Cecil Howe from Sword Peddler has a Kickstarter for a print version of his game The Forest Hymn & Picnic. (Full disclosure: after looking at the available preview content, I decided to back this Kickstarter.)
The most recent Kickstarter update is a set of rules for procedurally generating a forest monster, and an invitation to give it a try. Since I am very fond of proc gen, I decided to generate a monster.
Black Jenny
Galloping out of the Spookwood with a sound like a dozen tin cans dragging through the gravel behind her - here comes Black Jenny, out to wreak havocry on the good People of the woods. Jenny has the head of a donkey with eyes like black pools of endless night. She has no neck, her head just floats above her body, a child's body dressed in a shabby girl's school uniform. Her body floats too, hovering over her donkey Black Bottom, fur so depthless black it looks like a silhouette. Jenny looks like a child, but don't be fooled, she's incorporeal, and nothing can touch her.
Black Jenny rides to stop the People of the woods from singing or enjoying music. The community needs music - for celebrations and gatherings, to keep our courage up on lonely nights. Black Jenny makes the music go away. She opens wide her mouth to speak noise like a metal ocean, noise that crashes in waves, that breaks and withdraws and returns in a horrible rhythm. Jenny's noise is cacophony, a hundred metal voices screaming, and good People who hear it are like to get spooked and run away. (Make a Q&A roll with Resolve modifier and Sortilege grade against 10. If you fail, you are spooked and can't attack. Jenny makes this noise once when she arrives and again right before she leaves.)
One more thing, don't look too close at Jenny's black eyes, or in her mouth when she's screaming, or at Black Bottom beneath her. Anyone who stares at them gets to feel like drowning, and might could faint. (Make a Q&A roll with Intellect modifier and Funambulist grade against 10. If you succeed, you feel like waves of black ocean water washed over you, and you come to soaking wet. If you fail you fall unconscious and need a friend to wake you up. This is not a gaze attack, you only need to roll if you choose to stare at or examine Jenny's darkest parts.)
I don't know exactly what Black Jenny's scream sounds like, but I imagine it's something like the Pree-Sisters Swallowing a Donkey's Eye.
Showing posts with label links. Show all posts
Showing posts with label links. Show all posts
Tuesday, October 2, 2018
Friday, August 31, 2018
Two Blasphemous Guilds in Infinigrad
Michael Raston from The Lizard Man Diaries has a new book out, meant to generate guilds and guild-jobs for his Infinigrad setting. After my previous post generating a couple of Infinigrad neighborhoods, I was already thinking of generating a couple random guilds, and Michael sent me a free PDF of the book. It's based on the guild generator and the guild-job generator he previously posted to his blog, although a close reading might reveal differences. Luke Gearing from ANT-LERRR did the art and the layout, giving the whole thing a kind of punk-collage aesthetic that fits well with the content, and really elevates the visual experience of the book beyond the simple text of the original blog entries. A close reading of the text might reveal differences, but I think the blog and the book are basically the same. If you like the blog, your reasons for buying the book would be because you want to support Michael's writing, or you enjoy Luke's art, or your want to own the polished final product instead of the earlier draft.
Infinigrad, as its name implies, is an almost-infinite city, a city-plane like Ravnica ... and like Ravnica, it's full of powerful guilds that control basically every possible form of commerce. Although the guilds would like to war on each other endlessly, some powerful / magical law prevents any guild from acting directly against any other. Which is where the player characters come in. Players don't control guild members, they control unemployed vagrants that the guilds can use as patsies and cutouts and catspaws to attack one another indirectly. So the "guild jobs" that the generator creates aren't jobs for guild members, they're jobs the guilds want someone else to do for them. They aren't jobs that have anything to do with the guild's expertise - that's something they're perfectly capable of doing by themselves. These jobs are the only thing the guilds can't do, the only thing they need to hire someone else to do ... that is, they're cold war black ops.
I'm going to generate two random guilds and two random guild jobs. Since all the guilds are embroiled in a war of each-versus-all, I'm going to go ahead and assume that each of the two guilds' jobs are targeting one another. So that means that I'll learn more about each guild from the job its enemy wants done to it than I will from the job it wants done to its enemy.
First Guild - The Cackling Embrace
expertise 10/2/3, forename 10/2/1, modus 7/3/2, aftname 7/3/6
expertise: god killers
modus operandi: work is intended to be used in a netlike fashion
target 3/2, action 3/5, location 2/4, danger 1/10, reward 2/1
target: a device that moves the world around it, a person who causes reactions in others with silence and stealth
action: clean, erase, or otherwise erode target
location: wizardly places, magical laboratories, golem factories, portal mazes, and the like
danger: entire location is an obscene death trap, a torturer's wet dream
reward: a guild-specific blessing
The guild: The Cackling Embrace weave giant nets that look like spidersilk webs strung with dew. They use these nets to catch gods, plucking them from the sky and imprisoning them in glass display cases. Some they keep alive in a zoological garden, others they taxidermy and kill, others are never seen again. Once a god is caught in one of the Cackling Embrace's nets, it's cut off from its followers, unable anymore to empower relics or answer prayers. So far, the largest god they've ever caught was an enraged tree spirit the size of a train car, but at the moment they're weaving a new net to catch their largest god ever - an astral leviathan, a god whale.
The origin of the Cackling Embrace's nets are a closely guarded secret, but their enemies have recently learned that the "dew-drops" that bedeck each strand are mothers' tears of joy. When a mother learns that her sick baby will live, that it will remain here on earth with her rather than passing on to the afterlife, she laughs and cries, and her tears help bind gods to the world, cutting off their connection to the Spirit Realm, even as the nets bind them physically. The aquarium tanks where the Embrace display their most prized gods aren't filled with ordinary water, but with the same mothers' joyful tears.
The job: The Cackling Embrace aim to strike a decisive deathblow against Ambulator Vicis by using glistening net-silk ropes to bind and stifle their central mechanism, the Infinite Orrery. The existence of the Orrery and even its location are no secret - they're in the central chamber of Ambulator Vicis' guild stronghold. But reaching the chamber through any direct route would mean fighting off an army of Vicis guards, battering down doors meant to withstand the crumbling of the world itself.
Better to sneak in along the maintenance shafts and utility conduits that connect the Orrery to the bedrock of Infinigrad. Of course, navigating that route means winding a path through a maze of circle-shaped rooms with only one door, that rotate to connect with their four tangent neighbors. Innumerable of these rooms are death-traps, and only one safe route through the maze exists. The Embrace has learned that Vicis calls this route "the knight's tour" but beyond that little more is known. What information they can give you comes from a handful of survivors who only escaped by accident, finding their way by chance to one of the exits rather than the center of the maze. These scarred souls tell of friends crushed beneath rolling wheels, ground up in mills, broken on torturer's wheels, drowned in water wheels, cursed by wheels of fortune.
The Embrace will supply the rope to trap the Orrery. Fed into the mechanism as it spins, the rope will wind around and around it, creating a tangle that can never be untied, made from a material that can never be cut. Despite the dangers, they've had no dearth of volunteers, for the prize is a god of the victor's choice, any god from among the Cackling Embrace's collections.
Second Guild - Ambulator Vicis
expertise 7/3/3, forename 7/3/3, modus 6/4/4, aftname 6/4/2
expertise: wheeled transportation
modus operandi: work achieves the opposite effect of what is normally expected from expertise
target 2/3, action 2/10, location 1/6, danger 3/1, reward 1/1
target: someone or something taken for granted but vital and important, most see right through target
action: desanctify or otherwise corrupt target
location: heaving and overpopulated tenements, teeming with conflict
danger: an abundance of light, nowhere to hide
reward: thanks in the form of basic guild-specific service
The guild: Ambulator Vicis controls the Infinite Orrery, and with it, the very layout of Infinigrad. Underpinning every neighborhood in the city are gears and wheels, axles, shafts, and pistons - and they all connect back to the Infinite Orrery. Ambulator Vicis doesn't transport goods or people (although supply may be connected to demand through their aid), Vicis moves entire neighborhoods, reshuffling the streets of Infinigrad to push and pull, weave and shift.
