Santicorn 2024 - Effects of Primal Darkness

For Secret Santicorn 2024, Vile Cult of Shapes asked for "effects of prolonged exposure of Primal Darkness on various surface dwelling species."

 

I decided to write two sets of results. One for player characters, and one for NPC hirelings, henchmen, and so forth. I leave it to the referee and players to decide what counts as Primal Darkness in their game, and what sets it apart from normal darkness, although I think if you get trapped underground at the end of an adventure, that should certainly qualify.

 

 

Some characters gain power from the darkness...

  

When a PLAYER CHARACTER is exposed to Primal Darkness, ROLL on the table below. On the first exposure, roll d4; on the second, d6; and so on, up to a maximum of d20. If you roll a result you've received before, immediately roll again using the next highest dice, and add +1 to each future roll.

 

1 Your skin, hair, and eyes become unnaturally bleached and pale. You look haunted and unsettling.

 

2 You become cold-blooded. Your skin is cold to the touch, and you always look sallow and wet. You no longer suffer any ill effects from the weather or the temperature of your environment.

 

3 You now understand undercommon, the trade language used throughout the underworld. You speak with a native's fluency.

 

4 You now revere one of the gods of the underworld. Any previous faith has been replaced by this heretical new piety. You are eager to acquire scriptures, icons, and other tokens of your newfound religion.

 

5 You begin to "hear" the emotions of others as whispers in your mind. This provides insight during negotiations. And thinking beings can no longer hide from or surprise you.

 

6 You receive a vision from the underworld. With absolute certainty, you know the location of a valuable treasure room, and a path d6+6 rooms long that leads there, starting from a previously unsuspected secret door in a dungeon room your party has already explored and can access easily.

 

7 You can no longer perceive colors, only shades of grey. But you can also see a faint aura glowing from any cursed or poisoned objects, emanating from unnatural creatures in ways that suggest the nature of their powers.

 

8 You grow gills and can breathe underwater. You can dive and swim as easily as you can walk. You need twice as much water each day as before, and suffer from exhaustion if you don't get it.

 

9 You now understand Aklo, the Deep Tongue, the language of underworld aberrations. You can eavesdrop on the servants of the deep, but are now vulnerable to their lords' commands, without the protection of your previous ignorance.

 

10 Hideous and grotesque sights no longer phase or disturb you. You can meet the gaze of creatures whose sight turns others to stone with equanimity, stare into the eyes of tyrants who suborn others as thralls without blinking. But the sight of your own reflection - in mirrors, glass, even water - turns you away in terror, as a walking corpse flees from a cross.

 

11 You have acquired a "pet" down below. It serves you as a familiar serves a spellcaster, but its true loyalty is one of the great powers of the deep, and it is always watching. The referee will decide your pet's form; its appearance is related to the entity it serves.

 

12 A physical third eye opens in your forehead. You communicate by broadcasting your thoughts, no longer deigning to speak aloud. You understand the hidden logic of underworld passageways. You can spot its secret doors and are no longer confused by its impossible architectural.

 

13 You have been crippled by the underworld. You are now an NPC under the referee's control, and you become an outcast in town, living in a hovel in the worst district. You survive by selling gossip and portents, rumors about what has happened recently in the underworld and eerily accurate predictions about what will happen next. Occasionally, you can do more, identifying or fixing or fabricating useful items - if you have the right material to work with.

 

14 You cannot bear to be outside in daytime sunlight, and you must stand apart and separate from any group carrying a torch or lantern. If you approach too close to fire, it burns you as though you were touching it.

 

15 Your hair and nails fall out. Your fingers and toes elongate; you grow webbing between them, and fins on your joints. Salt wounds you like acid, and any damage caused by heat is doubled for you.

 

16 You no longer understand common language of the overworld. Its words sound like discordant gibberish; the noise of it hurts your ears.

 

17 You can no longer be healed by the servants of the surface gods. You are an unclean thing in their eyes, and their faithful aspire to smite you. Holy things are deconsecrated by your presence. Animals shun you. 

 

18 A new eye appears in the palm of each hand and your normal eyes wither away. You can "see" the presence of other thinking minds, even in the dark and through weak barriers. You always know the way to the nearest exit to the surface. You cannot bear to hold things in your hands for long.

 

19 You are blessed by one of the great powers that dwell beneath. You gain one level. You know with certainty who your patron is, and what favor they want in return for the power they've bestowed. You know you will die if you don't complete the task they've given you.

20 You are lost to the underworld. You are now an NPC under the referee's control, and you become implacable enemy of your former friends, determined to trap them down with you in the dark, and to bring ruin to the dwellers above.

 

 

... and some are destroyed by it.

 

When an NPC COMPANION OR ASSISTANT is exposed to Primal Darkness, first ROLL MORALE. Being lost in dark is traumatizing, and even loyal friends may abandon the player characters after such an experience. 

 

Then, if the NPC is willing to continue adventuring, ROLL D10 on the table below. The referee should make this roll in secret. In all cases, the players will not know the effect of the darkness until it is revealed as a result of play during their next excursion. The NPC cannot explain their own condition to others.

1 They gain a level, making them stronger, and possibly unlocking new abilities and talents.

 

2 If they are exposed to darkness, even normal darkness, they need to check morale at the end of the session.

 

3 They are miraculously unaffected by their ordeal.

 

4 Whenever they're exposed to darkness, even normal darkness, they begin screaming in terror, inconsolable, until the light returns.

5 They have developed an all-consuming obsession. They spend all their downtime on it, and will interact with anything related to it while adventuring. If Lawful, they are obsessed with shrines and prayers to underworld deities. If Neutral, they self-medicate with any intoxicating substances they can find. If Chaotic, they're addicted to gambling, and spend all their money on games of chance.

 

6 The next time they're exposed to darkness, they vanish into the underworld, and are never seen again.

 

7 They are driven to protect others from danger. Whenever a player character would fail a saving throw, or receive a critical hit, or take lethal damage, they will interpose themselves and take the effects on themselves instead.

8 Whenever they're exposed to darkness, or all the player characters are asleep, they will steal a valuable item a player character they're closest to. The character won't discover the loss until the start of their next adventuring session, unless they reach for the item in a moment of need. 

 

9 They are paralyzed by the sight of violence. They can no longer fight or even defend themselves. They are helpless in combat, and though they may hold a weapon, they cannot use it.

 

10 Whenever they're exposed to darkness, or all the player characters are asleep, or they're alone with only one character, they will attack with murderous intent. (If this betrayal seems unimaginable, they have instead been replaced by a Doppelganger, and this is the moment of revelation. The real NPC remains a captive somewhere in the underworld, waiting to be rescued...)

