Some Variant Spells

About a week ago was I chatting with Pat (@MountainFoot), @wereoctopus and Luka (@StratoMetaShip) on Twitter about spell variants. Matt Colville recently just did a bunch of rules for Wizard’s towers and funky spell variants, but they were like 7 pages long, hit and miss and a lot of effort. I thought I would bash out a couple of weird spell variants.

Here was the example we were discussing: 

Menress’ Frozen Portal: Functions as Hold Portal, only the held door is frozen shut.

And here are 9 more. Some muck around with the spell’s level, which make it different to the 5e version (that was the only Player Handbook I have in front of me). Cantrip refers to infinite use. You effectively trade a known spell for a trait or feature: 

Herins’ Illusive Step (1st Level): Functions as Misty Step, but only allows you to move a space within 5ft of a light source, such as a lit torch, lantern or candle.

Jericho’s Spectral Bowshot: Functions as Magic Missile, but darts are instead arrows fired from a ghostly bow. 

Usidore’s Specific Birdsong (Cantrip):  Functions as Speak With Animals, but only works with one particular species of bird chosen upon learning the spell, such as robins, geese or pigeons.

Yorow’s Flaming Breath: Functions as Burning Hands, but fire spurts from the mouth, not the hands. 

Harold’s Expeditious Summary (3rd Level): Functions as Legend Lore, but only works on the contents of a book held in your hand, providing a brief summary of its contents.  

Geera’s Ill-Planned Invisibility (1st Level): Functions as Invisibility, but only works while the target is singing loudly. 

Usidore’s Conspiracy of Birds: Functions as Cloudkill, but deals Piercing Damage instead of Poison Damage as a swarm of birds are summoned to attack the target area. Also deals damage even the creature does not need to breath.

Patricia’s Revealing Orb (2nd Level): Functions as Chromatic Orb, but also leaves a light source that lasts a minute at the target location, equivalent to the light created by a torch.

Theodore’s Wave of Frost: Functions as Thunderwave, but deals Cold Damage instead of 

Thunder Damage as an icy wind knocks nearby target to the ground. Instead of the audible boom, the rush of unnaturally cold wind can be felt up to 300 feet away. 

Journeys within Games and Best Left Buried

TL;DR: Best Left Buried is a horror-fantasy game that tracks a dungeoneering party’s descent from fresh-faced recruits to grizzled veterans. You can buy it here: https://www.drivethrurpg.com/product/254584

Bear with me, this goes on a tangent. I wanted to do something more than shameless promotion, so you get a blog article on something I think that is important in RPGs, but often overlooked in game design.

It is my opinion that many RPGs suffer from being overly generic in terms of genre and journey. D&D is a great example of this. You can use it to run (and this is a quote from the 5e DMG) games set in: Heroic Fantasy, Sword and Sorcery, Epic Fantasy, Mythic Fantasy, Dark Fantasy, Intrigue, Mystery, Swashbuckling, War, or Wuxia. It tries to hit a lot of notes, and while this gives it broad appeal and makes it very marketable, it also has downsides. 

Good systems should try to sell a genre, or, better even, try to sell a journey.

The best new roleplaying game I have read in the last year is Blades in the Dark. It tries to run a gloompunk heist game and every rule in the book is designed to do exactly that. The planning flashbacks, the downtime rules, the gang playbook, the Stress/Vice system all turns Blades into a bullet that hits the target right in the bullseye. 

A lot of people recognise this and try to pitch to a narrow scope of genre or gameplay style, but Blades does everything it can to carve out a singular feeling. That feeling is being Tommy Shelby from Peaky Blinders or Corvo Attano from Dishonoured or whatever heisty protagonist you are trying to nail.

Video games also sell feelings. Nothing beats sprinting around as the Doom Marine nailing demons with a shotgun, riding through Hyrule on a horse, or that “One More Turn” vibe that the good Civilisation games pump your veins full of.

What is this feeling that Dungeons and Dragons tries to hit? Was there an emotion or experience they were aiming for? Maybe there’s an art to that, leaving a system open an letting those emotions appear in play, but I honestly think Wizards didn’t even know. I think Gygax knows what he wanted from his game, but Mike Mearls certainly didn’t

Now, back to my stuff.

Best Left Buried is designed to run a specific style of game and give that same feeling. I realise now, but I tried to write a fantasy game and wrote a horror game with a fantasy setting.

