Thursday, August 27, 2020

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…

Monday, August 24, 2020

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. ;)

Friday, August 21, 2020

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.

Tuesday, August 18, 2020

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.

Monday, August 10, 2020

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.