Sometimes they simply relocate a single neighborhood, shoving its new neighbors aside to make room. Sometimes they do transpositions, switching two neighborhoods' places with a minimum of disruption to anyone intervening. Sometimes their work is more arcane, reshaping whole swaths of the city by reordering the residents according to some unknown or occult streetmap - maybe working for a wealthy client, maybe obeying the demands of the stars in their infinite gyre. Most commonly two neighborhoods in the same region of the city are made direct neighbors, or a divorce is finalized by relocating the sectarians deeper in their new home territory, far from the disputed border.
Either at the behest of a hidden client, or perhaps out of civic pride, Vicis has been making moves recently to relocate and contain a disaster site within the city limits, a foundry that exploded like a volcano, trapped in a bubble of slow-time, a problem that seems beyond the scope of any power in the city to address. Never directly, but always as part of some other job, Vicis has begun moving the disaster site, begun reshuffling which neighborhoods border it. They must be planning to contain or control the explosion, mustn't they? Or to contain it by surrounding the site with other derelicts and wrecks? Surely they can't be arranging their enemies to be repositioned en masse? Surely they can't be preparing to surround the site with their foes before releasing the explosion back to real time?
The job: How did the war between Ambulator Vicis and the Cackling Embrace begin? Does the Vicis take on gods as clients or retain them as counselors? Is the Embrace's hidden net-works facility somehow sensitive to the movement of the city? However the war started, Ambulator Vicis wants to end it. By studying the net-strands brought into their facilities by would-be saboteurs, Vicis has learned the secret of the mothers' thankful tears. By means unknown, they have discovered the Embrace's greatest collector, a human doctor known as the Angel of Infantile Mercy, who visits the slums and tenements whenever plague wracks them or illness runs floor to floor. The Angel of Infantile Mercy! Whom all the poor mothers pray to! Whom all the poor places beg to appear! Whenever the sickness comes, they beg her to arrive in time, before the dying starts. The Angel of Infantile Mercy saves them all, or most anyway, and collects no payment, only tears of joy and relief, only mothers' grateful tears.
The Angel of Infantile Mercy does as much work as dozens of other collectors. Without the Angel, the Embrace could not string their nets, could not fill their tanks. Ambulator Vicis wants the Angel gone. They want the Angel discredited, defamed. They have already planned the blasphemy, that the Angel only goes where the Angel has already been, that the Angel always travels to first to spread sickness, then returns to treat it, that all the children the Angel "saves" were only endangered because of her in the first place. Is it a lie? No one will want to believe it. Charges so serious, if credibly made, will mobilize the Fourth Estate to evaluate and judge. Any frame-up will have to be iron-clad to survive such scrutiny. Every witness will have to be paid, every track and trace swept away. The public would prefer to believe that the accuser tells lies, so any accuser must be prepared to weather the withering gaze of every investigating eye in Infinigrad. But if the charges stick, if the Angel can be blasphemed, then the Cackling Embrace may not survive the revelation of their association with someone so scorned.
In return, Ambulator Vicis will move the victor's home neighborhood anywhere they please, will let them choose their immediate neighbors, and agree to forego any job that would upset this arrangement.
Infinigrad, as its name implies, is an almost-infinite city, a city-plane like Ravnica ... and like Ravnica, it's full of powerful guilds that control basically every possible form of commerce. Although the guilds would like to war on each other endlessly, some powerful / magical law prevents any guild from acting directly against any other. Which is where the player characters come in. Players don't control guild members, they control unemployed vagrants that the guilds can use as patsies and cutouts and catspaws to attack one another indirectly. So the "guild jobs" that the generator creates aren't jobs for guild members, they're jobs the guilds want someone else to do for them. They aren't jobs that have anything to do with the guild's expertise - that's something they're perfectly capable of doing by themselves. These jobs are the only thing the guilds can't do, the only thing they need to hire someone else to do ... that is, they're cold war black ops.
I'm going to generate two random guilds and two random guild jobs. Since all the guilds are embroiled in a war of each-versus-all, I'm going to go ahead and assume that each of the two guilds' jobs are targeting one another. So that means that I'll learn more about each guild from the job its enemy wants done to it than I will from the job it wants done to its enemy.
First Guild - The Cackling Embrace
expertise 10/2/3, forename 10/2/1, modus 7/3/2, aftname 7/3/6
expertise: god killers
modus operandi: work is intended to be used in a netlike fashion
target 3/2, action 3/5, location 2/4, danger 1/10, reward 2/1
target: a device that moves the world around it, a person who causes reactions in others with silence and stealth
action: clean, erase, or otherwise erode target
location: wizardly places, magical laboratories, golem factories, portal mazes, and the like
danger: entire location is an obscene death trap, a torturer's wet dream
reward: a guild-specific blessing
The guild: The Cackling Embrace weave giant nets that look like spidersilk webs strung with dew. They use these nets to catch gods, plucking them from the sky and imprisoning them in glass display cases. Some they keep alive in a zoological garden, others they taxidermy and kill, others are never seen again. Once a god is caught in one of the Cackling Embrace's nets, it's cut off from its followers, unable anymore to empower relics or answer prayers. So far, the largest god they've ever caught was an enraged tree spirit the size of a train car, but at the moment they're weaving a new net to catch their largest god ever - an astral leviathan, a god whale.
The origin of the Cackling Embrace's nets are a closely guarded secret, but their enemies have recently learned that the "dew-drops" that bedeck each strand are mothers' tears of joy. When a mother learns that her sick baby will live, that it will remain here on earth with her rather than passing on to the afterlife, she laughs and cries, and her tears help bind gods to the world, cutting off their connection to the Spirit Realm, even as the nets bind them physically. The aquarium tanks where the Embrace display their most prized gods aren't filled with ordinary water, but with the same mothers' joyful tears.
The job: The Cackling Embrace aim to strike a decisive deathblow against Ambulator Vicis by using glistening net-silk ropes to bind and stifle their central mechanism, the Infinite Orrery. The existence of the Orrery and even its location are no secret - they're in the central chamber of Ambulator Vicis' guild stronghold. But reaching the chamber through any direct route would mean fighting off an army of Vicis guards, battering down doors meant to withstand the crumbling of the world itself.
Better to sneak in along the maintenance shafts and utility conduits that connect the Orrery to the bedrock of Infinigrad. Of course, navigating that route means winding a path through a maze of circle-shaped rooms with only one door, that rotate to connect with their four tangent neighbors. Innumerable of these rooms are death-traps, and only one safe route through the maze exists. The Embrace has learned that Vicis calls this route "the knight's tour" but beyond that little more is known. What information they can give you comes from a handful of survivors who only escaped by accident, finding their way by chance to one of the exits rather than the center of the maze. These scarred souls tell of friends crushed beneath rolling wheels, ground up in mills, broken on torturer's wheels, drowned in water wheels, cursed by wheels of fortune.
The Embrace will supply the rope to trap the Orrery. Fed into the mechanism as it spins, the rope will wind around and around it, creating a tangle that can never be untied, made from a material that can never be cut. Despite the dangers, they've had no dearth of volunteers, for the prize is a god of the victor's choice, any god from among the Cackling Embrace's collections.
Second Guild - Ambulator Vicis
expertise 7/3/3, forename 7/3/3, modus 6/4/4, aftname 6/4/2
expertise: wheeled transportation
modus operandi: work achieves the opposite effect of what is normally expected from expertise
target 2/3, action 2/10, location 1/6, danger 3/1, reward 1/1
target: someone or something taken for granted but vital and important, most see right through target
action: desanctify or otherwise corrupt target
location: heaving and overpopulated tenements, teeming with conflict
danger: an abundance of light, nowhere to hide
reward: thanks in the form of basic guild-specific service
The guild: Ambulator Vicis controls the Infinite Orrery, and with it, the very layout of Infinigrad. Underpinning every neighborhood in the city are gears and wheels, axles, shafts, and pistons - and they all connect back to the Infinite Orrery. Ambulator Vicis doesn't transport goods or people (although supply may be connected to demand through their aid), Vicis moves entire neighborhoods, reshuffling the streets of Infinigrad to push and pull, weave and shift.