The journey is fairly singular. The characters start off as badass adventurers, but then become destroyed by everything that lives in the dungeon.

Dungeoneering is a terrible career path. I discussed this in my first ever blog post. You go into the earth and fight monsters, deal with traps and get covered in mud and worse. You sometimes get rich, but you usually end up dead first. 

Through their journey, they would see all of this crazy shit in the bowels of the dungeon. They would be cut down by the monsters, or at very least left with weird insanity and crippling injuries. I wanted to plot this journey from a fresh newcomer to a grizzled survivors with PTSD and a pegleg. 

The came was originally called Descent, plotting both the descent of the characters into the dungeon both physically and spiritually. We also called it Crypt for a while, the environment where all of insanity was found. I eventually settled on "Best Left Buried", after dreaming up the tagline:

"There are things that dwell in the Crypt and some are Best Left Buried."

The end of the journey for our adventurers is death or worse. Eventually, as the injuries, insanities and mutations stack up, the character will become little better than the monsters they fight.

That’s the journey I’m trying to sell. That’s the journey of Best Left Buried.

Artefact Session: The Session Pitch for my Novel

I just found a crazy document in the archive of my computer. This is the campaign pitch for the D&D game that eventually become my books: The Last Errant and the WIP Last Mystic. 

The Barren would have probably been a weird game, but it sure as hell sounds fun: 

The Wasteland 

Influenced by elements of the Dark Tower’s Mid-World, the frontier spirit of the Wild West and the post apocalyptic vibe of Fallout, the Wastelands is a Dark Fantasy setting where adventurers head into the wild unknown of the Western Expanse, away from Hubris, a once-great city which is all that’s left of the Old Ways.

“I am the punishment of God... If you had not committed great sins, God would not have sent a punishment like me upon you.” - Genghis Khan

“Once again there was the desert, and that only.” - Stephen King, The Gunslinger

Hubris is a rotten city.

A city of corruption, blasphemy and the remnants of a dying way. Beneath its ruined spires, thousands starve to death every winter, while the powerful sit in palaces that stretch for miles, living in unimaginable luxury. Cultist scream the names of long dead gods in overcrowded streets and others worship darker creatures that lurk in the depths of the shadows: fiendish Blackbeasts, the eldritch Gibbering Ones and the emotive Fae. For the common man, the city of Hubris is a deathtrap. Many folk chose to leave the depravities of the city behind and seek out a simpler life in the Western Expanse.

Legends tell of a LAND BEYOND 

Stories say that the Expanse that makes up the Old West is nearly thousand miles tall and wide, , but past that lies the LAND BEYOND: the great city of Reverie, the realm of Dumah, ruled by the God-King of Numin, the glory of the Dawn Ocean. Some believe the LAND BEYOND exists, but many call them fools living on false hope. 

There is no law in the Expanse. It is the Wasteland, the Lost Wild, the Barren. Chaos rules.

The same legends tell that Lost Wild between Hubris and Reverie is a savage land. League after league of hungry desert, savage grasslands and haunted forest. Mile of mile of rugged terrain filled to the brim with madmen, beasts, ruined cities, demons and things a thousand times worse. A nightmare land that will never end. Even in near side of the Wasteland villages of Barrenfolk can only etch out a primitive existence, all while harassed by drifters, beasts and shifters. 

Heroes travel the Wasteland

The remainders of the Last Knights of Errant wander the Wasteland. These warriors, explorers and adventurers journey through the perils of the Barren. Some seek fortune hidden in ruined cities, others are running from something behind, but most simply desire to reach the LAND BEYOND whatever the cost. There heroes travel through the Wilds, fighting evil and aiding the Barrenfolk wherever they can. 

The Wasteland runs with a Low Fantasy version of the 5e ruleset, where magic exists but is rarely wielded by men. All players are human, using the variant human rules from 5e and may take two Virtues from the Adventures in Middle Earth instead of one feat from the Player Handbook. Choose a Background from either the PHB or AiME. There are eight classes:

• The Godsman, a friar who wanders the world spreading the words of Gods That Were. 
• The Scholar, a learned man who is uncovers the secrets of the past and is wise in lore
• The Slayer, a savage and dauntless killer who fights alone and with bestial fury 
• The Treasure Hunter, a scavenger who delves in the depths and recovers the remains of the world before
• The Wanderer, a traveller who is at home in the wilds of the Wasteland, bringing news as they go
• The Warden, a fellow brave of heart who kindles the spirits of allies and guards the hearth-fire
• The Warlock, a sorcerer of forbidden and evil magics, who has sold his soul to some strange entity 
• The Warrior, a stalwart and discipline fighter who rallies his allies in combat 

