By the way, these challenges were originally based off of Glogtober (example glogtober post), and they are the exact same thing. It’s a set of things to write about across an entire month, related to roleplaying games (not necessarily about the GLOG, but any RPG).

What is the GLOG? The Goblin Laws of Gaming. Originally drafted by Goblin Punch in this post. It’s an old school game.

I’ll be playing in Speedrun mode, which means my answers will (hopefully) be short and digestible.

Challenge the First

2 - Review Another’s Blogpost

A week or two ago I read The Do’s of Dm’ing from Joe the Lawyer, and I linked to it in my post on Connections. This is one of my favorite posts that I’ve seen in the past six months; it resonates with a lot of my own opinions.

Joe summarizes his core premise as such: “the first Do is to make sure everyone is having fun at the table.” This is in the first sentence, so yes, of course it’s important. The rest of the Do’s really add up to this first, ever important, rule. It’s part of our job as GMs to ensure our game nights are enjoyable for every single person who’s there.

It’s important to mention here that the GM isn’t the only person with responsibilities at the table. They aren’t the only person who needs to make sure folks are having fun. I think it’s everyone‘s responsibility to be aware of the gamestate and what is making things fun vs. not-so-fun. I really notice when people aren’t paying attention to the emotions of the table when I’m playing a group board game. Sure, there are folks who sit down for a competitive game night, but there are also folks who just wanted to play a game and end up getting screwed out of any sort of fun because of the actions of another player.

As a GM we have the ability to draw all the attention back to ourselves at any moment (or at least, you should). This let’s us pull the table into focus and bring up concerns about whether folks are still having fun or not. “Should we veil this scene?” and “Can we try not to disrupt the table with so much cross-talk?” and “I’m not sure that new feature is working for me, is it possible we could adjust it in a way that won’t hurt your character but doesn’t overshadow other abilities?”

Utilize the trust and confidence your players have in you to help foster a friendly game table. If you aren’t having fun, or if you notice someone else not having fun, bring it up! Say something! One of my teachers has a quote I like to think about whenever I get stressed about a situation that came up during play: “If nothing changes, nothing changes.” In other words: things won’t improve if there is no catalyst of improvement.

Beyond specifically ensuring a fun game table, Joe goes on to talk about explaining game system house-rules before actually playing with them. I’ve been in games where, all of a sudden, I learn that my GM has changed the rules from what I was told to read when I made my character. The rule of cool can be similarly harmful if GMs decide to ignore sections of a game that their players had intended to use.

Joe continues with emphasizing the importance of communication, specific notes to take before and after sessions (not dissimilar to the 8 Steps of the Lazy GM), and remembering to pace yourself if real-life issues make playing games difficult. These are all ways to ensure that you understand what you need to do in order to make game nights as fun as possible for your group, returning right back to the core premise.

Final Thoughts

I started GLÅUGUST for the first time ever. I’ve never even tried Glogtober before, so we’ll see how this goes. I had a lot of fun returning to Joe the Lawyer’s post on DMing. Sometimes GM advice is good, and sometimes it’s bad (shocker!), so I think it’s useful to get a second voice on these kinds of things.

This is certainly a new type of post for me. I’m not sure if it’ll be routine or not, but it’s fun, so that’s a win. I’m looking forward to writing up the next four challenges over the next two weeks. We should get a good look at my opinions on various RPG design strategies.

Thanks for reading! I’ll see you next week!

Things on my radar:

• Rick Hershey writes about designing games with an art collection in mind before you actually do any designing. This is a great way to avoid spending copious amounts of time searching for the (nonexistent?) perfect art piece.

• The CRIT Awards (Creator Recognition in TTRPGs) are ready for you to cast your votes! You don’t have to vote on everything, just the parts you recognize and care about. Go Vote!

• JP Coovert has a new video about setting up printing for zines you want to sell. It’s a great watch.

Let’s look at a few examples of what I mean:

Troika! Advanced Skills

In Troika! you roll a random character background, such as Pond Prophet, which gives you a set of Advanced Skills. Having a specific Advanced Skill for a situation where it applies gives you increased odds at completing that task, obviously.

However, the book only describes the use-cases of a few Advanced Skills available in the character creation section. This is because some Advanced Skills are quite esoteric and weird! You might have the Etiquette skill, and therefore know that you are good at making first impressions (p. 57 of the book). Alternatively, you might have Exography (the study of remote places, I think?) which is never mentioned again in the book.

These Advanced Skills are useful only if the player and GM come to an agreement of what they mean and when they actually apply. An Exographer might realize that they are really good at diagnosing what caused the downfall of an ancient civilization, something that might not have even crossed their mind if the game didn’t give them to freedom to strain and grasp at the threads of sense tied to an almost-extinct word.

I like that Troika! makes you think in these rare cases when an Advanced Skill has no description. You are granted the creativity to extrapolate beyond your background to who this character is and what they ought to be capable of.

Synthetic Dream Machine Traits

Firmly among my top three favorite roleplaying games is Luka Rejec’s Ultraviolet Grasslands. You can check out the rules within the newly completed Vastlands Guidebook for free!

Ultraviolet Grasslands is powered by the Synthetic Dream Machine, a weird system of supreme creativity. In this game, players have traits: “the innate, acquired and inherited, qualities and characteristics that make a character unique. This includes ... backgrounds, professions, mutations, downloaded skill packages, implanted prosthetics, corruptions, and memorized powers.”

A mouthful, but there they are. Traits are anything about your character that isn’t a held item or a person (funny enough, your character’s “friends” actually do count as traits for the purpose of mental inventory management). Traits give your character a bonus to any dice roll related to them. They can also give passive mechanical benefits, like extra damage with lances or the ability to digest any organic material.

Like Troika! some of the traits have descriptions about when they might be useful listed in the book. However, you can generate your own traits, which won’t have any definite description. In my experience, this allows players to set their characters up with collections of traits that they enjoy, and then whenever a situation presents itself to them, they focus on how their traits could possibly apply in order to get a bonus to their rolls.

For example, the trait “Remote Operator” might allow a character to remote pilot a drone from well beyond its normal connectivity distance. Alternatively, because this character also has traits related to mental power, they might try using mind control.

This freedom presents new opportunities for creativity from players simply because they can give their characters skills in anything imaginable.

No Description Games

These next three games maintain the UVG manifesto: players make their own skills. However, none of them have anything written about when those skills would apply. It’s entirely up to a discussion (negotiation) between player and GM about when/if a given action is possible. These discussions are a lot of fun because they often get everyone at the table thinking, laughing, and wondering how they can use their own skills in creative ways.

Daggerheart uses Experiences to drive skill creativity. Your background informs these experiences, giving you a pair of phrases to describe something unique about your character.

Examples include “Fake It Till You Make It” and “This Is Not a Negotiation” among others. How do these apply to dice rolls? Can they apply in combat situations? You only get two Experiences at the start of the game, and finding ways to make them both applicable in combat and non-combat situations can be very fun.

Can you use “Fake It Till You Make It” to pretend to be charmed by a gang boss, only to stab him in the back after an ally trips him? Can you use “This Is Not a Negotiation” to execute a foe mid-battle? Obviously both of those are great out of combat, but the trick comes to expanding them across all possible situations you might find yourself in, to get the most bang for your buck.

Dungeon Reavers uses Vocations & Affiliations in a similar vein. They are single words tied to a single stat. You get one Vocation when you make your character (something like Woodcutter, Merchant, Squire, Apprentice, Archaeologist, Linguist, Diplomat, etc.) and they give you an advantage when making checks related to it. Affiliations are relationships gained during play.

This is an extremely limiting method of producing creativity. On the other hand though, pearls are made only under extreme pressure. I find that picking a Vocation can be super important to developing how you’ll play this character. You want the Vocation to be meaningful in the game, and it would be nice to use it every session or every other session. That means picking something broadly useful, yet unique to the character. It also requires the same negotiation with your GM about if your Vocation applies. More dialogue is more better!

The final RPG I’ll mention is Paradiso’s RPG (the game that shall not be named here). In this game you are encouraged to find Expertise (skills, bonds, or backgrounds) in order to get bonuses to your dice rolls. If you can get all three Expertises, that’s really good.

Your character begins the game with two backgrounds and a mixture of two skills/bonds. That means it is entirely feasible for a character to get the maximum Expertise bonus right from the get-go. How awesome would it be for your to present your Mercenary who is both good at Haggling and a member of a Mercenary Company to negotiate with a crime lord: “I’m a professional mercenary, I can get more of my buds to help out your little circus here if you just give us a little extra cash beforehand.”

Trying to maximize the utility of your backgrounds, bonds, and skills takes a lot of effort, but is really, really worth it both as a creative exercise and for the purpose of overcoming challenges in the game. Constantly considering what is useful about being a Cook, or the Showmanship skill, or knowing a Ship Crew, can all lead to fantastically creative problem-solving opportunities.

Final Thoughts

Incorporating opportunities for players to get inventive with their skills and abilities is what makes roleplaying games very fun for me to play and run. Having game rules that require players to explain why a certain trait or bond applies to a given situation is fantastic and allows everybody to use what makes their characters unique over and over again.

One major drawback of so much skill creativity can be the brainpower involved. It’s mentally exhausting to continuously debate whether or not your Discipline skill allows you to swallow a centipede without chewing. On the other hand, practice, practice, practice and you’re creativity skills will only improve!

How can you incorporate more skill creativity in your games?

Things on my radar:

• Oh my goodness, I know I linked to it above, but the Vastlands Guidebook is AMAZING! Yes, it’s mostly just a few rules tweaks here and there and some gorgeous formatting changes and art coloration and it just doesn’t get better than this! I really enjoyed reading and skimming through these pages, I highly recommend you do too.

  • Note, in my Reflections on the UVG I talked a lot about how much the layout and word choices disappointed and confused me in the UVG & the Black City 2e. Those do not apply to the Vastlands Guidebook, which is my favorite thing Luka has ever published (and among my top RPG products of all time).

• Patchwork Paladin links to the article Three-round combat by Pretendo Games. I agree with the sentiment of this article, but if I’m a player who notices this type of emphasis on short fight resolution, I’m likely to play my character like I’m in Mythic Bastionland: Obliterate your enemy with as much damage as possible as fast as possible (a fool-proof strategy, time and time again). In D&D, this also suggests the Cleric/Druid ought to cast Mass Cure Wounds on round 2.

  • Am I already playing my character for quick damage? Probably. Does this really change the game? Shrugs.

• There are already a huge amount of (spectacular) entries to the Appendix N Jam 2026. I’m planning to submit my own entry, and that has led me down a rabbit hole of learning to make an old-school cover photo-bash amalgamation in Affinity. I feel like Dr. Frankenstein.

• I’ve never played it, but CAIN is a really cool idea of a game by Tom Bloom. I really enjoy looking at supplements for this game, because Tom’s fanbase has incredible artists. Check out Glory Unto Them for an example.

  • Also, the sleek layout folks have been using for adventures is really sweet. Take Veil of Night for example.

• Chris Vicari of Behind the Screen writes about designing cool villains. Is it weird that I design my player characters like he makes evil overlords?

• Chris also writes about prepping focused one shots. In my experience, setting a real life timer works well!

A Beastly World

What vibes does the world have? Prehistoric, Primordial, Kaiju, the Beastlands, Jungles, Rampage, Horde, Colossal, Mutating, Growth, Burgeoning, Nature, Survival of the Fittest

Your Connection to Beasts

1. Your community raised packs of beasts most folk would call dangerous (velociraptors, death cows, sharks, vampire wolves, etc.)

2. You were attacked by a great beast as a child, and it left a permanent scar.

3. You see the ghosts of extinct beasts in the shadows cast by firelight.

4. You carry the teeth of every beast you’ve ever felled on a necklace.

5. You sometimes hear the chittering of small animals and confuse them for actual words.

6. You have, or know someone else who suffers from, a strange form of lycanthropy.

A Dead World

What vibes does the world have? Ghostly, Thin Veils, Resurrection, Dead Animation, Necromancy, Gates of Death, Ancient Necropolis, Relentless, Undying, Vengeance

Your Connection to Death

1. You were marked for death as a child, but the reaper never came.

2. You often see the ghosts of people you don’t yet recognize.

3. You have an uncanny sense for when there are bones buried beneath your feet.

4. You were once greeted by a wight who believed they were your butler.

5. You watched a necromancer raise an entire village of dead peasants and march off into the sunset.

6. Your heart beats half as fast as it should.

A Draconic World

What vibes does the world have? Volcanic, Scaled, Cratered, Kobolds, Ancient Dragons, Serpentine, Treasure Hoards, Shapechangers, Eggs

Your Connection to Dragons

1. You carry a dragon’s egg. How did you come to acquire it?

2. You were approached by a scaled elder in your youth who recommended you never tell a lie.

3. Your family home was raided by kobolds. They took all your gold and wine, but left you alive.

4. You were born with dragon scales covering one or more sections of your body.

5. You have an uncanny sense for exactly how many gold pieces someone has in their pockets.

6. Your family passed down an heirloom to you, supposedly taken from a dragon’s hoard.

A Fairy World

What vibes does the world have? Mischief, Tricks, Dreams, Theft, Mirrors, Shadows, Twisted Reality, Strange Extradimensional Pathways, Flowers, Exquisite Beauty, Wilting Decadence, Rotten Horror

Your Connection to the Fey

1. You were cursed by a tricksome fairy when you were young (you cannot hear the rain, birds are invisible to you, food has no smell, wine has no flavor, etc.)

2. You always emanate an aroma of flowers or spices.

3. You have small, vestigial dragonfly wings sprouting from your back.

4. You grew up with a fairy godmother who lived in a gourd and made lots of pumpkin pies.

5. You always wear a thistle and briar laurel, mostly because it’s interwoven with your hair and skin.

6. Flowers sprout and wilt around you, reflecting your emotions.

A Holy World

What vibes does the world have? Religion, Prayer, Communal Belief or Suffering, Sanctuary, Light in the Dark, Wicked Evil, A Dark Ruler, Ruined Shrines, Fallen Gods, A Brilliant Deity

Your Connection to the Sanctum

1. Your family was given/refused sanctuary at a temple in a time of desperation.

2. You once restored the desecrated shrine of a forgotten deity.

3. You are frighteningly allergic to incense and holy water.

4. You took part in a holy ritual in your youth, and it left a lasting mark on your body.

5. Your religion has been forbidden across the realm.

6. You have the prayers of your faith painted/tattooed across your body.

Final Thoughts

This post was inspired by a resource I created for my players in a campaign I ran a couple years ago. I think it’s important to present your players with ways that they can passively and actively engage with your game world, especially during character creation. Thus, we get connections that can link your character to the vibes/theme of the world so that at the bare minimum they have something interesting to say about the world.

In a game like Daggerheart, these questions are built into character creation as a default with the campaign frames. In other games, you might not already have a list of connections that can help you get a grasp on what makes this world unique and interesting for this specific character.

Thanks for reading!

Things on my radar:

• Joseph R. Lewis talks about Wraithlands in a video about rules-light story games. I had mentioned this game in a previous post, so it was cool to see someone else’s thoughts on the actual content of the game.

• Joe the Lawyer has a post about how to run a fun table, which I resonate with.

• Fari RPGs (behind Songs & Sagas, Stoneburner, and other great games) is finishing up work on Boundless, which looks like it will be going to Backerkit.

• The Ennie Award nominees are out, and VOTING has started! I encourage you to vote on the sections that you care about, and skim through the nominees for potential new games to add to your collection.

  • I’d never heard of Thieves of the Tome until I voted, and I am shocked by how awesome this game looks. You use a real life book to cast spells.

A little space ship, soaring through the cosmic flux of outer space. What a dream, you think, just before the first meteorite strikes your ship’s hull, knocking you back to reality. Surely Aeion-6 has the least pleasant asteroid fields in the whole galaxy to AutoNav through. Hopefully the pay makes this trip worth it.

“Alert! Alert!” screams the telecom next to the pilot’s seat. You hit the bright red PLAY button. “New mission received from . . . Stewie Starshine . . . Mission Objective . . . Steal the moon!”

Truths of the Splintered Galaxy

There are several things anyone living in the galaxy would know:

The Splinter

The Splintered Galaxy is Pac-Man shaped. The mouth is a void of stardust, asteroids, and derelict machinery called the Splinter. No one remembers how it formed, when it formed, or if anything lives there. Only one person in recorded history has ever crossed the Splinter in a space ship: Lyktos, Usurper of the God-King. Everyone else just flies around it.

Space Travel Made Easy

Cities, space stations, outposts, and home-worlds span multiple star systems across the Splintered Galaxy. Space travel has advanced enough to allow quick travel between same-system planetary bodies and mostly painless travel between different-system planetary bodies using an Omnium JumpDrive.

Contested Imperial Systems

The Seven Sovereign Systems of the Splintered Galaxy are ruled by the Empress Pentesseleia. The half-dozen smaller systems of the Splintered Galaxy are at odds with the Imperial Legion and their conquest to ever-expand the Empress’ domain. What few planets are not contested by the Empress are often under another great threat: be it the hyper-advanced xenophobic Dorokhin aliens, an ancient world-eating space dragon, or the corrupted machine warriors left behind by God-King Olyzket.

