Lord Calbrax of Wichkem

Lord Calbrax rules this land with an iron fist. Literally, his left hand is made of iron, to replace one lost in one skirmish or another years ago. He is tolerated by his subjects; taxes are modest, government officials are punished for being jerks, there are no meaningless bans against forms of entertainment, etcetera.

He speaks in the third person at all times, referring to himself by his title, and uses a very formal mode of speech (“You have amused Lord Calbrax. Well done.”). He can be manipulated, by appealing to his sense of humor, rather easily, but it won't work more than once or twice for a given situation.

He's a big guy, wide and tall, still mostly lean but getting on in years. Small beard, close-cut hair, little eyes.

Will fight to defend himself. Uses the symbol of his authority, a flanged mace he named after his first wife, as his preferred weapon.

Secret of the Three Worms

Many people ask me "Lord Kraskanjax, what IS the purpose of the Three Worms?" And I chuckle, and disembowel them with the sacred Knife of Hashkajkak, for such secrets are reserved only for the Enlightened.

Lucky for you, you lucky thing, you are one of the cherished few worthy of the knowledge. It's quite simple, really: The first worm is eaten to cleanse the body of toxins and disease, the second worm is eaten to consume the first worm, and the third worm is eaten to eat that worm and is expelled in the latrine, thus allowing the body to eject the bloated disease-creature altogether. Then we worship the third worm until it expires.

Knacks

Every time you succeed at a task by using a generic roll (STR check to force a door, INT check to win at a game of skill) you gain the option of taking a Knack in that task; Knacks are not skills, as such, but they're a bonus to that task for that player all the same. You cannot buy points in Knacks, and you cannot get better at a Knack. You can only have one Knack per every 2 character levels, and you cannot 'forget' a Knack.

You can, however, loose a knack; if you roll a critical miss for a task that you have a Knack in, that Knack fails you and whatever the critical failure would be is compounded and made even worse. You can, of course, regain a Knack if you want to, but you have to critically succeed at the relevant task, or succeed at it during a tense moment, and your bonus is only +1, with no improved success chance, until you successfully use the Knack 2 more times.

If you have a Knack, you get a +2 bonus to succeed at the associated task AND your range for an improved success, if one exists in your game, is increased by 1. You can also, if your system has it, use a Knack to get an automatic success at a task once per game session.

Kandrick's Blade

On a successful critical, the damage is done to both the intended target and all of their bloodline descendants/ancestors throughout all of history. If the critical kills the target then they, understandably, cease to exist, have never existed, and their deeds and activities are immediately 'fixed' so as to explain their sudden but always nonexistence, as does their entire bloodline as above.

Security Detail: Planket's Farm

Something's brewing in the mountains, and the family owners of Planket's, which mostly grows poppy and marijuana for the medical industry, are worried. So worried that they're willing to hire mercenaries to protect their farm from whatever's coming their way. PCs who are hired get 300 a day, and any day they have to actually work (keep people out, get caught up in a firefight, get shot, whatever) they get hazard pay of an additional 1000 for that day. The contract specifically says that anyone who tries to get hazard pay fraudulently will have all pay revoked and any relevant charges will be pressed.

There is someone trying to take what the Plankets have made: an anarcho-commune further uphill made up of mostly ex soldiers and survivalists has had their eye on the farm for some time, both for its crop and the land itself. They had planned on offering the Plankets a deal of including them in the commune, and giving them a share of the commune's labours, in exchange for a share of the farm, but that offer was shot down due to the commune's quasi-legal nature. Now their leader, Dallas Groom, has decided that it's about time the commune shows the locals, and the government, that they're serious about taking their own slice of the state.

Aside from the PCs there about a half-dozen other mercenaries working for the Plankets, plus the family itself, and the commune has around thirty able-bodied fighters.

On the simple goblin: reproduction and life cycle

Goblins are born screaming and biting from the hide of their single parent after said parent has consumed enough raw material for their unique, disturbing biology to create an offshoot which grows and bursts from them like some kind of incredibly disgusting bubo.  A goblin is capable of surviving on its own within five to ten seconds from being born and their first instinct is to feed, usually upon their parent who, if they're smart, which is unlikely, has already buggered off. Newborn goblins are immediately accepted into goblin society, assuming they can be taught to not eat their elders immediately and how to swing a weapon. They continue on like this, eating and killing and occasionally splitting off a new goblin, until they reach maturity around age 4, at which point they become gendered, their otherwise smooth pelvises growing a spiked shaft for inserting their unborn young into a host. At this point they reproduce much like a xenomorph, infesting host bodies with an incubating egg-sack which will, when fully matured, burst forth in a gory display. These children are known as orcs, and we'll leave that for another post.

