Author Archives: Rob Donoghue

What I Learned

It was a lovely afternoon yesterday , and my son has finished finals, so we took a long drive to get some high quality ice cream to celebrate. As we were enjoying our treat, I realized we were fairly close to the Calvert Marine Museum. It’s a really amazing place full of sea life and Megladon models and adorable otters. We had not been there in several years, so it seemed like a good time to go back. I’m delighted that we did.

There were a lot of great things to see, but one caught me by surprise. In a display on naval conflicts in the Chesapeake Bay, they had a few weapons on display (pictured above, full credit to Mike Fitzpatrick) and among the familiar boarding pikes and blunderbuss was something I didn’t recognize. It looked like a spear shaft with some sort of tube strapped to the end in lieu of a blade.

It turns out, this was something called a Congreve Rocket, and it’s an absolutely fascinating piece of technological history.

(If you already knew about these, that’s awesome, but I absolutely did not, and that is not going to dampen my enthusiasm).

Functionally, it is more or less a polearm sized bottle rocket, with exactly the kind of accuracy you would expect from that. I found some videos of people launching them, and I was slightly disappointed to discover that you don’t hold it in your hand and point at the enemy, but despite that, I remained delighted enough to go read some more about them. It just got better.

  • The initial technology was actually from India, and I want to take a moment to shine a spotlight on the use of these in India by quoting a passage from Wikipedia:

    “Some of the rockets had pierced cylinders to allow them to act like incendiaries, while some had iron points or steel blades bound to the bamboo. These blades caused the rockets to become very unstable towards the end of their flight, causing the blades to spin around like flying scythes, cutting down all in their path.

    Just try and tell me that’s not hella metal.

  • The application of these rockets against the British provided motivation for William Congreve to make his own copy, and the British started putting them on their ships.
    • So far as I can tell, the rockets range and damage capabilities did not offer any real advantages over actual guns. Rather, the advantage they offered was that they required very little setup, so you could fire a lot of them in very short order. As it turns out, this was a pretty good way to start a fight.
  • These saw use in the early 1800s, including in the Napoleonic Wars, and apparently were knocking around in conflicts through 1870 or so. However, the specific use that resulted in them appearing in the Calvert Museum was their application in the war of 1812. These are the rockets of the famous “rocket’s red glare”.
  • Some efforts were made to use them in whaling. The lack of accuracy was an issue, but a whale is a big target, and it turns out that rocket sticks are really good for killing whales.

Unsurprisingly, my thoughts turned to how these could be used in games – I could 100% get behind this kind of dragonlance. Two big threads popped out.

The first is that this is one more thing to add to the bucket of things that all simultaneously exist in the late 1800s, in case you just need one more element for your cowboy/samurai/victorian game.

The second is very specific to Blades in the Dark. As soon as I read about the applicability to whaling, I can no longer imagine a Duskvol where these weapons don’t exists. Sure, you won’t see them on the streets often, because that’s such a terrible idea, but I think we all know that simply being a bad idea is not enough to stop much of anything in Duskvol. They’ll need a different name, of course, and I will absolutely run on the idea of stolen technology with these, and think about who used them first. My instinct is that they’re Iruvian, and the original rockets included flaring versions of their sacred flames, making them tremendously useful against ghosts and such. Applying the technology to more mundane murder seems very on point for Duskvol.

Anyway, it’s a very small thing, but it was a delightful reminder that the world is full of inspiration that is just waiting to smack you upside the head.

Beehouse

Food in the Dark

When I talk about threads I want to dig up, this is often the first one people mention, so I have opted to rescue it from the pits of twitter, clean up the worst excesses, and turn it into a post.

I have been, in bits and pieces, thinking WAY too much about food in Blades in the Dark. John did a great thing in Blades (which most such fantasy cities skip) of at least acknowledging that food is a thing that must come from somewhere, so there is a space for it.

As i got thinking about it, I think the trick is that there are two elements missing here – the starch, and the fat. The starch (wheat, corn, rice, whatever) tends to make for signature elements of a cuisine – bread, noodles, tortillas, dumplings and so on.

The fat, of course, is for frying. I mean, it’s got other uses too, but trying to imagine vibrant street vendors without frying just seems sad.

So where do those things come from in Duskvol, and what form do they take?

Working backwards from theme, there absolutely needs to be something that can be made into gruel, but that doesn’t narrow things to much. I admit, I could easily visualize dark rice paddies as the farms of Duskvol, so there’s a lot to be said for a grey, shadow rice.

Another solid option is the potato, and I gotta admit that it would feel kind of apt to revive the Lumper in Duskvol, since it’s a foodstuff that helps sustain a certain flavor (pardon the pun) of poverty.

Potatoes are also subterranean, so the idea of taters that grow under fragmented starlight just kind of feels right. And they can be gardened, which opens the door to rooftop gardens, dirt smuggling and veggie poaching.

Potatoes also are potentially incredibly diverse, so ranges of colors and breeds can be a point of pride, interest and competition. So, I think potatoes kind of win as the native default.

(Sidebar: Goats are a potential food source, but my sense is they’re more valuable alive than dead. That said, I am pretty sure that Duskvol’s cheese is amazing, and deserves much more attention).

Before I get to oil, there is some question about cooking method – I have inferred a very stereotyped British sense of cooking as the default in Duskvol, which is to say, a LOT of boiling things until they’re food.

And that’s fine as far as it goes, but there’s plenty of goodness to be had there, and potatoes play nicely with that (and with fish/eel and chips, as I think about it). So, lots of pots and pans in Duskvol, but what about ovens?

There’s no Technology reason why there would not be ovens, but I’m not sure how much there is to bake. Putting a pin in that to come back to.

So, let’s talk cooking oil. One reason it is on my mind is because there are a lot of really good ways to prepare eel, and frying is in that list. And to come back to working backwards from theme, I want Eel & Chips.