Imbalanced Factions

Three key groups vie to keep the Splintered Galaxy from ripping itself to pieces. None of them have been able to succeed very much thus far.

The Vanguard of the Red Throne (Sentinels of the Dying Heir). Exiled soldiers who believe the Empress had the previous Emperor and his rightful heir assassinated so that she could claim the galactic throne. They infiltrate imperial bases, hijack tech manufacturer’s cargo ships, and work to destabilize the empire.

Key NPC: Helios Noaad (sharp, proactive, rebel)

The Conclave of the Lunar Path (Witches of the Dark Moon). Moon-witches, wizards, and acolytes devoted to a sacred oath of protection, preservation, and illumination. They wield the strange magic drawn from celestial bodies to combat forces of evil in the galaxy. (Very much like the Jedi in Star Wars)

Key NPC: Serrath LeShae (meditative, empathetic, devout)

The Galactic Regulators (The Pearl Syndicate). Merchants, rogues, and space druids who work to restore the balance in a corrupted galaxy, one credit at a time. Returning life to a dying planet, stealing from the rich and giving to the poor, and preventing the creation of vile technology are all valid goals for their crew. They are both hated and feared by galactic nobility.

Key NPC: Stewie Starshine (epic, reactive, wild-card)

StarFIST Enterprises. A covert mercenary company that sticks to the ever-darkening shadows of space, sending their specially-trained and enhanced crews to do the dirty work no one else is capable of. Frequently they work with the other three factions in order to truly make a difference in the universe.

Key NPC: The Hummingbird (tiny drone, corporate, infected)

Brief Governance History

Long, Long Ago: The Seven Sovereigns established colonies of life across the Splintered Galaxy. Some say they came from beyond the Splinter, but that’s probably just a myth.

The Seven Soveriegns (And Their Star Systems)

1. Maxxer Beryllium (The Maxxium System)

2. Jazyzal Horne (The Horned System)

3. Yutri Sei-Ov (Sei-Ov’s Cradle)

4. Kaedan Modak (The Twinfold Complement)

5. Haali Nata (The Haali Nata System)

6. Dolly Sarn (Sarn’s Twister)

7. Bossk Illmind (The Bossk Four-Body)

Long Ago: The God-King Olyzekt marched armies of machines through the galaxy, uniting everyone, everywhere, beneath banners of fear and pain. He was undying, a metal lich, and discovered the last secrets of star magic and bioengineering.

After An Age of Despair: The God-King was usurped by Lyktos Splinterwalker, the first and only living being to have genuinely navigated the deadly Splinter. It is whispered that the God-King escaped death and lurks somewhere beyond the Splinter, biding time for his inevitable return. The people seem to like the Usurper.

Several Lifespans Later (Now): Emperor Mogul IV and his heir are assassinated by his wife, Pentesseleia Contractia IX. She takes the throne, naming herself The Red Empress. Rebellion begins almost immediately.

Final Thoughts

I used the Splintered Galaxy to great effect with the FIST RPG, and it was a lot of fun coming up with lore about all the factions and previous galactic rulers. There’s plenty of space for more interesting things to happen, and you can always abandon one star system for adventures in another. I’m hoping to come back to this setting in a future campaign, maybe trying the rules of Intergalactic Bastionland, Offworlders, Arathi Sector, or Stars Without Number.

Hope this worldbuilding gets you inspired!

Thanks for reading, it means a lot to me that people want to read my thoughts each week!

Things on my radar:

• I released a new D&D adventure called Escape from the Shadow Realm! It’s designed using the same principles in Quest for the Vorpal Sword, so if you liked that I’m hopeful that you’ll like this too.

• Role Player’s Digest 6 is out! I didn’t submit anything this time, but I highly recommend you check out GMaia‘s and Jasper C. Lock‘s posts on creating exciting characters.

• Witches of the Wenderweald Basic Rules by Odinson Games is out! I followed through the initial zines for this project and they were super cool (not to mention the art is fantastic). Highly recommend skimming for inspiration if nothing else.

• There’s a bundle of holding for Colostle and I remember people making reviews of this game and thinking it was cool.

• I’m replaying Baldur’s Gate 3 and I always manage to build three perfect, beautiful, wonderfully functional characters. And then there’s the fourth character... They always feel lackluster. Is it the distribution of loot? My class choices? Who knows.

• Also replaying Pokemon: Sword and I while Scorbunny might be the funniest pokemon ever, I’m managing to try a new strategy. I find myself wondering if there’s anything RPGs can learn from the pokemon games? (Answer: pets are always fun)

What are Omens?

Omens are individual fragments of an overarching situation resolving somewhere in the game world. I like to think of them as short scenes that could play out almost anywhere in the world, regardless of where the party is traveling or what their current goals are.

For me, Omens just need to be a spark of an idea that gets me inspired about something: an old merchant rolling a wagon and collecting teeth from passersby. Maybe I have stats for the merchant in case the party decides he needs to die, and maybe I wrote down why the merchant likes collecting teeth. In general though, Omens can be as short as you require them to be in order to keep them useful.

There are generally 6 Omens to a given Myth in Mythic Bastionland. I think this leads to a relatively satisfying duration of the situation, but I don’t see why there can’t be Myths with 3 Omens or 9 Omens too (or even more, if you want to duplicate the City Quest).

Omens are loosely, or tightly, linked to an overarching theme, obstacle, monster, or item somewhere in the game world. They resolve sequentially and you have the liberty to modify future Omens based on the methods used by the party to resolve or otherwise interact with previous Omens. In fact, should the party find a way to “solve the problem” of the Myth before the 6th Omen, you are allowed to call the whole adventure complete.

Sometimes the problem doesn’t get solved. In which case, you are invited to extrapolate beyond the original theme, obstacle, monster, or item and make a decision about how the game world changes based on the party’s actions (or lack thereof). This could mean a tsunami floods the low lands of your map, or a wicked tyrant takes over the largest settlement, or a bunch of interesting people go missing, or any number of other things.

As you might be able to tell by now, Omens aren’t really specific to Mythic Bastionland. They just go by other names in other roleplaying games. The name I like to use is pretty simple: adventures with consequences.

Recall: The Wilderness Roll

We saw this in the previous Mythic Bastionland post, but I’ll repeat it here for those who don’t remember:

(Travel, Mythic Bastionland, p. 18, Chris McDowall)

Every time the party travels somewhere, we see what they find: an omen of a nearby Myth or a notable Landmark of the surrounding area.

You might notice now that this is just like a random encounter table. You have a 50% chance to encounter something, with the odds stacked slightly against you for how often that something is a monster that wants to hurt you (or vice versa).

You also have a 50% chance of finding a cool monument or location nearby. I haven’t played too many games that are designed so that there is a chance you don’t find those cool landmarks, but I think it works for a game built around exploring the realm frequently.

For other roleplaying games, we don’t always know what to describe for a landmark (maybe there isn’t anything interesting on our map). In these cases, I find random tables are my friends.

Creating a monument to place in front of the party, regardless of where they are, can often lead to great collaborative worldbuilding, excitement about drawing on the map, and curiosity from those players who want to poke and prod and search for treasure.

Expanding to Other Systems

Okay, so we looked at what Omens are and how we encounter them, but what about actually using these ideas in other games?

You need adventures with consequences for your party to be faced with. They can choose whether or not to seek these adventures out on purpose, or they can encounter them in the wild as they progress other goals. What do you need for these adventures?

• Create an adventure location with a situation

  • Example: Kobolds in a cave want to serve a dragon who lives in the same mountain. The dragon is greedy.

• Make a list of progressively worse things to happen if nothing is done about the adventure location’s situation.

  • Example: Some kobolds stumble around looking for trouble -> A dragon is seen flying overhead -> Miners are attacked by groups of kobolds -> Kobolds with dragon-scale armor threaten a nearby village -> The dragon descends to claim a greater territory, an army of kobolds eager to obey

• Plop the adventure location somewhere on the map. Whenever the group visits this location, they will have opportunities to resolve the situation.

  • Example: Convince the kobolds to rise against the dragon. Ask the kobolds to please stop harassing miners. Offer bushels of gemstones a peace treaty. Eliminate all the kobolds in the cave. Make a deal with the dragon.

• After you have 4, 6, 8, or 10 of these locations, make a table to roll on whenever the party travels somewhere. When you roll a location’s entry, progress to the next “bad thing” and have it happen right where the party is so they can do something about it.

  • Example: 1, The Kobolds | 2, The Fairies | 3, The Rats | 4, The Goblins

How different is this method of situation-omen-adventure prep to what you might do normally? I don’t know, I can’t read your prep notes, but I bet it isn’t significantly different! Most GMs think about what their villains are doing when the party isn’t doing anything to mess with them, most GMs also develop adventure locations with things for the party to do there.

With this method, you’ll be able to quickly set up a situation that gets worse over time, creating a sense of urgency for the party to find an efficient way to solve each problem before it becomes really bad.

Final Thoughts

We looked at Omens in Mythic Bastionland and considered their purpose, their uses, and ways to use them in other game systems. In reality, Omens aren’t much different from typical adventure hooks and random encounters, but they often provide a progressive structure that isn’t always present in other games.

I encourage you to think about how you show villainous progress to your players, and consider if there are more ways you can up the ante with random encounters.

That’s all for this week!

Things on my radar:

• Sheep Detectives was fine, 5/10.

• New short D&D adventure coming soon (likely to be released next Friday)! It’ll will be a “sequel” to Quest for the Vorpal Sword.

• Murkdice has written about sequential encounter tables using Omens as one inspiration.

• There is a colossal Free RPG Day Bundle on RPGTrader. Please check it out!

• Chris Vicari has an interesting article on the Psychology of Choice in D&D Prep. I especially agree that “The more you understand your players, the easier it becomes to guess what they’ll do. The relationship gets sharper over time, and your craft sharpens with it.” This concept of orienting the content of your prep towards what your players enjoy seems simple and obvious, and yet it works wonders for engagement at the table!

(Assuming, of course, that you aren’t already playing Girl Frame, Lancer, Armour Astir, or any other wonderful game that actually has rules for mech suits.)

I’ve successfully incorporated giant mech vs. kaiju fights into my tabletop games more than once without having played a game specifically for mech fights. Maybe you want to do the same? In this post, we’ll look at some key concepts for what might make a mech fun to pilot, what makes kaijus fun to fight, and some system agnostic guidance for running a giant mech.

My ideas are inspired heavily by Gurren Lagann, Evangelion, Transformers, Power Rangers, Darling in the Franxx, and most recently, that one episode of Dandadan.

The Core Premise

We want our party of adventurers, heroes, fools to join together to pilot a single big mech. That means:

• There is a kaiju to fight (a really big monster).

• Everybody in the party needs a spot in the mech.

• Mechs are really strong but also very brittle.

• It should be simple for party members to exit and enter the mech if they want to use a magic item or character feature.

• It should be simple to grasp what a mech can do, we should tailor its abilities to expectations and focus on simplification, not complication.

• The party probably won’t use the mech very often, but if they do there should be lasting consequences.

• One really big attack, many small attacks, or a couple strong attacks make for fun combat decisions.

In my experience designing mech fights, what really matters most to my players is some meaningful (and probably tactical) decision making once they get in the suit. The battlefield becomes a lot bigger and their powers grow exponentially by joining together to defeat a major villain.

If you’re like me, and you’re not using a system that was designed for mech fights, then you also want to keep everything simple. Stats should be easy to work with, and the rules shouldn’t be much (if at all) different from the core rules of your game.

Build-A-Mech

Both mechs and kaijus follow the same rules and creation process, though I encourage you to make the kaiju just a little stronger than the mech, and make them even simpler for you to run.

Each bullet point is directed to solve one of the sections of the core premise.

• They probably have at least two arms, two legs, and one head. Each of these has a piloting center that a PC can occupy.

  • While piloting an appendage, a PC can take specific mech actions.

    • Arms. Good at grabbing things. Weak melee and ranged attacks.

    • Legs. Strong melee attacks. Moving becomes risky after making a leg attack.

    • Head. Strong ranged attack. Usually enemies can enter through here.

  • You might include additional appendages:

    • Heart. Heals the mech’s appendages. Summons protective barriers.

    • Wings. Allows the mech to fly.

    • Tail. Good at grabbing things. Spin for a weak area of effect attack.

• They should have a way to make a really big attack (i.e., super laser beam, fire breath, buster blade, universal drill).

  • Spend time charging up instead of attacking with an appendage to empower the next attack (double damage).

  • Store damage to empower the next attack.

  • Work together as a team, have a heart-to-heart chat, surrender yourself to the machine and empower the next attack.

  • Sacrifice the magic from a magic item to empower the next attack.

• Mech appendages are all vulnerable to the kaiju’s attacks and maybe some really big weapons used by smaller creatures.

  • Arms and Legs can take low damage.

  • The Head can take high damage.

  • Destroyed appendages are useless.

  • If the mech takes significant damage to the Head, or Torso (if using), the pilots must work together to keep the mech from collapsing.

• On their turn, a player can pilot their section of the mech, or exit onto a small balcony outside their piloting center.

• Spending too much time piloting a mech risks corruption of the mind.

Final Thoughts

Short(ish) post about giant mech suits and what it takes to make them for your roleplaying system of choice! I’ve used mechs several times in D&D and they worked very well. If you have any actual miniatures, transformers, Gundam, or even a bunch of soda cans, you can even display your giant mech suit on a battlemap!

You could also just play a game that has its own rules for mech suits: lots of mecha ttrpgs on itch.

Things on my radar:

• This summer I’m running four (4) weekly games. The fourth one starts this week. We’re playing UVG, Shadowdark (x2), and D&D 2024. It’s a bit hectic, but I’ve done this before.

• Projects are making good progress!

  • You can expect a new adventure for D&D this month!

  • A large adventure is probably coming at the end of the summer. Right now it’s being playtested by one of my weekly groups.

  • A small video game similar to my first one, Lona’s Fountain, coming later this summer. Learning Unity and finding inspiration. The graphics will be better.

If you’re super comfortable with Mythic Bastionland already, you may still be interested in reading “Okay, But I Didn’t Roll a Myth”.

Basic Exploration

Before we begin, the exploration procedure in Mythic Bastionland (henceforth MB) is as follows:

(Travel, Mythic Bastionland, p. 18)

There are three Phases in a day, and Knights are usually sleeping for one of them. Knights typically travel two to four hexes per day across a realm-wide hex map.

Players may or may not be given a map of the realm beforehand, depending on how you decide to run the game (I personally prefer a hand-drawn sketch of the realm, rather than handing my players a hex map). It’s the players duty to keep track of which hex they think they’re in (using an empty or full hex map, as above).

Each Myth has 6 Omens which are encountered via the Wilderness Roll or whenever the Myth’s “home hex” is visited. Each realm has 6 Myths spread randomly across its hexes.

Across the entire realm there are probably around 18 to 24 landmarks, maybe more. They include dwellings, monuments, ruins, hazards, curses, and sanctums. Some are more dangerous than others.

You, the GM, will design the realm before you play the game. The rules in the book make the process quite exciting, though it’s definitely time-consuming. I think when I make a realm from scratch it usually takes me two to three hours to get it all prepared. You might also use someone else’s pre-created realms, such as Sindraline or the Jotunrift. These usually have more content than you would generate on your own using the book.

Rolling a Myth

So your Wilderness Roll, which you make every Phase of the day, comes up as a 1, 2, or 3, that means you get to run a Myth Omen! In the book, each Omen is a couple sentences long and describes a small situation or scene that takes place before the characters. Often there are opportunities for characters to interact with the environment or cast of NPCs, and maybe about 50% of the time they’ll get into a combat.

In general, you should be focusing on the Primacy of Action (described on page 16) that states “past action taken by the players supersedes content generated by prompts or rules.” This means that regardless of the Omen you roll, you should think about the fiction first and consider how previous actions taken by players might change what the Omen actually is. You are encouraged to modify what is written into what might happen if nothing is done to stop it.

Additionally, Myth Omens do not have to make sense. That’s a part of what makes this game fun! Myths are weird and crazy and might take you to strange places. Some omens might take place entirely in a dream or across the realm from where you thought you were. You might never know exactly which omens are related to each other unless there is a strong through-line between them (which can create a useful discrepancy between player knowledge and GM knowledge).

If the players kill a sculptor because he was carving a statue and lamenting immortality, then maybe the arrival of the Colossus during a later omen shows them that the sculptor had bestowed a curse on the statue, awakening it to attack the realm. If, instead, the characters befriend the Colossus, perhaps the final omen is the Colossus waving as it walks off into the sunset instead of just collapsing against a mountain.

Running Myth Omens can seem daunting at first, but there are several strategies you can adopt depending on your comfort-level with the Myth:

High Comfort

You are really confident and excited to improvise based on what you understand about the realm.

In this case, you don’t need to do any additional prep other than having spark tables at the ready for when you need them. Read the omen, describe the scene to your players, and play to find out what happens.