 

 

 

And please check out A Swamp in Space to see "Gifts for the Adventurer in Your Life" - which wr3cking8a11 wrote in response to my own Secret Santicorn request!

 

You can also take a look at "Surreal Science Fantasy Adventure Seeds & More" - which Vile Cult of Shapes wrote for Kirt Dankmeyer of Orange Subterfugacious Raccoon.

 

Thanks to Archon's Court for organizing this year's exchange!

The Forest Takes Everything

Over at From the Sorcerer's Skull, Trey has an idea for a spooky season campaign setting that really intrigues me.

 

Trey wrote: "the world that the players' would know and explore is a sort of mythic forest, a dark fairytale sort of woodland with no apparent beginning or end." Rather than being heroes or conquerors, the "adventurers are wanderers in the wood, dealing with the things the forest brings them."

But the detail that stood out to me most was this - the forest-dwellers cannot remember the past. They don't know the history of the forest, they don't even necessarily remember the history of themselves. "Memory, like everything else, gets swallowed by the forest."

 

 

from Over the Garden Wall

 

Imagine you have a certain number of lines of backstory on your character sheet. Simple, declarative sentences.

 

Maybe they have a mechanical benefit, like you can invoke them for advantage or inspiration. They could represent skills or contacts, life history events that grant you abilities. Or maybe they just define who you are, who you were, before the forest.

 

And then, as you play, they start to vanish. Maybe at the start of each session one goes away? You wake up, as though from a dream, no clear memory of how you got here. Just a sense that you chose this, even if it was a mistake. Perhaps a sense that you'd like to leave, that you have unfinished business somewhere else, even though the forest is everywhere. Definitely whenever you're at some sort of low point, the forest steals from you while you're down. 

 

You could cross them out - your backstory, your memories. Or literally paste new strips of paper over them to cover them up.

 

You can add new memories as you play. Meet new people, learn new things, accomplish noteworthy deeds on your adventures. But those aren't safe either. Eventually, the forest takes everything. Everything. Unless you can find a way out...

Hit Points as Bullet Wounds

How much damage does a hit point represent?

For some time now, the official standard in D&D and Pathfinder has been that starting characters get the maximum hit points at 1st level, based on class. So typically 6, 8, or 10 - maybe 12 for certain fighting types or 4 for certain magicians, depending on the ruleset - plus a bonus for a high Constitution, which is pretty common.

You gain about half that amount, rounded up, plus the Con bonus again, each level. So it would be fairly normal to see an adventuring party with hp totals of 7, 10, 13 at 1st level; 12, 17, 22 at 2nd; and 17, 24, 31 at third. 

I would also say it's standard that these hit points are treated as representing real, physical damage. In most games I've run, played in, or observed at an FLGS, the Game Master says something like "you hit!" and "you miss!" to describe combat results. They describe damage as being "just a scratch" or "a really bad wound". Characters recover lost hit points with the help of healing potions or healing spells, because those lost hit points represent bodily injuries that need to heal before the hit points can be restored.

(Let me digress for a moment to acknowledge that there are people who'll talk until they're blue in the face and you're blue in your soul about how well actually Gary never intended hit points to indicate anything so concrete as bodily health, etc, they have always and everywhere represented an abstracted reserve of luck, martial skill, fighting spirit, elan vitae, and character morale that gets depleted during combat, etc etc, anyone who says differently is playing the game wrong and ruining the hobby with their scurrilous misinterpretation of the founders' intentions, etc etc etc. I'm actually sympathetic to the argument that we could describe combat differently, but I think I'm on solid footing about how the game is usually played, and I don't find it useful to pretend that one's own preferred playstyle has some deep rooting in custom and tradition just to facilitate a rhetorical appeal to faux-historical authority.)

Most weapons use d6, d8, and d10 dice to deal damage, plus of course a likely bonus for high Strength. That means that depending on the match-up of character and monster and weapon, most starting characters can sustain maybe 2-3 hits before they run out of hit points, and can probably endure another 1-2 hits each time they level up.

So returning to my original question, how much damage does one hit point represent?

The Alexandrian argues that the answer is on a sliding scale. Suppose getting hit with a short sword deals 4 damage - how much bodily injury that 4 damage represents depends on whose body it is. For a 1st level thief with 7 hp, that 4 damage is over half their total. That's a pretty grievous injury. Another hit like that and they'll either be dying or just plain dead. For a 3rd level fighter with 31 hp, it's not so bad really. They could get hit 6-7 more times like that before it would kill them. The severity of the injury isn't determined so much by the number of hit points as it is by the proportion of the total.

DM David suggests that the abstraction of hit points - the fact that they don't easily map to any particular amount of bodily injury - is the reason for their enduring appeal. He observes that virtually every game that sets out to "fix" D&D's combat settles on some kind of rule to make hit points and weapons damage more "realistic", and that despite these many "fixes", D&D's decidedly un-realistic combat remains more popular. He argues that this is because it's more fun. Players like the positive feedback of actually hitting their opponents, and they like not dying instantly the first time an attack hits them. It's more fun to narrate combat as a trading of blows than as a series of dodges, blocks, whiffs, and misses.

When I first learned about D&D, before I started playing, I thought that 100 hit points per character sounded about right. I suppose I must have been thinking of hp as percents. If you'd asked me how long a fight should last back then, I probably would have wanted something like the duration of combat you get in a round of Street Fighter or Mortal Kombat. For "boss fights" anyway, although I don't know if the rhythm of lesser battles against weaker monsters leading up to the climactic crescendo of a "final boss" would have occurred to me then. 

But some people want something different. They want combat to be short, decisive, and deadly. Or they want combat to be a "fail state", a mistake that you instantly regret making. Or they want it to be more "realistic". Or they want it to be more concrete and less abstract. At the risk of repeating the mistakes of the past, reinventing the square wheel as it were, I have a proposal for how to do that.

You're dying, John.

Hit Points as Bullet Wounds

• One hit point represents one bullet wound.

• The number of hit point a character possesses represents the number of times they can get shot before dying.

• The amount of damage an attack deals represents the number of bullets that hit the target.

Saito's not going to make it, is he?

 

Corollaries

• Attack rolls truly are "to-hit" rolls. If you roll a miss, that means the bullet misses its target.

• Your "armor class" represents your ability to dodge or evade. It's affected by your agility and by ducking behind cover, which causes the bullets to miss you.

• Body armor allows bullets to hit you, and so doesn't affect your "armor class" at all. Instead it provides something like a saving throw after combat to see if it successfully prevent the bullets from damaging you as much as they normally would.

• Hit point totals are low and will remain low. A non-combat character can survive being shot maybe 1-4 times, a combat-oriented character can survive maybe 1-6. Hit point totals probably don't increase as you gain levels, or only very slightly.