Godsman 

https://koboldpress.com/rare-magic-the-friar-a-fifth-edition-variant-cleric/

http://arsludi.lamemage.com/index.php/78/grand-experiments-west-marches/

OSR Guide For The Perplexed Questionnaire

Zak Smith of HitItWithMyAxe posted this list of 20 questions he wanted us to answer. I hate chain mail, but I'm happy doing this one, because the OSR is RAD.

1. One article or blog entry that exemplifies the best of the Old School Renaissance for me:

http://udan-adan.blogspot.com/2016/09/osr-aesthetics-of-ruin.html

I love this piece by Joseph Manola about the OSR and its obsession with ruination and decay. when i read it, it just made sense immediately and ending up inspiring large pieces of my work.

2. My favourite piece of OSR wisdom/advice/snark:

“Rules are hard to remember and details are easy to forget under stress. Intent is not. Intent is easy to recall and unlike detail it actually grows more powerful under stress. You remember who hates you. The more stressed you are, the more you remember it.”

This quote from Veins of the Earth by Patrick Stuart sums up my opinion of rules vs rulings, and also process vs procedure. It actually sits on my desk, glued to my office computer at my actual job. 

3. Best OSR module/supplement:

I think Veins of the Earth is simply unsurpassed from every design perspective, but it probably suffers from being too arty. 

The most useful thing I’ve ever ran is Skerples’ Tomb of the Serpent Kings. This stellar low level dungeon should be the “I don’t know what dungeon to run tonight, lets play *blank*" for every single OSR DM. 

4. My favourite house rule (by someone else):

I love the Black Hack’s usage die for food, light sources etc. I don’t know if that’s technically a house rule, because its part of a game already, but so many people use it as a house rule in other games that I reckon it counts.

5. How I found out about the OSR:

I was looking into Swords and Wizardry, after reading the Sword of Air, a mega campaign by Frog God Games. I remember then researching stuff like Dungeon Crawl Classics and them stumbling across Questing Beast’s youtube channel. From there, I bought a copy of Fire on the Velvet Horizon and the rest was history. 

6. My favourite OSR online resource/toy:

You can find every map you ever needed for a fantasy game here, in the storage repository of Dyson Logos: 

https://rpgcharacters.wordpress.com/maps/

7. Best place to talk to other OSR gamers:

I love Discord Servers. My favourite is the Questing Beast Patreon Discord server, but if you can’t get onto that, Twitter is pretty sweet. 

8. Other places I might be found hanging out talking games:

A few other discord servers for Troika, DIY RPG or OSR. If you want links to any of these, message me or comment below.  

9. My awesome, pithy OSR take nobody appreciates enough:

I love being rid of death saves, instant death or whatever, and replacing it with a coin toss. Tails, you live are unconscious. Heads, you die. It makes some really fucking dramatic moments. 

10. My favourite non-OSR RPG:

I know we aren’t meant to like story games, but I really love Blades in the Dark. It is a game carved like a bullet to do exactly one style of campaign and knock it out of the park. 

11. Why I like OSR stuff:

Less commercial and corporate. People make OSR shit because they love it and its cool. Most of it isn’t designed to shift copies or meet some targets, its because someone has a genuine passion for a project and made it themselves in the desk on their kitchen. The art is just better. There is less direction and it isn’t stale. Its like comparing original John Blanche stuff to something from a modern 40k product.

12. Two other cool OSR things you should know about that I haven’t named yet:

Luka Rejec, the WizardThieffighter and Stratometaship guy, has made two awesome products lately: Ultraviolet Grasslands and Witchburner, as well as doing art/layout for lots of other projects. This guy is the full package and does all of the art/layout/writing for his books. UVG is sublime and reckon everyone should read it. Grab his Patreon here and his twitter @Stratometaship

Other shout out is Troika by Dan S and the Melsonian Arts Council. The game is weird and utterly British and janky and I absolutely love it. Grab the Patreon and the book on DriveThruRPG 

13. If I could read but one other RPG blog but my own it would be:

Coins and Scrolls, cos Skerples makes a crazy cool blog full of massively gameable shit. Additional shoutout to any of his stuff on Feudalism, which a lot of people may find dry but i think is amazing. 