Medium Comfort

You aren’t confident that you can improvise a good scene from just the little scraps found in each omen entry.

In this case, consider reading through a few of the omens for each myth in your realm before the session and jotting notes about how you can further develop their related scenes if they come up during the game. Patchwork Paladin has a useful post for writing these notes!

Low Comfort

You don’t like the omen entries for a given myth, but think you can scrap something cool together anyway.

In this case, you’re basically going to re-write the myth using your own common sense and ideas. This isn’t too hard, you just need a series of six escalating scenes that offer choices to your players. They don’t need to be obvious choices.

No Comfort

You don’t like the myth at all.

In this case, you don’t need to use it! Just roll up a new myth and see if it works for you. There’s 72 myths in the book, and even more created by other people (I made 24 new Myths!), which means you have plenty to work with.

Okay, But I Didn’t Roll a Myth

Yep, this will happen when you roll a 4, 5, or 6 on the Wilderness Roll. There are two scenarios:

Landmark Hex

This hex has a cool landmark that you can describe and the players can interact with. The realm creation procedure should prepare you well for these landmarks, so don’t feel like they need to be complex, interdimensional hotels rising up out of a volcano. They can just be a potter’s hut on the edge of a forest. Everyone loves a nice potter who can tell them about the nearest myth.

If you really want to spruce up your landmarks, you can follow the Site Creation guidelines on page 15 to create a more in-depth exploratory location. I generally don’t do this, instead I save Sites for when I need a dungeon of some kind that holds a powerful relic of the realm.

No Landmark, Boring!

Sometimes empty hexes are nice, but you may decide that it would be cool to throw a red herring at the players. This means you are generating a scene that could feasibly be a myth omen, but actually isn’t. It kind of throws the scent off the trail while still creating a memorable situation for players to engage with.

Here’s a simple mechanism for creating these “fake omens” or otherwise weird and interesting scenes that could prompt player interaction:

Rolling a 4 on the Wilderness Roll

Use the Nature spark table (page 22) to generate some interesting Flora to cover a section of this hex. Have the Flora be near some kind of Feature too. When and if the players take a moment to study the Flora, use a Wonder “Theme” to generate an effect of the Flora.

Example: Aromatic Grasses near a Buried Brook that bring Pleasure and recall good memories when inhaled.

Rolling a 5 on the Wilderness Roll

As above, but this time generate some interesting Fauna near a Feature, and make the Fauna made out of a Wonder “Element”.

Example: Watchful Ungulates (large hooved animals, let’s imagine a hippo) grazing near a Colourful Seat naturally formed from a clay hill, and all the ungulates are made of Beasts (let’s imagine the big hippos are actually made of many tiny hippos).

Rolling a 6 on the Wilderness Roll

It’s time for a wandering person! Roll another d6: 1-2, it’s a Vassal | 3-4, it’s a Vagabond | 5-6, it’s a Knight. You can read about what these three types of people know on page 19 of the core rules. These people are encountered near an interesting Feature and right as you meet them, the Sky changes its “Tone” (just keep using those Nature sparks!).

Example: You spot a bard (Vagabond) hiding in plain sight behind a Spiked Monolith. As you approach them, the sun passes partly behind a mountain, covering the sky in a Bloody wash. The bard won’t stop twitching as they ask the directions to the nearest ruler’s keep.

Any Vassals come from the nearest Holding or Dwelling and are caught returning home after running an errand nearby (gathering food, talking to a friend, escaping danger, doing trade, etc.).

Any Vagabonds come from far away and are either looking for trouble or running from it. They won’t challenge the players, unless you think they should, and instead inquire (suspiciously) about where they can find riches (probably phrased as “nearest dwelling”) and/or a place of safety.

Any Knights come from the nearest Holding, serving it’s ruler on their court. They have been sent on a mission to receive guidance for the court from the nearest Seer, and would like directions from the players.

Final Thoughts

We went over how you might play through a Myth Omen when you roll one for the Wilderness Roll, as well as how you can spruce up the action after rolling a 4-6 in an otherwise empty hex.

I usually like to add extra details when the party has encountered two or three empty hexes in a row, that way I can keep the excitement and curiosity high. However, there are times when the party has a very specific goal in mind where I won’t mess with them during empty hexes in order to save time and help them reach their destination in a timely manner.

These tools are all about helping you manage how much you need to improvise in a given session, how much you feel like prepping beforehand, and what you can do if the game feels too stale and/or predictable.

Things on my radar:

• Dreaming Dragonslayer created a Mythic Bastionland Syllabus a while ago. You should check it out if you want to see what a subset of people are saying about the game!

• I watched Obsession and Backrooms at a theater this week! They are both worth watching if you like scary movies: 8/10.

  • Obsession was less scary, kind of like if you reversed Barbarian to be scary at the end and not the beginning.

  • Backrooms was very scary. I think it’s because of the way they did the camera recordings to make it really feel like you could be in the same position as the characters.

  • I might be biased because this was my first time actually going to the movies for a horror movie, so the surround sound really hit different.

• There are some really big Humble Bundle deals on ttrpgs right now, check them out if you haven’t seen them yet!

• Tavern Lore made a solo dungeon toolkit for Gloam. You could, of course, use it for any roleplaying game.

Some Context

The Ultraviolet Grasslands (UVG) is a weird science-fantasy mashup. It was written and illustrated by Luka Rejec and serves as a very pretty artbook and setting guide. The UVG is an expanse of wild ruins and strange biological phenomena. The goal of the setting is to allow players to traverse the UVG all the way from the Violet City to the Black City on caravans inspired by the Oregon Trail. In my case, the group’s goal is to assemble three Keys to the Stars so that they can build a space ship.

There is a rules system for an RPG inside the Ultraviolet Grasslands and the Black City, and it fits on one single page. I guess I could describe the system as a combination of FIST, D&D, and OSE, but in reality it’s more of a d20 fantasy game that combines your ability to make attacks and roll skill checks into “traits” which give you bonuses to dice rolls and maybe a passive effect beyond that.

My group is using the expanded system rules that were released in a beta version of the Vastlands Guidebook. The full version of these rules will probably come out soon-ish, since Luka just finished most of the writing and art.

The expanded rules make the game a lot easier to understand and give some further examples of what “traits” your character might pick up. There’s lots of other character oriented things in the book too, but we don’t really use much beyond a smattering of the equipment options and some of the spells (called “powers” in this game).

An example of a trait is Souljuicer - Read people’s intentions. Possess their bodies. Milk them of energies and information.

Whenever a player can describe their trait applying to a situation, they get +3 to their d20 rolls related to doing stuff in that situation. When characters level up, they can increase this bonus to +6 and then +9.

Things to Like

The Dice Rolls & Traits

Before running this game I had just finished a D&D 2024 campaign and was a little sick and tired of rolling d20s for everything. However, now that I’m well into this UVG game, I really think the d20 adds some fun to the game.

Being able to offset the variance of a big dice roll with your trait bonus (again, these are +3/+6/+9) makes it really cool when someone is prepared for a situation with a useful trait. This also means I can encourage my players to solve problems very creatively by looking at their traits to see what they could possibly get away with.

Players are encouraged to create their own traits in this game, which has led to lots of cool character concepts being formed. You also might think that this would leave people in different directions, but it’s actually helped my players form an relatively cohesive group that cares about the substances that make living beings “alive”.

I like this free-form style of play that favors creativity but also has pre-made traits in the book to fall back on. I think my players would enjoy the game less if they hadn’t seen some of the strong examples in the Vastlands Guidebook.

There are also other dice rolls that don’t get such big bonuses: Saves. When only luck will save a character they roll a d20 and try to beat a 13 or suffer the consequences of misfortune. This means almost any character is vulnerable to bad luck and powerful danger at any time in the game! So, even though my players are getting higher in level and have lots of cool traits, it doesn’t mean they can get out of every situation cleanly if luck isn’t on their side.

Hero Dice

UVG has a really cool “inspiration” mechanic called Hero Dice. These are d6s which you get at the start of a session and then again every couple hours. You can spend them to modify your dice rolls for the better, helping players succeed when they really, really don’t want to fail. Alternatively, you can spend Hero Dice to regain hit points, which helps when the only way to get hit points back normally is to do nothing for an entire week!

Hero Dice are also really useful because lots of the downtime actions in the UVG have tiered dice rolls where different numerical values correspond to better or worse effects. I tell my players what the next highest cutoff is and they can decide if its worth spending a Hero Die to get the next tier for haggling.

I think this is the most popular mechanic among my players. They love gaining and spending their Hero Dice because it makes them feel powerful and gives them a meaningful choice.

The Time Scale

UVG is a caravan-exploration-point-crawl setting. That means the players are constantly moving between locations and seeing cool landmarks. They also are buying and selling bulk loads of goods to fit on their large caravans. To help facilitate the scale of the player’s adventures, the game time is tracked using weeks instead of days.

Since we began the campaign, nearly over three months have passed in game time, which is about the same as my year and a half long D&D campaign (which started at level 1 and ended at level 12). Time isn’t slowing down for this group though, they’ve got placed to be and money to spend. I’m pretty certain we’ll see a year pass in game time before this adventure is over.

It’s not like we skip a lot of stuff with the shift in time scales though, because something interesting happens every week because of the framing of the weekly procedure. There is an encounter and misfortune each week that can affect the party and give them meaningful choices to make.

At the end of the week we make some notes about where the caravans ended up and determine where they head next. This creates a seamless loop that I’ve begun to enjoy.

The Creativity of the Setting

The UVG is really, really cool. There is something interesting around every corner and you can count on Luka to have drawn something truly inspirational on every page.

When I’m preparing my sessions, I often skim the book for bits of lore to throw into the game, particularly about the current destination of the group. Each destination has cool stuff to find and discover, interesting people to talk to, and weird things to happen to unlucky players. I like this a lot!

Science-fantasy is also my preferred genre of storytelling. I think I have a firm grasp on all the tidbits that make the combination interesting and cool. Being able to describe LED lights in addition to the skulls of dragons makes me happy.

Things to Dislike

The Layout & Writing

The UVG was not designed with the modern influences of Dolmenwood, Cairn, or Shadowdark to help inform its writing. Also, Luka is very particular about how he writes, and sometimes (usually, frequently, always) that writing can be hard to interpret because it’s lots of flavor and vibes and not very helpful to someone who just wants to know what the differences between oldtech and fantascience are.

The book is reasonably split into chapters about each destination in the UVG, but I’m not a fan of the use of plain text paragraphs for describing locations and information. I find it hard to skim for the genuinely useful information, and often I end up changing things so that I can actually understand what’s happening.

Having the change lots of things makes me sad, and I don’t like that I can’t always understand what Luka’s words are trying to convey about a person, place, thing, or idea. I know that Luka’s writing style is specific to him, and I don’t expect him to change, but I know that this is a big downside for my preferences in a setting guide.

Equipment Tags

Lots of the weapons and armor in the Vastlands Guidebook (also in the UVG, but there are less of them there) have these confusing little tags attached to them that add bits of tactical or strategical relevance. Oftentimes though, I just find these more trouble than their worth. Every single time someone picks up a new piece of gear they ask “what does intravenous mean?” or “what is reload again?”

Sure, this could just be a skill issue with us taking time to continue learning the system, but also I don’t know how much value the tags would add even if you did know what they did all the time.

Trait Passives

I like that traits give you bonuses to rolls. I don’t like that many of them give you a passive benefit, because that means my players want all of their future handmade traits to also have passive benefits. Sure, I like to make my own content for games, I’m a game designer after all, but I also like having some space in my brain for other things than helping balance the abominations handed to me by my players.

If there were more trait examples in the Vastlands Guidebook, I think this problem would be solved. If my players ran more games as GMs, I think this problem would be solved. As it is, I’m stuck with lots of questions about “I want to take a trait that does this thing, but I don’t know how exactly what to say for it...”

Grr...

Honestly this isn’t that much of a gripe, I just want to be lazy.

Final Thoughts

Okay, I mentioned only a few things I like and dislike so far about the UVG. In general, I think the core gameplay system is phenomenal, and one of the best chassis I’ve ever used to run a game. I also think that the game isn’t fully polished. Obviously we’re working with the beta version, but I’m not confident much will change when the full book comes out. Maybe I’ll be proved wrong though.

I don’t really think there’s much else I dislike about the game beyond what I mentioned, though there is plenty more than I love. The monetary and experience economics of the game are awesome, the quick monster stat table is great, and the ideas for trade goods the players might buy are really cool and thematic.

Would I recommend someone else buying and playing this game? I dunno, maybe look at when the Vastlands Guidebook is fully completed and see if they have a preview to look at first. The game is great, it’s not for everyone, and the setting is cool but occasionally hard to understand if you aren’t inside Luka’s brain.

Thank you as always for reading, see you next week!

Things on my radar:

• I really liked this post from David M about Player Engagement. It helped frame a lot of the insecurities I have about being a useful GM.

• The Mandalorian and Grogu was more entertaining than I expected: 7/10.

• Rewatched Dungeons & Dragons: Honor Among Thieves and I still think it’s a great movie: 8/10.

• I’ve started work on my June project. Not for a game jam submission this time, but it should be a fun little adventure.

Most of these weapons have high bonuses tacked on. If you like the idea of one of them, but don’t want to have a +2 or +3 weapon come out yet, feel free to reduce the bonus to whatever is OK for your game. Only one of the weapons has a spell attached to it higher than Tier 2.

You can roll on this list to pick a random blade (d10):

1. Calsum Reki

2. The Last Laugh

3. The Hydra

4. Life/Death

5. The Black Rendition

6. The Bloodspine

7. Empyrean Gladius

8. Calean

9. Harmony

10. Calisto

Calsum Reki, the Sealing Blade

A dark blade forged from an alloy of gold and silver with a sapphire embedded in the hilt. Within the gemstone, thousands of shifting figures can be seen milling about a pale city. Some are screaming.

Bonus. +3 greatsword.

Benefit. Once per day, when you kill a living creature with a soul, you can seal their soul in the sapphire. At any time, you can release a soul from the sapphire. When you do, you can ask the soul a question that it must answer truthfully to the best of its ability.

Curse. For every two souls you’ve sealed in the sapphire, the sword occupies an additional inventory slot.

The Last Laugh

Triangle-shaped and hollow, the blade looks more like a spearhead than a sword or dagger. The green inscriptions along the edge of the blade never fade, no matter how much it is sharpened.

Bonus. +2 dagger.

Benefit. You gain the Backstab ability if don’t already have it (see Shadowdark RPG Quickstart p. 22), and it deals +1 dice of damage.

Curse. Out of the corner of your eye, you always see someone laughing at you.

Sentience. Chaotic. Telepathy with wielder. Encouraging, jovial, and merciless.

The Hydra

Three-intertwining blades lock together to form a writhing sword. When swung, the blades rattle against each other with a roaring sound.

Bonus. For every 10 creatures slain with this sword, a new blade slithers out of the hilt to join the rest, providing a +1 bonus up to a maximum of +3.

Benefit. Once per day, you can extend the reach of the weapon from Close to Near as the sword blades lash out like the heads of a hydra.

Curse. You take double damage from fire.

Sentience. Chaotic. Telepathy with wielder. Many hissing voices, constantly bickering, hungry.

Life/Death

Two daggers, one straight-edged and silver, the other jagged and iron. Both have closed eyes engraved on their hilts.

Bonus. +2 daggers.

Benefit. You can make a DC 11 Wisdom check to cast Cure Wounds with the silver dagger. When you score a critical hit with the iron dagger, triple your damage dice for the attack instead of doubling them.

Curse. Each day, roll a d6. If the result is even, your Alignment becomes Lawful for the day. If the result is odd, your Alignment becomes Chaotic for the day.

The Black Rendition

A needle of shadow, four-feet from end to end, reflecting light with a distorted, yellow pallor. Some say the weapon was created to copy some greater, more powerful relic of the gods.

Bonus. +3 spear.

Benefit. You can make a DC 14 Intelligence check to cast Fold Space with the spear.

Fold Space. Tier 4, Duration: Instant, Range: Far. One creature you can see within the spell’s range is teleported into Close of you.

Curse. When you succeed your check to cast Fold Space, you take damage equal to your level.

The Bloodspine

A massive bone axe with a saw-tooth edge and black veins etched into its surface. You can feel a heartbeat from within the black metal haft.

Bonus. +2 greataxe.

Benefit. For every creature slain with the Bloodspine, it gains 1 charge. You can spend 10 charges to attack all creatures within Close.

Curse. If you ever have more than 10 charges, you must always try to attack the closest creature to you on your turn.

Sentience. Chaotic. Telepathy with wielder. Demonic, greedy.

Empyrean Gladius

Celestial runes run along the white rhomboidal blade from tip to hilt.

Bonus. +3 shortsword.

Benefit. Your first attack against a creature has Advantage and deals +1 dice of damage.

Calean, Assassin of Evil

A golden estoc with a filigree hilt depicting a scorpion chasing a cat around the tree of life.

Bonus. +3 bastard sword.