• If a character with 1 hit point gets shot, they start dying. If a character with 0 hit points gets shot, they're instantly dead. Most civilian NPCs have 1 hp. Having 0 hit points represents an state of illness or frailty.

• Dying will turn into dead unless you go to a hospital or other surgeon. Any character who gets shot will die from their injuries unless they take the time needed to apply competent first aid to their wounds. 

• Any bullet wound that isn't treated in a hospital or equivalent will result in the permanent loss of 1 hp. Any bullet wound that is treated still requires something like a saving throw after treatment to recover, otherwise it's lost permanently anyway.

• Recovery times are long. Expect to spend something like 1 hour per bullet wound on first aid and something like 2 weeks per wound recovering afterward. And those might still be "unrealistically" abbreviated. Translate into your game's relevant "turn" and "downtime" categories as necessary.

• Most unarmed combat deals 0 damage. You can wrestle someone to restrain them, get in a fistfight in lieu of negotiation, maybe even knock someone unconscious, but your bare hands aren't likely to kill anyone, except under extraordinary circumstances. A critical hit might kill, even by accident, and so might beating a helpless person.

• Knives deal maybe 1 damage. You get something like a saving throw. If you succeed, you still need first aid, and will suffer the consequences without it, but otherwise you take 0 damage. If you fail your save, you need a hospital, and take 1 damage. Knives can kill, but not as easily as a gun.

• Most bullets deal 1 damage, but special guns might have special characteristics. A very weak gun, perhaps one that's very quiet or easy to conceal, deals maybe 1 damage, like a knife. A very powerful gun, or one that's firing very dangerous ammo, will definitely deal 1 point of damage and will maybe deal 2. Again, you need something like a saving throw. Armor piercing bullets don't allow you to make a save to prevent their damage, but let's say they only deal 1 damage if you're wearing a vest. Special guns and special bullets are very expensive.

XP for Exploration - Maps, Monster Drawings, and More!

In a game about traveling, it makes sense that experience might primarily come from travel itself rather than from finding treasures or defeating monsters.

In Ryuutama, players earn a single XP award each time they finish a "leg" of their journey, based on the most difficult terrain they passed through on that part of their trip. You can earn 100-500 experience per trip, depending on the terrain and weather, plus a possible bonus for the most difficult combat, typically another 30-60. The XP totals needed to level up are comparable to 5e.

Players are encouraged to keep travelogues about their journeys, but I don't think there's a mechanical benefit to doing so. There is one other possible reward though - once per section of the trip, a Minstrel character can write a song about either the weather or the terrain, then sing it later under similar conditions to help out the other party members.

One consequence of this system is that it's more rewarding to take trips with short legs and frequent stopovers than to travel long stretches without visiting a town. It's an experience system that is well-suited to a game where you're traveling through settled lands, and where you're interested in staying awhile in each settlement. It would work less well in a campaign where you're exploring trackless wilderness, or where you pause at waystations so briefly that they're little different from any other campsite. It's also an experience system that's better suited to maps where players have some freedom to decide both where they'll travel and how they'll get there. It would work less well on map with only a single fixed route.


In Neoclassical Geek Revival, Zzarchov also awards XP directly for travel and exploration. Zzarchov's system is intended to reward and encourage longer journeys. Each session, each new room visited within a dungeon is worth more XP than the previous room - but if the players leave the dungeon, the reward resets to zero. The goal is to tempt players, perhaps against their better judgment, to press on further each delve than they might go otherwise.

"Experience points for a dungeon are granted based on how many rooms you had previously explored for the first time in this delve. The first new room might be worth 0xp, the second 10xp, the third an additional 30, the fourth an additional 60. This leads characters to constantly risk defeat by wanting one more room since leaving the dungeon to rest will reset the XP clock as it were. Trying to make it through that 13th room (which may be empty) is worth 780xp now or 0 if they return to the surface to rest. "

If we applied this system to overland travel, the specific unit of exploration that replaces "room" would depend on the kind of map you draw, whether hexes, grids, points, or something else. The most important thing to notice is that this system discourages the players from stopping in town. The longer they can remain out in the field, the more each discovery will be worth. This encourages an entirely different playstyle than Ryuutama's experience system.

The Dwimmermount megadungeon includes supplemental rules for earning experience (and money!) by selling maps of the dungeon and by selling clues that help answer key questions about the dungeon's history. I first learned about these mechanics from Dreams in the Lich House's review of Dwimmermount. In any game where players earn experience for finding treasure, setting our rules to assign prices to maps and clues creates a way for players to earn experience for exploration that fits within the existing framework of gp = XP.

The review suggests some basic considerations for anyone designing rules for assigning values to maps. "The book provides guidelines on the value of player maps based on the number of doors and rooms, and these scale with the depth of the dungeon level from hundreds to thousands of gold pieces in value." I suspect this works best when the players actually draw out a map. You could probably come up with a similar framework for assigning monetary values (and experience!) to player-written session reports, if you wanted to make an incentive for keeping diaries as well as for drawing maps.

One decision you would need to make would be whether to have the value of the map increase with its size in such a way that players get more for making several small maps or more for producing a single larger map. It initially seems to me more appropriate to make a single large map worth more than the sum of its smaller parts, but there is one reason to set the prices so that several small maps are worth more than the single collected version.

Players could face an interesting decision-making dilemma if selling maps creates a risk where rival adventurers might use the maps to swoop in and snatch up treasures the players hadn't collected yet. This dilemma is more severe if small maps are worth more than large ones. If the multi-session map is worth more, then there's little incentive to sell the map until after all the exploration is complete and all the treasures collected. If single-session maps are worth more, then the players will have to decide if the predictable depreciation of the map price is worth more than the potential, unpredictable loss of unclaimed treasures to rival adventurers.

Deciding on prices for clues to campaign setting mysteries seems like it might require the game master knowing what the all the mysteries and their solutions are. Without knowing those things, it might be hard to decide what counts as a clue, and when the players have accumulated enough clues to sell off their accumulated evidence.

Unlike with the maps, there doesn't seem to be any trade-off holding on to clues until you can sell a complete answer - aside from the general financial dilemma of whether you need money right now so badly that you're willing to accept less money overall to get some of it right away. My inclination is to say that complete answers should be worth quite a bit more than the individual clues that lead up to them.

The review provides a glimpse of what the maximum level of game master pre-planning and organization might look like. "Players can monetize exploration by recovering the secret history of Dwimmermount. There's a thorough discussion of the secret history, organized numerically, and these key facts can be gleaned throughout the dungeon from a range of sources. There are over 80 of them! Bringing evidence corroborating the secret history facts back to the surface allows the players to sell this information for exorbitant amounts of money when they accumulate enough facts to answer key questions about the world."