14. A game thing I made that I like quite a lot is:

Best Left Buried. The fantasy horror RPG game I’m written and is currently available on DriveThruRPG. It's been realeased but I weirdly haven't made a blogpost yet, mainly cos no one reads this blog.

15. I'm currently running/playing:

A Black Company-esque mercenary game using Warhammer Fantasy Roleplaying 2nd Ed, but set in my own version of medieval Europe. The players are chasing a bounty on a knight who is impersonating another knight. They decided the best way to draw this guy out was to write him a letter while pretending to be his long lost brother. Many letters have been written at the table and exchanged. We have spent 2, 4 hour long sessions without a single combat. 

16. I don't care whether you use ascending or descending AC because:

I know this cheating but I do care. Sorry? 

Descending AC doesn’t make sense to me. I have distaste for role under systems in general, because I think you should always have consistency of dice expectation. If high is good on damage rolls (and it always is) then 'to hit' roles or skill checks should be good as high too. It creates a massive disconnect with new players for the system. I hate when players have to go "Wait should this dice role be low or high for it to be good?", or ever worse, confusion after a dice lands about what the good results are.

Games that don't obey this rule, like Black Hack, GLOG, Into the Odd etc, will just never be things I want to run.

I make an exception for WHRP 2nd Ed, because D100 low is the only place where low is good and I feel like that is a different "dice space" that is defined separately from the rest of the game where high is good.

17. The OSRest picture I could post on short notice:

I call this thing “Footshark” and it comes from Best Left Buried. It’s mad.

The Consequences of Gold

This is another blog about how quasi-medieval tropes sometimes don’t make sense in D&D. 

On the entirety of planet earth, scientists believe there is about 171 tons of gold. You could fit in this in a cube 60ft in each dimension. This is a staggeringly small quantity of gold. It's about half a swimming pool worth of gold.

There are dragon hordes in published D&D modules with nearly as much gold as this. 

If you run gold for exp with just coins, getting to level 10 requires somewhere in the region of 30,000 gold coin. Basic D&D details that 10 gold coins weight a pound. By my calculations, this is 13 tonnes of gold. In 2nd addition AD&D, gold coins weight a third of a standard ounce or 9 grammes. This is about 2.8 tonnes. This is a significant 1.5 percent of the total quantity of extracted gold on the planet. This would be a decent stockpile for a sizeable central bank.

In short, gold is way more common in D&D than we give it credit for. 

How would this interact with our D&D economy?

For lots of reasons, like hyper inflation, monetary police and monetary base, most countries in medieval times printed their own coins. The only type of coin you could use in a country was coins made by the royal mint and stamped with the head of its monarch. 

Using gold coins you found in the dank crypt of an ancient king would not be acceptable at the local town’s smithy. They would look at you like you were trying to pay them in sexual favours or scottish banknotes. It probably wouldn’t be accepted anywhere. It is green, full of holes, smells and it certainly doesn’t bear the stamp of King Robert.

The equivalent here isn’t turning up in modern London and trying to buy a bacon sandwich with a 5 euro note. It’s trying to buy it with a pile of French Livre from 1800. Or, even more parallel, trying to buy it with a roman denarii you dug up from an old fort ruin in your back yard. 

This would play absolute havoc with pricing and exchange rates. How do we know that a Naga gold coin is worth as much as one of Roberts gold coins? What is the metal quantity like? What is the exchange rate between a Duergar electrum coin or pile of Elven silver? 

What I know for sure is that it is in King Robert’s interest for only his own money to be in use. ‘Illegal’ tender now has to be reported to the mint, where it can be scrapped and melted down in replace for a lesser quantity of the king’s minted gold.  

I imagine an NPC who melts antique coins down to mineral worth and the sells the gold back to the mint. She has one eye. The locals probably call her The Clipper. She would be an interesting place to marker weird treasure and monster valuables.

Whatever it does, it’ll change how your adventurers think and challenge them to get rich in different ways. 

Some Weird Spells from Best Left Buried

These are all unlevelled spells I wrote for my new RPG, Best Left Buried. I had a bunch of spells that relate to single schools, like Abjuration or Evocation or whatever, but no weird, ridiculous spells that belong in old school games. I took inspiration from a Scrap Princess blog that made the rounds about writing spells that weren't just keycards or blasting spells, and had some more tangible materialness. These belong in the same place as one of my favourite blogposts of all time, Skerples' 100 Orthodox Wizard Spells.