Benefit. You can make a DC 12 Wisdom check to cast Smite immediately after hitting a creature with the sword.

Curse. When you use the sword to slay a creature, you are assigned a sacred quest that you must complete within one month.

Sentience. Lawful. Vocally communicates from the scorpion filigree in Common. Righteous, passionate, lovestruck.

Harmony, Forged of Three Fates

This longsword sports a damascus pattern of three different metals from the Feywild: one turqoise, one black, and one blue.

Bonus. +1 longsword.

Benefit. You can make a DC 11 Wisdom check to cast Cure Wounds with the sword, or a DC 12 Wisdom check to cast Blind/Deafen, or a DC 11 Intelligence check to cast Charm Person.

Calisto, Sabre of the Silver Duelist

Forged by a master smith and an angel, holy magic runs through the Celestial and Gnomish runes on this dueling rapier.

Bonus. +2 longsword.

Benefit. When you challenge a creature to a duel and they accept, you gain a Luck Token.

Sentience. Neutral. Telepathy with wielder. Whispers, loves dueling.

Final Thoughts

I like converting my old creations to looser, less context-dependent versions of themselves that I could drag-and-drop into other games or single-session adventures. These posts are always fun for me to make, and I hope they help inspire your own creations!

See you next week!

Things on my radar:

• I had an article in Role Player’s Digest 5, you should check out the digest for more awesome reasources!

• Silver Nightingale released a Sci-Fi version of their One-Page Solo Toolkit, highly recommend.

• The New Millenium Bestiary is in production. This is going to be a cool monster book for DURF

The Hook

We’re at the heart of midwinter here in the Sister Cities and you, hardy adventurers, have been tasked with a deliver of utmost importance! Chief Baker Giorgio Carvallio has asked you to deliver his freshly baked snow-apple fritters from his bakery (the sign over the door reads: Welcome to the Erupting Pie) to the Prince of Mortal’s cathedral down the street (look for the Nogg stand! (Nogg is an Eggnog-like substance (and it’s really good))).

If you succeed in this daring (and perhaps deadly) venture, you will be rewarded with free baked goods for the next two weeks, as well as free room and board in the cathedral’s guest rooms.

Snow Apple Fritters. Delicate, hand-crafted, buttery. When you consume a lot of them, you feel complete. There are a total of 20 fritters.

But Wait

You’re not the only ones who want the snow-apple fritters, for, much to Giorgio’s chagrin, it’s a snow day today. That means the children of the Sister Cities have the day off from work, school, and other such activities so that they can go out and play in the snow. Of course, no adults allowed.

And they’re a wee-bit hungry.

You’ll have to survive the onslaught of fritter-starved children on your way to the cathedral.

A Quick Note

This adventure is about children and adventurers playing with snowballs. No one is intended to actually get hurt or be endangered during this scenario. Don’t hurt the children!

Running Up Mainstreet

When the adventurers have secured the snow-apple fritters and left the bakery, they can look down the street to see the Prince of Mortal’s cathedral up ahead. It’s only like 500 feet or so, no big deal. Then something happens:

A wet thwack to the brick building behind you alerts you to a child standing out on the snow-covered cobblestones. They can’t be older than thirteen summers, and have a scarf wrapped tightly around their face and neck. Laughing, the child turns tail and runs into one of the adjacent alleyways.

Ahead, more children slip in and out of alleyways, rolling snowballs between gloved palms and building snow barricades against the sides of buildings. Some of them are watching you, but most are watching the snow-apple fritters with a kind of crazed-greed. Maybe this delivery won’t be so easy after all?

The Street. It’s as long as you want it to be, criss-crossed by other streets and dark, snow-filled alleyways. Most of the shops and buildings are locked and closed, but you might find one or two that you can cut through. Each major intersection represents a battle against the Children. I’d aim for two-three of those.

The Children. Are all members of the Snowball Brigade, an (elite) group of urchins, youngsters, and kiddos who all love epic snowball fights. They really want those fritters. There are too many children to count, but probably between 8 and 10 at each major street intersection.

• The Snowball Brigade is led by Calvin the Captain, a human boy with more ambition than practical experience. He likes to shout orders and commands to his “troops” while bombarding his foes from behind a barricade.

  • “Brigade, do not give in until we’ve had those fritters!”

• The second-in-command is Margoska the Princess, an infernal-blooded princess who ran away from her tutors to play in the snow. She uses her limited knowledge of magic to propel batches of snowballs through the air while safely positioned on a roof.

  • “Don’t you dare tell Sir Veremy that I was here!”

• The glue of the group is Jal the Cannon, an orcish boy who hit his growth spurt early. He doesn’t entirely understand why everyone’s shouting and running, but he would love to try those apple fritters, pretty please. He’s strong enough to carry a snowman around and use it like a club.

  • “Does this mean I get to be captain now?”

Snowballs for Dummies

Here are some critical points for epic snowball fights:

• Making a snowball is trivial and takes no time.

• Throwing a snowball is easy but requires good aim.

  • Everybody knows how to throw a snowball; you can use physical or magical abilities to throw and aim a snowball.

  • It’s easy to throw a snowball nearby (30 feet), but hard to throw a snowball far away (more than 30 feet).

• Snowballs can be prepared and thrown in different ways:

  • Barrage. You can throw two snowballs at once, but aiming becomes hard.

  • Embiggen. Your snowball instantly Knocks Out its target, but it takes time to gather enough snow.

  • Calculated. Aiming becomes trivial and you can throw twice as far, but you might get Cold Fingers.

• Snow is cold. When you are hit by a snowball, you might get

  • Brain Freeze. Pause for a breather or stumble in a random direction.

  • Cold Fingers. Warm them up or else throwing a snowball becomes hard.

  • Knocked Out. Three strikes and you’re out.

• You could also choose to:

  • Build a Snowman. Provides cover, making it hard to hit anyone behind with a snowball.

  • Knock a Snowman Down. Mean and easy, but probably Knocks Out anyone standing behind it.

Finally, We Made It

At the other end of the street from the Erupting Pie bakery is the Prince of Mortal’s cathedral. Out front is a table set up with hot, steaming mugs of Nogg. Standing beside the table are two priests.

The Prince of Mortals. A deity of luck. Symbol is a gold coin. Priests wear amber robes.

• Beval. Young human man, curly hair. He hasn’t had any of Chef Carvallio’s apple fritters since he was a boy.

• Florica. Young half-elf woman, blue eyes. She knows all of the children in the Snowball Brigade by name, and their parents too.

If any of the snow-apple fritters survived the journey, Beval and Florica graciously thank the adventurers and share the remaining fritters among everyone present, including the children.

Afterwards, Calvin salutes the adventurers, Margoska’s tutors and maids escort her back to her palace, and Jal shakes everyone’s hands twice. The party gets free room & board at the cathedral and free baked goods for two weeks.

Final Thoughts

I cleaned up a lot of the verbiage for this little scenario. It’s not very complicated and it doesn’t take longer than two hours to have a good time with. I originally ran the adventure using D&D, but you’ll notice that I left out basically all of the mechanics. I wanted to favor the situation at hand rather than worry about exact numbers. Of course, I have the numbers, but they wouldn’t help someone who wanted to adapt this game using, say, Mausritter.

I hope you enjoyed the read and it gave you some ideas for how to make silly little scenes in your roleplaying games.

See you next week!

Things on my radar:

• I released a game last week! It’s a journaling game about managing a tavern, called From Dungeon to Table.

  • I’ve got two other projects in the works, and in June I’ll be starting a third. Look forward to more adventure modules and another small video game.

• Joseph R. Lewis has a series of short Shadowdark RPG zines coming to kickstarter.

• Witch Bolt released Marigold’s Bookshelf! It’s a cute little game where you listen to dungeon-synth-y music while exploring an alchemist’s cottage.

• I had the opportunity to run the Cairn adventure Seven Silver Spheres for some of my cousins. I don’t like how the adventure ends, but the rest of it was fun! I think it would work better if the players actually got some kind of reward instead of a sort-of gotch-ya moment.

  • I really like Pointless Monument’s other Cairn adventures though. Both the Ruin of Reputation and Fistful of Feathers seem much more exciting.

• I recently rewatched Smile and the first 45 minutes are still quite good and scary. The rest is whatever. 6/10. Smile 2 is much better and much scarier, by the way.

• Nope is a take on aliens I’d never thought of before. Great movie. 8/10.

If you’ve been following this blog for a month or more, you’ll probably have noticed that I frequently cite Sly Flourish’s resources. I really respect Mike Shea (of Sly Flourish) for his tips and strategies for making roleplaying games enjoyable for everyone at the table.

Just over a year ago I decided to switch my regular D&D prep techniques from megalomaniacal brainstorming to using the Eight Steps of the Lazy GM. This post is a reflection on using the eight steps and how it has interacted with roleplaying games besides D&D, and what twists I’ve used to make my prep serve my needs.

The key thing to think about: What is the minimum amount of work you do in order to feel prepared to run a game?

This isn’t an ad, just a reflection.

Summarizing the Eight Steps

The eight steps are designed to encourage you to spend your session preparation time wisely and to help reinforce your improvisational skills at the table. They work for me, and I’ve been encouraging new game masters to try them too.

Here are the steps:

1. Review the Characters

2. Create a Strong Start

3. Outline Potential Scenes

4. Define Secrets & Clues

5. Develop Fantastic Locations

6. Outline Important NPCs

7. Choose Relevant Monsters

8. Select Treasure & Magic Item Rewards

They are pretty self-evident, but you can read the article linked above if you want to find out more about how they work as a method of structuring prep (and improvising during play).

Include the characters in your notes and review them before each game. Focus on starting the game with something excited that hooks your players. Consider what events or situations might take place in your game. Write down some cool things for players to learn and make decisions based on. Describe interesting locations to explore or stumble across. Think about how to roleplay the NPCs the party meets. Write down a list of random encounters or design a special combat encounter. Look for cool loot that would excite the players.

Why I Use Them

I discovered Sly Flourish’s YouTube channel in Fall 2024, but I didn’t start using the eight steps until Spring 2025. My session prep had already undergone some changes in the Fall, and I thought it was working out okay. Well, it wasn’t, and in the winter I decided I needed to try something easier.

Originally, when I first started running games, I would write down exactly what would happen in the game (railroading!) and usually that meant I had way more material than I needed and any choices made were usually superficial (they gave the illusion of independence).

In my second campaign I swapped to just preparing a bunch of stuff each session that may or may not come up. For example, if the PCs were going to visit a library then I wrote up a bunch of random lore they might look into. What about the lore that I didn’t think about but they remembered from 8 sessions ago? What about the churro cart that they care a lot more about than my stupid library? Did they care that I had the names for all the librarians? No.

For my third campaign I changed pace from stuff to useful stuff. I did a ton of front-loaded worldbuilding before the campaign began (and used almost none of it) and each session I would spend a few hours coming up with cool stuff to slot in when it made sense. This actually wasn’t that bad in terms of gameplay, but it took a really long time to set everything up and that just didn’t work for my schedule. Also, it was becoming really stressful to not know if I had enough prepared to run a game, and what about all that stuff I wrote that never got used?

So I turned to the eight steps and they helped me with a few things that I care about:

• My prep only takes an hour per session. I don’t spend any longer than that unless I’m uploading assets to Owlbear Rodeo.

• My prep encourages me to improvise where, when, and how things happen rather than sift through notes and second guess myself.

• My prep has stuff for me to draw on if the pacing is getting dull.

• My prep gives me more useful and table-usable information than I think I had with any of my other methods.

I’ve found that this prep structure helps with my week-to-week campaign notes, and it helps me prepare adventures that I want to release to the public (such as Quest for the Vorpal Sword and Caverns of El). I like to include elements of the eight steps in my adventures to help motivate other GMs improvise and adapt to anything their players might choose to do that I didn’t give explicit instructions on (I generally give no explicit instructions, so I imagine this is quite useful).

In general, when getting an adventure ready to be released, I do my normal prep with the eight steps (I usually run the adventure around this time) and then I adapt those notes into something that is easily digestible for other GMs. For example, with Quest for the Vorpal Sword, I had a whole sheet of notes that I condensed into a trifold packet with instructions about how to run a D&D adventure, how to set up a time limit, and how each piece of the Vorpal Sword changes the overall quality of the weapon forged. This isn’t stuff I’d usually put in my prep notes, since I have an idea of how they work in my mind already. I only need to write down what I won’t remember during the session. For published adventures, I think it’s very important to separate out a series of clues and/or treasures that the GM can distribute throughout a session as they see fit. This way, all the information is presented upfront to the GM in an easily digestible way (bullet points of history, motivations, lore, etc.) and they can churn it into weird things the PCs interact with (i.e., a cracked mural of a many-pointed star labeled as ‘Hekattan’ in blood ink).

What Does My Prep Look Like Now?

I still use the eight steps, and I mostly stick to the outlined structure when I do my prep, but I also make changes based on the games I’m running.

• I run a lot of single session adventures, so I don’t need to Review the Characters as often as I might in a longer campaign.

• Scenes are a good step for managing pacing, so I use them to block out the start and end of each adventure (what calls the players to action & what threatens them from completing the job). I usually add the Strong Start as the first or second Scene. For campaigns, it’s harder for me to come up with a good Strong Start since we always end and start in different places. Sometimes something weird happening can work well, other times I have to think really hard about a call to action to draw folks in.

• It’s nice to have Secrets & Clues, and I usually make more than I would reasonably need. It’s easiest for me to come up with things to learn beforehand than to make them up on the spot.

• I’m still trying to figure out what I need to describe an interesting Location. Right now it’s vibes + room/place names and then I improvise the rest. It works. Dunno how I’ll improve it yet.

• On the other hand, I rarely need much to run an NPC for my games. A name is good enough to go on for an entire session, sometimes even longer than that. Having notes for what kind of voice the NPC uses is nice though, since I like to do that.

• Monsters come up less frequently for me than they might in someone else’s game. I don’t really enjoy combat as much as good conversations between players, so a couple monsters to drop in when the tension gets really bad is nice.

• I don’t always need random Treasure so much as an explicit Reward to give players for completing a mission.

For my campaigns, I usually used all eight steps together. They worked really, really well for D&D 2024, the Trespasser RPG, and a sandbox FIST game. In my ongoing UVG game, having a structure prep technique makes it possible for me to actually run the game. Without any scaffolding I would probably lose my mind trying to parse information from those psychedelic pages.

Using them with one shots and single session adventures typically has me cutting out Reviewing the Characters. Instead, I focus on taking really good notes when everyone builds or introduces their character so that I can factor their decisions into the game. Things that you want to pay attention to are: factions the PC is tied to, any role they wish to play in the adventure (cultist, mastermind, epic hero, etc.), and any weird trinkets or abilities they have (neuromancy, an abacus, etc.).

The Six Steps of Mythic Bastionland

I love Mythic Bastionland (MB), as you may know, so it gets to be the big example.

I found that when running MB I only needed five of the original eight steps, and I added my own extra sixth step. Fun fact: my prep usually took less than 30 minutes with this game!

1. Review the Characters remained useful (How much glory does everyone have? What Knight are they? What season/age actions have they taken? What allies or enemies have they made?)

2. Myths was a new step! (I tracked all six Myths in the Realm with a numbered list for easy randomization. What is their nearest Holding? How many omens have we seen?)

3. Secrets & Clues are always useful (Each Myth got at least one secret or clue about it, usually just a hint about the next omen to come up.)

4. NPCs kept coming up (I usually just pulled the Cast from each Myth into this section, and I added any characters the party knew in nearby Holdings. Seers also showed up here.)

5. Monsters were similarly useful (Same as the NPCs, I just grabbed these from the Myths. Sometimes I added something weird to encounter in an empty hex.)

6. Treasure sometimes showed up (There isn’t much loot in the Myths, so I wanted at least one interesting trinket ready if the party visited an empty hex or cool landmark.)

Scenes and Fantastic Locations didn’t really make sense to have in my notes. Scenes are taken care of entirely by the Exploration Procedure and Myth omens built into MB, and Fantastic Locations are only necessary when I know the party is heading into a more detailed location (of which there are very few; an example is in my notes below). Also, most of the “Fantastic Location” step is taken care of by the Realm Creation process before you start a game.

I prefer to interpret most Myth omens at the table rather than expanding them into something beforehand. I find that when I focus on improvising, the game sessions play far better for my tables. I think this is because each omen is quicker when you take the first interpretation that comes to mind and run with that. There are times when you understand a myth so well that you can interweave the omens even better than the book offers, but I also like the mysticism of finding something that makes very little sense when you first encounter it (why are these frogs making noises and giving us weird dreams? Does it really matter?).

You’ll notice I don’t mention the Strong Start step - that’s because it’s also taken care of by the Exploration Procedure by forcing players to make a bunch of decisions about where they go at the start of the game.

Here is an example of what my notes for MB looked like last summer:

You may notice some of these Myths aren’t in the original book! These are from my free supplement Myths Abound!