Sometimes they simply relocate a single neighborhood, shoving its new neighbors aside to make room. Sometimes they do transpositions, switching two neighborhoods' places with a minimum of disruption to anyone intervening. Sometimes their work is more arcane, reshaping whole swaths of the city by reordering the residents according to some unknown or occult streetmap - maybe working for a wealthy client, maybe obeying the demands of the stars in their infinite gyre. Most commonly two neighborhoods in the same region of the city are made direct neighbors, or a divorce is finalized by relocating the sectarians deeper in their new home territory, far from the disputed border.
Either at the behest of a hidden client, or perhaps out of civic pride, Vicis has been making moves recently to relocate and contain a disaster site within the city limits, a foundry that exploded like a volcano, trapped in a bubble of slow-time, a problem that seems beyond the scope of any power in the city to address. Never directly, but always as part of some other job, Vicis has begun moving the disaster site, begun reshuffling which neighborhoods border it. They must be planning to contain or control the explosion, mustn't they? Or to contain it by surrounding the site with other derelicts and wrecks? Surely they can't be arranging their enemies to be repositioned en masse? Surely they can't be preparing to surround the site with their foes before releasing the explosion back to real time?
The job: How did the war between Ambulator Vicis and the Cackling Embrace begin? Does the Vicis take on gods as clients or retain them as counselors? Is the Embrace's hidden net-works facility somehow sensitive to the movement of the city? However the war started, Ambulator Vicis wants to end it. By studying the net-strands brought into their facilities by would-be saboteurs, Vicis has learned the secret of the mothers' thankful tears. By means unknown, they have discovered the Embrace's greatest collector, a human doctor known as the Angel of Infantile Mercy, who visits the slums and tenements whenever plague wracks them or illness runs floor to floor. The Angel of Infantile Mercy! Whom all the poor mothers pray to! Whom all the poor places beg to appear! Whenever the sickness comes, they beg her to arrive in time, before the dying starts. The Angel of Infantile Mercy saves them all, or most anyway, and collects no payment, only tears of joy and relief, only mothers' grateful tears.
The Angel of Infantile Mercy does as much work as dozens of other collectors. Without the Angel, the Embrace could not string their nets, could not fill their tanks. Ambulator Vicis wants the Angel gone. They want the Angel discredited, defamed. They have already planned the blasphemy, that the Angel only goes where the Angel has already been, that the Angel always travels to first to spread sickness, then returns to treat it, that all the children the Angel "saves" were only endangered because of her in the first place. Is it a lie? No one will want to believe it. Charges so serious, if credibly made, will mobilize the Fourth Estate to evaluate and judge. Any frame-up will have to be iron-clad to survive such scrutiny. Every witness will have to be paid, every track and trace swept away. The public would prefer to believe that the accuser tells lies, so any accuser must be prepared to weather the withering gaze of every investigating eye in Infinigrad. But if the charges stick, if the Angel can be blasphemed, then the Cackling Embrace may not survive the revelation of their association with someone so scorned.
In return, Ambulator Vicis will move the victor's home neighborhood anywhere they please, will let them choose their immediate neighbors, and agree to forego any job that would upset this arrangement.
Monday, August 6, 2018
Two Chromatic Neighborhoods in Infinigrad
The Lizard Man Diaries has posted a generator for creating fantasy city neighborhoods. Le Chaudron Chromatique has a new fantasy building generator. Let's combine that with Lizard Man Diaries' fantasy building generator, and create a couple fantasy neighborhoods, as well as a landmark building for each neighborhood. In one neighborhood, we'll use the "fantasypunk megacity" generator to provide extra information about the neighborhood itself, and in the other, we'll use it to provide more detail about the landmark.
Neighborhood 1 - The Fountain District
Okay, so our random table tells us that this neighborhood's prevalent architecture is something to do with water transport - canals, pipes, sewers. There's engraved script that winds along the streets, and that script communicates some kind of message. Finally, the neighborhood is somehow existentially committed to being ethereal, vaporous, twisting, flowing, or floating. We can work with that.
Now let's add in extra detail from the other generator. The neighborhood has feral, makeshift, or jury-rigged architecture, made from repurposed materials, and seemingly on the verge of collapse. Despite its appearance, it actually required great expense in its construction. Meanwhile, the residents of the neighborhood are stoic or silent, and they dislike visitors.
Finally, the landmark building. It's a productive building of some kind and/or has something to do with food - a barn, farm, store, granary, greenhouse, mill, workshop or factory. Its special feature is that the building is made out of or connected to a giant fruit, vegetable, mushroom or tree.
Infinigrad: prevalent architecture 24, what's going on 85, atmospheric mutation 14
Fantasypunk megacity: raceoid base 6, physical quirk 2/3, mental quirk 4/4
Fantasy house: trait 1, type 3, special 8
"To everyone else in the city, the Fountain District is a joke, but despite the place's whimsical appearance, the locals in the Fountain are all grim and serious. The whole neighborhood is filled with pipes, the entire apparatus above-ground, looking like something from a Dr Seuss book or a Rube Goldberg diagram. Pipes as densely packed as bamboo in a jungle, rising 10 feet, 20 feet in the air, vaulting over the streets, passing through buildings at eye level though open windows. The layout is more or less permanent, but it looks like it was built yesterday and ought to collapse tomorrow. The pipes wind and meander, merge and split, diameters stepping up and down, water pressure rising and falling, joints and valves and gauges everywhere you look. At any given time, half the water in the neighborhood is in the air, which is how the Fountain District gets its name. Every spray looks like an accident, a leak, but there are thousands of them on every block, and every one of them gets caught by a funnel or basin or drain, perfectly placed despite looking for all the world like a haphazard mistake. The locals shuffle around all day, taking pressure gauge readings, carrying wrenches, tightening here, loosening there, grafting on new pipes that look just as accidental as the old."
"What the residents know, but won't tell outsiders, is that the pipes in the Fountain District perfectly match the blood vessels, organs, lymph nodes, and glands of an Astral Leviathan. Anyone who's studied marine astrobiology will notice the similarities immediately. The daily routines of the locals involve a great deal of turning on faucets, filling basins, drinking and washing and bathing - and somehow, they believe, their activities don't just copy the natural biological functions of the leviathan, they cause them. Every day for the locals is a 16-hour choreographed routine that sustains the life of their Whale God. If directed with the right orchestration, they could seize control of the great beast, summon it to the mortal plane. For now though, their goal is just to keep the Leviathan alive on the Astral Sea, and they treat this responsibility as a sacred trust."
"Unfortunately, with all that water, it was inevitable that something would start to grow. First it was rust-colored lichen growing along the pipes, then precise lines of moss forming living shadow of the whole apparatus on the ground. Then came the ultramarine snozzberries, growing on winding vines that gripped where the lichen and moss already took hold. The locals tried ripping it all up, but it just grew back, and vermicious wasps began attacking anyone who tried. Now a giant peach has grown up right in the south-central park, right where the Leviathan's womb should be. The wasps have chewed away the peach's interior, carving it like the cliffs of Petra. It seems to serve as a cafeteria of sorts for them, perhaps a boarding house as well."
"The locals have two theories about their newest landmark. One faction thinks the God Whale has cancer and the peach is the earthly manifestation of its tumor. The other faction thinks the God Whale is pregnant and the peach represents is offspring. Obviously opinions differ about what should be done with the peach, but both sides agree the stakes are very high. Just recently a peacemaker seems to have convinced both factions that the only way to decide is to summon the Leviathan itself to the city, and perhaps to let it cure itself by destroying the worldly embodiment of its disease. The ceremony is currently being planned..."
Neighborhood 2 - Old Foundry
According to the neighborhood generator, this one's dominant architecture are ancient factories, oil wells, and fire pits. It's also a maze of teleportation portals, and might not even be physically connected to the rest of the city. The atmospheric mutation causes everything to be frozen, preserved, or caught. Okay, I think I'm getting a sense of what this place is like.