The thing is, we don’t have a huge amount of Dairy (we have some) and crops are not so abundant as to suggest a great option. Of course, there is a lot of Leviathan oil, but is it food grade?

The answer is, I suspect, “Probably not, but safety standards have no place in Duskvol”. I’d be inclined to suspect that when leviathan is rendered, there’s a lot of waste product, and “inert oil” is one of those products which some enterprising soul found you could cook with.

It probably has a cooler name than “inert leviathan oil”, because canola. Maybe just “Red Oil”, since it has a bit of a tint to it. Staple of cooking. Probably a lard version of it as well, for all you “you’d best believe it’s not butter” needs.

As with potatoes, other options exist. This is just about defaults and signatures.

Ok, we’re starting to get somewhere here. I can envision a menu with more than 3 things on it. So the next question is probably flavor.

Salt is probably pretty ubiquitous. It’s non-agricultural and preservative, so I am pretty sure the city uses a ton of it.

Red Oil probably has its own distinctive flavor too. Not sure what – don’t actually don’t want it to be something squamous like “pennies”, so I’d maybe say it’s got a little bit of sharpness to it – an acidic edge despite not being acidic.

Since we’ve introduced potatoes and the idea that root vegetables might thrive a little bit more in the dark, that opens the door to a pair of magical friends – onions and garlic (and all their ilk).

Beyond that, I suspect that a LOT of the radiant farms are actually growing spices since so many come from flowers, since I’d wager the profit margins are MUCH higher. Now, this suggests something interesting.

Radiant Farming started in or near Duskvol, so they have a lot more of it than other places. Which may mean that Duskvol is a major spice producer. Now, while this would mostly be for export, it would mean spices would reach the streets more often than you’d thing.

(Oh! And turmeric! It’s a root! That’s another street seasoning)

So, we have some “local” flavorings (garlic, onion, turmeric, salt) and access to a wide diversity of spices with no rhyme or reason to them. Which suggests to me that DuskVol food tends to be strongly and erratically over-seasoned.

And since food shapes words, a “Duskvol Curry” means something whose contents are unknown, unknowable, and there’s no real way to tell if it’s going to be a good surprise or a bad surprise, or both. Because both the contents and the spices are “what’s on hand?”

It also means Duskvol has a high opinion of their cuisine because they have THE MOST spices, because they don’t quite get the notion and ultimately treat every spice like a different version of garlic, and the right answer is always “more”.

It also helps that the city has a tendency to obliterate your sense of smell.

So, we almost have enough for our fancy sunday dinner, but let’s come back to look at the protein. Eel is great, but let us consider the mushroom.

Mushrooms are AMAZINGLY diverse, and practically magical already, so there’s a LOT to be done with mushroom that can fill gaps.

(In our game, the coffee equivalent – called “shoe” because it’s boiled in a pot that may well have a boot in it – is made by boiling mushrooms)

So, practically, I want Mushrooms to be able to slide into that Protein slot a little. Other slots too, but I kind of want a Mushroom Roast to be a thing. And we have an easy way to do it – remember that Leviathan Waste Product?

It grows large pale and red mushrooms that bleed.

The bleeding (and also the singing) can be a little creepy, but for most people, they only see them once the’ve been harvested and cut up for presentation at the butcher. Yes, the taste is never great, but you get used to it. Along with potatoes, it is absolutely a food of the poor

Not to say the rich don’t eat mushrooms – they absolutely do – but they eat higher class mushrooms.

And with that, I now can actually see how a Duskvol family might actually make a special Sunday dinner that’s not the same as every other bowl of jellied eels they’ve ever eaten.

Lots more fun to be had in this space, but this will do for now.

A brief follow up

Ok, one last thought inspired by @sandrayln – flowers require bees. Beekeeping in Duskvol is INCREDIBLY IMPORTANT AND VALUABLE, since radiant farming would rely on it. So

1) beekeepers are all badasses

2) A Honey Heist would actually be a thing

So, I now think that pollination is the big difference between radiant farms, because I too love some of the alternate ideas. Also, I admit to wondering if ghosts can spread pollen.

Somone also pointed out that there are real world pollenating moths, and DAMN if that doesn’t seem on point.

Other thoughts

  • This thread actually directly inspired another post of mine.
  • Thinking about the Leviathans has got me to thinking about Leviathan Ambergris, which is a delightful/terrifying idea.

Mandatory Advancement

It has been observed to me that a lot of things I write as threads on social media would be better off as blog posts. I always agreed, but I also always thought of that as a function of how verbose I got (maximum verbosity). I wasn’t inclined to just copy the content to the blog because I’d already said it, after all. Who would want to read it twice?

However, with the ongoing collapse of Twitter and the move to other places, I realized a few things:

  1. When I was ONLY on twitter, i was reliably findable. I don’t think I’ll ever be in the situation of being on only a single platform again.
  2. I have absolutely lost track of people from twitter and that SUCKS, but it’s unreasonable to expect them to find me wherever I come to roost.
  3. It turns out that finding old threads is actually a giant pain in the ass.

So, between these things, I’ve bought into the idea of capturing relevant threads as blog posts. I don’t really have a workflow for this yet, and the process is going to be janky for a while, but this is my first swing at doing it. As such, apologize if the cadence of paragraphs sounds weird – writing in tiny social media snippets demands a somewhat different from. Thank you for your patience.


From a Bluesky thread on 5/18/2

Icon of Gears. Image sourced from game-icons.netOne more random Shadow of the Demon Lord thought. One of the main pitches when we started this was that it would explicitly be bounded to 11 adventures (which is going to be ~ 20 sessions). I’ve changed up the adventures, but I’m sticking to that premise very deliberately.

At the heart of that is the SotDL advancement engine. The game is designed for characters to level up after each adventure (from 0 to 10), which is why the adventures are constructed that way. I was enthusiastic to do this, and I think it’s been great, but it has still managed to surprise me.

