How I Spent My Summer Vacation

Over the summer, I got really depressed. I've had major depressive disorder for more or less my entire life, and I mostly have it well-managed, but sometimes it grows out of my control. Summers are often worse, for whatever reason. And of course, the general state of the world has worsened, downgrading from this-is-fine-dot-png to not-great-bob-dot-gif, in ways too numerous to mention, which isn't the cause of my depression, but certainly doesn't help either.

While I was depressed, I took a hiatus from blogging. I'm feeling better now, but it's been difficult to restart all the things I stopped doing during the most difficult time.

In March, shortly before my absence, Josep Torra of the Tirant lo Dau blog contacted me about translating my essay Landmark, Hidden, Secret into Catalan and publishing it in a zine. This easily makes LHS the most famous thing I've ever written. The zine is available on itch.io as a free pdf, and there's an inexpensive print option on Lulu. Josep's translation of my writing is on pages 81-86.

Tirat lo Drac 2022

Then in June, Chris McDowell also promoted Landmark, Hidden, Secret. It was tip #2 in his Bastionland Broadcasting episode "Preparing for an RPG Session - 3 Small Tips". The section that mentions me starts at around the 23 minute, 30 second mark.

 

 

 

 

Over the summer, my regular online gaming group met somewhat sporadically. Peter from Fantasy Heartbreak Workshop acted as the dungeon master, and ran us through Axo's Dungeon - which turns out to be quite a work of OSR collaboration, put together and keyed by Paolo Greco from Lost Pages, using geomorphs hosted on Dyson's Dodecahedron and Stonewerks, with updated art provided by Of Dice and Djinn. We used Peter's SKROP rules, which is his house ruled mashup of the GLOG and D&D 5e, and the game took place in his Owl Light setting, a science fantasy moon orbiting a Jupiter-like gas giant.

We started the campaign looking for human Reavers who'd been kidnapping villagers in a remote lake district, and found the dungeon on an island in lake. Inside we met an affable and nervous priest of Cthulhu, who wished to promote moderate worship of the Great Old One, but not so much worship that it might trigger madness in the worshippers or risk disturbing Cthulhu from his eternal slumber in any way. We also found a whole hoard of Reavers in a tenuous alliance with the Squid King and his Cephalopod army.

The dungeon has a lot of corridors and passageways, giving us an almost Metroid-like experience of rapid exploration. We rescued the Slug Witch from the Slug King, provoked a war between the Reavers and the Cephalopods that decimated both factions, and rescued the imprisoned villagers. Peter was amazed that we managed to navigate the dungeon so effectively to find the things we were looking for. I was amazed that our various disguises and stratagems actually worked and got the two armies to nearly wipe each other out. It was maybe my most efficacious campaign ever, in terms of accomplishing my character's goals during the game.

 

Axos Dungeon by Lost Pages

 

 

 

Recently we've started a new campaign with me as the referee. Ever since the new edition of Into the Odd came out, I've been wanting to run someone through the expanded version of the "Iron Coral" dungeon. Originally only a single level, it now has three! I actually ran the original as a DCC weird western adventure site, which I called "The Irontown Corral", but this is my first time running it using I2TO.

Peter and Leighton have just found an entrance to the second level, so I'm excited to see what happens next! So far Peter's Prize Breeder and Leighton's Sky Trooper have found 6 jars of "Dr Bronzeworthy's Fantabulous Frictionless Ball Bearings" and a very valuable crystalline sphere, thanks in part to some help from a couple of assistants that I rolled up using the Burnboss and Courier failed careers from Benign Brown Beast. (In the likely event of character death, the assistants will get promoted up to full player character status.) In the next section, I'm hoping they'll delve into territory none of us has seen yet.

The Iron Coral frontispiece by Johan Nohr

 

So that's how I spent my summer. Feel free to share what you've been up to in the comments!

Actual Play - I2TO Kansas City - French District

My partner and I spent the week at home - working remotely, self isolating, and social distancing. To cheer ourselves up a little in the face of the grim realities of life in the early stages of a global pandemic, we decided to start a campaign using Chris McDowell's Electric Bastionland.

My partner mostly just wanted to play D&D and was pretty open about the rules and the setting. I thought that we would both be more engaged with the game, and distracted from the bad news outside, if we created the campaign collaboratively, rather than if I tried to make everything up beforehand to just tell her at the table.

Emily had already decided that her characters, whoever they were, would be named Jack Kelly and Spot Conlon after a couple characters from Newsies. I decided I would try to draw on whatever I could remember from the French Dispatch trailer as additional inspiration, since it's also about a newspaper.

So far, we've had a short session to roll up her characters, a session to make a borough map, and a few sessions of actual play that I'll detail in a later post. We're setting the game in a fictional Kansas City, and the starting borough is the French District.

My cat was also interested in playing D&D

Jack Kelly is a charismatic failed Under-Laborer. He knows the secret of whistling to discomfit underground vermin, and wears a pair of tinted goggles due to his sensitivity to sunlight.

Spot Conlon is a dexterous failed Science Mystic. She believes that Truth is hidden in magnetism and she has Foreseen that there is power in the human mind.

The two friends owe a $10 thousand debt to Mr Howitzer, a newspaper publisher and arms dealer who badly wants to start a war that he thinks will be good for both his businesses. He's also a literal cannon with arms and legs who wears a business suit, sash, monocle and barrister wig.

The debt is for the sale of an antique non-electric printing press to Jack and Spot. It's housed in the Barbeque Bottoms district one borough over. Mr Howitzer won't consider even turning over the keys to the building until they've paid down their debt some, but eventually, they should be able to take control of it and start hand-printing their own newspaper.

