The Adventurer as Insect

I recently got my hands on the Quickstart edition of the upcoming Beetle Knight RPG. The mechanics seem interesting enough at first glance, but what captivated me was the high concept: the adventurer as insect.

The idea of casting the PCs as a small animal to emphasize their vulnerable place in a dangerous world is not new, of course (Mausritter being perhaps the most prominent example of the technique). Insects, however, are different from small mammals in one important way: they're far more powerful for their size.

It bears repeating: proportionally, insects are Marvel superheroes. They can fall from great heights or be struck with enormous force, then get up and casually lift many times their body weight. In other words, they have all the qualities of adventurers.

Some in the TTRPG scene are wont to lament how far modern pinnacles of the genre (see 5e) have strayed from the gritty and lethal days of yore. Gone are the editions where a single blow from a goblin's rusty blade could fell the hardy fighter. At today's gaming table, you're more likely to see that fighter hurled through a wall by a dragon's wing buffet, bear the full brunt of its breath weapon, and charge right back into the fray. After a few levels, heroes handle like tanks.

Or, you know, like insects. I think this comparison is worth more than a cursory glance. Consider the difference between the things an ant can shrug off (falls, flicks) and those it can't (glue, sustained crushing force). What if we let that inform our design? Rather than just becoming increasingly impervious to their environment, our adventurers wax invulnerable along some axes while remaining very much mortal along others.

The Beetle Knight Kickstarter is coming soon, and I'll be interested to see whether they play up this aspect of insectoid nature. Either way, it's a treasure trove of ideas for us all.

-V

Tasks and Fuses

A while back I submitted three cards to Long Tail Games' Tiny Library: Modern Fantasy deck of MOSAIC-strict game fragments. One of them, HEXRING character creation, was selected for inclusion in the final deck!

This is one of the other two cards. Glory in my handmade clipart.

front and back; click to enlarge

Thoughts

Timekeeping is as old as RPGs. It hits at all scales, from opening a locked door while combat rages to researching an ancient ritual in a vast library of scrolls. How long until the vizier's troops break down the door? How long until the potion is fully brewed?

By the nature of the medium, the cards are pretty self-contained. Tasks have made it into THAUMOS, while fuses ended up on the cutting room floor. 

-V

Simple Seafaring

"Between the lands march whale-roads."

-Luke Gearing, Wolves Upon the Coast

My current Godbound campaign is (loosely) based on the Skull and Shackles setting, replete with pirates, krakens, and merfolk. No surprise, then, that the PCs spend quite a bit of time shuttling back and forth between various islands aboard their ever-expanding fleet of sailing ships. 

I've never been much for overland travel rules. My games don't tend to be the strict time/resource type that benefits from religious day-counting, nor do I usually use the combat-XP-based advancement that rewards random encounters along the way. And sure, you can write up regional encounter tables that move the plot, but those are a LOT of work. "Easy for you, difficult for me," as the saying goes.

Still, I want to capture the inherent risk of ocean travel in the Age of Sail. Even for demigods, things can and do go wrong. Here are the minimal rules I use:

Simple Seafaring

Based on the distance to your destination and the speed of your vessel, determine how many WATCHES the journey will take. A WATCH is 12 hours.

Each WATCH, roll a d6. On a 1, you face a STORM. On a 6, you face an ENCOUNTER.

For an ENCOUNTER, roll on your prepared table. Sorry, no royal road. I'll include my current ocean encounter table at the end of this post.

In case of a STORM, decide whether you're steering to AVOID it or PLUNGING straight through.

If you AVOID, roll 2d4.

If you PLUNGE, roll 1d8.

Either way, if the sum is 8, your ship is wrecked. If the dice show a double (this obviously can only happen if you chose to AVOID) your journey is extended by that many WATCHES. E.g. on a double 3, the trip will now take 3 extra WATCHES as your evasive maneuvers take you far off your planned course.