Next up, the landmark building. This one is a combination of two building types. It's somehow both a small house and a theater, arena, music hall, agora, or forum.
Let's see where it came from. The building was built by whisker men, so it's got low ceilings, tunnels instead of hallways, and the whole thing feels claustrophobically cramped to surface dwellers. The weather directly over the building is different from the weather in the rest of the neighborhood, and the building has been somehow partially destroyed by caustic liquid or boiling lava. Maybe something like the output of all those foundries?
Infinigrad: prevalent architecture 52, what's going on 19, atmospheric mutation 11
Fantasy house: trait 5, type 7/5, special 9
Fantasypunk megacity: raceoid base 3, physical quirk 1/8, mental quirk 2/9
"Old Foundry is a catastrophic industrial accident in slow motion, quite literally. In the hundred years since the final redundancy failed, perhaps 1½ seconds have passed. The cataclysm is still happening, still threatening to wipe out all life in every neighborhood that touches Old Foundry, and in every neighborhood that touches one of them. You can still hear the alarm bells ringing, a low bronze note that hums like thunder and never wavers."
"The old founders must have triggered one final failsafe to slow down the disaster so that someone could fix it before it was too late, and surely someone will, but not today, and probably not for another hundred years. For now, it's much cheaper, much more profitable to redevelop other boroughs, places where the sky isn't black and the air doesn't reek of sulfur and there aren't 10-story-tall crucibles midway though tumbling over, no tidal waves of molten iron hanging over the ground waiting to finish splashing down. The cleanup is going to be a logistical nightmare, and frankly, no organization exists within the city with enough employees and enough expertise to handle a problem on this scale. No one even comes close, no one is even in the right order of magnitude. So the problem waits for another day."
"The old founders sealed off the Foundry when they pushed the final button. All roads leading in or out of it are dead ends. From the outside, you might not notice that the buildings along one edge of your neighborhood form an impassible wall, but from the inside, it's obvious that Old Foundry is inside a sphere of black. Every factory and forge in the city has a secret entrance to the Foundry hidden in it somewhere, and if you aren't careful to go back exactly the way you came, you could end up halfway across town when you return. The whiskerers maintain their own network of entrances, as they do with most things, and it links up in innumerable ways to their larger network of underground tunnels."
"The whiskerers don't mind the dark, they like the warmth of the place, and time being near frozen doesn't seem to bother them much, they move so slowly anyhow. The only thing that would bother them is the dry, but recently they solved that too. The whiskerers have built a shanty town in Old Foundry right underneath one of the fire control stations. An entire water tower is slowly falling onto them, most days just enough lands to make a heavy mist, occasionally they get a light rain."
"The whole slum is centered around the Sensatorium, a kind of museum / performance art space. It's maintained by an onsite caretaker, who tends the tactile portraits and the haptic displays. The museum is filled with slow-time objects with unusual textures and properties. The centerpiece is a fireplace surrounded by dozens of sconces. The fireplace is the door to an industrial oven that was blown off in the disaster, with a blob of lava that landed right in its center just as time came to a halt. The sconces are dozes of pieces of ever-burning metal."
"The whiskerers collect dead bodies too, all the original workers, they carry them off somewhere. But unlike the Sensatorium - their pride - they share the location of the dead with no outsiders."
Neighborhood 1 - The Fountain District
Okay, so our random table tells us that this neighborhood's prevalent architecture is something to do with water transport - canals, pipes, sewers. There's engraved script that winds along the streets, and that script communicates some kind of message. Finally, the neighborhood is somehow existentially committed to being ethereal, vaporous, twisting, flowing, or floating. We can work with that.
Now let's add in extra detail from the other generator. The neighborhood has feral, makeshift, or jury-rigged architecture, made from repurposed materials, and seemingly on the verge of collapse. Despite its appearance, it actually required great expense in its construction. Meanwhile, the residents of the neighborhood are stoic or silent, and they dislike visitors.
Finally, the landmark building. It's a productive building of some kind and/or has something to do with food - a barn, farm, store, granary, greenhouse, mill, workshop or factory. Its special feature is that the building is made out of or connected to a giant fruit, vegetable, mushroom or tree.
Infinigrad: prevalent architecture 24, what's going on 85, atmospheric mutation 14
Fantasypunk megacity: raceoid base 6, physical quirk 2/3, mental quirk 4/4
Fantasy house: trait 1, type 3, special 8
"To everyone else in the city, the Fountain District is a joke, but despite the place's whimsical appearance, the locals in the Fountain are all grim and serious. The whole neighborhood is filled with pipes, the entire apparatus above-ground, looking like something from a Dr Seuss book or a Rube Goldberg diagram. Pipes as densely packed as bamboo in a jungle, rising 10 feet, 20 feet in the air, vaulting over the streets, passing through buildings at eye level though open windows. The layout is more or less permanent, but it looks like it was built yesterday and ought to collapse tomorrow. The pipes wind and meander, merge and split, diameters stepping up and down, water pressure rising and falling, joints and valves and gauges everywhere you look. At any given time, half the water in the neighborhood is in the air, which is how the Fountain District gets its name. Every spray looks like an accident, a leak, but there are thousands of them on every block, and every one of them gets caught by a funnel or basin or drain, perfectly placed despite looking for all the world like a haphazard mistake. The locals shuffle around all day, taking pressure gauge readings, carrying wrenches, tightening here, loosening there, grafting on new pipes that look just as accidental as the old."
"What the residents know, but won't tell outsiders, is that the pipes in the Fountain District perfectly match the blood vessels, organs, lymph nodes, and glands of an Astral Leviathan. Anyone who's studied marine astrobiology will notice the similarities immediately. The daily routines of the locals involve a great deal of turning on faucets, filling basins, drinking and washing and bathing - and somehow, they believe, their activities don't just copy the natural biological functions of the leviathan, they cause them. Every day for the locals is a 16-hour choreographed routine that sustains the life of their Whale God. If directed with the right orchestration, they could seize control of the great beast, summon it to the mortal plane. For now though, their goal is just to keep the Leviathan alive on the Astral Sea, and they treat this responsibility as a sacred trust."
"Unfortunately, with all that water, it was inevitable that something would start to grow. First it was rust-colored lichen growing along the pipes, then precise lines of moss forming living shadow of the whole apparatus on the ground. Then came the ultramarine snozzberries, growing on winding vines that gripped where the lichen and moss already took hold. The locals tried ripping it all up, but it just grew back, and vermicious wasps began attacking anyone who tried. Now a giant peach has grown up right in the south-central park, right where the Leviathan's womb should be. The wasps have chewed away the peach's interior, carving it like the cliffs of Petra. It seems to serve as a cafeteria of sorts for them, perhaps a boarding house as well."
"The locals have two theories about their newest landmark. One faction thinks the God Whale has cancer and the peach is the earthly manifestation of its tumor. The other faction thinks the God Whale is pregnant and the peach represents is offspring. Obviously opinions differ about what should be done with the peach, but both sides agree the stakes are very high. Just recently a peacemaker seems to have convinced both factions that the only way to decide is to summon the Leviathan itself to the city, and perhaps to let it cure itself by destroying the worldly embodiment of its disease. The ceremony is currently being planned..."
Neighborhood 2 - Old Foundry
According to the neighborhood generator, this one's dominant architecture are ancient factories, oil wells, and fire pits. It's also a maze of teleportation portals, and might not even be physically connected to the rest of the city. The atmospheric mutation causes everything to be frozen, preserved, or caught. Okay, I think I'm getting a sense of what this place is like.
Next up, the landmark building. This one is a combination of two building types. It's somehow both a small house and a theater, arena, music hall, agora, or forum.
Let's see where it came from. The building was built by whisker men, so it's got low ceilings, tunnels instead of hallways, and the whole thing feels claustrophobically cramped to surface dwellers. The weather directly over the building is different from the weather in the rest of the neighborhood, and the building has been somehow partially destroyed by caustic liquid or boiling lava. Maybe something like the output of all those foundries?