Best Left Buried has a few gaming terms that don't belong in normal OSR terms, which would make these skills trivially easy to convert. Against the Odds is disadvantage. Upper Hand is advantage. Observation checks are perception checks. The three stats are Brawn, Wit and Will.

Candleseeker

You summon a semi-sentient mote of shadow. It travels at walking pace towards the closest source of non-natural, non-magical light or fire (a torch, a candle, a campfire, an alchemical brazier) within 10 miles. When it arrives, it eats the light, causing it to be extinguished.

Stonebone

You turn the a specific bone a creature’s body to stone by magical impetus. Target a humanoid within short range, and choose its head, torso or one of its limbs and turn the bones within to solid stone for 1 hour. This makes the bones more immobile and harder, but more brittle. An unwilling target may resist with an Against The Odds Brawn (Constitution) check. If the target has no bones, the spell has no effect.

Bone Magnet

You activate the trace of magnetic iron within the human skeleton. Target an object within short range and choose whether it attracts or repels. All targets with a skeleton within the zone must succeed a Will (Wisdom) check, or be attracted or repelled to the object for the next minute. If the object is small, the object will move towards the nearest skeleton. If the object is large, the skeletons will move towards it. Targets that pass the Will check can still move within the zone, but at half speed. If the target has no bones, the spell has no effect.

Pocket Realm

You whisk one small item away to a pocket dimension. Target a small object you touch that can fit in the palm of your hand. It is removed from existence and deposited safely in an extra-dimensional hiding place. The next time you cast this spell, the object you cast it on replaces the object already hidden in the Pocket Realm. The previously hidden object then appears in the palm of your hand.  

Mirror Sheen

You give a surface of an item a glassy, reflective sheen like a mirror. Touch a surface no larger than 5x5 feet. Its surface is transformed into completely reflective glass. If struck with any force the thin glass layer will shatter and reveal the original surface beneath.

Ropemaker’s Trim

You transform a length of humanoid hair into rope. Touch any quantity of hair bundled up in a width equivalent to a ponytail or braid. Each inch of hair  you transform turns into a foot of rope. The rope maintains the smell, colour and texture of human hair. If the hair has been braided before the transformation, the resulting rope is stronger.

Ne’ertrue Imitation

You create an almost perfect copy of an item. Touch any object that weighs less than a kilogram and produce a copy of it made of similar material. It is a passable imitation when observed from a distance or for fooling laymen, but any close inspection by an expert or magic user reveals the copy as a sham. The copy exists for one hour and then crumbles into dust. Merchants, tradespeople, and lawmen get very annoyed by this spell. Its use is punishable by death in most cities.

Voodoo Blindness

You inflict a terrible psychic injury upon yourself, which is transferred onto an enemy creature. You may Blind, Deafen, Restrain or Immobilise yourself. Choose a creature within short range, the enemy must succeed on an Against The Odds Will (Wisdom) check or suffer the same effect. The spell ends after 1 minute, and the effect ends on both you and the enemy.

Fear The Light

You compel the spirits that live within open flames to attack the nearest target. This spells targets every light source in a Zone within long range. Each source of light attacks the nearest creature to it. The larger and bright the light, the more damage. Hot flames, as well alchemical or magical sources of light, may do more damage. For example, a candle might do 1 damage, a  bonfire might do 2 and the flames of a demon may do 3.

Audinull

You whisk away all sounds from the environment around you and a number of your allies. Choose up to 4 creatures within short range of you. All targeted creatures gain the following effects for the next 10 minutes:

• They gain the Upper Hand on stealth based Wit checks.
• All sound based Observation checks against them are Against The Odds.
• They cannot speak or communicate in any way using sound.

Cadavic Augury

You investigate a corpse and divine some secrets of its death. You must touch a piece of the corpse to find this information. Roll a D6 in the below table be granted on of the following clues:

1. A clue to the method of death (a symptom of disease, description of a murderer or murder weapon, etc) 
2. A location of death.
3. A brief pang of emotion.
4. The last thing they said before they died.
5. A secret they carried with them to the grave.
6. Roll twice and gain both. 