Final Thoughts

Over the last year I’ve run about 15 different systems with the eight steps as my preparation structure. They worked for all of them. Admittedly, the systems aren’t really that different from each other. It’s not like I’m playing Public Access, Troika!, Lancer, Blades in the Dark, and CAIN all at once. The eight steps work really well for dragon adventure games like D&D and the situational heists, mysteries, or infiltrations that you find in games like FIST.

I think that as I continue to expand my collection of roleplaying games, and continue to run them, I’ll get a better understanding of the true breadth of use of these eight steps. I can’t wait to find out!

Things on my radar:

• I loved reading this Mork Borg Duo supplement, particularly for the section on making your own cult!

• I played a round of Blacktail Harbor solo and had a good time journaling about a very random and sporadic mystery. My character died, but they sort of saved the day.

• This Vampire Survivors-style game called Loki’s Revenge is a great homage to the genre!

Some things to think about:

• How is a Dragon different from regular people?

• Why are Dragons scary?

• What makes this Dragon a potential ally?

What is a Dragon?

I took a mythology class a year ago at school, and my professor explained the concept of dragons as ‘monsters made up of all the things people found scary way back when’ (heavily paraphrased). Maybe I made some of that up, but it made a lot of sense to me that dragons, this crazy creature, were the combination of the most deadly, frightening, or majestic things that people wanted to talk about in their stories.

For example, you can tell that some early representations of dragons had body parts that might remind you of lions, bats, or snakes. Those are scary animals in the real world, so to make something even scarier in a story, you can combine all three into one being: call it a dragon.

Anyways, that all doesn’t really matter so much now, but it’s cool to contemplate how the idea of a dragon can be formed. In our fantasy stories, dragons come from all sorts of cultures and inspirations. I personally enjoy dragons with claws and wings and weird breath attacks. I also think dragons should be able to cast spells and shapeshift into people. Dragon’s shouldn’t be immortal, but they are exceptionally long-lived.

There are other ways to design your dragons though.

You might like dragons from Ursula K. Le Guin’s Earthsea books. Those dragons are ancient, powerful, and it means a lot to be able to speak to one of them and live.

You might like Smaug from the Hobbit. He is a hoarding dragon that would do anything to protect his treasure and lair. Smaug doesn’t really get out much, until he’s ready to burn a city to the ground. Not a very nice guy.

You also might like the dragons from How to Train Your Dragon, they are mostly friendly and have complicated, but natural, lives. They come in lots of different shapes; more than you could catalogue. People ride the dragons and befriend them often. Dragons aren’t much different than people, except they have tangible claws and sharp teeth and are sometimes really big.

What about dragons from D&D? Those are polychromatic and come in all different age groups and mindsets. They fall on an even split across the lines of law, neutrality, and chaos. They also have weird breath weapons and sometimes cast spells or shapeshift.

There’s a dragon in Damsel too. She’s old and weary and mourning. She’s also profoundly lonely. There aren’t many of her kind left nowadays. Do you like your dragons unique?

Some dragons talk and others don’t. Some dragons fly and others swim or dig tunnels beneath the ground. Some are really big. Some have two heads. What do your dragons look like? How do they act around each other? How do they treat the little folk (mortals, humans, etc.)? How old are they? How powerful are they? What do people think of dragons?

If you want to center an adventure or story on a dragon, it’s worth spending the time to answer a few of these kinds of questions to help bring your dragon to life.

Sardalis Icetongue

Adult White Dragon, in D&D terms.

Sardalis Icetongue claimed her lair deep within icy caverns of Coldstone Mountain. She wasn’t the first dragon to use this place as a lair, and she likely won’t be the last, but she’s determined to keep it to herself until her frozen heart eventually melts. Her scales are silver and white, and in the spring they change colors to light blue and pink; not that anyone would notice, since she hardly ever flies below the snowy clouds around her lair. She has lived for just over two centuries, and plans to live for many more.

If the monks and nuns and prophets around Coldstone could describe Sardalis in a single word, they would all say the same thing: greedy. Sardalis only cares about her lair and its vast treasuries of gold. Some say that the caverns of her lair make up the entirety of the interior of Coldstone, and if anyone were to venture within they could return with enough handfuls of gold to never work again.

This is true. You could go into the caverns and you most certainly would find a pile of gold without too much trouble. The tricky bit is escaping the lair without Sardalis catching you. She works entirely alone, but one dragon is usually all you need when it comes to shepherds and cheeky adventurers. Especially when every coin in her lair is enchanted with an icy curse: touch one gold dubloon and your feet and hands will become encased with nigh-unbreakable ice. Stealing from Sardalis takes an enormous amount of caution, preparation, and gall.

Alternatively, one might seek an audience with the she-drake. Sardalis accepts (she’s not the welcoming kind) visitors regularly into her icy halls to discuss routine trade opportunities. Supply Sardalis with an ample amount of gold and she’ll let you borrow a magical trinket or two (better make sure you return it, or she’ll put a permanent freeze on your bloodline). Trade her a flock of sheep and she might pay you a handful of gold coins. In recent years, Sardalis has learned that pampering is worth the money.

Kerubazia

Adult Red Dragon, in D&D terms.

Kerubazia lost her lair when she was a young dragon and has never given up the grudge she bears for it. Rather than hunt for a new lair, she instead used her polymorphic abilities to join human society as a bandit captain, first stealing gold and treasure from dragon hunters, then seeking and assassinating each member of the original adventurer crew that invaded her lair. Even after reclaiming every individual gold piece and art piece that she originally held (and much more), Kerubazia’s hunger for revenge has yet to be sated. She also kind of enjoys playing “human” in social circles.

As a dragon, Kerubazia has gold and red scales and a crest of nettle-like spikes around her throat. Her wings are torn and useless, a side-effect of being attacked during her youth. After so much time among mortals though, Kerubazia spends most of her time as a mature elven woman with gleaming red eyes and a fiery attitude. She is ingrained into the criminal underworld, managing illegal good production and shipping, as well as political assassinations and facades. You would never see her leading a projet though. Kerubazia prefers to stick herself right next to the person in charge: secretary to the head executor of a bank, the advisor to this city’s governor, the companion of a renowned magician. No one ever looks twice.

Except, maybe, speculative adventurers who find the patterns in her activities, and get a draconic sense from her jewelry, speech, and taste. You also might be clued in to her newfound obsession: locating and wielding the Crown of the Celedrax. Wearing the crown would anoint her as the Celedrax, or Queen of Dragons, Empress of the Sky, The Chosen Comet. Not a bad title. Perhaps adventurers could be useful in finding the crown for her, then she can show the world that she is truly the greatest dragon of all time.

Final Thoughts

We looked at some ideas to help you identify your favorite dragons, as well as how to make your dragons stand out in your world. Then I gave a couple examples of dragons that I have incorporated into my own game worlds.

Dragons are great villains, allies, rivals, opportunities for treasure, opportunities for political intrigue, and schemers. How will you use a dragon in your next game?

Things on my radar:

• I’m hoping to add Dweomer into my everyday vernacular.

• Liminal Horror worked out as a great horror game. We loved the system for the little one shot I ran last weekend.

• Now I’m looking for a game that fits the vibe of a true mystery game. First impression is that my choice no longer matters.

• The Lair of the Dusk Witch has a hilarious post about a new spell that most people can learn!

• Occultronics wrote about making consumable items more enticing to use sooner rather than later by adding permanent effects!

• Beau Rancourt has a very cool post on a Survey of Overland Travel and I find it very interesting to learn about the effectiveness of each system when it comes to communicating rules, costs, and optimal choices.

• Dreaming Dragonslayer made a nifty ceremony for knighting squires with the oath for Mythic Bastionland!

So, what is the framework? I call it Want-Have-Sacrifice. The words came to me in a dream, but they were probably inspired by all the blog posts I read about characterizing NPCs and developing your character’s backstories through play rather than before the first session.

What Does Your Character Want?

Okay, this is (maybe) the hardest of the three frames. You need to quickly generate a goal or desire for your character. There are situations where this can develop over time, but in general I find it easier to have one as soon as you roll up the character.

How might you decide what your character wants though?

1. Your GM might tell you that you and your fellow adventurers seek the lost memory shards of Xaldynios Ossndar - OK, you want those memory shards!

2. Your friends might tell you that they want to find and slay a dragon to equip themselves in draconic armor - OK, you also should seek something tangential to dragon slaying. You might also want the armor or maybe you want a dragon slaying vorpal sword.

3. You might roll on a table of suggested goals (roll d6):

   1. Restore your family name (see Family Ties).

   2. Unearth a lost magic item (see Magic Items and 12 More Magic Items).

   3. Found a stronghold or safe-haven on the borderlands (see Levels High and Low).

   4. Retire with more money than you can count (see Wasting Money in the UVG).

   5. Join a powerful faction and follow their goals (see Two Rival Factions or Three Twisted Gods).

   6. Defeat your rival.

4. You might not want to know your goal right away - this is OK too! It means you have to do some guesswork for what motivates you, but an easy solution I’ve found is using the traditional alignment system (as seen in D&D)!

   1. Do you want to obey the law?

   2. Do you want to help other people, even if it puts you in harms way or in a bad position?

   3. Do you think you could spare an enemy’s life?

   4. Would you agree to unleash an elder entity if it meant you would become its champion?

What Does Your Character Have?

These are the assets available to your character (and maybe your party). You can figure this out as you make the character, usually, and by asking questions of your GM. Think of them as points of leverage in conversations and useful tools during exploration. These are things you can use to overcome obstacles. They might also become things you are willing to sacrifice.

Here’s my checklist for deciding what I have:

1. I look at my character sheet. Is there anything on there that I added to my inventory that might be useful?

   1. Take note of any magic items or spell books, those are always useful - especially if you can trade them for information, safety, or a favor later (we’re ignoring their combat uses in this post).

   2. Look for weird objects that seemingly have no use. If you’ve played Knave or Durf or Cairn or Mausritter you’ll know what I mean. What can you do with a bag of bees? Who knows, but it might come up!

   3. Money in your pockets is money that can be spent. You can buy lots of things: safety, security, and sustenance. Consider how valuable your treasure is in case you can trade it for something else, like passage through a deadly gulch, or the true name of a devil. If you never spend your money then it is just wasting space.

2. I look through my notes. Have I recorded any information that would be relevant to the situation or generally useful? This is stuff like the true name of a devil, or the location of a secret pass through the mountains, or the concept of a powerful spell. These are all pieces of information that someone else might want that you have to offer.

   • This option is easy if you take good notes. Patchwork Paladin has some tips on how to do so, at least as a paranormal investigator.

   • You might have access to information you as a player don’t know!

     • This can come from factions you are a member of, backgrounds you have, or skills you’re trained in. When in doubt, just ask your GM if you know anything about the Secret Society of Wonderful Wizards!

What Would You Sacrifice?

What in the wide world would you get rid of, lose, abandon, destroy, or forsake in order to achieve, gain, or acquire what you want. This is often something that you can decide in the moment, and it will mostly only come up during those hard questions.

Sometimes it will be easier to decide what you’re willing to sacrifice; questions like “do you want to rest for the night” are the easy ones. Hard questions include things like “Only one of you can escape the volcano. Which of you helps the other out of the cave mouth before the lava surges over you?”

Another way to think about what you’re willing to sacrifice is what do you care about?

• Material goods: magic items, weird items, money.

  • How much is this information worth to you, in cash?

  • Will throw your bag of bees at the ogre to distract it?

  • Would you trade your vorpal sword to end the war?

  • You would find more treasure if you enter the dragon’s lair.

• Abstract goods: information, people, reputation, safety.

  • You have the buried treasure map those pirates seek.

  • You’ll disgrace yourself if you surrender this fight.

  • You might trigger a trap if you open the sarcophagus.

  • Your allies may be put in a bad situation if you can’t make peace with these dreadful goblins.

  • You could rescue the prisoner, but it would risk alerting the guards.

Thinking about what risks you are willing to take, what the consequences of those risks might be, and what you are OK with losing as a result of those consequences is important when roleplaying your characters. Having a couple examples in the back of your mind will make those hard questions easier to answer, and the easy questions a breeze.

If this is really tricky, you might consider writing some example on the back of your character sheet:

• I would sacrifice myself if it meant saving another person, any person.

• I would rather not lose any of my gold, else I won’t be able to pay off this debt.

• Any information I can learn about the Shadow Lords is worth more than anything I currently possess.

Final Thoughts

What do you want?

What do you have?

What are you willing to sacrifice (to get what you want)?

There you have it: the Want-Have-Sacrifice framework for roleplaying games. Use it as you wish!

Things on my radar:

• A new issue of the Role Player’s Digest is out! I recommend taking a read or skim through the articles.

• I’ve been reading through Liminal Horror and Eldritch Instinct while trying to decide which I want to use for a haunted house adventure.

• Wraithlands looks like a cool game.

• Golem Productions wrote an interesting post about using Turn-Based vs. Narrative Exploration.

• Ways Unseen released a mini map pack, great for tiny dungeons.

• Valeria Loves has an interesting post on how to prepare a game (of D&D). My favorite part is the advice on developing random encounter tables.

I first saw this idea in Sly Flourish‘s hero tier reward, Crypts of Karigulon, a ShadowDark adventure designed for tight adventures run during gaming conventions. The adventure is a classic dungeon crawl through an ancient crypt, however you have a real-life timer for when the crypts collapse in-game. This distinction is useful because it gives the players at your table a concrete idea of time ticking away with each of their actions, while also ensuring that you don’t run an overly long adventure.

Quest for the Vorpal Sword is another example of a timed adventure. You can check it out for free on my itch page!

Setting Up a Timed Adventure

If you want to try this strategy, you need three things:

1. An adventure with a time-sensitive goal, and

2. A specific time limit.

3. A FINAL SCENE.

Time-Sensitive Goals

The first of these can be tricky to decide at first, but once you come up with a couple ideas they start to flow a lot quicker and easier. Your time-sensitive goal is ideally something that players can progress over time without needing to do every little thing in order to succeed.

For example, in Crypts of Karigulon, the PCs goal is to collect as many magical relics as possible (total of 6) in their time limit before the crypts collapse and swallow everyone and everything still inside.

Ideally, each percentage point that players progress the goal is also a percentage point of success chance in the FINAL SCENE. As in, each magical relic gives you a useful spell in fighting the werewolves awakened by the collapsing crypts.

Some examples of good time-sensitive goals are:

• Recover the lost memory shards of Xaldynios Ossndar and his mining company before the Glass Caverns are swallowed by a rampaging purple worm.

• Find all the inscribed rods of the wrecked merchant caravan before their true owners come searching.

• Harvest the Purple Crystals growing beneath the Axe Lord’s Barrow to make medicine for a vile plague.

• Translate the occult sigils littered around the Pale Moon Ruins before the convergence of the Demon Legions.

• Assassinate the corrupt nobles staying at the Camp of Nine Houses before the next Emperor is chosen.

• Find and explore the hidden groves in the Iraian jungle before an ancient enemy detects your presence.

• Find and save each member of a mercenary group from the terrors of the Quartzine Rift before it loses stability.

• Locate the fragments of navigation software from a derelict ship before scouts of the Red Empress come to scan the debris.

• Infiltrate Overseer Quani’s space station and secure necessary assets from his office to get passage into the adjacent star system. Additionally, you have the optional goals of rescuing captive refugees, hiring a star-dragon mercenary, and replacing Quani with a sleeper agent.

When you prepare these types of adventures, think less about “scenes” you want to have happen and more about what “situations” are going on in the general area. Things like what places are guarded, what secrets are kept here, who would try to stop the players, and what interesting NPCs are around are very, very useful.

Time Limits

The specific time limit is the easiest to figure out; you just decide how long you want the adventure to take. For single-session adventures I usually prefer 3 hours for my time limit; for my campaigns I prefer 4 hours so that people have more time to talk to each other.

The Final Scene

With your time limit decided, subtract 45 minutes from the total. This is when you bring out the FINAL SCENE. Your final scene can be anything, really, but in a lot of roleplaying games it works well as a cool boss fight of some kind. It could also be a chase scene, a tricky puzzle, a tense negotiation, or a skill challenge.

When you run your adventure, tell your players the absolute time limit, i.e. 3 hours, that they have to accomplish their time-sensitive goal. Then set a timer out that they can all see, so that they can watch the seconds tick away. On your own, either set a second timer or watch the first one carefully for when there is 45 minutes left. That’s when you interrupt everything else going on and introduce the FINAL SCENE.

During the FINAL SCENE the players are either trying to A) escape a bad situation or B) finish what they came here to do. I generally prefer option A) because it is usually easier to accomplish. Sometimes though, your time-sensitive goal encourages players to stick around and see things through.

If players were sent into an area to recover as many items as possible, they are probably going to be doing option A) in the FINAL SCENE as you introduce a big threat to their plans. Something like a swarm of locusts that chase them around a abandoned mansion does the trick quite nicely.

If players were sent on a mission where the quantity of things they do increases their chance of victory for their goal, like each corrupt noble assassinated increases the chance of the correct Emperor being chosen, then the FINAL SCENE might involve the players watching the Emperor be named with any remaining nobles stepping forward to intervene, giving the players a chance to save the Emperor one last time.