Travel and collecting clues about campaign mysteries are both types of exploration. Mapping and note-taking are both ways that players document what they've explored. Melancholies and Mirth has a guide to awarding experience for both exploration and combat. The key idea here seems to be running a campaign where the players still earn XP for treasure, but where the primary source of treasure is bringing documents and objects to interested organizations within the game world, rather than treasure hunting per say.

As with Dwimmermont, earning any of these rewards requires the players to find an NPC who wants to buy what they're selling. In Dwimmermount though, I think the conceit is that basically everyone is interested in maps and clues about the megadungeon - so the players can sell to whoever they like, and might use these sales to improve their relationship with key NPC factions. In these rules, certain organizations exist in every town, and serve more as generic quest-givers than as well-developed NPCs. There's nothing actually preventing giving those buyers names and personalities though, so if your players seem to prefer some quests more than others, it might be worth developing the NPCs on the other side of those transactions a bit more.

Melancholies and Mirths assigns prices to both dungeon maps and maps of the countryside, to secrets and pieces of history, to proof-of-death for both monsters and human NPC criminals, and to a few other things, including rare materials, presumably the type that can be used to make magic items. Again, the main difference between this and any other campaign is that most of the money and XP the players earn will come from exploration and collecting non-monetary treasures rather than from finding hordes of coins; and none of the XP rewards are automatic, but only occur after the players bring the desired objects to their respective NPC admirers.

A couple other bloggers have suggested creating rewards like this, but they've built the chance to earn additional experience into specific new character classes, rather than writing them up as opportunities that any character might participate in. I suppose this has the benefit of letting interested players portray particular archetypes (with their game master's permission, presumably) while leaving the primary game rules untouched.

One possible downside though would be if this turned into "my character gets extra treasure and levels up faster for doing the same kinds of things as everyone else". So if you did introduce rules that award XP for exploration to some characters and not others, I think you'd want to be vigilant to the possibility of conflict arising over perceptions of unfairness. (Although I haven't tried that, so I might be worrying about a possibility that doesn't arise often in practice.)

Cavegirl presents an Artist character class who can spend an hour of game time to paint "an unusual or impressive sight - which might be a strange landscape, monster, magnificent chamber in a dungeon, supernatural phenomenon, or something else". Paintings are worth 500 in cash and XP. The Artist's other abilities are pretty negligible, they're like a Thief with no thief skills, or a Wizard with no spells, so maybe leveling up really fast is fair compensation? I like the idea of roleplaying a character who's an artist, but I feel like the Artist would be a more interesting class if they were more like the Ryuutama Minstel or Goblin Punch's Bug Collector class, where the reward for identifying and studying an impressive site is to gain a new special ability that can only be acquired this way.

Monsters and Manuals suggests an Adventurer Sage class who earns money and XP for selling drawings of monsters, specimens of monsters, and of course, maps of dungeons and wilderness sites. The sizable rewards for bringing back complete monster corpses and capturing living monsters might even be enough to prompt players to approach combat differently than they usually would. This isn't far off from Melancholies and Mirth's alternate experience system, except that the Sage is the only character who benefits from it. Again, I like the idea of portraying a botanist or zoologist who's more interested in collecting natural specimens than in hunting for monetary treasure. It sounds fun. But beyond that concept, I'm not sure that being able to earn XP in an unusual way is very interesting as a character class's only special ability.

When I first saved the links to both these classes, I expected I'd be praising them, but on reflection, I think it would be better to make the cash and experience rewards for painting landscapes and studying monsters into general rules that could apply to any character. Aside from a class name that can provide a jumping off point for roleplaying a fussy aesthete or a nerdy scientist, neither the Artist or Adventurer Sage can actually do anything that other characters can't. They're like fighters with smaller Hit Dice, less armor, and lower XP requirements to gain levels.

In Final Fantasy VI, Relm is an artist who can sketch monsters and then summon magical monster drawings to fight on her behalf, Strago is a magician who can study monsters' magical abilities and then cast them as spells himself, and Gau is a feral child who can observe monsters' natural behavior and enter a rage where he imitates their physical attacks. Something like that interests me, personally, far more than class-specific experience bonuses.

So if I think that XP for exploration should be universal rather than character specific, what kinds of rewards do I think should be available to character classes that are especially exploration focused? I mentioned Ryuutama's Minstrel back at the beginning. Like most other bard-like characters, they can inspire others to do better on certain rolls, but with an added mini-game of learning songs while you travel that can only inspire under certain terrain and weather conditions. In some sense, the Minstrel is worse than other bards, since they can't sing their songs just any time, but somehow the mental challenge of deciding which songs to learn, and the emotional reward you experience when your planning pays off later seems to make up for that limitation. It's an ability that's less useful, but more fun. (It's also unlikely to ever be use-less, unlike some other "Goldilocks" abilities. You don't have to pick your songs in advance, unlike a ranger selecting their Favored Enemy or Favored Terrain, so you'll never be disappointed to discover that you can't sing Song of the Snowstorm because it turns out the campaign is actually set in the tropics.)

Goblin Punch's Bug Collector is a bit like a wizard who gets terrain-specific spells each day. Every morning before breaking camp, the Bug Collector finds a random assortment of local bugs, and can capture a certain number of them. The bugs live for 1 day in captivity, and each bug can perform a single trick, once, so mechanically this is very much like casting any other spell in D&D. But there's something kind of joyful about the presentation, and the fact that your spells are random each day, but the spell list they're drawn from is tied to the local landscape, provides a nice mix of surprise and player choice.

Pathfinder Ultimate Wilderness offers a similar ability in the Geomancer archetype for Occultists. The Geomancer can learn a set number of spells of the player's choice each level, but they also know bonus spells based on whatever kind of terrain they're currently inhabiting. These aren't chosen randomly like they for the Bug Collector, and they can change mid-day if the character passes from one terrain type to another. It still seems like it would add a fun bit of variety to the character, and would make decisions about where to travel matter in a fairly concrete way.

The Cartographer archetype for Investigators provides a mechanical reward for map-drawing that's pretty similar to the Minstrel's songwriting. Instead of inspiring others, the Cartographer can benefit themselves by studying the map they just drew of their current location. The only flaw here, ironically, is that you would never not be able to use this ability, so it lacks some of the charm of the Minstrel's  matching-terrain requirement. (Potentially you could re-introduce the charming sense of limitation by only allows maps to be useful on a return visit to a previously mapped spot.) For a game master wanting to add exploration-based abilities to their game, the Cartographer and Minstrel do have one other upside. Unlike the Geomancer or the Bug Collector, this sort of simple bonus-granting ability doesn't require an extensive list of possible spell effects before you can introduce it at your table.

House Rule - DCC Crits by Dice Type

In Dungeon Crawl Classics, an attack roll of natural 20 is always a critical hit. An attack roll of natural 1 is always a fumble.