The more precious the body part you touch and the more recent the death, the more coherent the information will be. Somewhat surprisingly, the entrails seem to be the most revealing source of information. A field of corpses with disturbed intestines is likely the sign of a prying necromancer.

Death To Subsistence Agriculture

This is part of some series of blog posts i intend to write about Economics in D&D and fantasy in general. By economics, I don’t mean inflation or GDP or government spending, I’ll mostly be talking about concepts like fiat currency, pricing, resource allocation and demographics.

Sadly, an enormous percentage of D&D world building is lazy when it comes to the thinking about economics. The reason for this is that most run of the mill high fantasy hand waves these sort of questions and replaces them with quasi-mediavel tropes. 

However, the base assumptions of D&D setting entirely deviate from what happened in the real world in 11th to 16th centuries. This means the resulting society would be different. Anything that sits at being quasi-medieval does not cut the cake in terms of making sense with a fantasy world. The way we think about money, population structure and employment is entirely different once you add dungeons and/or dragons to the mix. 

Population Structure

The vast percentage of the medieval population in Middle Ages Western Europe was engaged in feudal substance agriculture. Largely unaffected by war, these people just tended to farm grain, vegetables, chickens and cattle and get on with their lives. This leads to the village aesthetic of many D&D campaigns. There is a village with 100 or so farmers, as well as a blacksmith, a ye-olde shoppe, a carpenter and a chapel with a level 1 cleric who can cast Cure Wounds and Detect Good and Evil. There might even be a wizard’s tower nearby. 

This assumption is entirely wrecked by the existence of low level evil humanoids, such as Goblins, Orcs, Bugbears, Gnolls etc. These raiders will be constantly attacking and harrying villages, which are largely defenceless against them. Essentially, a large militarised population lives within your borders and you are constantly at war with them. 

The closest equivalence I can think of is Dark Ages England, but if the Saxons/Vikings lived in your forest and in massive cave networks under your towns, rather than coming over on boats from Germany and Scandinavia. I also feel like the emphasis for the Vikings was more on stealing things than murdering people for fun, which is what most Orcs get up to in their free time. I may be wrong about this.

This has a number of effects on the population. Villages as we think of them no longer exist. I imagine that most of the populace would move into walled townships. 

The dominant profession is no longer farming, but a defensive military. Vast numbers of local guardsmen are required to defend civilisation from constant attacks. Less people working in the fields means less food, which means less population. 

Civilisation shrinks. Everything becomes more centralised in terms of government. People are forced into specialisation due to narrower population. 

I imagine the optimum version of this is a less extreme version of an Attack on Titan Style walled city that is a few hundred kilometres wide, but building a wall of that size is probably a waste of time when tunnels just go under it.  

This also mucks with price lists. Food is more expensive than it should be. Weapons and armour are much cheaper, as a huge percentage of the population is trained and armed .

This all depends on the assumption that goblins exist. How extreme would this have to be if dragons exist in any quantity?

Things from the Crypt – The Potgarbler

Deep in the Crypt, on old and crippled figure tends to a rusty cauldron at the end of the cavern bare. We watch for a while. 

He moves around, distinct, erratic. He pulls a collar bone from a lonely corpse, raps it twice on side of pot, smiles at the hollow sound and throws it into the bubbling soup. He takes a flask from his waste, uncorks it and takes a long, exaggerated sniff before adding a pinch of powder to his concoction. 

As he works, he sings. It without tune or melody and is pure cacophony.  

The cauldron gasps as it boils. The steam is thick and milky, but still half translucent, catching the light of low fire and refracting it about the room. Droplets of it gather on the ceiling’s stalactites, congeals in enormous bulbs and then fall onto the floor, gathering in sticky pools. 

We don’t like the look of the ragged, half-dead fella, nor trust the chemics he’s brewing, so Dellius buries an arrow in his back. After he slumps down onto the floor, we head in the cavern, looking for scraps. 

MacDoulan takes a fool’s move. He reckoned he saw something moving inside the pot, so sticks his spear in it. A boiled leathery hand grasps the shaft with unholy might and pulls it to the goop, along with McDoulan.

Two more of us died before we could bring the boiled thing down. 

Pot garblers are the results of bizarre experimentation by Cryptlords, necromancers and heathen cultists. When producing an army of the living dead, sometimes constructs of bone are not enough and their master demands beasts of flesh and blood for service.