The pair also has a rival Denton, a failed Newspaper Intern, who now leads a detachment called The Snoozies whose motto is "No news is good news!" and who sell comforting fictions about the state of the world printed on broadsheets once a day. The Snoozies don't like the idea of Jack and Spot printing their own newspaper, but they're also opposed to Mr Howitzer and his sensational warmongering.

Jack and Spot have a couple leads on treasure. First, La Petite Patisserie has noticed some rival sweet stores connected to the Chocolate Factory setting up shop and muscling in on their turf, and Jack and Spot have a tip that they'll pay $1000 to anyone who can manufacture a crime spree to help scare off their rivals. Second, a wealthy shut-in living in the Thundercloud Estate Apartments recently died without naming any heirs. The apartment is locked up pending a visit from the probate court and an estate sale, so there's time to pull off a burglary before the authorities get there.

After considering her options, Emily decided that Jack and Spot would try to scare off the rival sweets shops, starting with the Chocolate Fondue Shoppe. I'll post about those adventures later, but for now, here's the borough map we came up with, following the advice in Electric Bastionland.
 

Routes
___   streetcar line
- - -   bicycle route
......   pedestrian footpath
~~~   dirigible rides

Landmarks
1   Chocolate Factory
2   Weather Observatory
3   Thundercloud Estate Apartments
4   Howitzer Tower
5   La Petite Patisserie
6   River Landing
7   Turtle Fountain
8   Le Tabac Fumée
9   Steamboat Crash Site

Complications
A   chocolate marsh!
B   foggy with a chance of pickpockets!
C   weird weather!
D   over-critical fashionistas!
E   too many tourists!
F   talkative elderly turtles!
G   protesting pacifists!
H   ongoing construction!

 
Emily and I took turns deciding on the different landmarks and inventing potential complications. Almost everything needs more detail before it'll be very usable at the table, several of these elements are barely more than a name right now. But it was enjoyable to make these decisions together, build off each other's suggestions, and create something quite different than I might have come up with on my own.

I've also been trying to use Chris McDowell's advice, about information and choices, about offering Sophie's choices (pick one to save or risk losing both, the same dilemma we confront in triage), about filling the city with people. I've also been thinking of Richard G's advice about how to structure serial adventures for social climbers, and in terms of the travel complications, of Signs in the Wilderness's concept of defining places by their dangers.

One area where I've already "messed up" is in mapping the borough, where CMcD recommends drawing circuits rather than straight lines for the main paths. C'est la vie, it's probably not an over consequential "mistake", and at least I think the current set up feels reasonably like a sprawling American city. I also want to start taking more care to apply the triple rule (that people, places, and objects should have an original purpose, a current purpose, and something unexpected on the side) - I think that will contribute a more distinctive feel as I start laying on details.

Links to Occupations

Below is a list of occupation lists I might use in my own DCC games.

I like occupation lists, both for the way they paint an immediate picture of the game world, and also for the way they provide an instant prompt for playing the role of a new character.

The Medievalists:

from Coins & Scrolls:
Actual medieval occupations

from Ten Foot Polemic:
Failed Medieval occupations

from Zenopus Archives:
OD&D NPC occupations

from Into the Dark:
Old School occupations

The Dickensians:

from Into the Odd:
Failed occupations (for the Bastionland city setting)

from Zero Level Blog:
Our World occupations (for the Our World / Lost World setting)
Lost World occupations (for the Our World / Lost World setting)

from Roles, Rules, and Rolls:
Baroque occupations

from Iron & Ink:
Yellow City races, castes, and backgrounds (for the Yoon-Suin setting)

from Pride & Parchment
Scythian / Slavic occupations, goals, and traits

from Tales of the Grotesque & Dungeonesque:
Dark Secrets (and a pdf of the same)

The Weirdos:

from What Would Conan Do?:
Planar backgrounds (for the Troika! setting)
Bonus planar backgrounds (for the Troika! setting)

from Living 4 Crits:
Mouse Guard occupations and character creation
Disney occupations (and a pdf of the same)
Revolutionary War occupations (and a pdf of the same)
Numenera occupations
JRPG occupations
Star Wars occupations

from Giblet Blizzard:
Weird Urban occupations

from Rogues' Repast:
Carcosan occupations (for the Carcosa setting)

Play Report - I2TO Salt Factory

Over the winter holidays, Joshua Burnett from the Bernie the Flumph! blog ran an Into the Odd adventure, and I had the opportunity to play in it. I thought at first it might be something Chris McDowall wrote for Electric Bastionland, because the description of the exterior of the salt factory was pitch-perfect in terms of my understanding of the setting for I2TO, but later discoveries inside the factory revealed similarities to some of Josh's other ideas.
 
 

My initial character for this game was "Pinky", so named because of her resplendent all-pink outfit. (Picture noble attire from the Revolutionary War / French Revolution era, complete with tricorn hat, just all in various shades of pink.) Pinky was joined by one-armed "Lefty", Bob, Aldo, and "Pithy", who started the game with a magic book that let him speak in a universally-understandable glossolalia language.
 
This crew of five down-on-their-luck Bastionians heard a rumor that a safe route to an abandoned salt-processing factory had recently been discovered in the Underground. They sensed a business opportunity in "salvaging" materials from the site, and hired famed underguide Nix Perpendicular to lead them to it. Nix also brought along a handful of replacement characters "tourists" to help pad out his billing. The journey was uneventful, passing mostly though Bastion's enormous sewers before abruptly arriving in a large cavern. The stalactites here were all made of salt, and refracted their torchlight like rainbows.
 
The salt factory looked like a pile of red-painted metal cubes, stacked and overlapped seemingly at random. It stood at the center of the cavern, surrounded by a lake of milky white liquid. A bridge made of large copper plates sitting on thick copper cables hung over the lake and led to the factory. The bridge led to a large red-metal door. A rickety iron catwalk wrapped irregularly around parts of the factory as well. Nix took them as far as the bridge, then sat down to play solitaire dominoes and informed the adventurers that he'd wait 8 hours, and not a minute longer. Aldo looked across at the factory, and tried to persuade Nix to stay for 12 hours. Nix eventually relented and agreed to 10, but now sat grumbling about how his wife would be furious with him for coming home late.
 