As they level up, characters gain an extra action dice that they can use to make attacks. The extra dice starts at d14, then improves to d16, and then d20. It's impossible to crit with a d14 or d16. The chance of a fumble is higher, but not as much as you might expect (from 5% with a d20 to around 6% with a d16 and 7% with a d14).

Those aren't the only non-standard dice types in DCC though. There's also d24 and d30. When should you get a critical hit with them?

The rules don't specifically say. All giants in DCC use d24 attack dice, and crit on any roll of 20 or higher. (This gives them about a 21% chance of a critical hit on each attack!) But that's a special ability that's explicitly called out in every giant's monster stats. So I don't think player characters should get the exact same benefit from rolling a d24.

On the other hand, I don't think players should only be limited to critting on a roll of 24 on a d24 or 30 on a d30. The chance of a fumble on those dice goes down (to around 4% and 3%, respectively) but I think the chance of a critical hit should go up. The fun of rolling a larger dice should be accompanied by the fun of a better chance at critting. So how do we accomplish that?

My suggestion is this. When a player rolls a d24 attack dice, they score a critical hit on a natural 20 and a natural 24. So they improve from a 1-in-20 chance to 1-in-12, or around 8%. When a player rolls a d30 attack dice, they crit on a natural 20, 24, or 30. Their chance increases to 1-in-10, or 10%.

If you're using the rules for fleeting luck, I would be happy to say you earn a temporary point of Luck on any roll of 20, 24, or 30 as well.

What about warriors? In DCC warriors and dwarves can spend a point of Luck to convert a fumble into an ordinary miss. Warriors also get an increased critical range. At 1st level, a warrior scores a critical hit on any natural 19 or 20. This improves to 18, 19, 20 at 5th level and to 17, 18, 19, 20 at 9th. Along the way, their chances of critting go from 10% to 15% to 20% on each attack.

How should this interact with the larger dice types? I would say that a warrior still gets their expanded crit range, and the extra chance from using the larger dice, but doesn't get to expand their range any further. So a 1st level warrior rolling a d30 gets a critical hit on a 19, 20, 24, and 30, but not on a 23 or a 29. Their chance of critting improves to around 13%, but not to 20%.

The reason is more clear at higher levels. If we allowed a 9th level warrior to increase their crit range on each new dice, then on a d30, they'd score a critical hit on any roll from 17-24, and again from 27-30, a 40% chance of a crit! This would make rolling a 25 or 26 weirdly disappointing. It would also take away some of the fun of critical hits, which is that they're unpredictable. You never want to expect crits so regularly that you become disappointed when you don't get one. I like critical hits, and for me, having them happen almost half the time would ruin one of the things I like about them.

d666 "Powers Checks" for Raveloft

Tales of the Grotesque and Dungeonesque recently posted a critique of "powers checks" in Ravenloft. Jack describes the premise of a powers check, then listed his two key complaints.

"The idea behind the powers check mechanic is committing evil acts triggers rolls to see if your character is warped by the powers of darkness until they ultimately become a villainous NPC. Along the way, a character gains strange powers and finds their body and mind twisted and corrupted."

"The mechanic mostly serves the purpose of enforcing 2e AD&D's sense of morality. The Realm of Terror box set is explicitly clear that powers checks are intended to make players play the game the right way. You can almost hear the beleaguered sigh of the camp counselor as they tell you kids to knock it off or nobody will be allowed to go swimming after lunch."

"If a player wants to lean into the idea that their character has become tempted by evil or corrupted by darkness, the mechanic punishes them for playing in that mode by eventually taking their character away. The road down into the abyss also has a tendency to cripple your character in one way or another."

After reading that, it occurred to me that I'd accidentally introduced a powers check into a game I'm refereeing. In a recent session of my Wizard City campaign, my players found a badass Hell Gun that's supposed to immediately send the gun's target to Hell (and condemn the gun's user to go there after they die too). I loved this idea, but it seemed kind of disproportionately strong compared to the other capabilities of a GLOG character, so I added one more stipulation, a 1-in-136 chance that the gun's user is dragged down to Hell immediately.

The boring way to describe this is to say that the player had to roll 3d6, and their character would be killed on an 18 ... but the cool way to describe it to say that they had to roll a d666 and would be doomed on 666. I assume the original Ravenloft powers check was also something boring like a d100 roll.

So let's convert my impromptu mechanic into a full on powers check by adding two other possible results. Let's also give it a better name, like the Hell Roll, or something. Any time a character invokes a dark power, the player must roll three 6-sided dice:
- on a 6, the character gains a new dark power
- on a 66, the character is corrupted by the dark power
- on a 666, the character either dies instantly or becomes a servant of the dark power

That seems cool, but the nature of Jack's critique wasn't really that d100 rolls are a thematically boring way to represent the exciting danger of using Hell powers. His first point is that he thinks the check is used to force the players to make their characters act like heroes by punishing them if they try to do anything villainous. His second is that instead of cultivating morally-ambiguous heroes who are tempted by the seductive power of the Dark Side, the "powers check" mechanic discourages you from flirting with supernatural evil by making it feel too risky.

To address Jack's first critique, we need to rethink when to make a powers check or Hell Roll, or whatever. In Ravenloft, it sounds like you have to make a powers check when you perform evil deeds like killing people and taking their stuff, which in previous versions of D&D was treated as ... playing D&D. (Sometimes it almost feels like we shouldn't look for moral guidance from a game where you portray murderers, burglars, robbers, and thieves?)

But I would argue that this kind of mechanic is much better if we don't attach it to notions of sin, and instead attach it to ideas about contamination or taint. Without going too deep into theology or philosophy, I think we can draw a distinction between a mechanic that makes it dangerous to perform evil actions and a mechanic that makes it dangerous to get in too close proximity to evil objects.
 
We can imagine sin as something that accumulates when people perform certain acts. Two notable features of sin are that it can be repented and forgiven, and that it only accrues based on what you do, not the tools you use to do it. This makes it a poor fit for this game mechanic for a few reasons.

A sin mechanic doesn't put much constraint on player actions if they can remove it at will by claiming that their characters feel genuinely sorry and are prepared to spend their next downtime action praying. (Especially if your received ideas about sin come from a version of Christianity in which it's enough for forgiveness to come from God, even if the victims of your actions won't - or, because they're dead, can't - forgive you.)

A sin mechanic also appears to punish players for the very same actions that other game mechanics reward them for. This in turn calls for an explanation of why the same actions are only sometimes sinful. I suppose you could put your players in a position where they're doing bad things to bad people for good reasons, and where shouldering the weight of the sin that comes along with doing that is just part of their heroic burden ... but that's not really how Ravenloft used the mechanic. Claiming that doing bad things for good reasons accrues no sin is troubling in its own way though. Trying to justify why killing this type of sentient creature is a sin that requires forgiveness, but killing that kind of sentient creature is a righteous action that pleases the divine starts you walking down a mental path that leads somewhere very ugly very quickly.