Infinigrad: prevalent architecture 52, what's going on 19, atmospheric mutation 11
Fantasy house: trait 5, type 7/5, special 9
Fantasypunk megacity: raceoid base 3, physical quirk 1/8, mental quirk 2/9
"Old Foundry is a catastrophic industrial accident in slow motion, quite literally. In the hundred years since the final redundancy failed, perhaps 1½ seconds have passed. The cataclysm is still happening, still threatening to wipe out all life in every neighborhood that touches Old Foundry, and in every neighborhood that touches one of them. You can still hear the alarm bells ringing, a low bronze note that hums like thunder and never wavers."
"The old founders must have triggered one final failsafe to slow down the disaster so that someone could fix it before it was too late, and surely someone will, but not today, and probably not for another hundred years. For now, it's much cheaper, much more profitable to redevelop other boroughs, places where the sky isn't black and the air doesn't reek of sulfur and there aren't 10-story-tall crucibles midway though tumbling over, no tidal waves of molten iron hanging over the ground waiting to finish splashing down. The cleanup is going to be a logistical nightmare, and frankly, no organization exists within the city with enough employees and enough expertise to handle a problem on this scale. No one even comes close, no one is even in the right order of magnitude. So the problem waits for another day."
"The old founders sealed off the Foundry when they pushed the final button. All roads leading in or out of it are dead ends. From the outside, you might not notice that the buildings along one edge of your neighborhood form an impassible wall, but from the inside, it's obvious that Old Foundry is inside a sphere of black. Every factory and forge in the city has a secret entrance to the Foundry hidden in it somewhere, and if you aren't careful to go back exactly the way you came, you could end up halfway across town when you return. The whiskerers maintain their own network of entrances, as they do with most things, and it links up in innumerable ways to their larger network of underground tunnels."
"The whiskerers don't mind the dark, they like the warmth of the place, and time being near frozen doesn't seem to bother them much, they move so slowly anyhow. The only thing that would bother them is the dry, but recently they solved that too. The whiskerers have built a shanty town in Old Foundry right underneath one of the fire control stations. An entire water tower is slowly falling onto them, most days just enough lands to make a heavy mist, occasionally they get a light rain."
"The whole slum is centered around the Sensatorium, a kind of museum / performance art space. It's maintained by an onsite caretaker, who tends the tactile portraits and the haptic displays. The museum is filled with slow-time objects with unusual textures and properties. The centerpiece is a fireplace surrounded by dozens of sconces. The fireplace is the door to an industrial oven that was blown off in the disaster, with a blob of lava that landed right in its center just as time came to a halt. The sconces are dozes of pieces of ever-burning metal."
"The whiskerers collect dead bodies too, all the original workers, they carry them off somewhere. But unlike the Sensatorium - their pride - they share the location of the dead with no outsiders."
Monday, July 30, 2018
Joel Simon's Dungeons I Want to Explore - Evolving Floorplan Elementary Schools
People are programming neural-networks to do all kinds of things these days.* Joel Simon used one to design a new elementary school.
Rather than feed his AI thousands of elementary school floorplans and then ask it to produce a new one that fits in with the others, Simon gave the computer one floorplan and asked it to keep the same rooms in the same sizes, but rearrange the layout, first to minimize the amount of building materials and the time it takes to get between classrooms, and then to minimize how long it takes anyone to reach a fire exit.
The structures the computer came up with are probably impossible to build, and would likely feel deeply unsettling to be in. He says "I have very mixed feelings about this project. ... By not obeying any laws of architecture or design, it made the results very hard to evaluate." He could probably get a viable building if he also demanded that the neural-net only draw rectangular rooms and uniform hallway widths. Instead, he ended up with a lot of teardrop, hexagonal, and diamond-shaped rooms;** hallways that get narrower the deeper into the building you go (because the expected foot traffic diminishes as people enter shallower rooms); and hardly any windows. He explains: "Windows were also experimented with ... this led to many interior courtyards."+
Joel Simon's elementary schools don't look like any buildings that actually exist, but they do look like they'd make pretty good dungeons. The numerous branching paths and dead-ends would create a non-linear exploration experience, and the frequent use of room-to-room doorways actually creates a number of loops despite the hallways never reconnecting.
I imagine that the green classrooms would be standard dungeon rooms, while the mustard-colored teachers' lounges are caches hidden by secret doors, the red admin rooms and light blue facilities seem like lairs or faction strongholds, while the lavenders spaces are "specials", and the playground is a garden. The organic, space-saving and material-reducing logic of the place even makes a kind of sense if we imagine that it's underground. (Other explanations could be a building constructed by fungal / alien minds, a building rearranged by evil magic, a memory palace as it exists within the subconscious of the victim of your heist, or the Dark Hyrule / Upside Down counterpart to an ordinary building.)
* I feel like there is some collective ritual of reassuring ourselves that our jobs are still safe among members of the precariat and various white-collar professions, where we read these things with bated breath and then have a good long post-panic laugh after seeing that neural-nets are still so bad at designing anything. I also feel like that will probably change within my lifetime. I suspect that someday we'll all look back fondly at a time when a computer thought "grass bat" and "turdly" were good names for a paint colors. I can't tell you how relieved I feel whenever the all-seeing eye of surveillance-driven internet advertising offers me something ludicrously inappropriate. It's going to be disquieting when internet ads inevitably learn how to offer me things I might genuinely want.
** I expected circular rooms, and you can see that they are circular in the preliminary floorplan, but then the rooms expanded to fill all the unused space between the circles, leading to a number of odd, hard-to-describe room shapes.
+ I would have liked to see one of the floorplans with an interior courtyard. Again, it's something that you would never build in a real school, but that fits the the underground dungeon aesthetic. Then again, as a child, I used to want to live in a Victorian house that took up the outer ring of a 3x3 grid, with the center square being an interior arboretum - so who knows, maybe AI architects will give us the courtyards we didn't know we wanted.
Rather than feed his AI thousands of elementary school floorplans and then ask it to produce a new one that fits in with the others, Simon gave the computer one floorplan and asked it to keep the same rooms in the same sizes, but rearrange the layout, first to minimize the amount of building materials and the time it takes to get between classrooms, and then to minimize how long it takes anyone to reach a fire exit.
 |
| Fig 1 - The neural-network's two final designs from Joel Simon |
The structures the computer came up with are probably impossible to build, and would likely feel deeply unsettling to be in. He says "I have very mixed feelings about this project. ... By not obeying any laws of architecture or design, it made the results very hard to evaluate." He could probably get a viable building if he also demanded that the neural-net only draw rectangular rooms and uniform hallway widths. Instead, he ended up with a lot of teardrop, hexagonal, and diamond-shaped rooms;** hallways that get narrower the deeper into the building you go (because the expected foot traffic diminishes as people enter shallower rooms); and hardly any windows. He explains: "Windows were also experimented with ... this led to many interior courtyards."+
Joel Simon's elementary schools don't look like any buildings that actually exist, but they do look like they'd make pretty good dungeons. The numerous branching paths and dead-ends would create a non-linear exploration experience, and the frequent use of room-to-room doorways actually creates a number of loops despite the hallways never reconnecting.
I imagine that the green classrooms would be standard dungeon rooms, while the mustard-colored teachers' lounges are caches hidden by secret doors, the red admin rooms and light blue facilities seem like lairs or faction strongholds, while the lavenders spaces are "specials", and the playground is a garden. The organic, space-saving and material-reducing logic of the place even makes a kind of sense if we imagine that it's underground. (Other explanations could be a building constructed by fungal / alien minds, a building rearranged by evil magic, a memory palace as it exists within the subconscious of the victim of your heist, or the Dark Hyrule / Upside Down counterpart to an ordinary building.)
 |
| Fig 2 - The neural-network's design process from Joel Simon |
* I feel like there is some collective ritual of reassuring ourselves that our jobs are still safe among members of the precariat and various white-collar professions, where we read these things with bated breath and then have a good long post-panic laugh after seeing that neural-nets are still so bad at designing anything. I also feel like that will probably change within my lifetime. I suspect that someday we'll all look back fondly at a time when a computer thought "grass bat" and "turdly" were good names for a paint colors. I can't tell you how relieved I feel whenever the all-seeing eye of surveillance-driven internet advertising offers me something ludicrously inappropriate. It's going to be disquieting when internet ads inevitably learn how to offer me things I might genuinely want.