The group worried that the bridge might be electrified, but couldn't see any obvious power source connecting to it. Bob and Aldo went across one at a time without incident. Lefty went next, and halfway across, the copper panel he stood on started tipping from side to side. He made it safely across, but the plate toppled into the milky liquid, which seemed to boil and froth as the plate sank into it. Pithy tiptoed up to the gap, then tightrope walked across the gap between the plates. Pinky ran across the bridge, sending the whole thing swaying violently, and threw herself across the gap, just making the long-jump to safety.
 
The group assembled on the scaffolding in front of the main door. It was painted red, but the metal underneath was obviously badly rusted. The lock was pitted and salt-corroded. Lefty decided to follow the scaffolding around the building. On one side, it came to a dead end where the metal had rusted away and collapsed. On the other, side it led to a side-door. The group decided to force open the main door, which screamed as metal rubbed against metal. Worried about the noise, Pithy used his book to call out greetings in the universal tongue, but received no reply. They forced the door the rest of the way open and went in, finding what looked like a locker room or break room, coated in a layer of clear salt like glass. They saw four workers "flash-frozen" in salt sitting at a table where they had been playing cards. There was a metal staircase leading up, another leading down, and a door leading straight out.
 
They quickly case and search the room. Pinky opened the door and found that it led out into a long hallway. Lefty checked the card table to try to steal the bets, but saw only a handful of coins. He also saw a brass key hanging from one of the worker's belts; when he grabbed it, all four dead workers and the table and chairs shattered like glass and crumbled to the floor. Lefty tried looking nonchalant, but did stoop to recover the handful of coins from the floor. Pithy searched the supply shelves and found a cigar box full of over a hundred silver coins. Bob located a powerful aetheric torch light, although it had no battery.
 
Instead of using any of this room's exits, the adventurers decided to check the side entrance. They used the scaffolding to go around the building, although it too began to groan and sway ominously as they walked. This door was covered in peeling grey paint, and was locked tight. Pinky got out her pocket watch and set an alarm to go off in 9 hours' time. Bob got out his portable ram and eventually managed to batter down the door, though each hit from the ram echoed like a crash of thunder. The door opened to reveal an anteroom, with its floor covered in hundreds of knife-like salt shards growing up from the ground. They decided not to risk the catwalk again at this time, so Bob used his ram to sweep a path clear, creating noise like a thousand shattering glasses as he did. The group went through the room and opened the door to the hall, with Pinky standing ready with her musket to cover their progress.
 
The hall is empty of life, though they find a bank of lockers along one wall. They begin breaking them open. Pinky found a worker's protective gear - coveralls, safety glasses, and hardhat. She decided to put them on over her clothes, which were already getting coated in salt. Lefty found a "World's Greatest Dad" mug. Bob found a musket, but having one already, gave it to Lefty. Aldo found a security guard's armor. Pithy found an aetheric battery that could fit into Bob's new lantern, and when they put it in, it lit up double bright.
 
The first room they found off the hall had large hole corroded into the floor. Shining Bob's lantern down the hole, they saw a catwalk running around the wall, and a distant floor probably two stories below. They also heard the faint sound of a baby crying coming up from the hole. In a building that had been abandoned for decades, maybe centuries. They quickly backed out of the room and keep exploring.
 
Down the hall they entered another room. The walls were decorated with crude graffiti of slogans like "HONEY YOU NO EAT!" In the corner of the room was a glass insect's nest swarming with what look like red-glass ants. Through the glass walls of the hive they saw a reservoir of opalescent liquid. Pithy used his magic book to try conversing with the ants. He heard them say "Work work work work work." Pithy tried asking politely for the ants to give him honey. They began scurrying around, clearly agitated. "They want to steal the honey! There is naught but work! There is naught but honey! Release the alarm pheromones!" Only a moment later, the floor shook and they both felt and heard footsteps running toward them down the hall, and a voice screamed "Who's stealing my honey?!"
 
Pinky looked down the hall and saw the silhouette of a black bear charging toward them. She tossed a bomb into the hall and ducked behind the doorframe. The bomb exploded, wrecking the hall, but the vantablack bear kept coming, though its movements were slowed, and it was bleeding profusely. Bob popped around the corner and got off a shot with his musket, finally felling the beast, which looked like a perfectly flat, perfectly black silhouette no matter which angle it was viewed from. Bob and Pithy went into the hall to skin the bear. Lefty used animal repellent to disperse the ants, who all fled for the corners of the room. Lefty used his new mug to scoop up some of their opalescent honey, while Pinky broke off a honey-filled chunk of the hive and wrapped it in the leather apron that came with her new coveralls. (3 doses opalescent honey, effect unknown.) Bob donned the bear pelt like a cape, wrapping its arms around his neck. Pinky smeared bear's blood on her face, hoping the smell would frighten off any other animals lurking in the ruins.
 
After their harrowing encounter, and with the structural integrity of this whole section of the building compromised by the bomb blast, the group made their way back to the security door, and used the scaffolding to return to the main entrance and the salted-over break room. On the walk around, Bob used his new aetheric lantern to inspect the exterior of the building, but the magi-technical light didn't reveal any new features. In the breakroom, the stairs leading down seemed bent out of shape since the last time they were in the room, and the door to the hall had been broken down. They decided to go upstairs.
 