Suppose though, that we feel satisfied that this monster really is evil. It does bad things to innocent people, and will continue doing so unless we kill it. Slaying this particular monster is an unambiguously good act. Great! So then why would it be sinful to bite the monster with vampire fangs, or slash it with werewolf claws, or shoot it with a Hell Gun? Maybe others won't see a conflict here, but the version of Christianity that I was exposed to as a child seemed to be filled of stories about how a person with a pure heart can't be made unclean by evil. The evil deeds of others might harm your body, but they can't sully your soul, only their own. If impaling Dracula is good, why should I accrue sin points if I stab him with Jack the Ripper's scalpel rather than a knife that came from my kitchen drawer?

For gaming purposes, if player characters are going to roll dice to avoid being dragged down by supernatural evil, I think it's better to imagine it as a kind of spiritual pollution, or radiation, or poison. For gaming, I think it's better to imagine contamination rather than sin. This kind of evil is like a toxic substance, and it gets on you just by coming near it, moreso if you handle it or use it.

You get contaminated or corrupted by wielding evil weapons, using evil super powers, casting evil spells, reading evil books, invoking evil spirits. Basically, if you could imagine replacing the word "evil" with "radioactive" and have everything still make sense, it's probably okay to roll some dice to try to avoid it.

In fairness, I think this is already the most common way that the risk of being consumed by evil gets used in gaming, aside, apparently, from Ravenloft. Changing the conditions under which player characters accumulate corruption points makes them far more palatable to award during the game.

I would add one final condition as well - players only make powers checks as the result of voluntary decisions. You don't need to roll the dice because a vampire bit you or a werewolf scratched you. That gives you a power, but doesn't put your character's soul at risk. It's only when you use that power yourself that you risk contamination.

(The real-world implications of either of these perspectives on evil can be quite troubling, depending on the situation they're applied to. Imagining that some inner purity or righteousness absolves them of blame for the harm caused by groups that they're members of or benefit from, allows a lot of people to ignore that harm and even contribute to it - in a way that they might not if they perceived themselves as tainted despite their ignorance or good intentions. Similarly, if we apply the logic of contamination to almost any form of abuse, we arrive almost immediately at a very ugly form of victim-blaming. Frankly, this has been quite a lot more thinking about the nature of evil than I really intended to embark on at the start.)

Jack's second critique of the powers check is that it serves to restrict player choices in a couple of undesirable ways. For one thing, it's an attempt to enforce a particular play style using an in-game rule when some sort of outside-the-game mechanism would be better. If you'd prefer to pretend to be dissolute grifters and ne'er-do-wells rather than heroic monster-slaying world-savers, then, idk, maybe don't play the game that says it's about slaying monsters right there on the box? And if your players want to pretend to kill animals and torture villagers for fun, you don't need a game rule to stop them, you need new players, and quite possibly to question the life choices that led you to sit down at a table with that last batch.

The other potential problem is that the powers check might discourage a character behavior you want to encourage - namely pretending to be the brooding sort of hero who fights monsters so long that they begin to risk becoming a monster themselves.

This trope has two components. The first is a kind of evil that it's tempting to give in to. The second is some motivation to resist that temptation. The first component should be supplied by evil powers that are really cool, and substantially more powerful than the available non-damning options. Like, you're not going to use Blackbeard's accursed single-shot matchlock pistol if you've got a truck-mounted anti-aircraft gun as part of your starting equipment. You might risk your soul though, if there was a dracolich bearing down on you and those power levels were reversed.

Some of the motivation to resist temptation can be supplied by the players themselves. Again, genre buy-in is important here. Otherwise you might end up with a party of Bella Swans eagerly flinging themselves beneath the fangs of the nearest Edward Cullen, because they want nothing more than to be transformed into a beautiful superpowered monster with no discernible failings. Which could be fun, though characters with an unbridled enthusiasm for condemnation rather miss the mark if we were aiming for brooding or angst.

But even if your players are self-motivated to avoid transforming into full-on monsters, if you want them to use these powers some but not too much, then you probably need to define what "too much" means. But you probably also want the players to feel a little uncertain about where the line is drawn. You don't want them striding confidently up to it without fear of overstepping, you want them to worry that every step might be the one that carries them too far. Which means you need a dice-rolling mechanic. (Well, maybe not NEED exactly, but there's certainly a place for one.)

Offering the players cool superpowers that carry a chance of self-destruction creates a kind of resource management mini-game of risk and reward. The possibility that using your power grants you other risky powers serves to amplify the temptation. The possibility of partial disfigurement serves as a warning sign along the road to damnation. You want to use these powers, but every time you do might be your last. If your regular weapons aren't enough, the only way to kill the monster might cost you your soul. So roll that d666!

When You Come at the King, You Best Not Miss

In D&D it can sometimes seem like your only two options for enemy royalty are the chess king model - where the king is realistically weak and helpless compared to the knights and castles defending him - or what we might call the Into the Badlands baron model - where the reason he has become and remained the king is because he is the single greatest fighter in his own army.

We could probably also call this the "chess queen" model

A third model occurred to me when thinking about character classes like The Extras, The Financier, and The Crew - that is, royal villains and their retinue of loyal bodyguards are represented within the game mechanics as a single enemy creature. So royal monsters get higher HD as their rank goes up, not because they become better fighters, but because they become better protected by a larger staff of intermediaries.

The king is always surrounded by his most loyal bodyguards, and initially, any damage is dealt to the guards. The figure of the king, in this model, represents the last Hit Dice, perhaps even the last hit point - you don't get to touch him until all the guards are down. With apologies to both Omar Little and Ralph Waldo Emerson, when you strike at the king, you won't kill him, at least not until all his guards are out of the way.

The question of whether the king escapes and returns later with a new retinue, gets captured, gets executed, or is simply thrown out of the palace and exiled - this is a question the players can answer outside of combat. And except for possibility of daring escape, these are all questions that can be answered simply by the players coming to a consensus. Once the king is at their mercy, they no longer need to roll any dice to determine what happens to him.

I believe it was also Emerson who asked
"Is you taking notes on a criminal fucking conspiracy?"

I was reminded of this idea during a conversation with Trey of From the Sorcerer's Skull, who suggested "A mechanic wherein Underbosses were like the ablative armor of the Big Boss would be interesting. The heroes don't get a chance to confront them until they've taken down enough "points" of Underbosses."