Death Slave

(Taken from the synopsis for some new zeroth-level DCC book on RPGNow)

Your soul has been bound, how doesn't matter. You've been plunked down into a corpse, not your own, and now serve a master who hates your guts, has some deep, deep rage against you that will not be satiated until you've served for a thousand lifetimes.

Haw haw. Shitstick.

As a Death Slave you have a few things going for you, though; one, you can't die. Well, you can die, but your soul remains bound to the person who took you out of the afterlife, so they can just plunk you back into a body and you'll be right as rain. You can also push your body past the limits of the living and suffer no personal consequence.

10,000 Masters of Wooj, pt 1

There's an old proverb that goes "Kick a rock in Wooj and you'll find two masters". While that's probably not completely accurate, there are a lot of warriors of incredible skill in the Wooj, and every day more are trained.

When your players create their character, they also create a Master, someone who teaches and guides their growth over the course of the game, assuming they aren't killed/abandoned/whatever. On creation the player can choose to have their master either be the originator of a style or another student of said style. If the Master is an originator the player begins play with more Prestige but only one technique, at full mastery, where as a student of a student has less Prestige but knows 3 techniques at half-mastery each. The logic being that an originator of a style will spend more time teaching each technique, whereas a teacher of a style will drill the basics first before going into particulars.

Masters are rolled differently from PCs: their stats are irrelevant, only their level rolled on a d20. This level is to compare them to other Masters, as even a 1st level Master is heads and tails stronger than the toughest student of another style. They know all the techniques of their style, as they originated them, though they only have fully mastered as many of these techniques as their level; the rest are at half-mastery. They can only teach a technique up to their own level of mastery, and improve by spending kai, just as their students do. However, Masters have one ace up their sleeve: they earn sympathetic kai when their students do.

Example Master

Wayel, master of the Healing Fist

Wayel was once of the Hand, a group of five warriors who each learned a different subset of the skills of the Grand Master. As the practitioner of the Healing Fist, Wayel learned to return life, rather than take it, and was the first to use the Healing Fist against the Shien Horde, eradicating the undead from the world for the first time. They have, of course, since returned, so the students of Wayel are highly sought after for their unique skills.

Persons in the wastes

Boris Dashard: mid 30s, balding, heavy build going to pot. Travels between Ager and Moss' Platform trading whatever scrap or gera he can find on the trip, sometimes goes south to Barrel Mill for squid jerky. Carries an old game cartridge, a copy of Bloodlines of the Eternal Warrior, in the hopes that, one day, he'll find a working console. Pretty reliable in a fight, but don't expect him to drag you with him if you're too hurt to move.

Monster PCs pt 1

So a thing on Facebook got me thinking about a campaign where the PCs play monsters on the run after their last boss was killed by a group of murderhobos looking for loot. At its core it would be a reskin of the normal OSR classes and races, but I think the change in dynamic would be interesting to play, if only because it would allow some different RPing to happen (can't go to normal villages, you're a 'monster').

So what races should we be focusing on? Well, the first thought was gnolls. Gnolls would progress like specialists, get a +1 to spot or search or whatever because of their sense of smell, and would probably have a hard time being sneaky after being in water (-3 to stealth checks against anything with even a mediocre sense of smell). After that came the obvious choice of orcs. Orcs would progress like fighters, would get an automatic +1 to their STR stat, and literally cannot stop themselves from being rude/bullying to anything smaller than they are (resist with save vs magic/compulsion or on a 1-in-6, whichever your system uses). Then after orcs I thought, goblins? Or Ogres? Mind-flayers? Problem is that once you start down the avenue it's hard to know when to stop. Or let the players build their own from this same thought process: progress like X, one minor bonus, one minor negative.

So Mind-flayers would progress like magic-users, would get a +1 to their WIS, and have to eat a brain once every 12 hours or lose 1 point of CON, cumulative, for each meal missed. Each meal would cure 1 CON lost in this way up to the character's max.

Goblins? Goblins would progress like specialists, get +1 on their ability to be sneaky, and would have to roll morale like a hireling when in dangerous situations (average roll, though, 12).