Up the stairs, the group arrived in an office with a half-dozen ruined, salt-crusted desks. Pithy found the least damaged desk and searched it, discovering a ledger that recorded the production of various metallic and mineral salts, measured in archaic units that no longer had any meaning. He put it into his pack next to his magic book. The other desks were too badly damaged to recover anything. Pinky checked the office's door. It was decorated with a brass crest like a swarm of serpents with red jeweled eyes. As Pinky got close, the eyes lit up and she heard the hum of electricity. She backed away, and the sound stopped. Lefty inspected the door, and the whine started again, louder than before, and the air began to smell like ozone. Lefty took out the brass key he stole earlier and used it to unlock the door, and the mechanism powered down again, although Lefty's hair stood upright.
 
Through this protected door, they entered another room where the walls were covered with glass screens, mostly broken and burnt. In the center of the room was a throne with an emaciated corpse wearing strange mechanical armor, somehow wired into the rest of the room. As they stepped closer, the corpse opened its eyes and looked directly at them. "Have you come looking for work?" Speaking for the group, Pithy said yes. "Very well. Report for work at the refinery on Floor 5. Here are your pass keys." As the corpse spoke, four red metal cubes shimmered into existence in the air in front of them, and each explorer grabbed one. Pithy asked how to get to the fifth floor, and the figures eyes turned somehow angry and it began standing up out of the chair. "Between Floor 4 and Floor 6." They all quickly backed out of the room, and as they left, the corpse eased itself back into a sitting position. They shut the door and Lefty locked it behind them.
 
They returned to the break room and went down the damaged stairs, and at the bottom saw a sign saying "6". The room the stairs lead to looked horribly corroded, and there was a dead dog lying in the middle of the floor. Pity used his book and asked "Alive, woof woof?" but got no response. He approached, and the floor collapsed under him. There was a sickening thump and then silence from below. Bob tied a rope around his waist and the other end to the stairs and rappelled carefully down through the hole in the floor. Pinky approached the dog, saw that it was wearing a bejeweled collar with a tag that said "Rex", and managed to work it free from the corpse. She put it on, thinking she might be able to resell it later.

On the level below, Bob found himself in some kind of workshop for assembling clockworks. Pithy's dying body lay in the middle of the floor. Bob managed to revive Pithy and gave him some water to sip. They heard the sound of at least two crying babies coming from just beyond the room's doors. Bob quickly retied his rope around Pithy, climbed up to the floor above, and then with Pinky's help, hauled Pithy back into the corroded room. Just then Aldo came staggering down the stairs from the break room. "Oh thank god!" he exclaimed in relief, "I thought I lost you guys!" Bob swore under his breath. "Goddammit I thought we lost that guy." The others showed Aldo their hand-sized red cubes. They were all perfectly shiny and clean - the only things in good condition they'd seen so far - and appeared to be identical.
 
Aldo tries to impress his comrades by breaking down one of the doors leading out of the room, but although they look as corroded as the floor Pithy fell through, they're remarkably solid. After making a terrible racket, he finally managed to kick one down, then drew his long-axe and led the way into the hall. They came to a room with a catwalk around its perimeter but no floor, and a hole corroded into the ceiling. A story below them, they saw a large chamber filled with pipes and vats, but no obvious way to get down. Aldo led them around the catwalk to another door, this one in much better condition. Aldo tapped the door, and something tapped back twice. He tapped again, and got another two taps back.
 
Aldo asked "Is anyone there?" A voice answered "no!" Aldo asked again, "Could you open the door, please?" The voice answered back, angry, "You open your door please!" Aldo remained polite, "But we asked you first?" The voice became even angrier, "Don't talk to ME about politics!" Aldo stepped aside to let Bob have a try. Bob noticed a keyhole with dim light coming through, and more dim light spilling out from under the door. "I'm Bob" he tried, "What's your name?" The voice sounded less angry this time. "Bob, Bob, we're all named Bob." Aldo piped up "I'm Aldo!" but the voice corrected him, angry again, "No, you're Bob." Bob tried passing his red metal key cube through the keyhole, and a moment later they heard a grinding, crunching sound. "Po-ta-to chip stale" said the voice behind the door. Unfortunately, they also heard another sound, a tinkling and clinking like glass and metal bumping into each other. Three multi-legged crystalline creatures came onto the catwalk, using the door the party had entered through.
 
Sensing that it would take too long to talk their way through the door, Aldo rushed the creatures with his long-axe while Bob, Lefty, and Pinky let off a volley from their muskets. The creatures were quickly reduced to shards. Pinky sifted through the wreckage and found a fang that she thought she could use as a dagger. (d4 damage, STR save or lose 1d8 STR due to electrolyte leech.) With their immediate problem resolved, they turned back to the door. Bob tried again, "Would you like another potato chip?" The voice seemed agreeable, "Yup, just go ahead and slide that under the door there." Bob had them right where he wanted them, "I'm sorry, this one's too big to fit under, you'll have to open the door." The door opened out toward Bob, revealing a filthy humanoid with red rimmed eyes, a lengthy beard, scabrous leprous skin, wrapped in bandages. Bob screamed in horror and kicked the door closed, it bounced off the humanoid, knocked it to the floor, and rebounded open.

As the door swung open, the adventurers had only a moment to take in the scene, the floor covered in filthy carpets and a dead body, and a half-dozen more bearded, bandaged humanoids staring out at the party with revenge in their red-rimmed eyes. Bob fired his musket, instantly killing another of the horrible men, and Lefty and Pithy joined to kill two more. Aldo yelled "I really don't want to be doing this!" before charging into the room with his long-axe. Two of the awful men leapt onto Pithy and Aldo and began scratching and biting them with their filth-crusted fingernails, their slavering mouths. Pinky executed Pithy's attacker with her musket, and Aldo managed to kill his with his axe. Pithy approached Aldo and poured rum onto his already-infected wounds, drawing a yelp from Aldo.

Searching the room revealed mostly more layers of blankets and rugs, all soaked with sweat and other ordure, but also a metal card with a key pattern cut into it, and a glorious bejeweled halberd, which Aldo took. The horrible men had barricaded the only other door out of the room with piles of rolled-up carpets, and graffiti reading "BEWARE THE DESPICABLE INFANT!" was scrawled near the door. They listened at the door but didn't hear any crying this time. A second door out was secured with a simple latch.