Mechanically, Trey thought you could borrow rules from the 2nd edition of Robin Laws's HeroQuest rules: "You could encounter a Boss without going through the Underbosses, but at that point the Boss is really high on the challenge curve and you're likely to get beat." 

Richard from Richard's Dystopian Pokeverse thought this was similar to the "onion skin campaign model" that's used in Sandy Peterson's Masks of Nyarlathotep. He adds that Patrick from False Machine is already using a rule like this in one of his current games where Richard's a player: "Having reduced a rival to 0, the attacker has to state they specifically want to kill/capture the king and use their forces against the remaining 1hp point."

And finally, Steve from Kaijuville thought this reminded him of a mechanic that sometimes shows up in Warhammer 40K: "Characters joined units that basically meant the unit became a Wound sink for the character. In hand-to-hand combat, enemies couldn't wound the character until they dealt with all the unit models."

Landmark, Hidden, Secret

There are three ways I think about information in roleplaying games. Information can be landmark, or hidden, or it can be secret.

This division can apply to locations on an overland maps, objects within dungeon rooms, and even to details about locations and objects that the players encounter.
 
 

A landmark in Super Metroid
Closer inspection reveals something, hidden or secret, underneath

 
Landmark information is automatic and free. Players hear landmark information the first time without asking, and if they ask, they can be reminded of it as freely as they heard it at first. Learning landmark information doesn't take up any fictional time and doesn't pose any risks.

In a hexcrawl, the keyed encounter is a landmark, but so is the type of terrain. In a dungeon, the main contents of the room is free information, but also the shape of the room and its dimensions. You don't have to ask to be told these things - being told them is what defines a context in which you can ask meaningful questions. It's what defines the start of the turn, what sets the stage where the next act of the game will take place. If your adventure includes read-aloud text, that's landmark information.

An ordinary exit door is an example of a landmark. The judge tells the players the door is there during the initial description of the room. Later, if a player asks, the judge can describe the door in detail again, as though the character is glancing across the room, or recalling it from memory.
 
 

Most chozo statues holds a treasure, but to collect, you must risk approaching
One statue will carry you to safety, another will fight you to the death

 
Hidden information isn't automatic - players have to ask to learn it. And it often isn't free - there is often some fictional cost that must be paid to learn hidden information. However, unlike secret information, there is no chance of failure. If the players ask the question and pay the cost, they will learn the hidden information.

Landmark information is free because the characters can learn it from a distance, simply by looking at the surface of a thing. Hidden information is more expensive because it's more intimate. To learn it, a character must be close enough to touch the thing, must interact with it directly. Landmark information is received passively. Hidden information is actively obtained.

There are two costs to learning hidden information. The first cost, which is possible but not mandatory, is time. If your game keeps track of time, then it's possible that learning hidden information will require allowing some to pass. A turn passes, a clock moves one tick, wandering monsters are checked for, the encounter dice rolls.

The second cost is risk. What's hidden might not be beneficial, or might include both benefits and harms. What's hidden might be a hazard, an ambush, a trap. Discovering what's hidden doesn't always mean being harmed, but it does always mean making your character vulnerable to harm. There's no way to learn what's hidden without taking that risk.

The contents of every treasure chest are hidden information, every cabinet, every closet, every safe. Everything under or behind or inside is hidden. Seeking out and finding hidden information is one of the main goals of the game. Our characters don't simply look at the most obvious features of each room before moving on to the next. They explore.

A door concealed behind a curtain is an example of something hidden. The curtains themselves are a landmark, but the judge doesn't announce what's behind them. To find the door, a player must ask what's behind the curtains, must place their character at risk to push them aside.
 
 

Samus Aran's x-ray scope reveals secrets, if she makes the choice to use it
Some walls can be destroyed with the correct weapon ...

Secret information has no guarantees at all. It is the opposite of automatic, and it's always expensive. It's not just that players have to ask for secret information, as they do with hidden; there is also a chance the judge will continue to withhold the information, unlike any previous type. To learn secret information, players must roll the dice and win. That extra risk, not just of injury but of failure, is what makes secret information more costly than hidden.

Whether players can even learn the existence of secret information is something I think judges disagree about. Some judges would say that proving the existence of a secret and revealing the information should be accomplished as a single step - if you can't reveal the information, then you can't know if there even is a secret there to be revealed. Other judges would say that proving there's a secret and learning what the secret is are two separate steps requiring two different skills. Both those approaches seem to agree on one thing though - the existence of a secret is a secret itself.

I would say that the existence of a secret should be hidden information. I would say that players should be able to prove there is a secret by asking a question and taking a risk. Actually learning the secret should require rolling the dice, but discovering that there IS a secret there to be learned should not be a secret unto itself.

One thing that's useful about this hierarchy I've established is that it helps me think about how players should learn information. You discover hidden information by examining landmarks. You learn secrets by examining hidden information.

There is one comfort for players whose judges make the existence of a secret a secret itself. A player can always suspect the existence of secret information, even if their character can't prove it. This is more or less what some judges mean when they talk about "player skill".

A device that causes a bookshelf to rotate out of the way, revealing a doorway when a particular combination of books are tilted at specific angles, is an example of a secret. The bookshelf is a landmark. The existence of the device is hidden, but any character who inspects it closely will notice that the bookshelf is perfectly flush with the wall, and that the floor is scratched and scuffed in a half-circle in front of it. The operation of the device, however, is a secret. It's not enough to spend time trying to activate the device. There is a chance the characters will try but still fail.
 
 

... some floors destroy themselves at the slightest touch
The most dangerous secrets are the ones you never thought to look for

 
I think there are two benefits to thinking about information this way. Thinking about the difference between landmarks and hidden information helps write and tell better descriptions. Thinking about the difference between hidden information and secrets helps decide how to resolve player actions.

The difference between landmark information and hidden information isn't just the difference between what you say when players first enter a room and what they have to ask you to find out. It's also the difference between information that is free and information that comes at a cost.

You actually don't have to give a detailed description of everything the characters can see when they first enter a room. In fact, you probably shouldn't. Down that road lies madness, and ten-minute long read-aloud text. It's probably better if your initial description is short and evocative, if it sets the mood and lists the items available to investigate, and then gets out of the way. That doesn't mean all the other information is hidden. For many items on that list, your additional description should be free, and should be as detailed as the player would like. But it does mean that some information is hidden, and you should know which information is free, and which information takes time or involves risk to learn.