** I expected circular rooms, and you can see that they are circular in the preliminary floorplan, but then the rooms expanded to fill all the unused space between the circles, leading to a number of odd, hard-to-describe room shapes.
+ I would have liked to see one of the floorplans with an interior courtyard. Again, it's something that you would never build in a real school, but that fits the the underground dungeon aesthetic. Then again, as a child, I used to want to live in a Victorian house that took up the outer ring of a 3x3 grid, with the center square being an interior arboretum - so who knows, maybe AI architects will give us the courtyards we didn't know we wanted.
Saturday, July 28, 2018
Two Good Links on Resource Management
I'm not the only one with resource mobilization on her mind.
In his book Art Worlds, Howard Becker proposes that individual genius isn't what creates art, art is created by communities of artists - working together, trading ideas, improving on one another's techniques, discarding unnecessary elements, refining the elements they keep. In this view Gary Gygax and Dave Arneson didn't invent D&D, the Lake Geneva wargaming scene invented D&D. It's obvious that there would be no Tekumel without D&D, it's less obvious, but no less true, that there would be no D&D as we know it without the educational supply companies mass-producing unusual-sided dice as classroom aids. Individual artists get credit and blame for the final products that bear their names, but if those products are credit-worthy, it's because of the community who helped invent, test, prove, and refine the ideas and techniques that went into that product, because of the community's theorists who justified and explained the ideas, because of the community's trained audience members who had already learned to appreciate what the product offered. It might require painstaking historical research to uncover the individual contributions of the community members, it might be impossible if insufficient records were kept of ephemeral conversations. Individuals get credit. But it's the community that creates.
My point is, resource management is having a cultural moment within what I would call the Old School Renaissance roleplaying scene. (Other people might call this scene/community by a different name, the self-identity of any scene is one of the things its theorists and aestheticians argue over and refine.) I've written a couple posts about resource management, but I'm not the only one thinking about it right now. One of my goals is to take stock of other people's ideas, but I'm not even alone in my stock-taking. Another of my goals is to look for places to innovate, but any innovations I think of will not be my ideas alone, they will be ideas I only had, ideas I only could have had, because of what other people wrote and thought.
Other people working on the same idea as you doesn't mean that you (and the world more generally) is in danger of running out or using up all possible ideas on that topic. It means the opposite. It means that's where the action is, at least right now. It means that ideas will come thick and fast from all corners, good ideas getting replaced by better ideas, today's draft torn down to make way for tomorrow's revision. And if someone else has literally the same idea you just had and posts it first, all it means is that you both looked as the same inspiration, both experienced the same eureka. The same idea might be thought up by many people simultaneously, because it's not any individual's idea, it's the community's. Stay involved, keep trying, speak up faster next time. You may not get credit, out of the whole community, hardly anyone will get credit, but you can still be a part of the scene. That's what's going on with resource management in the OSR right now.
Necropraxis offers a great overview of good ideas that have come out of the OSR, almost all of them related to resource management, or at least ideas that make RM-play possible. Half of Brendan's post reminds me of my own rough outline for my post series, half is full of ideas and suggestions that don't necessarily seem to be part of RM-play, but are principles that are necessary to make resource management function at the table.
"Make chargen fast and easy. Support fully random character generation. Determine starting gear randomly rather than shopping."
If you want to free up the cognitive resources necessary to pay attention to resource management, one place to cut complexity and decision-making is in character generation. Making starting gear randomly rather than painstakingly-selected speeds things up a lot, but it also has another consequence I'll talk about in a second. Plus, as Out for Blood (who Brendan links to) explains, random character generation is quick, quick chargen makes frequent character death possible and more palatable, and character death makes random chargen more fair by preferentially culling weaker characters faster, giving players more time to develop strong characters through gameplay.
"Low level D&D is a sweet spot for dungeon exploration games."
A game where you're worrying about running out of food or water or light is inherently a low-power game. Keeping gameplay grounded and low-fantasy leaves room that makes resource management possible. Superheroes don't count matchsticks. Gods don't carry flint and steel.
"Minimize bookkeeping. Not all games demand complex resource management, but I think it is better to let the nature of the game determine rules requirements rather than neglecting the consequences of encumbrance due to the hassle of using cumbersome mechanics."
Figure out the simplest version of things, so that you can use that if you need to, so that you have a baseline to add complexity to if you want to. Use something because you want it, ignore it because you don't. Don't feel forced to include accounting you find unnecessary, don't feel forced to exclude things you want because you can't figure out an easy way to count them.
The Scones Alone also has a recent post about resource management, ostensibly for Into the Odd, but his ideas could be applied to pretty much any old-school D&D-type game. To me, there is one big idea here, and then lots of other smart observations. (Also, I haven't read Into the Odd's latest playtest document, so I'm not completely certain how much of what he's written is new, and how much of it is just new to me.) The big idea is expedition resources. For vital resources like food, water, torches, and rope, one character carries the party's entire supply as a single indivisible object. What impresses me about this idea is that it's simpler than what you might otherwise think is the simplest version of this idea (which would be that each character carries their own supply of torches, let's say, as a single indivisible bundle.)
"If even one character in the group is carrying a single quantity of the resource, there is a sufficient amount for the entire group to use. They have an expected use that does not ordinarily deplete the resource. Creative uses of the resource trigger a Luck Roll that may deplete the resource. Only three states for vital resources: sufficient, resource about to run out, resource gone. If nobody in the group has the resource, the party suffers some negative effect."
Every vital resource has an expected use that doesn't deplete the resource at all (so for food, for example, one ration in one character's gear feeds all party members). Making creative use of a resource triggers a luck roll (Brian's example for food is dropping scraps to distract a monster, you could also imagine leaving a trail of breadcrumbs, eating extra portions to heal damage, or feeding an NPC you just met). The possible outcomes of the luck roll are that the resource runs out, that the resource has only a single use left, or that you get lucky and the resource remains un-depleted.
I like very much that this idea removes the shopping question "how much is enough?" from resource management, and focuses all the attention on the dungeoneering question "how shall we use this during play?" The right amount of anything to buy is one. One is enough ... as long as you use it exclusively for its intended purpose. And this is true regardless of how many people are in your party, so there's no wondering if each person needs to buy extra torches because there are fewer of you this week than last. This approach takes the classic lamp-oil trade off "shall we use it for light or shall we use it as a weapon?" and finds a way to generalize it to all the classic resources. Use your resources as intended and you're done, they're managed. Or use them creatively, which uses them up. Perfect. That's just about the perfect resource management decision, and in The Scones Alone's approach, it's the only RM decision.
"Notice something though? The group has only one of each Expedition Resource. That's a 'sufficient' quantity for the group's expected needs. But if a Luck Roll happens to deplete one of those resources, or one of the characters falls into a lava pit, the group now lacks that resource. We've successfully eliminated the guesswork about exactly how many individual rations, how many flasks of water, how many oil flasks are needed, and instead replaced it with the question of: 'How much redundancy do you want?' Or, what is your risk tolerance? Which is a more interesting question to me. It also happens to be an easier question to manage resources for. Maybe the party hires a porter to carry an extra everything? Of course, porters sometimes get scared and run away with all of their stuff..."
Again, this is smart. If a character dies (or at least dies in certain ways) or if an NPC fails their morale and runs away, you're not just down a person, you're potentially down your entire supply of a vital resource. It's the kind of risk that would basically never occur if you're counting individual torches. I mean yes, you could still run the risk of running out of individual torches, but probably only if you under-shopped. Here the question is not "should we buy 20, 40, or 60?" it's "should we run the risk of carrying only one, or give up the space to bring a spare?"