Bob led the way this time, through the un-barred door and down a hall that was lit from the far end by a vibrant green glow. They arrived in a room that seemed to be filled with light, all emanating from a smooth crystalline statue of a naked woman, who shone brighter than the aetheric torch with sickly green light. The statue stood on a plinth with a dusty sign and a level. Pinky got close to wipe the dust from the sign so she could read it. It said "QUEEN PLUTONIUM, OUR LADY OF HIGH ATOMIC WEIGHTS", and up close, Pinky could see that the statue was hollow, made of clear glass and filled with a glowing green liquid. Everyone took cover behind Aldo as he prepared to flip the lever from a distance using the tip of his new bejeweled halberd. The liquid began pouring out of the statue's mouth, viscous and ooze-like. As the liquid level dropped, the group could just see the handle of a sword floating suspended in the liquid. Pinky shot the statue with her musket, causing it to burst open, and the ooze splashed out all at once and started advancing toward the party. Pinky ran forward, leapt over the ooze, and grabbed the sword in its scabbard. She nearly wrenched her arm from her socket; it was incredibly heavy. Aldo tried to hold back the ooze with his new halberd, but only succeeded in slicing it in half. One side of the bisected monster approached him and burned his clothes and flesh as it lashed him with pseudopods. The other reared up and crashed onto Pinky like a wave, and as it flowed away from where she'd stood, the only thing that remained was the dull-metal weapon. Aldo lit and dropped the bomb he'd been carrying and chased everyone else back into the hall. After the explosion, no trace of the statue or plinth remained, although the room still glowed faintly green, and the sword laid undamaged on the floor.

As the party watched, the other door to the room popped open, and in walked "The Brain," a handsome, intelligent fellow with an Orson Welles voice and only one arm (and my second character). The Brain picked up the sword, pulled it from its scabbard to examine it. He saw that the blade was a beautiful, almost glowing metal beneath the dull grey of the lead scabbard, but also realized that it was too heavy for him to wield effectively as a weapon, and so strapped it to his back as a collector's piece. (d10, ignores armor, chance of radiation poisoning, requires 13 STR to use.) Retracing their steps, they returned to the first room they encountered on this level, the one with the hole at the bottom of the steps that Pithy earlier fell through. They used the rope they'd tied off earlier to rappel down into the clockwork workroom.

This time, the group searched the cabinets of the workspace. Bob found a bomb, Lefty found a rocket, and Aldo found some very high-quality tools. Bob and Pithy listened at the two doors leading out of the room. One was silent, the other revealed the soft sound of an infant wailing in the distance. The group agreed to open the silent door, but it seemed to be blocked from the other side. Bob used his portable ram to batter the door down, again making a sound like thunder as the ram slammed against the metal door. When the thunder stopped, everyone could clearly hear the angry infant screaming coming from very nearby.

Inside the room, the see three skeletons wearing tattered coveralls and security badges. Aldo found some archaic armor and an accompanying shield. Pithy found an antique blunderbuss, and Lefty found what he thought was a flash-bang grenade. Looking up at the ceiling, they saw small holes like some liquid had once been dripping through from the floor above. All the while that they searched, the sound of the infant crying grew closer and louder. Losing their collective nerves, the adventurers ran for their lives calmly decided on an orderly and strategic retreat from the site. They climbed up the rope, climbed the stairs to the break room, and made their way back across the bridge. They found Nix Perpendicular playing backgammon with some of the tourists he'd brought. He was pleased that they'd made it back before even the original 8 hours were up.

5e Character Backgrounds - What Purpose Do They Serve?

Character backgrounds are a cool enough concept that they probably deserve their own post, but I've been thinking about D&D 5e recently, so I want to jump ahead and look at character backgrounds in 5e specifically.

Backgrounds in general serve a dual purpose in character generation. The first is to provide a list of starting equipment very quickly. Their second and more important function is to act as an aid to roleplaying, by providing just enough in the way of characterization, backstory, and purpose to make THIS fighter you're playing today different from THAT fighter you played last week (you know, the one who DIED and left you in need of a slightly different character concept for next session.) The most important difference between the starting equipment packages in the original version of Into the Odd and the starting occupations from I2TO Bastionland is that the occupations don't just tell you WHAT you're carrying, they tell you WHO is carrying those things.

In DCC you just get a job title, a weapon, and one item; in I2TO you get a bit more equipment, a sentence of describing your career, and a you roll on a pair of tables that give you a couple more sentences of backstory along with a couple skills or special abilities or what have you.

In 5e, your background gives you a couple skill proficiencies, a tool proficiency, a language or two, and a package of starting equipment. (You'll get more of each of these from your character's race and class as well.) They give you tables to roll if you want Character Traits, Ideals, Bonds, or Flaws. (Which you might, since those can be sources of roleplaying insight like I was just praising other backgrounds for.) They give you a "Feature," which is a special ability that typically relates to downtime activity.

They also almost all invite you to co-create part of the campaign setting with your DM.

I didn't notice that last one previously, because I didn't read any of the backgrounds closely enough, but that's kind of a big deal. If you follow the 5e's instructions to let each player co-create part of their shared campaign world as part of character generation, you probably end up with a "Session 0" of the type advocated by Dungeon World, Freebooters on the Frontier, and Beyond the Wall, among others. If you follow those instructions, then it seems that instead of the DM developing a campaign setting before play starts, the beginning of play is actually the DM and the players creating elements of the world together in an imaginative collaboration that happens at the same time as character generation.