It has moved advancement from a pull economy to a push economy (or maybe vice versa). My usual mindset on advancement is “Have the characters done enough to merit advancement”. In this model it’s “I have two sessions before they advance. Can I put in enough content to make it feel worthwhile?”

Having that responsibility pushed onto the GM is a little disorienting – I absolutely had a moment last night of “I dunno, are they ready to advance?” Before I caught myself. But that is entirely a result of my own experience and expectations, not a problem with the model.

Given the time to think about it, I love that the responsibility is pushed to me as a GM. Weirdly, it feels right, and very much aligns with my personal philosophy of GM authority being genuine, but also being received.

To dip into a bit of business terminology, I consider GMing to be one of the truest forms of something the nerds call servant leadership. So, having the decision to advance removed from the GM, and making the GM beholden to it, feels like the antidote to many problems.

Advancement (whether in XP, gear or other things) is, after all, the most powerful of the GM’s soft* tools of enforcing their authority. Don’t play along? No shinies for you!

* – or indirect. Contrast with “hard” tools like narrative/mechanical authority or dropping pianos on characters.

And to be clear, this is not a problem we need solved in this group. We don’t have players grubbing for XP, and we don’t have GMs withholding rewards. But even without the problems, the explicit push to advancement changed up the game in useful ways.

(Ok, that last bit is not strictly true: we do have one XP grubbing player. However, he’s me, and I can testify that it has nothing to do with authority and is strictly a result in the joy I take in pushing the limits of game engines.)

In this specific case, the advancement is forcing me to keep up the pace as a GM. To get behind the curtain, there were only two real fights this level – the drake, and an assassin and her minions last session. Both fights were good, but there was a lot of intervening stuff with travel and talking

My old instinct would have been to say “Really, I need one more session at this level, so they can get in another fight”. And it would have been a decent instinct, in part because I have the sensibilities to make it work. Which is why having it blocked was such a shock to my system.

In opting not to talk myself out of following the rules, I’m forced to turn a much harder lens on my own GMing. In very practical terms, this challenges my sense of pacing. I had never considered this before, but by controlling advancement, I could always buy myself more time as a GM. That’s what I would have done with this. I would just have tacked on one more session, put some cool stuff in it, and carried on. This is one reason my campaigns run the risk of bloat. I can always add more. Always.

It also changes the questions I ask myself. In classic D&D mode, where fights are the driver for advancement, then as a GM the first thing I must ask is if the fights were enough. Yes, sure, I will also think about other things that happened, but the real backbone is the fights.

It’s reached the point of being an old joke that “We didn’t roll dice once the whole session!”, but that sentiment that the dice and swords are supposed to come out is baked in. What you don’t often hear is “We didn’t roll dice one, and we leveled up!”

Because of this focus on fights, I also end up unintentionally weighing my own performance as a GM on the fights first. Were they engaging? Dangerous? Good tension and stakes? Did everyone have an opportunity to shine? Those are all good questions, but they often overshadow the rest.

When advancement is going to happen anyway, fights are pushed down to parity with every other kind of scene. And by extension, I now need to cast a wider net to judge the session. Those hard questions I might ask about a fight now also need to be asked about everything. And that’s marvelous.

This is technically a bit of GM disempowerment, but it is not wrapped in the usual cloak of handwaves and judgement. It removes a SPECIFIC choice, and in doing so increases responsibility and accountability for the GM. This won’t always be welcome, but in this scenario, I LOVE it

Now, critical caveat – I’m explicitly talking about XP and advancement in the D&D shaped space of gaming, which SotDL falls very solidly into. Outside of that space, lots of games have found other fantastic ways to tackle advancement which may or may not resonate with this.

Specifically, the implications of this (and any advancement system) have profound resonance with the interaction between the fiction of leveling up and the mechanics of leveling up. And that absolutely introduces a creative challenge.

One upshot of D&D having as many levels as it does is that the HP difference from one level to the next is not so huge as to be jarring to explain. You can take a little more punishment. Without that kind of frog boiling, it would be hard to explain the same character going from 10 to 200 HP

(Yes, HP are an abstraction, blah blah blah. We all know this, but we also know that is a VERY THIN layer of rationalization, one that is quickly dismisses through an exercise of dropping characters down pits of different depths. I’m using them because they’re a simple example.)

When advancement is guaranteed to chug along, you are faced with trying to come up with a narrative under which it makes sense that your thief is now a ninja. Thing is, it’s a good kind of challenge, and it has many solutions.

The two easiest are “don’t care” (handwave) or just say that’s how things work (the JRPG solution)

The hardest is for the game designer to have created really mechanically satisfying advancement which does not introduce enough change to raise this problem. I think these are mutually exclusive goals (that is, the satisfaction relies on change) but maybe someone can pull it off.

In between, we have the more reliable solution of “creative narrative”. This might just be that the GM can BS really well or it might be an opportunity for the GM to cede some authority and let players narrate. Between those two ends are useful techniques like montages and flashbacks.

As someone who very much like techniques like montages and flashbacks and who ALSO very much likes opportunities to invite players to narrate, the “challenge” of smoothing over the fictional bumps starts feeling very much like an opportunity.

Bottom line: I have played around with a lot of different designs for handling advancement in a lot of contexts, but this is the first time I’ve really dug into anything like mandatory advancement. I really like the knock on effects, and I need to think of how else to use this delightful tool.

The Shining South

For a while, I had been considering setting up a fallback D&D game for the local crowd. Something simple and easy to pick up for situations where schedules explode and such. This idle though ended up intersecting with a pair of curiosities: How does high level D&D play really feel in practice, and what does an all martial game feel like?

The result is a standby game designed with a sort of Lankhmar vibe, with a collection of characters who are personally badass, but are still skipping out on their bar tabs.