The necromancers weaves flesh from a potion concoction, sews on it on to a revenant and places it to boil in a potion full of glue until it sets.

The creature is in great and terrible pain until the process is complete, as the steaming glue seers the bones and turns the flesh to leather.

It takes weeks or even months to finish a pot-garbler and the final beasts is a zombie without compare whose flesh is not rotting but keen and terrible muscle, a leathering skin that cannot be pierced by spear or arrow.

While in this state, the garbler is vulnerable. It can’t see while in the pot and sits silently and in intense pain until the process is complete. If disturbed, it pulls itself from its fleshy womb with a great and terrible moan, still drooping in half-set glue, to consume whatever broke its incubation state.

To find out more about Pot-garblers and the other terrible creatures the Crypdiggers fight, keep an eye out for my upcoming RPG, Best Left Buried

The Oak of Mother Bones - One Page Dungeon

A couple of weeks ago, Sash and I finished a one page dungeon and submitted it to the One Page Dungeon Contest. Here's a look at it!

  

Cresting over the top of the wode, the Oak of Mother Bones is almost a hundred meters tall. Within lie the assorted minions of a manipulative green hag, as well as the strange cursed treasures that she holds.

Many of the encounters are designed to punish the characters for greed. Those who arrive in the dungeon seeking treasure or an easy route to power will likely be crippled by punishing encounters. I reckon it would work in 5th Edition for characters of 3-4th level, but could be used at lower levels if your players are smart at avoiding combat. 

Drama, Consequence and HP

Drama comes from making decisions with consequence. Hit points suck balls at making this happen. 

If you ask different people what hit points mean, they say different things. What does losing HP even represent? When do you start bleeding? Does HP represent the quantity of blood in your bones or just a numerical measure of fighting spirit/stamina? How does healing magic work? Does it bolster your spirit or actually cause your physical wounds to knit shut? How much of HP is psychological and how much is physical? Does HP work differently for characters and monsters? When is something bloodied? 

A large percentage of games us this mechanic, but a lot of them fail to clarify what they actually means. The abstract needs to exist for gameplay to happen, but it’s just oddly unsatisfying. The fact is, RPGs require something to show how not dead your character is. If characters died immediately when something hit them, that would suck as fights would be swingy, but detailed lists of bruises and injury charts would be complicated and slow the game down. 

Playing D&D or its variants requires you to live with the weirdness of HP. It lives in every TSR, WoTC or 3rd Party book, and most OSR books keep it as well. It can’t be avoided if you don’t want to mod the shit out of everything you read.

All of the stuff above is irrelevant, really. You can handle it just by talking about how you deal or receive damage with different words and bits of imagery. The bad thing is that hit points suck the consequences out of RPGs. 

Your HP regenerate when you sleep overnight. This means that even you are on deaths doorstep, you can fully recover from whatever maladies you have just by taking an 8 hour nap with a sleeping bag (and maybe rollmat) in the dank and dangerous gloom of a poorly lit cave with no fire and no food. This means that combat in the dungeon does nothing, as long as you can take a rest, and the monster doesn’t fully kill you. Combat is no longer dangerous. You’ll be fine if you avoid death (1) and can somehow sleep. 

If you want keep HP, you need to find new ways to inject consequence into your game. You players will not properly respect danger if they can bounce off whatever ills you throw at them. Make them afraid!

Maybe you could add an injury table or an insanity table. My game, Best Left Buried, has both of these, and will be available soon. Make your player deal with the risk of permanent dismemberment or disability if they get crit or are made unconscious. If they face and eldritch horror and only just win, give them an irrational fear or compulsion, or start mucking around with the Trait/Ideal/Bond/Flaw on their character sheet.

The other way is to force them to deal with consequences that are material or emotional. Give them something or someone they care about, and risk it being taken away from them if they make a mistake. If you threaten their favourite NPC or settlement, they will take that seriously. If someone tries to take their magic item or gold, I bet you they will start to care. 

The final way is my favourite. Make the rest do different things depending on how good a night sleep they got, looking at variables like light, food, comfort and interruptions. For example, few hours of sleep scratched together in a wet, damp cave without a fire, while monsters hunt for them, might grant no HP at all. Six hours of rest with a single watch shift in a relatively dry cave, along with some rations and a small fire, might restore a few hit dice worth of HP. If you manage to get a full night sleep in a tavern or a well guarded base, you get all your HP back. This adds a new element to your game, where establishing a well guarded camp with a good supply of food, light and warmth is vital when journeying into multi-rest dungeons. 