No matter what you do, I find that the more over the top and crazy the FINAL SCENE is, the better these adventures work. By beginning with a concrete task with measurable progression and timing, then ending with a strong threat to their goals, you end up developing an incredibly memorable adventure for your friends.

Final Thoughts

We talked about writing timed adventures to create compact and memorable scenarios for your friends. Remember, with these adventures you should be developing a “situation” rather than a linear path. Grab a map, scribble some collectibles on it, and give the players a reason to find those collectibles before the Tarrasque finds them.

Hope you enjoyed this post, see you next week!

Things on my radar:

• I’m making my way through the Discworld audiobooks and they continue to amaze. Equal Rights is fantastic!

• I’m thinking about the different strategies we GMs can use to run games for different age groups than we are used to.

• Beau Rancort has an entertaining post about the Arden Vul megadungeon, saying their campaign could not sustain the vast quantities of treasure available on level 4. What I learned from the post is that you need to take some time to consider how much XP you make available in your modules.

Some questions to consider:

• How much information is “just enough” to run a deity in your game?

• What are the weird ways in which followers of a deity reflect the entity they worship?

• What does it take for an entity to be named a deity?

• What alignment does each of these deities give off? You might think of Law, Neutrality, Chaos or Good vs. Evil.

Together, as One

The Twisted Three were a group of scholars and researchers of the Old Empire. They sought ancient lore, secrets, and rituals that would serve the Emperor and his Right Hand. Over time though, the Twisted Three grew more self-interested in how to amass power for themselves. They learned of a horrible ritual from an ancient evil known as the First Vampire. This ritual taught them how to siphon divine energy into their mortal forms. All it cost was an angel’s soul. And their humanity, of course.

They weren’t always known as the Twisted Three, especially not in the time of the Old Empire. Back then they were simply Szet, Tises, and Thune. None of them ruled over the others; they were intellectual equals as far as any of them were concerned. The pursuit of infinite knowledge called to each of them, at first because they wanted to serve their Empire, but later because their greed became self-centered.

Steps 1-100 of Ascension

The ritual learned from the First Vampire is known as Threading Wings to Heart and Soul. Anyone who reads about it or studies the ritual itself will recognize it as utterly profane and evil. Nothing good could ever come from performing it.

To perform Threading Wings to Heart and Soul, you need to:

1. Acquire a divine being equivalent to an archangel.

2. Drain the divine being of its soul and magic using a combination of unholy devices and strange seals (described in detail in the ritual’s original manuscripts).

3. Deposit the divine soul within your mortal form.

4. Tether the divine soul to yourself so that it cannot escape, ever.

5. Survive the healing process.

When the ritual was done, the tethering of divine essence to mortal beings caused Szet, Tises, and Thune to change into Greater Beings. They called themselves Gods because they bore divine might, knowledge, and near-immortality. At the climax of this mutation, the First Vampire fled the scene and betrayed the Twisted Three: speaking to a fourth archangel about the ritual.

The Bad Stuff

The archangel, now called Scour, was too late to stop the ritual. She has sworn eternal vengeance on the Twisted Three for slaughtering her friends. Scour has bladed wings and fights using a combination of silver spears and arcs of golden light. Not even death will stop her from carving her friends’ souls from the bodies of the Twisted Three. Unfortunately, the Twisted Three is exceedingly good at evading her. It would take external intervention to bring them together for a drawn out battle.

With the ritual complete, word quickly spread of the ascension. Eventually it reached the divine pantheon of real deities, who were rather miffed about the whole situation. Thune decided to smooth things over by betraying Szet and Tises. In exchange for Thune being forgiven for murdering celestials, she would use her newfound power to prevent any further attempts at divine ascension.

Through spreading rumors and perhaps some divine influence by the Trickster God, the three new deities gained divine names. In her betrayal, Thune also declared Szet and Tises to be the Twisted Two for their corrupt ways.

• Szet was named the Unbidden Eye, God of Sight.

• Tises was named the Unspoken Tongue, Goddess of Speech.

• Thune was named the Seraph, Goddess of Health.

In dark circles, where the Unbidden Eye and Unspoken Tongue’s voices are heard better than others, the Seraph is instead called the Untouched Flesh. Though very few have made the connection between the Seraph and the Twisted Two, those who do refer to the trio as the Twisted Three instead.

The Unbidden Eye

Formerly Szet.

(When describing these deities, they all appear as giant-sized)

Appearance: The Unbidden Eye appears to his followers as a cyclopean giant cowled by gray robes. He never speaks, instead he communicates through visions of distant realms and objects.

Symbol: Concentric circles surrounding strange eyes are generally considered to symbolize the Unbidden Eye, though some scholars debate whether obsidian eyeballs would be a better mark of the deity.

Followers: mutate over time into monstrous hybrids with many eyes and slimy gray skin, eventually becoming something like a Nothic as their pursuit of knowledge consumes their original form. There is no definite “leader” among the Unbidden Eye’s acolytes. Most followers of the Unbidden Eye are solitary creatures, keeping to themselves, and rarely forming into groups. They tend to dwell in ancient ruins, sewers, or abandoned houses where they can focus on their studies.

Goal: to witness all things in the universe.

Tactics: placing “eyes” everywhere so that no secret goes unseen.

Ire: through an innate connection, the Seraph constantly places wards and seals around the Unbidden Eye and the Unspoken Tongue, preventing them from returning or leaving the material plane to visit other worlds and their followers.

Prophecy: a divine leader will rise up to reunite followers of the Eye and Tongue, drawing them from darkness into light to resolve the tension between the Twisted Three.

Gaining Reputation with the Unbidden Eye and his followers might involve:

• unearthing ancient secrets (the more esoteric the better)

• destroying Seraph-marked wards preventing travel/sight

• spying on someone or something important

• keeping a valuable secret from someone who would benefit from learning it

• uniting the solitary followers of the Unbidden Eye

Rewards from the Unbidden Eye and his followers could be:

• visions of a secret location

• knowledge of impending doom

• strange mutations that aid in perceptive abilities

• an invisible friend who sits on your shoulders and whispers in your ear

Acting against the Unbidden Eye could cause:

• unfortunate rumors about you to be spread

• temporary or permanent blindness

• illusions or shadows stalking you and your friends

• temporary or permanent memory loss

The Unspoken Tongue

Formerly Tises.

(When describing these deities, they all appear as giant-sized)

Appearance: The Unspoken Tongue appears to her followers as a black robed woman surrounded by a shifting mass of black tendrils and smoke. She communicates almost entirely using telepathy. Very rarely will she use the true unspoken tongue.

The unspoken tongue, as a language, sounds like an overlapping chorus of every language in the universe combined with a few other odd sounds (glass shattering, water trickling, volcanoes erupting). Anyone who hears this language is able to perfectly understand the speaker and feels as though more than just idea, emotion, and intent are being communicated. Additionally, should the Unspoken Tongue deity wish it, anyone who hears the unspoken tongue language spoken may have their head explode.

Symbol: Inky tongues drawn on pale scrolls typically mark locations and books tied to the Unspoken Tongue. Statues and sculptures related to the deity will generally just include an uncomfortable amount of barbed tongues. Many scholars disagree on the true origins of the deity versus when the language was first used. Some consider the unspoken tongue to be the first language, and the Unspoken Tongue was the first deity to be willing to share its knowledge with others.

Followers: paint the insides of their mouths black to mask the shriveling and wilting of their tongues. They generally refuse to speak, since some have been blessed (or cursed) with the knowledge of the unspoken tongue language and blessed (or cursed) to forget their native spoken languages. If they do need to communicate ideas without risking a head explosion, acolytes of the Unspoken Tongue have all learned a form of sign language. Most people are afraid of the acolytes, believing they deal in horrible sacrificial rituals.

The leader of the Tongue’s acolytes is a clerical woman, Monaca de Laga, who has many strange piercings and short black hair. She leads the acolytes towards a better future, hoping to one day make the practice of researching ancient or forbidden languages a less reviled subject to the commonfolk. Monaca does not appreciate apprehension and makes her decisions quickly and without regret. She has no time to waste on the past.

There usually aren’t more than 2d4 acolytes of the Unspoken Tongue in a given city, and far less in towns or villages. On a journey, you might meet a pilgrimage of 1d6 acolytes searching for a linguistically interesting ruin, or a shrine to the Unspoken Tongue. Traveling acolytes might be accompanied by 1d2 mercenaries, if the acolytes can afford it.

Acolytes typically wield kris daggers (the ones with the wavy blades) and light armor when traveling. They’d prefer not to fight, instead trying to talk their way out of a bad situation. However, if the Unspoken Tongue wills it, they are not afraid of using their mastery over language to fry someone’s brain.

Goal: to read everything in the universe; to master communication.

Tactics: silence, patience, appearing weak so that they can move when the time is right.

Ire: through an innate connection, the Seraph constantly places wards and seals around the Unbidden Eye and the Unspoken Tongue, preventing them from returning or leaving the material plane to visit other worlds and their followers.

Prophecy: a divine leader will rise up to reunite followers of the Eye and Tongue, drawing them from darkness into light to resolve the tension between the Twisted Three.

Gaining Reputation with the Unspoken Tongue and her followers might involve:

• recovering ancient or forbidden textual artifacts (books, tomes, scrolls, tablets, inscriptions, etc.)

• destroying Seraph-marked wards preventing travel

• discovering a new language

• finding a way to understand and communicate with a foreign entity

• helping spread the benefits of linguistic research

Rewards from the Unspoken Tongue and her followers could be:

• the secret password to a location, puzzle, or lockbox

• rapidly learning a new language

• knowledge contained in a book lost to time

• the ability to speak a word or two in the unspoken tongue language (perhaps granting a cool spell effect)

• a loyal, linguistic and clerical follower

Acting against the Unspoken Tongue could cause:

• unfortunate rumors about you to be spread

• temporary or permanent inability to form coherent sentences

• your tongue consistently betrays you and your friends

• temporary or permanent memory loss

The Seraph

Formerly Thune. Also known as the Untouched Flesh, or the Unbroken Skin.

(When describing these deities, they all appear as giant-sized)

Appearance: The Seraph appears to her followers as a white-winged angelic figure. She speaks frankly and plainly, and values absolute neutrality over all else.

Symbol: Interlinked silver circles are often tied to the Seraph, though bladed wings are sometimes used as well. It is unclear if the Seraph has modeled her divine self after Scour, the archangel who swore vengeance on the Twisted Three for murdering her friends.

Followers: generally normal priests, though many of them are more afraid of the Seraph than they like to admit. The Seraph commonly sears away any of the inner clergy who might be interested in revealing the secrets of healing and medicine to someone “unworthy”.

Most priests wear white robes with silver ribbons. Some of the high-ranking priests will wear a blade-winged medallion as their holy symbol, rather than the typical interlocked rings. Many priests drawn to the Seraph are drawn because they wish to learn how to heal people. Many priests who go down this path regret it, realizing how much the secret knowledge of various healing spells and rituals is coveted by the Seraph’s churches.

The recognized leader of the Seraph’s holy clergy is Draga Ebonheart, an divine-blooded tiefling (half-devil) who spends her time pilgrimaging between Seraphic temples and silencing those who would spread the secret knowledge of healing stolen from the Seraph. Draga is imposing, emanates an aura of fear and awe (at the same time), and has dipped her twisting devil horns in gold. She doesn’t usually waste her time with new acolytes, instead she concerns herself with getting to know anyone who has been granted the secret gifts of healing knowledge (to make sure they don’t also need to be silenced in the name of justice).

The average convent of Seraphic priests usually houses 2d6+3 priests, and 2d6 acolytes. Their chapels are defended by 1d6+4 knights trained to protect the secrets of healing. It is rare that more than one priest is required to travel (outside of a really powerful healing ritual, which takes 1d6+1 priests), and when any priest does travel they take an entourage of 1d4 acolytes, 1d2 knights, and 1d6 lesser guards. No one wants to get caught by bandits on the road and have to reveal the secrets of healing.

Goal: to heal everyone who needs to be healed, to let die anyone who needs to die. Maintain an equal balance of life and death.

Tactics: secrecy, holy seals, cultish organizations, melting someone where they stand.

Ire: the Seraph has never been able to forgive herself for what she, the Unbidden Eye, and the Unspoken Tongue did to the three archangels who died to raise them to godhood. She believes that justice must come eventually, but is unwilling to be the one to decide when to act. In the meantime, she obsesses over constraining the Eye and Tongue so that they cannot amass enough power to rise against her. This obsession makes it substantially harder for the Seraph to rationally focus on being a good deity.

Prophecy: one day, Scour will be brought before the Twisted Three and given the chance to make right what was done wrong so long ago.

Gaining Reputation with the Seraph and her followers might involve:

• performing a healing ritual for someone who desperately needs it

• refusing to perform a healing ritual for someone who desperately needs it

• spending laborious time studying diseases and medicine

• recovering a lost reagent useful in creating healing salves, medicine, or diseases

• keeping a valuable secret from someone who would benefit from learning it

• placing or strengthening wards against the Twisted Two

Rewards from the Seraph and her followers could be:

• much needed healing at a thematically appropriate moment

• the secret ritual of disease curing

• divine weapons useful for protecting the secrets of healing

• an extended lifespan

• large safe havens to rest and recuperate in after adventures

• knowledge of an ancient plague that left a ruined city (with lots of treasure)

Acting against the Seraph could cause:

• immediate death by holy fire

• drawing the attention of Draga Ebonheart

• Seraphic knights to hunt you down

• an untimely illness to befall you

• temporary or permanent memory loss

Final Thoughts

Big long post about three deities and a little bit of background knowledge to see my thought process. I used these three deities in my most recently concluded D&D campaign and I loved them! My players thought they were each very cool and had great flaws. Near the end of the campaign they were debating pretty strongly about helping the archangel Scour attack the Twisted Three, but eventually they decided to try a bit of diplomatic negotiation instead.

Fun tip: it can be shockingly risky to ask a deity, “Do you like your job?”

I know this was a longer post, so thanks for making it all the way to the end! See you next week!

Things on my radar:

• I’m playing a Daggerheart adventure today! Yippee!

• I really like roleplaying games that give players playbooks for their classes. This helps me refine my character concept and play them at the same time. I recommend checking out Powered by the Apocalypse games or Forged in the Dark games for examples of these.

• I was able to run Sly Flourish’s adventure Grotto of the Grandfather last weekend. It’s designed to be easily playable at game conventions (I found them equally useful at tabletop club meetings). The adventure was very fun! Makes me want to design my own adventures in that style...

• I finished listening to the Rosamund Pike narration of the Wheel of Time books 1 through 4. She’s very, very good at it. Now I’ve moved on to Discworld and the narrators are kicking space turtle butt. Highly recommend.

The UVG is a science-fantasy Oregon Trail-meets-Monopoly roleplaying game. Your goal as a player is to survive the grueling trails and roads that connect Destinations in a chaotic wilderness all while mastering the trade economics between distant peoples. Each player is in charge of their own caravan of beasts, wagons, vehicles, pets, and friends. Together they make up a mobile caravanserai that collectively goes on adventures in the Ultraviolet Grasslands.

(My group has a more specific goal to build a spaceship and leave the planet, but that’s a story for another day.)

The UVG Rewards

By looking at how a game rewards players with experience and level-ups, we can determine what type of gameplay is expected and encouraged. In Nuclear Angels, characters gain new abilities by rolling dice and failing. In Old School Essentials, characters level up when they collect gold and kill monsters. In the UVG, players (not characters, but players) gain experience by doing any of the following:

1. Exploring cool locations (called Discoveries)

2. Going on quests (often assigned by NPCs)

3. Being a fun person

4. Attending a session

5. Returning treasure to civilization (I personally do not use this one)

6. Wasting Money (aka Carousing)

(Leveling and Growth, Vastlands Guidebook (beta), p. 30)

When I was describing the UVG to my friends before the campaign, I said:

“This is a game about amassing unspendable quantities of wealth and wasting it on junk you do not need.”

My favorite of the six ways to earn experience is the sixth option: spending money in order to gain experience and nothing else. This is important for the players because they can earn a lot of money by trading expensive goods between Destinations in the UVG. Over time they’ll amass more money than they can spend on upgrading their character’s equipment or caravan, and eventually it becomes important to max out their character experience above all else.

In other old school games (the ones about collecting treasure for XP, usually) I find that there isn’t always a lot of stuff to spend your money on. For example, in Old School Essentials you might run out of things to purchase after your second dungeon delve because you’ve gotten all the cool mundane armor and weapons and now just need some uncraftable magic items. Your GM might invent a way for you to spend money on magic items, or you might pay for a million retainers or mercenaries to fight wars for you, or you might literally build a castle. All three of those options feel like stuff for late game Domain Management (see my post Levels High and Low for more on this topic). Regardless, the book doesn’t really have great solutions for your influx of cash.

The UVG has more than OSE, including the spend money for experience option, but it doesn’t have everything. Plus, some people might not want to stick to those types of activities for experience and may want something even weirder, sillier, or wackier to try. This led to the fabrication of 10 Ways to Waste Money in the UVG, a bunch of options for wasting money on things you do not need in exchange for a little bit of experience and a lot of aura.