For ease of use, we went with the Forgotten Realms, but picked a less traveled corner of it. I have always been struck by the idea of the Shining Sea (in the southwestern corner of the map) as a trade sea. Just based on geography, it’s a lot more interesting in that regard than the Sword Coast, and I kind of wanted to lean into that.

So, with that in mind, I started digging into the setting and figuring out what to keep, what to toss, and what to roll with.

Timeline wise, I figured I’d set the game a little bit (say, ~20 yers or so) after the “current” 5e era, which I’m anchoring as “The events in Tomb of Annihilation”. I’m picking that particular anchor because Chult is one of the nations on the Shining Sea, not some weird foreign backwater. Also, I rather enjoyed the characters in the Tomb of Annihilation campaign we played, so this gives me the opportunity to clean up some setting elements I didn’t like, while also potentially arranging some future guest appearances.

Which lead to geography.

I looked over the maps of the various editions, and one thing that jumped out is that 4e really did a number on the south. Prior to the spellplague and related events, the Shining Sea looked like:

 After 4e mugged it in an alley and went through its pockets, we got

So you don’t need to spend a lot of time flipping back and forth, the big differences are:

  • Halruaa is now more or less a magical smoking crater
  • The land bridge connecting Chult to the Mainland is now an archipelago
  • The Shaar grasslands are now a desert.
  • The inland sea- the Lake of Steam, is greatly reduced in scope

There are other changes, of course, but those are the big ones.

Now, I’m largely ok with the Halruaa thing – a big magical disaster was on point for a magical nation, and it creates something that has been “lost” within recent memory, as well as a dangerous place for things to happen or come from. So, that’s cool.

I’m kind of leery of the destruction of the land bridge, but I can lean into that. In my version of things, that whole arm used to be a sort of trade alliance, with Chult in a position of prominence. The disaster did a number on that, and also explicitly weakened Chult sufficiently that Amn could come in to “help” them recover, setting them up as a client state, and more or less explaining a lot of the political and economic weirdness in Tomb of Annihilation.

I’m not super hot on the destruction of Shaar, largely because it’s really boring. If you zoom out on the map, the eastern edge of Shaar is now a preposterously large hole in the ground down into the Underdark, and it feels like someone decided there should be some consequences to that, so they rolled out a desert and wiped it away. This bugs because Shaar’s really interestingly diverse as its conceived, and gives space for a lot of races and cultures that are squeezed out of the rest of the map. On the other hand, I still wanted a disaster of some sort, just to roll with the theme.

So, I rolled back the desert, but replaced it with rips in reality. Swaths of Shaar now touch upon (and sometimes drift back and forth into) the Feywild and the Shadowfell, and as a result, the whole place has gotten more dangerous. This is more pronounced to the east, but the problems have been pushing slowly westward, forcing locals to either adapt or flee. Result is that it’s a wild place, full of excuses for weirdness, but it also gives a good source for a wide variety of people to come from, which is something I want in this hypothetical city.

But for all that, it was the last thing that really stuck in my craw.

See, I look at the 3e map of the Shining Sea, and I see a trade sea with numerous interesting cities, with a narrow stretch of water connecting it to another, smaller trade sea. Which is to say, I look at that map and I see a location that absolutely resonates with Istanbul/Constantinople, which is a darn good starting point for any city. And then I see that 4e really decided to stomp on that as hard as it could, not only changing the geography of the water, but also more or less explicitly torpedoing all those interesting trade cities in favor of generic weirdness.

So, that wouldn’t stand, simple as that. I knew where I wanted my city, and I knew I wanted robust trade, specifically pulling upon two historical influences – Istanbul, and the Indian Ocean trade routes. But the good news is I had over a century since the events in 4e, and that gave me the lever I needed, since all it really took was time to let the Lake of Steam fill in again, and for the various cities to make their recoveries. By doing that, it allowed my as-yet-unnamed city to start to coalesce into shape.

Sidebar: No Hard Feelings, 4E

It may come across that I have some hard feeling towards what was done to the setting in 4e, and I suppose I do, but it’s not something I’m upset about. There are a lot of factors in play when editions change, and the general decision to drastically upend the Realms was entirely reasonable on paper. What’s more, they made the probably-entirely-reasonable decision that this was not a section of the map that there was a lot of emotional investment in – the further you get from Waterdeep and the Dales, the fewer people really care what happens in the setting.

Plus, frankly, there were two good reasons for some of the changes. First, a lot of them were more thematically in line with 4e and it’s points of light ethos. By breaking everything drastically and making everything kind of a mess filled with dramatic and visually striking badness, you set up a very 4e friendly sort of setting.

Second…well, a lot of stuff the blew up had been kind of cringey. If you dig into the old sourcebooks about the South, you will not have to wait long for words like “exotic” to start showing up. In more traveled parts of the Realms, the weaker parts of the world-building were frequently shored up by the patina of history that came from layering material atop itself many times, but for these “exotic” locales, it was more likely to just reinforce the bad patterns. There’s something to be said for cleaning out that particular detritus.

I’m sort of torn on this, because on one hand, it feels a little uncomfortable to deal so explosively with the places which exist for foreigners to come from. But on the other hand, it’s not like they were going to take the time to flesh them out, especially in a single FR book.

But, ultimately, I get it. Someone had a job, and that job was to blow up the South. And, honestly, until I decided I explicitly wanted to move off the Sword Coast, I hadn’t really noticed. I had to re-read a lot of material to remember what had even happened in the South, so they probably did their job right.

Thankfully, one of the joys of this hobby is that my hands aren’t tied by those past decisions. I find it useful to study and understand them, but only so I can take ownership of the things I intend to do.

The Sprawl’s Missing Move

Cyberpunk image of someone shopping at a kiosk

Ai Art image (“Cyberpunk Shopping Kiosk”)

We finished a really fun campaign of The Sprawl a while back, and it’s been rattling around in my mind. It’s a great game, but it has a few assumptions and structures which are essential to play that have some inobvious elements. The one that sits most strongly in my mind is the Hit the Street move.