Of course, nothing forces you to follow the instructions as written. If you're a DM who does have a campaign setting already, then you could simply tell the player "choose from this list of gods" or "choose from this list of military organizations" rather than asking them to invent one with you. In fact, you could pretty much automate the choices. 5e does a little of this already. It doesn't ask the player to invent an artform for their entertainer or a criminal enterprise for their charlatan, it simply asks them to roll on a random list to discover which one is their specialty. So you could simply take that process further and randomize all the choices 5e asks players to make about the world. If you have a campaign setting already, this would make char-gen that much faster, let you skip Session 0, and start playing the game that much faster. Over at Tales of the Grotesque & Dungeoneque, Jack is doing just that with his Cinderheim setting. (Clever Jack also noticed that there are 12 backgrounds and 12 character classes listed in the 5e Player's Handbook, so you can REALLY randomize character creation - and add a bit of I2TO-style random backstory - by making tables for EVERYTHING.)

You could also do the opposite and expand Session 0 to include even more worldbuilding tied to the character backgrounds. (One again, Jack got their first on this one.)

So, as I said, that's one thing that 5e backgrounds provide that's unusual, at least compared to DCC and I2TO. (Not unusual, obviously, for Dungeon World or other games that emphasize co-creation.) The other thing that's a little unusual is the Feature, which provides an ability that you'll probably use during downtime. My initial impression when I skimmed the backgrounds was that they all just had a Feature that entitled you to free room and board somewhere in the game world, but on closer inspection, there is some more variety, though not so much that every background is unique. I'm going to go out on a limb and guess that Background Features must have seemed challenging to design to WotC's staff writers, because several of them are basically repeated in the Player's Handbook, and because when they suggest additional backgrounds in other places, they typically suggest just borrowing one of the current Background Features rather than supplying a new one.

When I was running my Island of the Blue Giants campaign (I'll pick it back up again someday, I swear), and using  Zenopus Archives's OD&D backgrounds for human characters, I had this idea that the alien weirdos on the island wouldn't do any of the normal NPC stuff, and the only way to get those tasks accomplished would be to have the right background, or be forced to do without. So if you had an innkeeper in the party, you could convince people to let you pay them to sleep inside their buildings, but otherwise, you'd have to camp on the outskirts of every village you went to.

I relate this anecdote, because it connects to 5e's Background Features, and to the oft-repeated old-school lament that if you give one character the explicit ability to do something, you're implying that characters NEED the ability in order to do the thing. The go-to example is that giving thieves the ability to pick locks and do badass ambushes, you're implying that other characters can't do that. This doesn't have to be a lament though - remember my idea to deliberately award abilities to certain characters because I don't want others to have them. But with that in mind, if you're going to write a Background Feature that says a character can do something, then it should be clear how that task will go for characters without the Feature. And judged on that criteria, I think some of the 5e Features could be better written. There's a lot to criticize about the writing of feats in 3.5 and Pathfinder, but I will say this at least, if you take a feat that basically says "you punch real good" then there's also reminder text to make sure you know know what normal punches are like. With 5e's Background Features, it's not always clear.

To see what I mean, let's look at the sailor's Feature, "Ship's Passage." This ability lets you ride for free on any ship you want, but the DM has official permission to be a dick about it to put you through a brief nautical adventure en route to your destination. So what happens if there's no sailor in the party? My instinct is that what happens is that the characters pay to ride on a ship and ...still have the same brief nautical adventure? I'm not really sure though, which is why I wish the alternative were stated instead of just being implied. So let's tinker with this example a little more, and see that reveals anything interesting.

A second interpretation is that other characters have to pay cash to ride on ships, while sailor ride free but get sidetracked by adventure. Except honestly, that sounds worse than just settling your check. I can see that a player choosing the sailing background might mean that they're interested in sailing adventures, but what I just described feels less like giving them the adventure they want and more like penalizing them for picking that background by throwing extra obstacles in their path.

But solving that problem would require the text of the Feature to be different than it currently is. I want it to be something like this - most characters are landubbers, they have to choose between paying cash or getting taken for a spin on an obligatory nautical adventure, but if you're a sailor, then you my friend, you ride for free AND get to arrive on time. I'm a little bit nervous about suggesting an ability that basically says "use this ability to skip being forced to play D&D", but on the other hand, if EVERYTHING'S a hassle, then your highly-motivated, goal-oriented characters might never actually get anything done, because every time they take a step down the path, two new paving stones spring up between them and their goal. Maybe sometimes what you need is an ability that says "skip THIS hassle and move on to the hassle you're actually interested in." It's the same argument in favor of character skills. We can waste an hour of real time narratively describing searching a room in order to find nothing, or we can roll the dice to see that we found nothing, and get on with having a game-night where we visit more than two rooms of the dungeon before everyone has to go home. In one sense, a quest is nothing but a series of hassles that stand between the player characters and their goal, but if the solution to EVERY problem just creates more troubles that get in the way, then no one is ever getting to Solla-Sollew. You need some decisive solutions, or you just get infinite regress. You go on a quest hoping that you'll complete it, not that you'll just be led further and further afield forever. All of which goes to say, that maybe one possible use for Background Features IS to skip specific narrative hassles so you can just move on to the next part of the game.