I like this because it revolves around player choice: how much risk are you willing to take? Plunging has a 1-in-8 chance of catastrophic shipwreck, while avoiding reduces that to 1-in-16, but comes with an average of seven and a half extra hours of travel. 

In practice, of course, the first time I whipped this system out one of my players gently reminded me that as a Godbound of the Sea, he and all ships in his company are immune to bad weather. Ah well. Nevertheless, one of his loyal captains who wasn't with the main fleet did get caught in a storm, though he chose to avoid it and suffered no delay.

Bonus: Gods of the Isles Ocean Encounter Table

If you're a player in this campaign, read no further!

1. Roll a wizard
2. Sea Serpent (bestial, hungry), damage rolled straight
3. Grindylow kidnappers, slaves taken in the night to 0102 (reroll if it’s daytime)
4. Sahuagin raiders from 0209. They want to capture the ship, or at least sink it. Stats as Mermen led by a Minor Hero w/ gift of the Sea
5. Clan of water Nagas, on the warpath against King Phoon the storm giant
6. Rival pirates (one of Harrigan’s lieutenants in command)
7. Raft of castaways one with ghoul fever
8. Dulimbaian scout riding a Roc. Will not attack an obviously superior force
9. Talking whale named Marenestimabilissima, who insists she is a god and demands worship (stats as “Titanic Beast” Misbegotten)
10. Resplendant Barge of Heavenking, seeking tributes
11. Patrian warship X Fretensis
12. Roll a dragon

The Drinkers of Light

The two sources of celestial power in Oth are light and fire. Light is of Alef; fire is of Tav. That much is broadly agreed on. The light of Alef fuels the web of life (and thus the web of magic) on the surface, flowing through plants to animals and eventually to thinking beings like the alefim, grimmot, and humans.

Some say that humans also contain the fire of Tav; this is controversial. Letys Ink-Eyes' thesis defense on the topic was famously interrupted when a Last Radiance terror cell firebombed the classroom. Their message of "if she loves fire, let her have it" was considered philosophically unsound, but pragmatically convincing.

Anyway, it's well-known that humans contain a sliver of Alef's light. What's less well known is that this light can be stolen.

They rise to positions of power. They draw all eyes when they enter a room. They are the subject of fascination, admiration, speculation. Victims come of their own volition, once the art is mastered.

Alefim call it "oluká," and many give the same label to its practitioners. When the right resonance is established in the weave of magic, the physical and metaphysical can be made to mingle. Celestial light, that abstract etheric concept, harmonizes with the material world. An oluká can then draw it out of their victim by consuming their bodily essence.

Eating flesh is possible, but rare. Oluká who take the ghoulish path rarely last long, as the hunger for light quickly becomes an addiction, and hiding serial cannibalism is difficult. Instead, the most common choice is the consumption of blood.

yum

(There are other reliable methods, from which spring the legends of succubi.)

Light so stolen can only be held for so long. When it inevitably drains away, the oluká is left ravenous for more. They will do anything to regain the feeling of transcendence it grants, to say nothing of the adulation and status to which they have become accustomed. 

They take more, more, more. Even those who are careful begin leaving a trail of bodies.

At best, they are hunted down and slain without anyone learning the reason for their predations. At worst, they begin teaching the secret to others, gathering apprentices to share the burden of collecting victims. These twisted cabals are often made up of the leader's former victims themselves, now bound to their teacher through ties of not-entirely-natural loyalty.

Some families of oluká persist for generations. They age only slowly, dying to violent internal struggle more often than time's arrow.

Brahim Phtali, called the merciful, is kept under lock and key by the glass archivists of Nabb. In exchange for a trickle of volunteer victims, he provides insight into historical arguments, lost lore he still recalls.

There are those in Nabb who question the balance of power in this relationship.

One might expect the alefim to revile this perversion of their lord's power, but they seem indifferent. Perhaps the degeneracies of an already-degenerate people hold no surprise for them. Or perhaps they are all too glad to see humanity devour itself from within.