This is the move that players use to get things like gear and information. It’s one of the big drivers of play because as a move it’s a generator of problems and motivations to bring things to life, and it’s also the gateway to other moves like getting cyberware. However, it can feel a little odd to invoke for things that seem like they should be much lower stakes or a normal part of life. I know that I, at least, was a little bit leery to engage it for the simple reason that it’s a bit like playing with fire. I was happy to do it when I was looking for that sort of scene, but in other situations, it felt like too much.

And that was a very practical problem. Because we didn’t use the move as much, it also meant we didn’t use the Create a Contact move nearly as often as we could have, and in turn, that meant we gave up one of the more fun knobs in the game. Now, for our particular game, it worked out ok because we had a number of invisible compensations, but that doesn’t seem like a very sustainable solution.

The trick, I think, is to add one more basic move to the game (as well as a couple more item tags). It’s a very simple move, and critically, it’s a move that I think you can safely introduce to any Sprawl game without concern because there’s a good chance it will never get used, but by never getting used, it still provides value.

Sounds weird, yes. But roll with me – here’s the move


Hit the Kiosk (Cred)

When you go to to the store to buy something like a civilian, you can spend cred to buy gear or other services.

    • Any gear acquired has the legit tag
    • If you spend an extra 50% (round up) the gear has the luxe tag
    • If you double the cost (minimum final cost of 4 cred) cred, it has the super luxe tag.
    • You can use this move to buy cyberware without making the Go Under The Knife move. If so, the but the cyberware has the owned tag.

So, there you go. For color “the Kiosk” is really any shopping opportunity, ranging from a high end showroom to whatever your amazon equivalent is, and if your cyberpunks want to be good consumers, then shopping is a breeze. Most of these things even come with free shipping! Why would you ever Hit the Streets and deal with all that uncertainty?

New Tags

Luxe – It’s really nice, and obviously so. Exactly HOW it’s nice is up to you. It might be more obviously decorated or of a fancier brand. Perhaps it’s a limited edition, ultra rare collectors item. Whatever it is, anyone in the know is going to notice.

Super Luxe Oh, sure, that ultra rare collectors item is nice, but did you know the creator had 5 initial prototypes with unique engraving and three of them were destroyed in a workshop explosion, and the rest of the line is based off the remaining two? One of them is in that big glass case in the foyer of HQ. Oh, the other? Well, let me show you something.

Legit – this item was procured in the correct manner, and complies with all regulations and agreements associated with its extended usage contract. It is properly registered in all appropriate databases, keeps its licensing current and of course allows authorized access for maintenance and compliance purposes.

Gameplay

If it’s not obvious, legit is very much like owned as a tag that is there to be an absolute lighting rod for complications. Exactly what sort of complications will depend a bit on the specifics of your setting, but for most things, the easiest way to think of it is like a smartphone or an EZ-Pass[1]. It leaves a trail, is easily compromised by folks with permissions, and it could even show more sophisticated behaviors, like geographic awareness. Guns might not be able to fire in places like airplanes or secure corporate facilities.

For the handful of things that may not have built in smarts (like, say, explosives), the legit version still has a serious data trail that goes back to you, and can include things like unique molecular signatures in explosives, effectively giving an explosion a serial number.

Implicit in this is the idea that the gear that characters use has the serial numbers filed off, so to speak. However, it’s also been done well enough that it doesn’t immediately raise red flags as being off the grid. For that, see the Street tag, below.

Optional Tag: Name Brand Products

If you want to lean into the setting a little bit more, an alternative to the legit tag is a “brand” tag. To set this up, take the corps in your game and have the table come up with a couple product brands that corp is behind. Feel free to have fun with this. Once you have this list, you can now use these all as tags which serve as some combination of legit, luxe and super luxe. There’s no real mechanical change, but knowing which corps are behind which brands may help provide a bit of direction to the complication that arise.

Optional Tag: Street

If you use the legit tag and have a sense of how it fits into the world, consider also introducing the street tag.

Street – This is an off the shelf item that’s been hacked, modified or has otherwise violated its TOS. It’s still entirely usable, and no longer has the drawbacks of a legit item, but the modification is also obvious to inspection.

In practice, this draws a different sort of complications – Street items are going to triggers sensors and alarms in the sort of places that pay licensing fees.

Summary

To make the subtext into text – this is not a move that the characters want to make. Buying over the counter is convenient, and may be great for civilians, but you absolutely don’t want to be trying to raid a Labryintel facility with guns running Labryintel software.

Rather, what this does is make it very clear *why* you are hitting the street, and maybe gives a little nudge in that direction.

1 – This is an American thing, I dunno what the equivalents are elsewhere, but it’s a little transponder like widget you put in your car so you can drive right through tolls and have them auto-charged against your account. Super convenient, and also an incredibly efficient way to track where your car goes.

Work in Progress – NotAmber

I’m running an Amber game for the household, and I’m using the following system. It’s a super rough writeup, but I wanted to get the draft version up somewhere.  There’s a very minor power system I’m not getting into right now, but the heart of it revolves around a iceless system where you roll dice after success to determine the position the success leaves you in.

Core Stats

The 4 stats[1] are:
Fire (Spades) – Covers actions relying on physical speed & nimbleness.

Air (Diamonds) – Covers actions relying on intellectual horsepower or pure perception.

Water (Hearts – Covers actions of personal presence or understanding what is known.

Earth (Clubs) – Covers actions of physical strength or toughness.

When taking an action, if it falls under one of these stats, the character gets the stat as a bonus. If two stats might apply in different ways (such as using clubs or spades to hit someone with a stick), use the one that aligns with the player’s description of the action. When two or more stats both seem applicable (such as spades and diamonds in a question of how quickly you notice something) use the lower of the two. 