It also helps to think about those occasions when information shouldn't be free. When a character is unfamiliar with a work of technology or magic, they should get a description that makes what's familiar to the player strange to the character. When it's dark, perhaps all that characters can learn for free is the shape and size of objects, perhaps under those conditions more information should be hidden and risky. Total darkness is boring. But instead, think of those moments in children's books about not being afraid of the dark, the moments when you realize the "intruder" is just a hat atop a coatrack, or the "monster" is just a pile of clothes in a chair. Those moments happen all the time in fiction, and hardly ever in games. If applied to more interesting objects than coatracks and laundry, they might add a certain feeling of wonder and mystery to experience of exploring in the dark. Total darkness is a total lack of information. Not everything should be hidden. But having some information require extra effort to collect makes that information stand out. Its very difficulty highlights it, and makes it dear.

The difference between hidden information and secret information is that hidden information only requires getting close and only requires that the character spend time on the task. Secret information requires something more, something extra. Ideally, it requires applying a skill that can't - or can't easily - be modeled by player description. In my example of the secret door earlier, if it was just one tilted book that activated the device instead of a combination, it would probably only be a hidden door. All that takes is time, and there's no chance of failure. To guess a combination though, takes too much time, more time than the characters have, and there's plenty of opportunity to guess wrong. So it makes sense to roll the dice.

If all a search requires is time, and the characters have enough time, then what they're searching for is simply hidden, and they can find it without needing to roll the dice. Checking all the burial niches in a funerary crypt where the dead are interred as though in a vault of unlocked safety deposit boxes, digging up a grave, breaking down a false wall or a bricked-over doorway: these all take time - and sometimes make noise - but they require no particular skill, involve no particular risk of making a mistake or overlooking something.

Something can become secret simply because there's not enough time to find it. A methodical all-day search might be certain to turn up what you're looking for - but to uncover it in a single, 10 minute exploration turn requires luck or insight or skill. It requires rolling the dice. For there to be not enough time there has to be some kind of time pressure, some kind of countdown or deadline, either narrative or mechanical, some kind of reason the characters can't just spend all day. Remember, for the players, that search only takes as long as they need to say they agree to it.

There can also be not enough time because of the skill required to make the search. Not all problems have easy solutions. Trying to solve them just by spending time might require, not hours, but years, centuries. Knowing how to solve a problem like that quickly is a skill. It's special knowledge that not everyone - not every character - possesses. And even if a character has the right skill, there's still a chance that they'll fail. So roll the dice. Roll the dice, because the alternative is to make the players try to act out their characters' searches. Roll the dice because while the characters might have all day, the players don't, and their time, your time, is worth more than trying to devise and explain the correct search algorithm.

Again, not everything that isn't a landmark should be a secret. Some things can simply be hidden. Having to explicitly request to look closer is already a barrier to discovery. The additional barrier of a dice roll is appropriate in some situations, but not every situation.. But before rolling the dice, decide if the information is secret or just hidden - decide what it would mean for the characters to be able to fail in their search. If you don't think they even could fail, then it's not really a secret, and you don't need to roll the dice.

Some games include conditional information that is halfway between hidden and secret. Like secret information, it can't simply be found by every character who looks. But under the right conditions, it can be found, with no chance of failure, like hidden information. Skills in Trail of Cthulhu and its sister games work like that. If you have the right skill and you search for a clue, you will find it. But if you don't have the skill, you simply can't find it. Equipment in a lot of video games works this way. In A Link to the Past, if Link has the right magic gloves, he can lift boulders to clear a path, but without them, the path remains blocked. In Super Metroid, Samus needs specific ammunition to shoot down specific doors; without the right ammo, the doors remain closed.

A final note is that some games have only secrets, with no hidden information that can be learned without making a skill test. In the earliest dungeons, you can't even open a door without passing a skill test. I think how difficult it is to gain information should be based on its importance to the game.

If the players have to know some information, it should be landmark. This is true of all the visual description needed to create a shared image of the game world in everyone's imagination.

If information is really important, it should probably be landmark or hidden. No player wants their judge to "fudge" and lie about the result of a dice roll, or to "railroad" and seize control of the characters to make them do something ... but no one wants to cancel their expedition and spend the rest of the session hastily putting together a back-up delve just because they couldn't find the one secret door that revealed the rest of the dungeon either.

Information can safely be made secret under one of two conditions. The first is if that information is truly optional. It might be very nice for the players to find it, but the game won't come to a complete halt if they can't. The second condition is if there are a variety of ways to learn the information. If there are at least three ways to learn a piece of information, and the characters botch every attempt, then perhaps it's okay to let them fail. No one wants the entire group's game to end for the night because of one bad dice roll, but three bad dice rolls, accompanied by three rounds of planning and three narrative descriptions of the attempt mean that failure hasn't stopped the game - watching the characters fail has become the game, at least for this night and this secret.

A Mechanic for Misinformation

Okay, so your player characters are trying to gather information.

Maybe they're detectives on a case, or chthonic investigators looking for clues, maybe they're picaros out rumormongering, buying drinks for the house, trying to loose some rival adventuring party's tongues, or vagabonds accumulating a collection of bardic lore.

What have you. There's information, and they're trying to gather it.

Okay, so you assign a Difficulty Class or a Target Number or whatever, and you ask them to roll the dice, and they roll too low.

What happens next?

Well, you could just decide that they failed to gather any information. Or, you could roll on the Random Misinformation Table, below.
 

 
RANDOM MISINFORMATION TABLE

1 Dangerous Rumor - Not just a lie, you learn something like the opposite of the truth. Acting on this rumor will put your life in danger. If you're directed to another site, the place is a deathtrap or ambush.

2 Wild Goose Chase - No information, but you're directed to another site, which will supply more random misinformation.

3 Harmless Rumor - A lie, but incorrect without being dangerous. Acting on this rumor will inconvenience you.

4 Trivia - No information, or at least not what you're looking for. But at least you know that you don't know.

5 Treasure Map - No information, but you're directed to another site, which will supply the information you're looking for.

6 Partial Clue - The truth, or at least part of it. The information might be incomplete or cryptic, but it's correct, and might combine with other clues or partial clues. If you're directed to another site, you'll learn more than you were originally asking for.
 

 
You could also assign these results their own DCs or TNs, or you could break them up to create subtables corresponding to different degrees of misinformation.

I would assign results 1-2 to a critical miss, 3-4 to a miss, and 5-6 to a partial hit in a system with three degrees of failure, and assign 1-3 to a miss and 4-6 to a partial hit in a system with two degrees. Considering the alternatives, "no information" is a beneficial outcome.

The results of receiving random misinformation tend to be action-focused, so that even if your players didn't learn what they wanted to know, they probably at least know what they're doing next.

The problem with "no information" as a result is that it can kill any forward momentum. (This could also be a problem with a partial clue.) Reducing the frequency of that outcome should reduce the risk of your players getting stuck. If they do seem stymied, encourage them to think of their other possible leads and follow up on one of those instead.

I generally roll most dice out in the open, but I suspect this will work better if the players don't know in advance what type of misinformation they're receiving.