Engaging Challenges for Godlike Characters

Challenging the Gods

They say the best Superman stories are the ones where the problem CAN'T be solved by Superman's powers. No amount of strength or speed can fix interpersonal drama or untangle a logical paradox. Or rather, Superman's abilities may play a key role in the ultimate solution, but they can't solve everything on their own. There's no "brute force" method. Writers for such high-powered superheroes face an eternal challenge: how to reliably put them in situations they can't just punch their way out of? 

GMs face a similar in games where players can reach godlike levels of power. I'm running a Godbound campaign right now, and a big part of the fun is that many challenges that would stymie your average RPG party are a walk in the park for a pantheon of demigods. Horde of demons? Two combat rounds; three at most. Angry monarch? A single Theurgy spell makes him your best friend, permanently. Societal ills? Invest some Influence or Dominion; repeat as needed.

This is fun in moderation, just like beating up a roomful of goblins as a level 10 character can be fun. But at a certain point, running roughshod over a world that can't push back loses its luster. After all, if we wanted PURE wish-fulfillment, we'd get rid of the the rules entirely and just re-write fictional reality.

DCs don't mean nothin' when you've got the Word of Might

The "Superman solution" of non-physical challenges isn't a silver bullet (to mix our metaphors) either. Taking Godbound as an example, plenty of divine gifts and miracles can sidestep the problems one would often throw at an invincible protagonist. Even large-scale trouble, city-scale dangers, don't reliably force clever decision-making.

What are some solutions?

1. This isn't a problem

(or, wish-fulfillment can be fun)

Maybe your players just want a sandbox to mess around in. That's fine! It can't all be OSR grittiness and getting skewered by a skeleton's spear. Some groups might never get tired of putting dragons in headlocks and kicking storm giants in the nuts.

If this describes your band of herculean misfits, read no further. Let them run wild across the campaign world to their hearts' content. What I've found, though, is that this kind of license grows stale over time. Maybe a long time! But eventually.

2. Juice up the baddies

(or, ogres now have 12HD)

Godbound itself is guilty of this sin to some degree. The section on adapting monster stats advises a Hit Die scale that's quite a bit higher than old-school equivalents, and goes so far as to say that a creature should have at least 10HD if you want it to pose a challenge for the a Godbound party. It's tempting, then, to let your expectations (dragons should be a deadly challenge!) inform the power level of the foes your party faces.

Resist! This failure mode is so, so common in video games; don't let it happen to you. I've never played Skyrim, but every time I read about how if you go back to low-level dungeons at high level, all the enemies have leveled up as well, I want to tear my hair out. 

If the party has the same probability of victory against an ogre that they would if you were playing B/X, then in what meaningful sense are they more powerful? If every time you get a +1 to hit, the monsters' AC improves by 1, you're treading water.

I actually do make exceptions on this point for mythical foes like dragons. Demigods vs. an ogre should be a one-sided beatdown; demigods vs. a wyrm of legend deserves an epic fight.

3. Zoom out

(or, nice empire you've got there)

Ah, domain-level play. The promised grail, so rarely reached. Unless you're a god! This is the recommended solution in Godbound--give your party vast lands to rule, besieged on all sides by dark empires and jealous rival demigods. 

I've said before that scale isn't a solution on its own, but that's not entirely true. The use of Influence and Dominion in Godbound is limited by the scope of the changes you're making: town-sized, city-sized, or kingdom-sized. 

Zooming out to the level of fantasy geopolitics also creates foes that can't just be killed: how do you handle a nation bent on your followers' destruction, when killing their leader just leads someone else to take up the scepter? Do you wipe them out? Is protecting your flock worth violence on that scale? Hah, ethical dilemma! 

4. Go cosmic

(or, punch god in the face)

In a sense, this is the right way to use solution #2. Instead of increasing the power level of your standard monstrous menagerie, let your party fight their way up the corporate ladder of enemies all the way to the top. Broke: orcs in an abandoned castle. Woke: bound demons in an abandoned flying wizard's tower. Bespoke: insane angels in an abandoned celestial dominion.