"Players quickly have so much gold that buying more-than-sufficient quantities of vital resources is trivial."
Resource-management heavy games may inherently be poor and/or low-power games, but if your character is routinely bringing back so little gold from the dungeon that you can't afford flashlight batteries and bottled water, then your campaign world may be a little too crapsack. Remember you're risking death down there. If all you're getting in return is pocket-change that leaves you unsure about whether or not you can afford a microwave burrito and to refill your Zippo lighter, then the risk/reward structure of your world may be too cruel for anyone to survive. Brian's idea would also justify charging non-trivial prices to replenish your expedition resources. Remember, you're not just buying a torch, you're buying all the torches you'll need to get through the dungeon.
"It is difficult for players to know how many individual rations, flasks of water, torches, etc. will be sufficient for the current session. Players will usually have either so much of a vital resource that it ceases to matter or so little that it feels like they guessed incorrectly."
To this I would add that if you are using fully-random character generation, including randomly generated starting equipment, then it feels perverse to punish the players with their characters getting lost in the dark forever and then starving to death, just because you, the judge, made them roll on a random table and then wouldn't let them go shopping afterwards. This is the point I said I would come back to earlier. If random starting equipment is a best-practice that gets games going faster and lets people actually play, then you can't subsequently force them to wallow in misery because they had random starting equipment rather than a painstakingly selected bespoke panoply.
"The more differences items have in relation to encumbrance, the more difficult the system is for players to manage accurately and efficiently. Limit encumbered status to, at most, two states: normal and overburdened. All items are either normal or Bulky. Normal items take 1 slot. Bulky items take 2 slots. There is no 'X quantity of this item fits in 1 slot'. If you have 4 vials of poison, it takes 4 slots to carry them."
"A single treasure is treated as a single, indivisible item. Most treasures are Bulky. Some treasures are Unwieldy - they cannot be carried in your inventory. You must come up with a plan, equipment, personnel, etc. to transport them. An important idea is the indivisibility of treasures. Take this into consideration when making your treasures. A heavy, golden vase makes a better treasure than a pile of gold coins. The latter immediately re-raises the 'how many coins per slot' question. If you really want chests of coins, play the 'It's a game. The chest of coins is a single, indivisible Bulky item' card."
Brian gives his player 8 encumbrance slots per character. Note that the popular encumbrance equal to Strength means an average character in an OSR game will get to carry 10 items, after packing rations, torches, and rope, they're left with 7 discretionary spots. In a party of 3 using expedition resources, each character can pack a single expedition resource and be left with 7 discretionary encumbrance slots. Perfect.
Brian's advice here is also just one more reminder that if you're going to use encumbrance, you have to keep it simple. I'm of the opinion that encumbrance is often difficult to use because we often ask it to do too much, tracking significant items, insignificant items, bundles of items, armors that can take up between 0-6 encumbrance slots, incorporating adjustments for strength, multiple movement rates, etc. Brian keeps it dead simple. A specific number of items, period. No bundles, nothing is special. Just this much and no more, and that's it. Again, if you want to add more complications later, there's still some value in identifying the simplest possible version for now. The simplest simplest version is still just to ignore these things entirely, but the simplest version that actually uses some form of encumbrance is probably going to look something like this.
The treasure rules are dead simple too, and preserve original D&D's challenge of making treasure an encumbering item, not just something that disappears into hammer space the moment you pick it up. I think caches of coins are still do-able, but I would suggest making each cache be a unique currency or denomination. The "late Renaissance gold florins with a rare anti-pope obverse minting" are a separate cache from the "Iron Age iron coins dating from Vandal Savage's third empire right before he was overthrown by Kru'll the Eternal" - and both of them are going to a numismatist to get changed for cash before you can spend them. Brian also points out something that I've noticed recently, and that Luka Rejec is obviously thinking about with his rules for "hacking up treasure", which is that there's a distinction between items that take up 1 or 2 encumbrance slots, and items that are larger than an individual character can carry. While technically, this issue could come up with adventuring equipment too, more often, it's a problem that arises from treasure, and I don't think it's fair that you, the judge, should show the players some cool treasure and then force them to leave it behind because you couldn't figure out what rules would adjudicate how their characters could carry it.
In his book Art Worlds, Howard Becker proposes that individual genius isn't what creates art, art is created by communities of artists - working together, trading ideas, improving on one another's techniques, discarding unnecessary elements, refining the elements they keep. In this view Gary Gygax and Dave Arneson didn't invent D&D, the Lake Geneva wargaming scene invented D&D. It's obvious that there would be no Tekumel without D&D, it's less obvious, but no less true, that there would be no D&D as we know it without the educational supply companies mass-producing unusual-sided dice as classroom aids. Individual artists get credit and blame for the final products that bear their names, but if those products are credit-worthy, it's because of the community who helped invent, test, prove, and refine the ideas and techniques that went into that product, because of the community's theorists who justified and explained the ideas, because of the community's trained audience members who had already learned to appreciate what the product offered. It might require painstaking historical research to uncover the individual contributions of the community members, it might be impossible if insufficient records were kept of ephemeral conversations. Individuals get credit. But it's the community that creates.
My point is, resource management is having a cultural moment within what I would call the Old School Renaissance roleplaying scene. (Other people might call this scene/community by a different name, the self-identity of any scene is one of the things its theorists and aestheticians argue over and refine.) I've written a couple posts about resource management, but I'm not the only one thinking about it right now. One of my goals is to take stock of other people's ideas, but I'm not even alone in my stock-taking. Another of my goals is to look for places to innovate, but any innovations I think of will not be my ideas alone, they will be ideas I only had, ideas I only could have had, because of what other people wrote and thought.
Other people working on the same idea as you doesn't mean that you (and the world more generally) is in danger of running out or using up all possible ideas on that topic. It means the opposite. It means that's where the action is, at least right now. It means that ideas will come thick and fast from all corners, good ideas getting replaced by better ideas, today's draft torn down to make way for tomorrow's revision. And if someone else has literally the same idea you just had and posts it first, all it means is that you both looked as the same inspiration, both experienced the same eureka. The same idea might be thought up by many people simultaneously, because it's not any individual's idea, it's the community's. Stay involved, keep trying, speak up faster next time. You may not get credit, out of the whole community, hardly anyone will get credit, but you can still be a part of the scene. That's what's going on with resource management in the OSR right now.
Necropraxis offers a great overview of good ideas that have come out of the OSR, almost all of them related to resource management, or at least ideas that make RM-play possible. Half of Brendan's post reminds me of my own rough outline for my post series, half is full of ideas and suggestions that don't necessarily seem to be part of RM-play, but are principles that are necessary to make resource management function at the table.
"Make chargen fast and easy. Support fully random character generation. Determine starting gear randomly rather than shopping."
If you want to free up the cognitive resources necessary to pay attention to resource management, one place to cut complexity and decision-making is in character generation. Making starting gear randomly rather than painstakingly-selected speeds things up a lot, but it also has another consequence I'll talk about in a second. Plus, as Out for Blood (who Brendan links to) explains, random character generation is quick, quick chargen makes frequent character death possible and more palatable, and character death makes random chargen more fair by preferentially culling weaker characters faster, giving players more time to develop strong characters through gameplay.
"Low level D&D is a sweet spot for dungeon exploration games."
A game where you're worrying about running out of food or water or light is inherently a low-power game. Keeping gameplay grounded and low-fantasy leaves room that makes resource management possible. Superheroes don't count matchsticks. Gods don't carry flint and steel.
"Minimize bookkeeping. Not all games demand complex resource management, but I think it is better to let the nature of the game determine rules requirements rather than neglecting the consequences of encumbrance due to the hassle of using cumbersome mechanics."
Figure out the simplest version of things, so that you can use that if you need to, so that you have a baseline to add complexity to if you want to. Use something because you want it, ignore it because you don't. Don't feel forced to include accounting you find unnecessary, don't feel forced to exclude things you want because you can't figure out an easy way to count them.