Characters start with 2 points in each stat, and have 12 more points to spend. This number is the default for an Amber like game, but might be adjusted up or down. 

Descriptors

Characters have 3 descriptors. They’re freeform, so go nuts. If a descriptor is applicable to a situation, then you get a +3 in that action. If a second descriptor is applicable, the bonus drops by 1, so you get +5 (that is, +3 and +2). If all 3 are applicable, then it drops again, and it’s +6 (+3, +2 and +1).

NPCs

NPCs have descriptors, but very rarely have stats. However, they have another mechanic to give them a little variability – Tiers.

NPCs can have a tier from 1 to 5, and the tier represents:

  1. How many descriptors they can have
  2. How big their starting descriptor bonus is. 

So, a Tier 4 NPC might be a, I dunno, Brave, Bold, Knight, General, and in a fight he’s going to be running around with a value of 10 (4 + 3 + 2 +1) so he’s KIND of a badass. 

TierRepresents
0 Inexpensive furniture. Lunchmeat. Very small rocks.
1 The woefully inadequate. Children. Exceptionally fierce squirrels.
2 Most People
3 Heroes, adventurers, general badasses
4 Demigods, paragons, Isekai protagonists
5 Dragons, Gods, all that jazz.

As a double cheat, the GM is not obliged to sketch out all of an NPC’s descriptors, and they’re free to re-use them for simplicity. Which is to say, you don’t need to flesh out that Tier 3 Bandit. Just give him a 6 on banditing. That’s what he’s there for. IMPORTANT: This is just a trick for sketching out nameless characters. Anyone important enough to have a name merits a little more attention to detail, especially because for those characters, it can start mattering what descriptors they have or don’t have. 

Resolution

Higher number wins.

I mean, yes, sometimes there’s no an opposing number, in which case the number is “what kind of person could successfully do this?”, and then higher number wins. If you need guidelines, consider that a tier 2 human doing the thing they’re best at has a big old 3, so 3 is a pretty good default. 5 is good for something pretty hard. 9 is pretty much best in the world sort of stuff. 

Couple rules of thumb:

  • Set the difficulties as if they were for NPCs, and that allows the characters to benefit from their stats, which is what they’re for.
  • There’s a whole thing here about the role of narration in resolution. If players are clever or use tactics or find other ways to shift the situation, you can very reasonable make up a few points difference. This is, however, very subjective and that’s deliberate. If you don’t want it to be subjective, you probably want more numbers. 
  • Tools done provide bonuses, they just change the difficulty. A cliff might be really hard (5) to climb on its own, but much more doable (3) with rope. The same logic applies to things like taking time, having help and all the other ways that people tackle problems. 
  • For all that I’m committing page inches to them, static difficulties are largely boring. Even if players can’t immediately overcome such a challenge, a little extra effort will usually be enough, so try to assume success, and just fold in things like extra time.
  • Opposition, on the other hand, tends to be a little more interesting, at least it can be. 
  • MOST of the time, there’s no actual “resolution”. You know what the character’s numbers are, and you are going to stop to trigger the system when the logic of the narrative is obvious.

BUT WHAT IF IT’S INTERESTING?

When it’s interesting, or there are uncertainties, the GM can call for a roll. Critically, you only call for a roll when the character is going to succeed. If not, stick to narration and description. But when success is certain, but other questions are open, that’s the time to call for a roll. Possibilities include:

  • Going into town to ask around about a person
  • Crossing swords with a notable opponent
  • Breaking into a well guarded villa
  • Relying on magic for…well, most things.

The purpose of the roll is to see how the situation unfolded – has it revealed new opportunities, or has it sprung unforseen complications?

A roll is made with 2df, so the potential results range from -2 to +2, and the results are interpreted as follows:

RollMeans
+2Everything’s Coming Up Milhouse. A happy coincidence introduces a major opportunity.
+1A lucky break. Things go well, and a minor opportunity is revealed.
0Business as usual. The scene plays out by the numbers.
-1Bad Break. Minor complication
-2Oh @$^%! Major complication.

OPPORTUNITIES & COMPLICATIONS

Opportunities & complications are both elements that move the scene forward – they either introduce a question that the player must answer (like: The building is on fire, what do you do?) or an opportunity for action that had not previously been available (like: You spot a secret door, do you want to go through it?). 

Opportunities are generally easier to adjudicate. A minor opportunity might take the form of a little bit of extra information, a friendlier reception, a nice tip or the like. A major opportunity is a full on lucky break – run across a friend, discover a significant piece of information or generally be in the right place at the right time. 

Complications are trickier. They can suck, but it’s important that they not negate the underlying success. If the complication offers a choice, the choices should not include (effectively) retroactively failing.

As an example, the character sneaks into a castle to steal the Maltese Frankfurter. They have the skills to succeed, but there are a lot of variables in this, so the GM calls for a roll, and the player gets a -2. 

The GM’s first instinct is “You grab the Frankfurter, but then every alarm in the place goes off. You have only moments to flee ahead of the guards”.

Now, that might be a fun scene, but it raises the question of what the player was trying to accomplish. If their goal was GETTING the Frankenfurter, this is probably fine. But if their goal was passing undetected, this pretty much flips the bird to that. For that character, the twist emerging after they get out might be more appropriate. 

A minor complication sours the result a bit. You succeeded, but…perhaps you took a minor injury, or the prize had a catch, or you didn’t end up right where you hoped. A minor complication tends to not be about a choice but is instead just a little extra badness that was outside of the character’s control.

A major complication take one of two forms. First, they might be a consequence – an injury, a loss of resource or some other complication they need to proceed in the face of. These are fine, and if you can think of a good one, they’re cool. Otherwise though, consider a force: the complication create a situation the character must respond to, such as an imminent threat, and asks “What now?”