10 Ways to Waste Money in the UVG

In the UVG, wasting money is paramount to the caravanner experience. Some caravans waste so much money that they unlock a higher mental state, ascending into the sky to become whistling clouds.

The following 10 objectives can be thought of like achievements in a video game. When you complete them, you get a small, almost insubstantial, reward. You can only complete each objective once. You may grant yourself a unique title related to the objective as well, and force others to use this title when addressing you, such as “The Master of Odd Fruits” (attained by wasting $5,431 on creating a monopoly on the odd fruits trade good).

If you don’t know how much money to waste on an objective, $2,000 + 1d6 x $1,000 is a good ballpark estimate. Every time you complete an objective, you immediately gain 1d6 x 100 XP. Very few of these objectives may have beneficial (or negative?) side-effects after the XP gain.

1. Monopoly. Spend at least $5,000 on sacks of a single type of good across at least 3 destinations before selling any of it.

2. Executive. Finance the entire “political” campaign of a less-than-optimal candidate.

3. Veteran. Throw money at refugees of war (for example, aiding the refugees of the Hundred-Fold Legion’s porcelain drone draft).

4. Adopt a Road. Adopt one of the few roads in the UVG.

5. Voyager. Finance the creation of an Other Gate (a teleportation portal to this plane or the next) with the post-master builders, Djuram and Sakraboldt.

6. Walking Cemetery. “Employ” significantly more Undead creatures than Alive creatures in your service (at least 12 bodies).

7. Padishah. Employ a venerable legion of aids to maintain a near-permanent sense of luxury, even on the road.

8. Shepherd. Collect at least 10 local varieties of mules to carry sacks of goods.

9. Disneyland? Visit every ride in an amusement park or circus run by the golems or post-mortals of Long Ago.

10. Suspicious Grant. Fund the research of a doctor, scholar, or master wizard.

Another way to waste money (that I did not think up) is proposed in the UVG itself:

• Fine Dining. Many Destinations have restaurants, inns, and taverns. After a week’s patronage at the location, you’ll gain experience and a side-effect (positive or negative).

Final Thoughts

We briefly examined the gameplay mechanics of Ultraviolet Grasslands and what activities the experience rewards encouraged. I then went a little overboard with one of the encouraged activities, wasting money, and creating a bunch of horrendously inefficient ways to waste tons of money on things you will never, ever need. But, I ask you this, is it more fun to become the “Chameleon-Eagle (Mule) Manager” or to stare at your 5,000 gp wallet and have no idea if you even have enough to fund a legion of mercenaries to fight those goblins.

Don’t get me wrong, building castles is great, but sometimes it’s nice to be able to waste money on things that don’t matter.

Thanks for reading!

Things on my radar:

• Been thinking about abstraction in combat in war games, roleplaying games, and board games. How much abstraction is too much, how much is too little?

• Delver’s Choice has some fun thoughts about running Mythic Bastionland and being creative.

• Cantium Signalworks wrote about NPCs and using a single word to describe them.

• Murkdice gives some great reasons to make your own tiny sandbox setting!

• Home by Lonely Adventurer looks like a great resource for generating small settings (such as a compact sandbox above).

Announcement 2: This week I re-released the Caverns of El, a pair of dungeons designed to be explored in a single session. The adventure is system agnostic, so you can use any roleplaying game of your choice! The re-release was so that I could practice using layout tools in Affinity (the layout I created is heavily Mork Borg inspired).

In this post I’ll present an example of two rival factions, the Eclipse Knights and the Steel Shadows. For each faction I’ve provided a description of what they do and a summary of their goals and other relevant information.

Some questions to consider:

• How much information do you need to know about a faction in order to run them?

• How much information do you need to know about an NPC in order to run them?

• What are the benefits of working with or against a faction?

The Eclipse Knights

The fabled city watch of the Sunchoked City, Loreno, and the secret masterminds behind most of the city’s unjust organized crime. They are unfailingly recognizable in their mechanized armor and ever-present in the darkest corners of the city, yet they never seem to catch the real bad guys, the ones behind the operation. Nobles love them; everyone else, well, they whisper in hushed voices behind the guards’ backs.

In public, the face of the Eclipse Knights is the young commander Alyna Firepike. She is fierce, competitive, and ambitious. Her speeches inevitably rile up crowds and get their blood boiling about whatever it was she was talking about. She constantly meets with rich nobles to discuss how the watch can better serve Loreno’s esteemed locals. Alyna is secretly an erinyes summoned by the true master of the Eclipse Knights.

In reality, the true master of the Eclipse Knights is Heptarch Gol van Gol, one of the seven council members who rules Loreno. Gol is quite scholarly, inventive, and utterly evil. He invented and manufactured the special armor that the Eclipse Knights all wear, and is working to create a special kind of magic golem to accompany their patrols. Gol van Gol is secretly a lich, and he summoned Alyna to help with his operations. Some who know his true nature call Gol van Gol the “Gear Lich of Loreno”.

Their goal: exert complete control over the economy and populace of Loreno without them truly knowing what’s happening.

Their tactics: brute force, machinery, “accidents”

What keeps them from achieving their goal: the constant presence of the Steel Shadows trying to undermine the city watch.

Members of the Eclipse Knights wear mechanized breastplates studded with glowing gemstones. This armor provides a number of benefits to the Eclipse Knights:

• The gemstones can glow very brightly, potentially blinding those nearby not wearing the armor.

• The gemstones are also mini scrying eyes for Gol van Gol and Alyna.

Alyna wears a special suit of armor equipped with two machine arms: one wielding a sword and one wielding a shield. In combat, the sword allows Alyna to make one additional attack and the shield provides its usual bonus.

An example watch party of Eclipse Knights consists of 2d4 Eclipse Knights, d2 War Hounds (wolves, if nothing better), and 1 Priest of the Choking God (domains are famine, fire, and sunlight).

Building favorable reputation with the Eclipse Knights might involve performing any of the following actions:

• assisting to capture actual, real criminals.

• assisting to capture “real criminals” who had been “participating in illegal activities” that would unfavorably reflect upon the Eclipse Knights.

• recovering “lost documents” that may or may not include sensitive information about the Eclipse Knight’s patron, Gol van Gol.

• locating magical artifacts that can be used to upgrade the Eclipse Knight armory.

Once favorable reputation is established, the Eclipse Knights might provide PCs with the following:

• special clearance badges (get into high security places, or for free, or at a weird time).

• their own suit of mechanized armor.

• mechanical prosthetics.

• invitations to noble houses for parties.

The Steel Shadows

The scoundrels and thieves of the Sunchoked City, and the ones who really keep things in Loreno running smoothly. The Steel Shadows cloak themselves in darkness and race about the streets at night, constantly evading members of the Eclipse Knights on duty. They aim to dismantle the Knights one guard at a time until they make it to the Gear Lich at the top.

Anyone you ask would tell you that the leader of the Steel Shadows is someone called the Crow Caller. Sometimes just called “Crow”, he is a man who lurks on the walls of Loreno speaking to the crows that gather there. Crow is muscular, heavily tattooed, and ragged. It seems as though more than one bird has tried to peck away his eyes. He sends potential initiates on introductory quests for the Steel Shadows, usually somewhere they have a good chance of dying. If they come back alive, he knows they’re worth something. Crow can actually talk to crows and he sends messages with them. He’s tried talking to other birds, but the message usually gets garbled.

But Crow isn’t the real leader of the Steel Shadows. No, that would be Lemonheart, who initiates won’t meet until after their fourth or fifth deadly job. When they do, they’ll discover that the true leader of the Steel Shadows is an actual shadow; a ghost of a ghost, not even really there except just before you blink. Lemonheart is cruel, frank, and a good listener. She invites experienced members of the Steel Shadows to help decide the faction’s next missions to dismantle the Eclipse Knight’s hold on the city.

Lemonheart used to be Heptarch Vaja Kin, but she was disintegrated by Gol van Gol in an epic battle on a nearby mesa (the mesa is now a scorched and blackened hill). Lemonheart doesn’t enjoy talking about this experience.

Their goal: Establish a fair and just criminal apprehension system in Loreno.

What keeps them from achieve their goal: Everyone wants to join the Eclipse Knights (an excellent benefits package), and no one wants to believe the Knights are horribly corrupt and led by an actual undead lich.

Their tactics: Ends-justify-the-means, assassination, example making.

Members of the Steel Shadows usually wear dark cloaks and edgy clothing when their on the job. Sometimes they’ll wear steel earrings to help recognize each other in public spaces. Most Steel Shadows are expert thieves, assassins, poisoners, con-artists, merchants, warlocks, or sorcerers.

Lemonheart is a special shadow with increased base stats, some minor spellcasting, and the ability to reflect spells on their caster. Crow doesn’t fight people (a sworn pacifist), he just runs away while a murder of crows pecks at his opponent’s eyes.

An example cloaked company of Steel Shadows includes 1d4 thieves, 1d4 assassins, and 1d2 magic-users (warlocks or sorcerers).

Building favorable reputation with the Steel Shadows might mean accomplishing the following:

• finding documents that reveal sensitive information about the Eclipse Knight’s tactics, goals, or secret identities.

• securing outposts in Loreno to base operations out of.

• recovering magical artifacts that can be used to combat the Eclipse Knight’s excellent infantry.

• researching the history and weakness of liches in order to weaken the Gear Lich.

• killing Eclipse Knights.

Once favorable reputation is established, the Steel Shadows might provide PCs with the following:

• magical cloaks that help them create magical darkness.

• magic daggers that mark whomever they damage with tracking wounds.

• information about secret (or guarded) passages throughout Loreno (sewers, walls, etc).

• access to outposts and safehouses inside and outside Loreno.

Final Thoughts

There we have it. Two interesting factions for the Sunchoked City, Loreno. I came up with the lore, but it was probably inspired by Viktor from Arcane season 2, the Steel Watch in Baldur’s Gate 3, and a few other things. Some of my friends will probably recognize the idea of the Eclipse Knights as very similar to an idea I had proposed a few years ago for a faction called the Eclipse Legionnaires.

How do you like to prepare factions for your games? What types of adventures warrant any faction preparation at all? Feel free to let me know!

Thank YOU for reading, I really appreciate it! Happy Saturday, and I’ll see you next week.

Things on my radar:

• Maatlock made the awesome Hexmap Studio where you can create and annotate detailed maps! I bet this would be useful for a Mythic Bastionland campaign...

• Blockbeard has a random generator based on literary sources. Seems like it could be useful to a creative mind!

• Role Player’s Digest 3 came out this week. You can check out my post on Family Ties as well as everyone else’s great contributions.

• I’ve been reading through Into the Many Towered Twilight and I’m learning a lot about what dungeons are capable of.

• Hey, by the way, it looks like Substack automatically formats copy-and-pasted Markdown text now? Sweet!

The game system we used was Cairn 2e, but I’m certain any other system would work just as well. I also made some references to Sly Flourish’s City of Arches campaign setting, but only because I like the idea of red portals, teleporting archways, and things like that.

This is a compilation of the notes I made during session prep with some additions based on how the adventure went during play.

Sinkhole!

The adventure begins with the PCs hopelessly lost in the Crimson Desert, a series of red sand dunes and ancient ruins, looking for a distant jungle oasis called Mother’s Tears. Just when things couldn’t get any worse, a sinkhole opens beneath their feet and dumps the PCs headfirst into an ancient tomb.

The room they fall into is marked by a sapphire statue of the Goddess of Death, and surrounding the statue is a group of rather surprised gnolls wearing red hoods.

The statue could be toppled onto one or more of the gnolls.

About the gnolls:

• These are the Redhood Gnolls, they work for fun and profit, mostly for profit.

• They were hired by a lamia named Zareya Tigertongue about a month ago to guard her lair.

• The gnolls failed to guard the lair, allowing a human to get in and steal something precious from the lamia’s hoard.

• Now the lamia has tasked the gnolls with killing the human.

• To prepare for killing the human, the lamia sent the gnolls into a lost tomb to recover an ancient weapon that’s supposedly good at killing things.

• The gnolls entered the tomb through a hijacked portal.

The Tomb of Nethara Kadeshi

After dealing with the gnolls, the PCs will quickly discover that this tomb belongs to a powerful archmage. In their explorations they might see the following rooms (ordered from east to west).

About the tomb itself:

• The tomb is designed so that the souls of any who were buried here can rise up from their sarcophagus, walking through the tomb halls to collect their mortal possessions, then progress through a gate to the afterlife.

The Sarcophagus of Nethara Kadeshi

Sandstone sarcophagus, carved with the likeness of a female archmage holding a khopesh crossed with a scepter, two beast-headed statues stoically guard the entrance.

About Nethara Kadeshi:

• She was an apprentice to the Sorcerer Queen who plagued the desert long ago.

• No one really remembers the apprentices, but they might recall that the Sorcerer Queen was quite evil.

• The Sorcerer Queen experimented with undeath, and so did her apprentices.

• In her youth, Nethara failed to become a lich. This failure caused her to rise as a mummy when she died.

• Because she is a mummy, her soul did not leave her corpse and go to the afterlife.

• Because she is a mummy, Nethara has been stuck inside her sarcophagus for about 800 years.

• Nethara really, really wants to get out of here and go to the afterlife.

• Nethara has a vorpal khopesh, which she is unwilling to give up.

The Statue of the Goddess of Death (the PCs started here)

Sapphire statue of the Goddess of Death, sandstone walls, lever on one wall.

About the lever:

• It controls an opening in the ceiling which the PCs fell through.

• The lever is currently in the “open” position.

• The lever jams once put in the “closed” position.

The Treasure Boat

Wooden canoe, richly crafted, covered in ancient coins and jewelry.

This boat would be a good source of treasure.

The Gate to the Afterlife

Pillars support the ceiling, at the far end of the room is a sandstone archway, the keystone is a red brick carved with the face of the Goddess of Death, within the archway is a veil of shimmering light.

When PCs enter this room, a talkative, well-spoken gnoll named Copperfang hops through the archway from Zareya’s lair. There is a 25% chance he goes feral, and a 75% chance he just wants to get out of here alive.

About the archway:

• Normally this would be a gate to the afterlife. Souls would be able to pass on to the next realm.

• However, the archway has been remotely hijacked by the lamia Zareya Tigertongue and now leads to her lair.

• Fixing the archway requires someone who knows how to fix archways, like Zareya.

The Lair of Zareya Tigertongue

After investigating the tomb, the PCs might step through the archway to deal with the lamia at her lair. If they do, they’ll probably try one of two things:

1. Fight the lamia

2. Talk to the lamia

The archway leads into Zareya’s luxurious cavern, which then opens into a jungle grove lined with draconic pillars. You might consider placing some guards in her lair. My suggestions would be 1d4 gnolls, 1 manticore, or 1 chimera, spread out between the cave and the pillars.

Her Luxurious Cave

Plush pillows, grape vines, hand mirrors, scattered gold coins, feathered fans, sandstone archway pulsing with energy.

Draconic Pillars

Marble pillars weathered by time, wreathed in vines, carvings of dragons intertwined and falling to the earth.

About Zareya Tigertongue:

• She is obsessively conceited.

• Her kiss can enthrall her victims.

• Her beloved, magical, awesome, diamond hairpin was stolen by a human from the nearby oasis of Mother’s Tears. The human was Prince Djoshan.

• Zareya wants to assassinate Prince Djoshan and take back her diamond hairpin.

• She’ll offer to send the PCs in place of the gnolls to assassinate Prince Djoshan and retrieve the hairpin from his bedroom.

• The sandstone archway in her lair can also be rigged to teleport people straight into the prince’s bedroom.

• Really, Zareya will do anything to get the hairpin back.

• Also, she doesn’t really have friends. Just enemies and people she pays to protect her stuff.

The Oasis of Mother’s Tears

It is possible the PCs find their way here, either by trekking overland through the Crimson Desert from the Tomb of Nethara Kadeshi (4 days travel) or by teleporting through the tomb’s archway and then leaving the Lair of Zareya Tigertongue.

There are a few things to observe while at the Oasis:

The Jungle Around the Oasis

Dangerous, lush, flowering, filled with ancient ruins and bizarre creatures, somewhere in here is the lamia’s lair.

The Oasis Itself

Pleasant, clear waters, lovely atmosphere, exotic animals grazing right next to you.

The Village Built at the Oasis

Guarded by desert nomads, built from smooth sandstone with slanted wood roofs, the people here love to gossip.

The Palace in the Village

Resplendent, noble, rich, luxurious, gold-plated, outdoor pool and patio, floor-to-ceiling windows as often as possible.

About the Oasis:

• Governed partly by a noble family and partly by desert nomads.

• Right now, the noble family consists entirely of Prince Djoshan.

• The desert nomads are usually nice people. There is a small sect of them that is wickedly, horribly, undeniably evil.

• This would be a good home base for future adventures.