The Scones Alone also has a recent post about resource management, ostensibly for Into the Odd, but his ideas could be applied to pretty much any old-school D&D-type game. To me, there is one big idea here, and then lots of other smart observations. (Also, I haven't read Into the Odd's latest playtest document, so I'm not completely certain how much of what he's written is new, and how much of it is just new to me.) The big idea is expedition resources. For vital resources like food, water, torches, and rope, one character carries the party's entire supply as a single indivisible object. What impresses me about this idea is that it's simpler than what you might otherwise think is the simplest version of this idea (which would be that each character carries their own supply of torches, let's say, as a single indivisible bundle.)
"If even one character in the group is carrying a single quantity of the resource, there is a sufficient amount for the entire group to use. They have an expected use that does not ordinarily deplete the resource. Creative uses of the resource trigger a Luck Roll that may deplete the resource. Only three states for vital resources: sufficient, resource about to run out, resource gone. If nobody in the group has the resource, the party suffers some negative effect."
Every vital resource has an expected use that doesn't deplete the resource at all (so for food, for example, one ration in one character's gear feeds all party members). Making creative use of a resource triggers a luck roll (Brian's example for food is dropping scraps to distract a monster, you could also imagine leaving a trail of breadcrumbs, eating extra portions to heal damage, or feeding an NPC you just met). The possible outcomes of the luck roll are that the resource runs out, that the resource has only a single use left, or that you get lucky and the resource remains un-depleted.
I like very much that this idea removes the shopping question "how much is enough?" from resource management, and focuses all the attention on the dungeoneering question "how shall we use this during play?" The right amount of anything to buy is one. One is enough ... as long as you use it exclusively for its intended purpose. And this is true regardless of how many people are in your party, so there's no wondering if each person needs to buy extra torches because there are fewer of you this week than last. This approach takes the classic lamp-oil trade off "shall we use it for light or shall we use it as a weapon?" and finds a way to generalize it to all the classic resources. Use your resources as intended and you're done, they're managed. Or use them creatively, which uses them up. Perfect. That's just about the perfect resource management decision, and in The Scones Alone's approach, it's the only RM decision.
"Notice something though? The group has only one of each Expedition Resource. That's a 'sufficient' quantity for the group's expected needs. But if a Luck Roll happens to deplete one of those resources, or one of the characters falls into a lava pit, the group now lacks that resource. We've successfully eliminated the guesswork about exactly how many individual rations, how many flasks of water, how many oil flasks are needed, and instead replaced it with the question of: 'How much redundancy do you want?' Or, what is your risk tolerance? Which is a more interesting question to me. It also happens to be an easier question to manage resources for. Maybe the party hires a porter to carry an extra everything? Of course, porters sometimes get scared and run away with all of their stuff..."
Again, this is smart. If a character dies (or at least dies in certain ways) or if an NPC fails their morale and runs away, you're not just down a person, you're potentially down your entire supply of a vital resource. It's the kind of risk that would basically never occur if you're counting individual torches. I mean yes, you could still run the risk of running out of individual torches, but probably only if you under-shopped. Here the question is not "should we buy 20, 40, or 60?" it's "should we run the risk of carrying only one, or give up the space to bring a spare?"
"Players quickly have so much gold that buying more-than-sufficient quantities of vital resources is trivial."
Resource-management heavy games may inherently be poor and/or low-power games, but if your character is routinely bringing back so little gold from the dungeon that you can't afford flashlight batteries and bottled water, then your campaign world may be a little too crapsack. Remember you're risking death down there. If all you're getting in return is pocket-change that leaves you unsure about whether or not you can afford a microwave burrito and to refill your Zippo lighter, then the risk/reward structure of your world may be too cruel for anyone to survive. Brian's idea would also justify charging non-trivial prices to replenish your expedition resources. Remember, you're not just buying a torch, you're buying all the torches you'll need to get through the dungeon.
"It is difficult for players to know how many individual rations, flasks of water, torches, etc. will be sufficient for the current session. Players will usually have either so much of a vital resource that it ceases to matter or so little that it feels like they guessed incorrectly."
To this I would add that if you are using fully-random character generation, including randomly generated starting equipment, then it feels perverse to punish the players with their characters getting lost in the dark forever and then starving to death, just because you, the judge, made them roll on a random table and then wouldn't let them go shopping afterwards. This is the point I said I would come back to earlier. If random starting equipment is a best-practice that gets games going faster and lets people actually play, then you can't subsequently force them to wallow in misery because they had random starting equipment rather than a painstakingly selected bespoke panoply.
"The more differences items have in relation to encumbrance, the more difficult the system is for players to manage accurately and efficiently. Limit encumbered status to, at most, two states: normal and overburdened. All items are either normal or Bulky. Normal items take 1 slot. Bulky items take 2 slots. There is no 'X quantity of this item fits in 1 slot'. If you have 4 vials of poison, it takes 4 slots to carry them."
"A single treasure is treated as a single, indivisible item. Most treasures are Bulky. Some treasures are Unwieldy - they cannot be carried in your inventory. You must come up with a plan, equipment, personnel, etc. to transport them. An important idea is the indivisibility of treasures. Take this into consideration when making your treasures. A heavy, golden vase makes a better treasure than a pile of gold coins. The latter immediately re-raises the 'how many coins per slot' question. If you really want chests of coins, play the 'It's a game. The chest of coins is a single, indivisible Bulky item' card."
Brian gives his player 8 encumbrance slots per character. Note that the popular encumbrance equal to Strength means an average character in an OSR game will get to carry 10 items, after packing rations, torches, and rope, they're left with 7 discretionary spots. In a party of 3 using expedition resources, each character can pack a single expedition resource and be left with 7 discretionary encumbrance slots. Perfect.
Brian's advice here is also just one more reminder that if you're going to use encumbrance, you have to keep it simple. I'm of the opinion that encumbrance is often difficult to use because we often ask it to do too much, tracking significant items, insignificant items, bundles of items, armors that can take up between 0-6 encumbrance slots, incorporating adjustments for strength, multiple movement rates, etc. Brian keeps it dead simple. A specific number of items, period. No bundles, nothing is special. Just this much and no more, and that's it. Again, if you want to add more complications later, there's still some value in identifying the simplest possible version for now. The simplest simplest version is still just to ignore these things entirely, but the simplest version that actually uses some form of encumbrance is probably going to look something like this.
The treasure rules are dead simple too, and preserve original D&D's challenge of making treasure an encumbering item, not just something that disappears into hammer space the moment you pick it up. I think caches of coins are still do-able, but I would suggest making each cache be a unique currency or denomination. The "late Renaissance gold florins with a rare anti-pope obverse minting" are a separate cache from the "Iron Age iron coins dating from Vandal Savage's third empire right before he was overthrown by Kru'll the Eternal" - and both of them are going to a numismatist to get changed for cash before you can spend them. Brian also points out something that I've noticed recently, and that Luka Rejec is obviously thinking about with his rules for "hacking up treasure", which is that there's a distinction between items that take up 1 or 2 encumbrance slots, and items that are larger than an individual character can carry. While technically, this issue could come up with adventuring equipment too, more often, it's a problem that arises from treasure, and I don't think it's fair that you, the judge, should show the players some cool treasure and then force them to leave it behind because you couldn't figure out what rules would adjudicate how their characters could carry it.
Monday, March 5, 2018
DIY & Dragons on Blogs on Tape!
Beloch Shrike, who operates the Papers & Pencils blog, has another project called Blogs on Tape. The purpose of Blogs on Tape is to act as a kind of podcast or audiobook for OSR blog posts.
The most recent entry (at the time of writing) is episode 47, where Nick LS Whelan reads aloud my post on running a campaign of avaricious decorators willing to pry up the floor boards of an ancient cathedral to make nice-looking siding for a wealthy patron's potting shed.
You can listen to the recording here.
The most recent entry (at the time of writing) is episode 47, where Nick LS Whelan reads aloud my post on running a campaign of avaricious decorators willing to pry up the floor boards of an ancient cathedral to make nice-looking siding for a wealthy patron's potting shed.
You can listen to the recording here.
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