Of course, creating epic-level adventure locations is a challenge of its own. They've got to feel strange and wondrous, not just "this is a dungeon, but you can't use your divine power to teleport through the walls because they're made of special celestial concrete." My best shot at this so far is the Oubliette.

5. Incompatible goals

(or, what color do we paint the temple walls)

You can't have your cake and eat it too. Sometimes your high priest wants to make peace with a rival religion, while the grandmaster of your paladins wants to wipe them out. Maybe the heart of a celestial machine offers the key to ultimate power, but disrupting the machine's operation would devastate the mortal world. Ain't that just the way.

go watch Over the Garden Wall

The two incompatibles might both be good, they might both be bad, or there might just be a tradeoff. The "both bad" version is a staple of superhero movies, from the exploding ferry in The Dark Knight to the death of Lois Lane in the first Christopher Reeve Superman. 

But the "both good" scenario has its merits, too: imagine you plan to honor one of your followers as your greatest mortal champion, but two candidates both desperately want (or even need!) the glory.

One danger with this approach is that it risks making the characters' great power irrelevant. If I joined a campaign because I wanted to play a god of fire and death, I'm going to be pretty peeved if every session is spent debating the finer points of tithing for my cult. 

So make sure the party still has a chance to open up the throttle and let rip once in a while. Put something in their path they can crush without remorse.

Perhaps an ogre?

Thoughts

One of the most striking insights of the OSR, for me, is this: don't give out abilities that render core challenges moot. In dungeon crawling this means no light cantrip, no goodberries, and no bags of holding. It got me thinking about when a game, by design, elides the classic obstacles of an RPG.

My current Godbound campaign faces all the problems described above. At level 1, the pantheon was about as capable as high-level mortal heroes, but at level 3 they're carving through krakens like cake. All the solutions listed are tricks I've tried or traps I've fallen into. 

It's tough, but crucially the players seem to be having a great time.

That's the whole idea, right?

-V

Ghost Cults

Ghosts are usually a temporary annoyance.

The various religions of Oth are divided on the matter of the immortal soul. The Church of the Last Radiance teaches that Alef reclaims their light at the moment of death, and the deceased returns to unity with the divine. Their itinerant preachers often add that souls tainted by evil are instead seized by Tav-who-is-below, dragged down to fire and pain. Church authorities discourage this heretical strain.

Ghosts complicate matters. When a person of particular power--magical, political, it doesn't seem to matter--dies, they may leave an echo of their spirit behind. Ghosts linger in the places they spent their lives, haunting those who cared the most for them. Their power over the living depends on the strength of their relationship. As those left behind move on, the ghosts fade.

On rare occasions, a ghost becomes part of the legend of a place. If everyone in a town knows that the old mill is haunted, that mental energy may be enough to anchor the ghost and prevent it from fading. Ghost hunting is a mostly psychological art, and exorcisms rely on convincing the community that the spirit has been banished (which then becomes true).

what a pain in the neck

Anyway, those aren't the sort of ghosts the Cults worship.

These days, there are two great Powers in the world. Alef: the Last Radiance, the Coin of the Morning, the Dayflame; and Tav: Chained Tav, Tav-Who-Is-Below, the Deep One. But it wasn't always so. 

Once there were five, before Alef and Tav defeated and slew the others, long before mortal life was first conceived. The three dead Powers are corpses now, lifeless balls of rock that can be seen in the night sky, reflecting Alef's divine light.

But oh, what ghosts they left behind.

Such is the strength of these remnants that they can be felt even across the unimaginable distance to the sites of their haunting (their celestial corpses, of course). The four seasons are defined by the waxing and waning of their relative influence:

• Yodar: Yod ascendant. Caution, wisdom, harvest.
• Sachar: Samech ascendant. Family, hunger, meditation.
• Tsadar: Tsadi ascendant. Change, ambition, love.
• Afar: Alef alone. Plenty, growth, travel.

