage to kill a few guards and nearly Lagakh with Spiritual Guardians. Our heroes triumphed in the end, capturing one of the acolytes alive to rip his knowledge out with Detect Thoughts. A bit of Speak with the Dead filled in the holes.

Before they’d left for the Moathouse, Tindomé had spoken with Gimha who’d suggested they gather a party and travel to a series of caves used in the era of Acheron as cells for ascetic worshipers of Apophis famed for their powers of prophecy. Tindomé thought it was a splendid plan and agreed to go as soon as he and Lagakh got back from the Moathouse. Now they knew Gimha’s plan was to lure as many of the adventurers (especially the spell-slinging ones) away from the Keep and into an ambush. And that the Priestess of Apophis in the Caves of Chaos was all but ready to unleash her humanoid army on the Keep. Gimha didn’t know how they planned to succeed (it was with the help of summoned earth elementals) but knew the hour was fast approaching.

Tindomé finally got his audience with Castellan. He gave Tindomé and Lagakh some coin and an invisibility potion to scout out the caves. Which they did.

First, Tindomé had Lagakh help him disguise his scent. They avoided going in the caves of the cult (feeling too creeped out by the entrance), then did a pretty good job scouting through the orc and bugbear caves, a bit of the gnoll caves, and the goblin caves. They nearly got nabbed by the magic in the minotaur’s caves, never got past the door into the hobgoblin caves, and decided the owlbear and ogre didn’t need to be disturbed. They got caught in the orc’s net (and escaped with the help of a well-timed Unseen Servant) and then later fell into the kobolds’ pit trap. Another Unseen Servant “opened” the pit for them to crawl out, but there was a mob of kobolds there now, and through sheer numbers they put more than a few holes in poor Tindomé. He passed out, but Lagakh was able to carry him out and pour a healing potion down his throat.

The two then high-tailed it back to the Keep to make their report. The High Priestess of Astarte told them that the Priestess of Apophis was using an ancient altar upon which various humanoid chieftains had pledged not only their obedience to the cult of Apophis, but also that of their descendants. It was the great-great-great-great-so-many-greats-grandchildren of those long-ago chiefs who had brought their tribes to the Caves of Chaos so the cult of Apophis could capture the Keep.

Tindomé and Lagakh agreed to infiltrate the caves and desecrate the magic altar with holy water in hopes of breaking the hold of Apophis on the humanoids. An Adept of Astarte named Zaret went with them, and the Bailiff with some mounted archers went as well to supply a diversion.

T, L, and Z infiltrated the cult’s caves and, after nearly desecrating the wrong altar, got the job done and then ran like hell to escape the wrath of the cultists and their undead minions. The humanoids either started fleeing or turned on their erstwhile masters.

The Castellan is planning to hit the caves the next day. By then, most of the humanoids will have packed up and left. The cultists might still be there; I haven’t decided yet. Either way, most of the treasure will be gone.

END OF SPOILERS

Which brings up an interesting point about how EXP interacts with player choices. What T did was perfectly valid and effective in so far as foiling the plots of the cult. However, Tindomé liberated only 50 gp worth of treasure from the whole affair which he’ll have to split with Lagakh. If it wasn’t for rewards from the Keep folk, the entire affair would have been at a loss after you count in the used healing potions (worth 50 gp each themselves). By the time the soldiers sack the place, there’s barely going to be any treasure left to speak of that isn’t cursed. If we were playing by B/X rules, my wife’s character wouldn’t have earned enough EXP this way to get anywhere near 2nd level (and we started Tindomé off at 3rd since we were using 5e rules and she was playing solo).

GP-for-EXP certainly encourages more aggressive and mercenary play. Whether that’s a bug or a feature will really depend on what your goals are. I have to say that what happened certainly felt like something out of a Conan or a Thieves’ World story, so I’m pretty happy with what did happen, and my wife very much enjoyed herself. If we continue, I’ll probably send her Tindomé to the small farming hamlet of Orlane, a vital source of food for the Keep until they can get their own farms productive. Papers recovered from the cult will show that the servants of Apophis are making headway in their designs against the town, thanks to the aid of a mysterious personage called Explictica Defilus.