Within the Tumultuous Giant

Moving around within the rampaging giant is no easy task: the gears and shafts, lack of OSHA standards, and its own stomping, juddering gait make all movement in haste, including combat, require an appropriate skill or save roll to avoid being thrown off your footing and, potentially (1 in 6), into the grinding gears.

Characters thrown to the gears get one save or skill roll to drag themselves out before they are torn into by the gnashing teeth, and may re-try their roll on their next turn, assuming they survive. The gears do d12 damage; after rolling damage consult the list below

1-3: minor damage from small gears. Lucky bastard.

4-6: a random hand or foot has been mangled, crushed beyond all functionality.

7-9: a random arm or leg has been crushed, rendered useless.

10: A huge wound in a vital area has been opened up: ribs are crushed, organs ruptured, whatever. Survival is unlikely, but possible. Bleed out as per your system's rules.

11: THE SPINE! Your spine has been broken. Total paralysis. At least you can't feel the pain, anymore. You can no longer act in any capacity except to scream.

12: Got your nose! Or your whole head. Whatever. Dead as a doornail.Squish.

To HP or not to HP

I've been seeing a lot of systems lately that reduce the importance of HP to pre-existing game engines by adding narrative-based damage systems (injuries cause wounds that compound instead of lowing a number) or by making the penalty for reaching 0 HP be almost unrelated to the concept (HP is 'luck', 0 HP means you're finally actually taking hits). It occurs to me that eliminating the numerial indicator compeltely and going straight to the narrative system would be... expedient.


However, then it starts to look like a rip-off of Shadowrun's wound system.

It's like this, though: Your weapon does its normal die worth of damage, but you're rolling against your target's HD. If you roll under you do a 'minor' wound, if you roll at or over you do a 'major' wound, and if you roll max and over you get a one-hit kill.

A character who takes minor wounds equal to HD  gets all their minor wounds upgraded to a major wound; a character with major wounds equal to their HD  dies. They can roll against their CON to hold their guts in and fight on until the end of the battle, and can roll against CON again to try to hold on until help can arrive for 1 turn, and again at -1 to the CON roll, cumulative.

PCs HD is equal to their CON / 3 rounded down.

Spacelaw #315

During a catastrophe or emergency, the captain of the ship rotates to the next crew-member by randomly-determined, static, order. They are the captain until the end of the event, at which point they return to their previous duties. Commonly known as "Bromide's Law".


This law is best enacted aboard a ship with no static captain, such as smaller frigates or cargo-vessels.

(Taken from the unfinished Escape from the Dimension of Insidulous Cruellitude by Ben Croshaw)

Momentum Disrupter

Originally designed to help reduce the effects of G-forces on astronauts, momentum redirectors apply ionic forces against momentum to reduce the chances of injury during an impact. They also provide a small amount of protection from incoming slow-moving projectiles, interpreting the ballistic the same as an incoming surface.

Anyone with a momentum disrupter can avoid most, if not all, damage from a fall, a thrown weapon, or from being thrown against a surface, acting as d6 armor against any damage that would be taken and adding 6 to any roll associated with such behavior.

Treasure Buried

An otherwise innocuous treasure chest in a random room of a random dungeon actually contains a small, sandy beach. Anyone who steps inside the chest is sent to said beach. Leaving is simple: find the chest on the beach, step inside, and be returned.

Roll a d4:

on a 1-2, the chest is a beach in miniature and anyone who gets in it is shrunk. They can see the rest of the world by looking up, they can be removed from the chest but will not return to normal size unless they take the recursive route.

on a 3-4, the chest is a teleporter to a sandy beach somewhere. The PC who enters is 'lost' and cannot be found within the chest.

If the beach is removed from the chest the link is broken and anyone within is stuck in their present state until otherwise saved.

Both chests (in the dungeon and on the beach) have false bottoms containing enough money to get the PC with the most XP to the next level and a random, fucked-up treasure item of the GM's choice OR the following items:

A medium-sized coin made up of many interlocked gears that are in constant motion. Allowing the coin to injure the carrier (getting a bit of skin stuck between the gears, for example) will summon a small horde of slavering rats (d12+6) that will obey one basic command to the best of their ability before dispersing. The coin is from another realm, another place beyond, and will slowly kill whomever holds it (-1 CON every month of possession, heals like normal if disposed of).

A small trinket chest containing a quantity of coal (d6+3) that will either explode when thrown (d12, ignore armor) or will provide a +2 armor bonus to whomever eats a piece for one combat.