The seasons tug on the spirit as much as they change the weather. Far more wars break out in Tsadar than in Yodar, while most construction happens in Afar despite the heat. The influence of the dead Powers is everywhere, but most folk--even foolish humans--know better than to speak with them.

The Ghost Cults are the exception. They spring up in cities, usually among those who consider themselves enlightened and erudite. Often they begin as "research organizations," groups of scientists and mages who think they can learn from the Powers, uncover secrets of the universe.

Once they start hearing the voices, though, the devolution is quick.

purely academic

You can tell a ghost cult's age by how much its members resemble their patron. Early-stage cultists of Samech are grim and reclusive, while by the end their teeth are stained red with human blood. Tsadi-cults begin with duels and orgies, and end in mass suicide.

For the dead Powers are mad, and their madness is infectious.

As patrons, the celestial remnants have little to offer. Their fires are long extinguished; they have no strength to share. The greatest asset of the ghost cults is their unity. At least at first, the members' common allegiance grants a supernatural feeling of community and camaraderie. It is this sensation that holds the cult together as its rituals become more extreme, and society at large begins to root it out. 

Because of their intellectual appeal, ghost cults often count powerful mages among their initiates. Zavesh the Spider-Lord infamously made worship of Yod the official religion of the Venomous Empire, and legend says that the seers of his inner circle were crafting a ritual to re-ignite Yod's inner fire when they were wiped from the map by a hurricane so powerful that it cracked bedrock.

Despite the dangers, it's rare to find a city of any consequence without some ghost cult activity. Although it's a rare occurrence for civilization to collapse entirely under their influence, the cults eat through the ranks of the aristocracy and intelligentsia, clashing in the shadows until they become too obvious to ignore. Then the horrors come to light, the membership is purged, and the city moves on. As long as there is hidden knowledge, some fool will seek it out.

For the voices do have secrets to tell.

Thoughts

Cults are an iconic feature of pulp fantasy. Contrary to what some have argued, I think there are plenty of good reasons for your average fantasy citizen to become a cultist. In a world of low social mobility and strict hierarchical society, cult membership is a "cheat code" to gaining respect and status. Anonymity and secrecy offer an escape from class-based identity, a chance to rise or fall on one's own merits. In that way, it serves much the same purpose as military service did in some time periods, but with less travel and (potentially) less danger.

The ghost cults are a different kind, though--fashionable among the upper crust rather than the hoi polloi. This isn't unlikely either; factions in the nobility are always looking for excuses to form alliances and consolidate their power-bases. It's just unfortunate for them that in this case the object of devotion eventually drives them stark raving mad.

From a fiction / gaming standpoint, the ghost cults are useful because they could have almost any goal or scheme. Kidnappings? Sure. Dark rituals? Absolutely. Vandalism? Oh boy, what a surprise when the trail of graffiti leads not to a gang of juveniles but a cabal of cannibalistic university professors. Heck, rip the cults out of Oth and put them in you own world. There's always someone who Looks Beyond.

-V

Southern Coasts Map Update

Back in May I posted a small hexcrawl called the Southern Coasts, a slice of a swords-and-sorcery setting inspired by the Black Company series. 

The map for that crawl was made in Hexkit using the default free tile assets; which, while gorgeous and gritty, aren't my own work. So I've now re-created that map myself, with hand-drawn tiles in my own inimitable style. Gritty... not so much. But it's mine.

Thoughts

The big reason for this redraw is that the stock "HK-Classic" tiles have a non-commercial use license. This crawl is part of THAUMOS, which eventually I plan to make available in full in exchange for... money, so an update was always in the cards. 

There's also the fact that I've made maps for almost all my campaign settings, and they all look something like this. It ain't a Veles game without pastel cartography. The ur-example of this phenomenon is my "Thaumocracy" setting; I ought to post that map sometime.

Happy Thanksgiving, and good crawling!

-V