Another possibility would be to use Features to award some kind of narrative boon. One type of narrative boon could be relationships with NPCs. So, play a noble, get a loyal servant; play an urchin, get a fellow-orphan who tags along on all your journeys. I suspect there's more opportunities for this sort of thing, although for now, gaining access to special NPC followers that you can't get any other way stands out as an appealing option. (Like the way that ex-law enforcement characters on tv shows always have "a buddy on the force" so they can call in a favor to pull a copy of the criminal record of anyone they want.) Whatever other benefit you offered, it would need to be something that money can't buy, or at least, it needs to be expensive enough that it wouldn't otherwise be available to low-level characters. So maybe the sailors OWNS a ship, or at least has more-or-less permanent, unlimited access to one for the purpose of adventure - whereas other characters CAN'T just pay cash to ride on a boat because it costs a king's ransom. They'd have to form a relationship with an NPC who could offer them passage as a favor, while the sailor skips that step. Because they already have that relationship, they can just waltz right up onto the boat. (Is THAT what the "Ship's Passage" feature is supposed to mean?)

In the 5e Dungeon Master's Guide, they hold up the sage's Feature, "Researcher," as an ideal to strive for. The feature doesn't allow the sage to know information, or give them a bonus on rolls to know things; instead it says that if they don't know the information, then they will know where to go to find out. So, according to the DMG, this is a Feature that provides an impetus to go on quests, by providing the players with goals to quest for. (Although again, I wonder about what's implied about how this goes for non-sage characters? Wouldn't they just go hire an NPC sage, who'll either tell them the information, or tell them where to go find it? Is that even actually more difficult? Is the ONLY hassle you're skipping the hassle of hiring one NPC who wants you to hire them?) I'm not sure many of the other Features accomplish the stated goal of providing adventure-seeds. I suppose if the noble owns a building that occasionally has problems you have to go fix, or if the acolyte's temple needs you to run errands for it from time to time, that might rise to the level of providing quest-fodder. But as I said before, I would want it to feel like you're rewarding each player for their choice of character background, and these ideas feel more like punishments. No one wants to take a week off from their Quest for the Holy Grail because Camelot needs you to mow the lawn again.

The Features I mentioned earlier, the ones that give you room and board somewhere, actually do meet my standard for removing hassles, even if the hassle they remove isn't one that seems super relevant to me personally. So far when I've played 5e, I've played it as episodic and mission-based. I haven't known or cared much about what my character got up to between sessions. If I'm already not imagining where she sleeps, or deducting lodging fees from her treasure count, then the chance to let her sleep somewhere for free isn't especially enticing. Just because it doesn't interest me, though, doesn't mean there's anything wrong with it. In fact, if that's the case, maybe it's good if all the Features are equally useless to the way I game. That probably just means they're all serving a function in someone else's play-style. However, it also means that I want to keep brainstorming to think of features that might all be equally use-FUL to me.

Some of these features may also be sneaking in more co-creation below the radar of my attention. The sailor, who as I mentioned, gets free passage on a boat. Well, what if it's a specific boat? It probably has a name, a little backstory, and an associated NPC or two. Those all need to be made up, presumably (if we follow the lead of how 5e asks us to make up other things) by the sailor's player and the DM working together collaboratively. The same goes for the acolyte and the entertainer, who get free room and board somewhere. My initial read on those was just that, in whatever village the characters end up in, the bard or acolyte will be able to get a free place to sleep for everyone. (That's more or less how it goes in season 3 of Robotech, where Yellow Dancer can put on a concert in every town her team passes through.) But maybe if the characters have a stable home base instead of being on the road, these Features should involve co-creating ONE temple or A theater that the characters have specific connections to.

In a way, some of these Features feel like they're a way to decide which specific take on a general activity will occur in the campaign. So for example, your characters are going to have to sleep somewhere, but drawing on the Background Features helps decide if you're being hosted at a temple, camping out in the dressing rooms of a theater, or what have you. It's not like if you DON'T have those backgrounds then you won't have anywhere to sleep, it's just that if you DO, then what could be a fairly generic activity becomes slightly personalized. I2TO does something like this too. In a Bastionland campaign, every adventuring party starts off owing a giant debt to somebody. But precisely WHO you owe all that money to depends on which character background you use to decide on the nature of the debt.

One final use for Backgrounds occurs to me, and that's as a limitation on disguises in any sort of intrigue game. In Person of Interest, the character of Finch is a computer programmer who becomes a billionaire. When he goes somewhere in disguise using a false identity, he can portray a tech worker or a rich man, BUT he can't formulate any plan that depends on him passing himself off as a tough guy. Reese is a former soldier who got trained as a tuxedo-wearing spy and assassin. Other military personnel recognize him as a veteran, hit-men instinctively know he's a killer, and and he wears a suit well enough to convince businessmen that he's only mercenary in a metaphorical sense, BUT no one would ever believe he was a social worker or a nurse. So maybe in a 5e game that involves disguises and spying, the players HAVE to come up with plans that rely on their characters pretending to be the same kind-of-person as their backgrounds, even for their fake identities. The sailor can pretend to be a cabin boy or an admiral, as the situation requires, but they won't fool anyone if they try claiming to be an entertainer. Their Backgrounds provide some scaffolding for the players' creativity in coming up with their cunning plans, and maybe lend a little continuity to the characters by ensuring that their successive fake identities all have SOMETHING in common. And like I just suggested, if you're playing an intrigue game, there ARE going to be disguises, of one sort or another. Drawing on the Backgrounds just helps to personalize that mandatory activity based on decisions the players have already made about what they want their characters to be like.