Options:

  • Roll for all the good stuff – If a scene is particularly cool, such as a duel with a nemesis, the outcome might be sure to be failure, but it might be fun to allow them to throw in a die roll to see where it goes. 
  • Bad Stuff – If using this rule, characters are allowed to take one more descriptor (though they can still only use 3 of them on a given action). This descriptor is flagged as “Bad stuff”, and in any situation where the character actively uses it, a roll is appropriate, and if the roll take a bad turn, the bad stuff descriptor is almost always the problem.

Anaway, as I said, it’s a work in progress, but I want to capture the bones of it here.

1 – I could not tell you how many variants on these 4 stats I have used throughout the years.

GM Cues

I’m always intrigued by the idea of mechanizing language, but I usually think about it from the player side, where certain phrases are designed to trigger mechanical effects. Things like aspects and moves, yes, but it also is a big part of games that require a lot of learning to engage – “I cast magic missile” is a sentence that is absolutely dripping with mechanical hooks. “Cast” is an action which engages mechanics. “Magic Missile” is a specific set of effects laid out in the rules. Once you understand those things, then the sentence feels natural and organic, and the volume of rules kind of fade from view. It’s a good trick, and one worth deliberately pursuing.

Last night I ended up thinking about this from the GM side. Now, the GM has somewhat different responsibilities in her language. Yes, the rules mechanics are also in play, but the GM is also the proxy for the characters sense of the world. She is their eyes and ears, so to speak, and the decisions related to how to communicate the world are incredibly important.

Specifically, because the GM cannot convey every piece of information about what’s going on, she must be able to shorthand it efficiently. Consider a scene where our bold adventurers enter a room – the GM describes it in a quick sketch (“About 30×3, with bare walls and a door on the opposite wall”) but then goes into great detail about a specific piece of furniture, let’s say a desk. The GM has just signaled to the players that the desk is important and would be interesting or useful to engage with.

Or so we hope.

This is one of those areas where the history of adventure design has worked against us. In older, more competitive games, that sort of thing would be viewed as cheating, or the GM giving hints, which was bad sportsmanship. That lead to two specific patterns that have kind of dirtied the water.

First, adventure designers and GMs started deliberately subverting this expectation by applying loving detail to things that were distractions or ultimately hazardous. This, in turn, made players very wary of anything the GM drew attention to as a probable threat, which in turn inspired GMs and Designers to make things worse. Not a great scene. Hopefully, newer players don’t have as much of this baggage, but this is one of those areas where a new player can be quickly scarred and taught not to trust the GM, so its worth being mindful of it.

Second, it lead to an idea that descriptions needed to be “neutral”, with no cues from the GM. This is not super practical because it requires that the GM either go into excruciating detail, or that the players must ask questions about every single thing until they happen to hit upon the right thing, in a weird variation on one of those computer puzzle games where you need to get the mouse on exactly the right pixel to solve the problem. Not fun for anyone.

The solution to this was to move it to the dice. Early perception skills were mostly a way to skip this process and answer the question “Do you find the cool thing?”. Obviously, the topic of perception skills has evolved a lot since then, but I hold it up as what is ultimately a pretty convoluted way to avoid a fairly simple mode of communication.

I’m not necessarily saying that you should forgo perception checks in favor of GM cues, but I’m definitely suggesting that you COULD.

Buying Trouble

A Fate Die Rolling Variant

Intent

I’ve been running a lot of games in the Blades in the Dark family lately, and enjoying it a lot.  I really missing having aspects as a knob to turn, but it’s full of other shiny bits.  The one that I really enjoy is the mechanization of the complications as something orthogonal to difficulty.  It’s an idea that exists in other forms in other games, Fate included, but it’s a tricky piece of tech that I’ve sometimes struggled with.

This is, hopefully, the end of the struggle.

Trouble

This rule has only two parts: Complications, and Buying Trouble

Complications

Complications are twists on a situation.  Stylistically, they have a fair amount in common with aspect compels, but mechanically they are separate from the aspect economy, and are instead tied to the situation at hand.  Aspects are fertile ground for inspiration for complications, but it’s bad sport to use a complication for something which is more appropriate to a compel.

Complications are created as a result of rolls, and it’s important to remember that the complication should never negate the success. The complication is *something else* going wrong – it may complicate the situation (thus, the name) but it should never devalue the success. Specifically, if the player takes a complication in order to avoid a problem, the complication should not be that problem. 

 Complications might include:

  • The arrival of opposition
  • Unwelcome information being released
  • Resources being used up
  • Flumphs

Complications come in 4 different levels

  1. Annoying – These are minor complications – maybe a small resource loss or a moment of slapstick.  
  2. Inconvenient – This complication is making the current situation a little more difficulty.  It might require another roll, an unexpected resource spend or otherwise keep things from going quite as smoothly as hoped. As a tip, this is *roughly* the severity of a compel. 
  3. Problematic – The complication is a problem of it own, and needs to be dealt with or avoided. 
  4. Disastrous – Things Go Bad.  This complication is a BIG problem, and is likely to totally upend the situation.

Buying Trouble

When a player rolls dice, they have the option of dropping all dice showing minuses to ‘buy trouble’.  Doing so changes the result of the die roll, but introduces a complication  of a level equal to the number of minuses spent.  

Example

Finn is picking a lock, because RPG Conduct Code demands that all examples include at least one door.   His player rolls – – + +, for a net zero.  Finn could take that, but he’s in a hurry – the guards are coming and he’s tight on time, so he buys trouble, and changes his roll from a 0 to a +2 and the GM is free to introduce an inconvenience.   

The GM should explicitly NOT have the effort take longer, or have the guards show up as a complication – that’s exactly what the player was buying trouble to avoid, so it would be a Jerk move.

If Finn’s been making trouble elsewhere, this would be a great time for that to be found out, and perhaps have an alarm go off.  This is going to make things harder, but it doesn’t create an immediate consequence.