Prince Djoshan

The PCs may find themselves interacting with the prince at his palace at the Oasis of Mother’s Tears. Either by teleporting into his bedroom with the help of Zareya Tigertongue or just by walking there.

About the Prince:

• He is horribly lonely.

• So rich he doesn’t know what to do with all that money.

• Prince Djoshan is really looking for a friend or someone interesting to talk to every once in a while.

• He stole the diamond hairpin from Zareya Tigertongue thinking it would bring her to his palace and they could get to know one another over a charcuterie board at his pool.

• If presented with the opportunity, he’d love it if the PCs could ask the lamia to come meet him for a charcuterie board at his pool.

• Prince Djoshan doesn’t really care about the hairpin, and if it can be given back to Zareya as a sign of goodwill he’s willing to go through with it.

• He does not realize how dangerous the lamia could be.

• Spends about 50% of his time in the pool, 25% praying in the palace shrine to the Goddess of Death, and 25% in his bedroom.

• He prays so much to the Goddess of Death he is basically a priest himself. If necessary, there is a 50% chance that he can actually manipulate the archway in his palace to become a gate to the afterlife for Nethara Kadeshi.

• Everything in the palace is managed by maids, butlers, guards, and cooks.

• His whole family is dead. Parents from old age, sisters from plague.

• No one in the village cares about him other than the fact that he is unfathomably rich.

Final Thoughts

There you have it! An expanded summary of my one page of notes I made for the adventure I ran.

In my case, my players almost died to the gnolls at the start, got lucky when the gnolls freed the mummy, acted as Nethara’s escorts to the afterlife, then promised to help her fix the archway. They did so by walking across the Crimson Desert with the help of their gnoll navigator (Copperfang) and then meeting with Prince Djoshan to get the hairpin back for Zareya. The lamia then agreed to fix the archway in exchange for her hairpin.

Chaotic, exciting, wild! Just the way I like it.

Thanks for reading, I hope this adventure gives you some ideas for your own creations! See you next week.

Things on my radar:

• I have a couple projects in the works right now. One of them might be finished next week, if we’re lucky! Keyword: star.

• I’ve been thinking hard about what the perfect dungeon room description would look like for me. I haven’t found the answer yet, but I’m getting closer.

• Dragon’s Den released their second Ironbound Adventure, a module for solo adventuring using Ironsworn!

• I recently purchased Electrum Archive Issues 1 & 2 for a discount, and they’ve been excellent reading material for my science fantasy campaign.

• It’s been on my list for a while, but I finally got around to watching Beef and it’s very good: 8/10.

For today’s post, I decided to redesign a set of my favorite items and share them with you. These items are oriented towards a game like Shadowdark and are less context dependent than their original versions. If you want to see more of my ideas about magic items, check out my previous post Magic Items.

Here goes a list of 12 magic items streamlined for more drop-them-in old school play!

1. Whispers of Dreams Left Secret

2. Halakyr Sensory Adaptor

3. Woszayjin, Wizard Blade

4. Sha’kal Ressiad, the Scalebreaker

5. Flesh of the Luck God

6. Soul Tarot

7. Atrocity

8. Treachery

9. Cosmos Blade

10. Still Ocean

11. The Jawbreaker

12. Chance Cubes

1. Whispers of Dreams Left Secret

A golden dagger that seems perpetually dull, resisting any attempts made to sharpen it.

Bonus. +2 dagger.

Benefit. Once per day, you can turn yourself and all nearby creatures Invisible for 10 minutes. They are no longer Invisible if they attack or cast a spell.

Curse. Each time you use the benefit, choose a random creature affected by it. That creature forgets one significant memory of their choice.

2. Halakyr Sensory Adaptor

A blossom-like mesh of silver filigree implanted in place of an ear.

Benefits. You cannot be Deafened against your will. At any time, you can make yourself Deafened until your next turn. Once per week, you can supercharge the adaptor and hear everything, even distant sounds, in perfect detail.

3. Wosayzjin, Wizard Blade

A sword knit from magic-made-manifest, orbited by the arcane runes of spells both ancient and new.

Bonus. +3 longsword. If you can cast spells, then you can wield this sword.

Benefit. Each day, a random spell is inscribed in a random language in the air around the sword. If you can read the language, then the spell counts as one of your memorized (or prepared) spells for the day.

Sentience. Neutral. Telepathy with wielder. Speaks only when absolutely necessary. Ancient knowledge.

4. Sha’kal Ressiad, the Scalebreaker

A jagged-edged katana forged around a snake’s bloody spine.

Bonus. +3 longsword.

Benefit. A natural 20 on an attack roll with the weapon severs the head of the target.

Curse. Every time you use the benefit, there is a cumulative 5% chance that the weapon’s blade whips back and severs your own head.

Sentience. Chaotic. Communicates through nightmares. Manipulative.

5. Flesh of the Luck God

A fragment of divine skin grafted upon oneself.

Benefit. You, and anyone near you, gain a luck token every morning.

Curse. The Luck God wants their flesh back.

6. Soul Tarot

A case of tarot cards, each depicting a different person instead of the minor or major arcana.

Bonus. As a +2 dagger. Usable only when thrown (as if you were throwing playing cards).

Benefit. There are 78 trapped souls contained within the deck. Once per day, you can deal double damage with the Soul Tarot, freeing one of the trapped souls within a card. If the attack kills you target, choose one of the following:

• Life. Heal 1d6 hit points.

• Money. 2d6 x 5 gp materializes in your pocket.

• Wisdom. You can ask the released soul one question. It answers truthfully.

Curse. If you die while carrying the Soul Tarot and there are less than 78 cards left in the deck, your soul is imprisoned within a new card.

7. Atrocity

A drill-shaped dagger forged from a rotten green metal.

Bonus. +1 dagger.

Benefit. Once per day, you can cast Acid Arrow with a successful DC 12 Intelligence check. This benefit is not expended on a failure.

Sentience. Chaotic. Telepathy with wielder. Serpentine and cruel.

8. Treachery

A short, thin stiletto with a cratered, gold blade. It could be confused for a small, ceremonial dagger.

Bonus. +3 dagger.

Benefit. Once per day, you can cast Invisibility with a successful DC 12 Intelligence check. This benefit is not expended on a failure.

Curse? The weapon is invisible as long as it is not in contact with skin.

9. Cosmos Blade

A massive amber-colored blade drawn from a gemstone meteor.

Bonus. +2 greatsword.

Benefit. The weapon is unnaturally light and only requires 1H and 1 slot instead of 2. Additionally, you can cast Levitate or Feather Fall with a successful DC 12 Intelligence check. This benefit is not expended on a failure.

10. Still Ocean

A black-bladed katana with a blue-wave engraved across the flat edge.

Bonus. +3 longsword.

Benefit. You are immune to all spell effects, including those cast by your allies.

Curse. Your maximum hit points are reduced by an amount equal to your level.

11. The Jawbreaker

Ten sugar-coated flower petals compressed into a dense sphere of pure deliciousness.

Benefit. Once only, you can consume the entire Jawbreaker and regain all missing hit points.

12. Chance Cubes

Golden polyhedrals etched with shimmering numbers. It is rumored that exactly six such cubes exist across the multiverse.

Benefit. Randomly determine what die size your chance cube is (valid die sizes are d4, d6, d8, d10, d12, d20). Once only, you can roll your chance cube and add its result to any dice roll.

Curse. If your chance cube rolls a natural 1, you die and your soul is erased from existence. At least one person nearby forgets your name entirely.

Final Thoughts

I hope you enjoyed these twelve magic items, I know I enjoyed tweaking them down to into bite-sized pieces. My personal favorite of the items is the Soul Tarot. Originally, the tarot cards were actually part of a larger toolkit used by a gambler who could also flick coins and throw exploding dice. I decided it would be a bit easier to shift things down to just the cards. Overall I’m quite happy with how all the items turned out.

See you all next Saturday!

Things on my radar this week:

• Inkvein, a MORK BORG megadungeon by Murkdice is out on Backerkit. Check it out if you like crawling through caverns filled with horrible Bendy and the Ink Machine monsters!

• Zootopia 2 was a good sequel, and 100% contains a reference to The Shining, 9/10.

• How to get to Heaven from Belfast and Derry Girls are both good, 8/10.

• Triangle of Sadness was both exactly what I expected and nothing like what I wanted, but it’s probably worth watching: 7/10.

• Seven Dials is intriguing. I never read the Agatha Christie book, but I would recommend the show: another 7/10.

Also: I released a tiny video game on itch called Hero’s Last Stand. It takes less than a minute to try it out in your browser!)

Try tying your characters to a family name! It helps you try different approaches to the same goal over time, while allowing you to maintain a level of consistency across characters.

I latched onto this idea while playing high-lethality OSR games where you’re never really certain if your character is going to survive through the next session. It helped me deal with the fact that while I may love my character and their goals, the dice may not. You can see my opinion on dice here, by the way.

There are lots of different kinds of factions you could tie your character to. In this post, I’m going to look specifically at using a family name to tie your characters together.

What do I do?

If you wish to pursue this path, you’ll want to complete the following steps whenever you make a new character from the family:

1. Give the character the family name

2. Give the character the family’s goal

3. Consider how the character could try to achieve this goal

The first two steps don’t really change after the first iteration. It’s the last one that really counts for developing unique characters from the same family. If you’d prefer to sort of just play the same character with a different first name, then you can skip this last step.

Family Names

Just by giving your character a cool family name it can help you characterize them. Name dropping something like “Kaelek Enne of the House of Enne” feels awesome, no matter how many times you do it. Trust me, I’ve gone to great lengths to introduce my characters as often as possible.

The way you name your character can vary from setting to system to personal preference. For games with a less modern setting, remember that even having a family name can represent great power to people who only require a first name.

If you intend to use this strategy to tie most of your characters to the same familial faction, try to pick a name that both fits the setting and isn’t annoying to pronounce. Joke names can be funny at first, but can also get old and frustrating when situations become tense. The name Tanzygawixishthll might look cool on paper, but when you have to say it over and over again (or, your fellow players have to say it), the pronunciation may get in the way of a good time.

The family begins as just a name, an inkling of an idea. Over time, it takes meaning upon itself based on your actions. You are writing your own family legacy.

Family Goals

So, you’ve got a name and it sounds reasonable, what’s next? Now you want to select a goal for your family that you are interested in pursuing (perhaps in different ways) across multiple characters/personalities. Selecting a goal is best done with the rest of the table during your session zero or session one, after you know a little bit more about what the adventure is about.

Some good fallbacks if you are unsure are:

Your family seeks to...

1. Amass great wealth

2. Find a lost heirloom

3. Restore their former glory

4. Expand their domain

5. Induct new people into the family

6. Subdue a rival family

Make sure these don’t conflict too much with your adventuring group’s main goals. You don’t want to get in the way of the overarching campaign structure, you just want a reason for your family to keep sending relatives into risky situations.

Some examples of familial goals that I have used in the past are:

• Establishing a political foothold to prove we are still strong

• Becoming the wealthiest family possible (rags to riches)

• Searching for lost artifacts as part of a dying wish

All characters you play from this family should understand this goal and have it at the forefront of their mind. If you want to get creative and unique, you can bring in a family member who actually wants the exact opposite of all your former characters. This can be a fun dynamic shift for you and the other player characters.

Family Members

No one in a family is exactly the same, not even identical twins or psychically linked cousins. When you make a new character and tie them to a family, think about how this character is unique and how do they try to achieve their goals?

The methods in which a character enforces their will upon the world distinguish them from other characters.

Your first character might be a very curious, outgoing individual who asks questions of everyone they meet. After dying in an armed robbery, you might bring in a new character who is deeply suspicious of new people and approaches most situations with utmost caution.

It can be helpful to roll or choose a mien or personality from a random list for each new character you create. If you have an overarching theme for your family (i.e., crime family, noble family, merchant family, farming family) you can subtly change that aesthetic using the mien or personality as inspiration.

Some common options for your character’s personality are:

1. Dark, brooding

2. Light, go-lucky

3. Curious, inquisitive

4. Suspicious, cautious

5. Charismatic, outgoing

6. Righteous, judicial

Example - The O’Sheas

I recently joined a Dolmenwood game and decided that all my characters would be descended from Granny O’Shea, a woman with quite a bit more than a little fairy magic running through her blood. In her youth, Granny O’Shea participated in something in either the Dolmenwood or the fairy realm before eventually marrying and moving into a rich manor house on the duchy’s southern border.

Recently, on her deathbed, Granny O’Shea sent a message to each of her some two dozen children and grandchildren, both living at the manor house or off pursuing careers elsewhere. Each message was unique, presenting a task for that person to complete. Many of these tasks are related to the Dolmenwood.

My first character, Clever O’Shea, was tasked with retrieving an artifact from the Witching Ring, a circle of standing stones at the center of the Dolmenwood. Unfortunately, he met an untimely demise before being able to accomplish this quest.

My second character, Eilish O’Shea, has a similar task regarding the Witching Ring. We’ll see how she fares.

This has worked quite well so far, even after one early character death. My characters are still tied to the goal of the campaign (exploring the Dolmenwood) and to the goals of the faction I represent (the family of Granny O’Shea).

No matter what happens my goals will never stray too far from fulfilling Granny O’Shea’s dying wishes.

I also managed to convince another player to play a member of the O’Shea family alongside me! Having a cousin makes for some exciting banter and roleplay!

Example - The Pearl House

In the big, long Mythic Bastionland game, I played family members of the Pearl House. The family began with the Pearl Knight, who, by use of a cursed magic item, was erased from memory, and became a sort of family patron that donated most of his earnings to the wellbeing and support of the Pearl House. Future members of the Pearl House took of sword and shield in the name of commerce, hunting, and fair play. They held friendship as the highest and most important loyalty tie.

Aside from the Pearl Knight, who shall not be named, I played four other members of the Pearl House during the latter half of the campaign (for the first half I played two other miscellaneous characters).

The Pearl Knight’s successor was Aeiona (I tried to fit as many vowels as possible into one name), the Rat Knight. She was awesome, and actually managed to survive through the entire campaign after starting as a young knight with only 3 Vigour! She went through a lot of trials and tribulations, including lots of colossal kaiju monster fighting, god-shrine hunting, and was even reborn like a phoenix from a flaming brazier. Her goal was to grow the Pearl House from a small family to a large, influential, political powerhouse. She succeeded! In the end, Aeiona retired as Countess of Gwyn Traeth, her home holding.

Aeiona’s successor and son was “Little” Dove, the Weaver Knight, who loved to weave his own cloth robes. Dove was a true hero-type. His goals were to spread the influence of the Pearl House into other realms, and he did so by being one of the first knights to visit the realm to our north. There he dealt in regional politics, even having the chance to save the life of the ruling lord! Later on, Dove joined a merchant company that brought a great deal of wealth to the realm (and further influenced the Pearl House’s political power). In the end, Dove survived through the end of the campaign, retiring with his family in Gwyn Traeth.

Little Dove’s successor and son was Lwddwyr (pronounced like “Luther”), the Violet Knight. Lwddwyr didn’t make it very far, he died on his third expedition, admittedly a very dangerous one. He was known for his exploits in trying to become the greatest wizard in this realm and the next, for he had hoped to bring a bit of magic to life in the Pearl House.

On another axis of the Pearl House was Morgant, a complicated character with an estranged relationship with her name and life (having suffered an accident at a young age, and picking up the same cursed magic item as the Pearl Knight did long ago). Her goals were to build strong friendships and to one day reunite herself with the Pearl House. It took a long time, much negotiations about certain evil actions taken while under the influence of a cursed magic item, and some bonding over killing a salty king before Morgant finally achieved her goal. She retired at the end of the campaign in Gwyn Traeth in the loving embrace of the Pearl House.

So, four characters all tied to the same faction: the Pearl House, with similar goals and beliefs that allowed me to play them over time without having to fear extreme changes in the game. No matter what happened in our realm, I always had the wellbeing of the Pearl House at the front of my mind. Nearly every family member cared about fostering strong friendships with others, so when in doubt that’s what I tried to do. If I was already friends with people, I looked to see how the Pearl House could increase its political or economical power in a given situation. These allowed me to develop a strong presence for the Pearl House over the course of the campaign.

Final Thoughts

We looked at what might go into tying your characters to a family name and what it allows you to do. This is an option I highly recommend for players in high-lethality roleplaying games because it allows you to adapt to character death without feeling like you’re starting over completely from scratch.

Thanks for reading, I hope you find this inspiring or useful!

Things on my radar:

• Quest for the Vorpal Sword is out now on itch!

• Hey, so is Hero’s Last Stand, you can play this one in less than 60 seconds!

• I enjoyed reading through Mythic Mountains’ article: a Tale of Two Sandboxes and thinking about how different games, play groups, and prep-styles have influenced my experience in campaigns

• Mr. Staleman has a cool post on designing interactive elements in games

• The Ruins of Castle Gygar was in an itch bundle I purchased recently. It’s a fun dungeon and I’ve been enjoying trying to solo my way through the upper floors with a party of Old School Essentials characters.

• I’m watching all of the Scream movies for the first time. So far Scream 3 and 4 are my favorite.