The thing that got me thinking about this is that if I'm able to run anything like the Nutcracker Princess campaign, then room and board is going to be provided to all characters as a matter of course. The hospitality of the local monarchs is NOT to be questioned. So any Feature that just says "you get free room and board" is de facto useless in that setting. And as I said before, I'm sort of okay with it if ALL the Features are equally useless, but I'd be even happier if I could think of replacement features that would be useful in that game.

I2TO - Never Tell Me the Odds!

... actually, wait, please DO tell me the odds!
  
Let me back up. Chris McDowall of Bastionland is writing a combined rules / setting book for running Into the Odd (I2TO) in his fictional city of Bastion.
  
In support of this setting, he's also written a truly excellent list of failed careers for starting characters. These are fantastic, and aside from the generally terse, evocative writing, there are two things about the list that stand out. First, they fully capture the mood of Bastion as a bureaucratic labyrinth full of petty middlemen, where there's no job too lowly or too demeaning that there's not somebody stuck doing it, probably with an overly self-important supervisor breathing down their neck the whole time. And second, these careers are decidedly failures. You're not just someone who failed at their job, you're someone whose job itself was a failure, your job that should never have existed in the first place. You would have been failing even if you'd done it perfectly, which was probably impossible, because the task you were given was probably misconceived from its very inception.
  
Seriously, go read his list of careers. I'll still be here when you get back.
  
Okay, so given a list of 100 careers, my inclination would be to roll a d% dice and just scroll down that master list. It's the DCC way!
  
But this is I2TO we're talking about, and one of its unique character generation mechanics is the way you generate your starting equipment / career based on your ability scores. Look at your highest ability score, then look at your lowest ability score, then look at a matrix of high and low scores and find your position. (There's also a neat trick where you roll d6 hp and d6 starting money, and each of those d6 rolls gives you a piece of equipment or a class feature that sets you apart from other characters with the same occupation , and creates a kind of balance by giving the best STUFF to the weakest, poorest characters... but although that's nifty, it's not really relevant to our current conversation.)
  
Chris shows off the failed career ability score matrix in a preview video for his new book, and I've reproduced the image below.
  

  
Which brings me back to my original question - what ARE the odds?
  
What I mean is, what are the chances of getting any one of those failed careers as your starting occupation? If you roll a d% dice on a 100-item table, it's easy - each occupation has a 1% chance, and you have exactly the same chances of getting any one of them as you do of getting any other.
  
But in I2TO it's not so easy. Because you're not equally likely, for example, to have a high score of 15 and a high score of 17, which means you're not equally likely to get careers from one row or column versus another. If you knew how likely you were to get each ability score as your highest or lowest, you could cross-multiply and fill in each of the hundred cells in the table. (You can do that with a d10 by d10 table representing a d% as well, it's just that every cell along the top and side has a 10% chance of appearing, and when you cross multiply 10% by 10% you get 1% every single time.) Unfortunately, it's also not so easy to figure out the chances that this or that will be your highest or lowest score  - even using AnyDice's "at least" and "at most" features.
  
It's so not easy, in fact, that I didn't figure it out. I asked for help, and Brian Ashford from the Ominosity blog stepped up to answer my question. (Edit: Brian had the same question I had, and got his friend Jamie Prentice to help solve the math. When I posed my question, Brian shared Jamie's answer with me.) I took the output he gave me and turned it into the table you see below. I can't independently verify that it's correct, (obviously) but basic sanity-testing shows that percentages add up to 100, and the careers that depend on the likeliest ability scores are themselves the most likely.
  
In the table below careers that are more likely have a light background and black text, and the lighter the background, the more likely you are to end up with that career. Careers that are less likely have dark backgrounds and white text, and the darker the background, the less likely the career. I used 1% as the cut-point, so the more likely careers are the ones that you'll get more often than if just you rolled d%, and the less likely careers are the ones that show up less often than they would on a d%.
  

You, uh, might want to enlarge that...

Looking at the diagram reveals at least one surprise (it surprised me, at least). I expected that Chris would make the most ordinary and prosaic careers the most common, while making the more unusual stuff rarer. And sure, as expected, you're less likely to play as "a dog" or "a brobdingnagian giant" or "literally two characters for the price of one". But on the other hand, if everyone at the table got the likeliest characters, you'd end up with a gonzo party where one character's a psychic, one's a muppet, your spellcaster is either a science mystic or the priest of an alien god, and the last character is actually a whole group of kids stacked up under a trenchcoat. Meanwhile, occupations like "grad student", "ex-con", "orphan" (just one this time), and "poor kid from the country who moved to the big city to make it big" are much less frequent than I would have guess (much MUCH less frequent, in the grad student's case). Although I should note that if Chris changes the order of the careers as he moves from blog post to finished book, then some of what I've said here about which careers are most common could be rendered false.
  
One final benefit of mapping out the odds like this is that any would-be designers out there who want to emulate I2TO's character generation mechanics can see how to arrange their own 94 classes to achieve whatever worldbuilding effect they're going for. As a designer, you can decide what you want to be most common, and with this information, put it in the correct location so that it actually will be.