But supposing he hasn’t, the GM might have the door go someplace other than Finn’s player expects.  Perhaps his map is wrong, or he picked the wrong door, and now he’s lost, or in an awkward location.

If Finn had bought more trouble (say, he’d rolled  – – – +), then the door might go someplace like a closet, or to a room where the staff are preparing a meal, and now he has a whole new problem. 

Using These Rules

You can drop these rules into any Fate game, and they’ll work fine.  However, there are some interactions that are going to be worth watching.

First, in games where there are a LOT of Fate points in play, this is going to be a less appealing option, because the mechanical utility of this approach depends on the pressure to offset a bad roll.  If fate points are bountiful, there’s very little pressure to take consequences.  That’s not necessarily a bad thing – presumably the many fate points mean that compels are keeping things plenty interesting, so complications are less necessary.  This rule still works in those games, it just may come up less often. 

Second, this approach synergizes well with having aspects flip dice rather than give a flat +2, because it keeps bonuses bounded, and it introduces a bit of a dynamic of using aspects to avoid trouble when appropriate. 

Options

Nuanced Trouble

There may be a temptation to let players decide how much trouble they want to buy (rather than have it be all or nothing) .  That’s fine, and it’s a reasonable option, but it has the risk of introducing analysis paralysis.  Don’t use this option if your players are going to take more than half a second deciding how many minuses they’ll spend.

Closed Economy

For players who like to constrain the overall Fate Point budget in play, consider this option:  

  1. The GM starts play with a fixed pool of Fate Points (say, 1 per player)
  2. When the player takes a complication, the GM may opt to take a number of Fate Points equal to the level of the complication.
  3. The GM’s Fate point pool is limited to those on hand.

Bargains

Aka “The Morgan Rule” – If you want to steal Devil’s Bargains from Blades, they can turn blanks to plusses.  Not sure if this really works, but – putting a pin in it as I think.

Next

So, this is pretty much version 0.1. I’m genuinely excited to try this at the table and see how it evolves. I suspect the closed economy option has got a lot of legs, because I think it might be a real solution to the se’f-compel issue. My biggest concern is to see how well it plays with the flow of fate points. They might be complimentary, but there’s a non-zero chance of them tripping over each others shoelaces, in which case this might be the basis for something else entirely.

The Gygaxian No

A d20 iconRandom aside: One design ethic that I do not particularly enjoy in D&D is what I would describe as the “Gygaxian No” – that is, the players have legitimately earned certain abilities and spells, and adventure designers explicitly negate them for simplicity or effect.

Two most common examples being higher level adventures that take away mobility effects (like flight), and effects which explicitly pierce immunities.

I 100% understand why adventures remove mobility, I just find it lazy and sloppy in almost every situation, especially because it’s almost never “This is harder”, but rather “This is FORBIDDEN”

And I just find the immunity thing a jerk move. Player immunities are reasonably rare in D&D, and are often against rarely-encountered things like disease, and the result is often the only time disease shows up is when it ignores immunity, and that’s just crappy.

What’s most curious to me is that this is not actually a problem with D&D – it’s not a thing the rules require! It is 100% bad habits in adventure and encounter design, passed down by tradition.

and to unpack a little, the immunity thing is actually a bit worse than a jerk move, it’s explicitly a violation of the social contract. As soon as players realize that the game may randomly negate choices, they are well served to change how they choose in more “safe” directions

Which is to say, just taking stuff that works well in a fight. If you’re wondering why your players are min/maxing all the time, make sure to consider the lessons they learned when they tried something else.

(From a Twitter Thread)

Prime in the Dark

Ok, small rules hack for Forged in the Dark, which I’m calling Priming.

Priming is something that may be used as a GM option when players take efforts or risks that draw attention to an element in play (such as an item or supporting character). The effect to capture here is something akin to Chekov’s Gun (“If in the first act you have hung a pistol on the wall, then in the following one it should be fired. Otherwise don’t put it there.”), when play has clearly suggested that a thing is interesting, and the GM wants to show that she too is interested.

When an object is primed, it gets a point. An object may have multiple priming points if it keeps showing up interestingly – it’s entirely at GM discretion – but the bar should be higher with each step. The primes don’t do anything until such a time that it is part of a flashback which explains why this thing is significant. When that happens, the number of primes is subtracted from the stress cost of the flashback.

Cinematic Primes

If the game you are playing is more of the cinematic/high action variety, then consider this optional rule – any excess prime (that is, prime beyond the cost of the flashback) turns into potency. This is potentially very powerful, but it also very much lines up with cinematic sensibilities.

Slow Burn Primes

Primes usually don’t last beyond one session (or one story, if they’re packed in there) but if you want the idea of a longer payoff, the Slow Burn prime rules allows for a single object to accrue one point of prime per session per player. If you’re using slow burn priming, you probably shouldn’t mix and match with regular priming, but if you do, then any excess is removed.

An Example

In our most recent game (a very cinematic one), one of the characters entered play with a giant blue teddy bear on the back of his motorcycle. What followed was a series of action-adventure stuff; car crashes, explosions and the works. For several 4-5 results. I offered “losing the bear” as a consequence, but the player chose to take other hits rather than lose the bear. As a result, it got primed three times over the course of the session.

When the player finally flashed back to revealing that the bear was full of explosives, I normally would have only charged them one stress (because it was not a stretch), but instead it was free. Also, because this was cinematic, I used the overage towards potency, so when the bear blew up, it was a big, satisfying explosion.

Addenda

* This is never mandatory for players. The GM is expressing interest, but there is never a mandate that there must be a flashback. That said, if there isn’t, then the GM will probably re-use the element later.

* There’s really no rule here. This could 100% just be done with the GM auto-discounting flashbacks based on her sensibilities. The reason for a mechanic is less about the discount and more about the signaling.