If you give them risk that matters, then drama happens. Drama makes the players care more. Try it out in your normal game. It’ll work. Honest. 

(1) At higher levels, death doesn’t really even slow you down either. This is another sapping of consequence away from the game, but is a fun end game reward and should PROBABLY be allowed.

The Game Without A Name

I had an idea for a game. Maybe it's a campaign. Maybe it's a book. I don't know. 

The idea of dynasty play has always appealed to me. There's something cool about playing a lineage of heroes instead of one singular guy is dope as hell. You aren't just Steven the Fighter; you are Steven of the Line of Tellibor.

I've also always loved the idea of West Marches. A slow hexcrawl west, as civilisation creeps out into the wilderness. Your characters slowly reaching higher and higher levels.
So here's the pitch, sling them together. 
You start with maybe 2 characters each, who march off into the wilderness and settle a village. You get to make these characters: choose the classes and races, choose a profession (like a background) and give them a couple of magic items to act as heirlooms. 
These are your elders. They start the campaign and are the men and women from which your lines are begun. 
Every year, you get two phases: Summer and Winter. A year takes a week. Each character gets to do something in each phase:

• Travel: Your character goes off travelling, maybe to school, a nearby city or just to see the world. This does something. Maybe some XP, a chance at finding something cool or learning a new skill/language. 
• Go Ranging: The wilderness gets worse every year it is left untamed. You spend a phase treating the symptoms by dealing with minor roving monsters.
• Practice Profession: Each character has a thing they do in the village, like smithing, farming, researching magic, building stuff, hunting, dealing with pelts, merchanting, being village priest or chief. You can assume that this stuff is done casually in your spare time by your character, maybe helped by an understudy, but if you dedicate a whole season to it, it gives you a cool bonus. 
• Study (Under Another Character): Your character spends time learning from another character of the same class and higher level. At the end of the phase, they increase in class level by 1. This is probably the second quickest way to level up after going out and adventuring yourself, but it requires that high level teacher.
• Recruiting: By means other than procreation, you find another PC. Maybe he is a village pleb that you train up to a PC level or an outsider you invite to the village to live with you. This works, but the guy you find is completely random and probably worse. Either that or it costs a lot of gold.
• Find A Partner: Your character finds a partner of appropriate childbearing gender. This might be another character, an NPC or someone else in your village. This means you can now have kids. This is important.
• Have A Kid: Well done. Your line continues. Randomly generate a level zero baby that HOPEFULLY will live to the age of ~15, where it can become a first level adventurer of randomly determined class and stats. Kids probably have their own set of moves they can do, each of which bumps up a stat, gives them a new proficiency or pushes them towards a certain class when they are older. 
• Adventure: The final and most exciting option. Your character goes one an adventure to dig into some dungeon, clear out a tract of wilderness, explore a savage land or deal with a monster camp. Run a one shot dungeon. Only the characters who take the action come with you and go on an adventure. This is the best way to get money. It's the best way to get experience. It's the best way to get magic items. It's the best way to keep the monsters away from your door.

That's the game. Maybe the group meets twice a week? Once over the internet to decide what there characters in their two phases of each year, once again to run any adventures you wanna do. 
A vital part of this assumption is that you run multiple PCs, anywhere between 2-5. This means that even if half of your characters stay at home, at least one is available to go out on an adventure weekly. If you can't make it, your character does something else. Simples.
Once humans get old, their physical stats start to fall off and they stop being effective adventurers, and settle down to raise a family, train followers and practice a profession. Eventually, they die of old age. Every couple of real time months, game time decades, a new generation of baby adventures set forth and has to level up and do the thing.
The base assumption of this system is that most people are humans, who, comparative to everyone else, breed like rabbits. To stop other races being powerful, they get experience slower and are harder to breed and find partners, as well as having kids who take longer to grow up. I love the idea of keeping an Elf Bard, Dwarf Smith or Gnomish Wizard around for hundreds of years, training generation after generation after human adventurers. Even better, you could spend 100 years (2 real-life years) getting that one Elven kid ready for adventure.
So let me know what you think and comment below. If it gets enough traction I might write it up properly for 5e with a whole bunch of professions, random events and maybe the tables for generating new kids.