Savage Rifts

I have no idea why Savage Rifts has captivated my imagination so much. Perhaps it's how the game strives to let these three characters run in the same group, and all have things to do. The vagabond, basically a hobo


 A full-conversion cyborg


 Oh you know a FUCKING DRAGON

In the original game you can take a look at the equipment for starting characters. Glitter Boy pilots start with a Glitter Boy, a 10-foot gleaming power armor suit with an incredibly powerful Boom Gun. Juicers start with their biocomps and their US-football-pad-looking armor and their variable beam rifles. Vagabonds have like a laser handgun and soap. There is a long list of Vagabond gear and it reads like the kind of thing a homeless survivalist might have. We can safely assume the Glitter Boy pilot doesn't smell terrible (unless she's been stewing in her armor for a week), but with the vagabond, we have to be reassured, and the equipment list does that. Soap.

Anyway, marrying this insane setting to Savage Worlds meant that our author, Sean Fannon, and his cohorts and compatriots were going to balance out these different OCC/RCC classes. Dragons and vagabonds, living together in harmony, both contributing to a party of adventurers.

Having made some characters with the Player's Guide, they may be getting there. I doubt a vagabond or a wilderness scout can punch-out a combat cyborg, but that's not really what their role is. But it does seem like the MARS characters (Mercenaries, Adventurers, R?, Scholars) are seasoned skill-hounds compared to the other characters, who are quite gifted within their narrower focus.

I'm really looking forward to more; I hope to start posting some sample characters I wrote up, trying to learn Savage Worlds and the Rifts-specific rules.

Jail: Building Character and Eventually Causing Death

This particular jail is a mine. Perfect for PCs who've slighted someone such that they figure backbreaking work will help them gain character, and also eventually die. PCs start out with no gear. Any oddities not built into their bodies are also gone.

Locations

1. The Mines: A warren of small tunnels. People have to hunch over to enter. Chintzy candle-lanterns provide meager light. There are pickaxes (d6) and a few pneumatic hammers (d8, two-handed). You can perform all kinds of Honest Work here. Working here for a week nets you a roll on the Random Finds chart.
2. Barracks: bunch of triple-decker bunk beds. You can sleep here. There's little to no privacy, and hiding anything in or near your bunk will be tough. There are tables where people eat in a corner. Someone, somewhere in the dim is often playing a mouth harp.
3. Mess: It's behind a stout metal door and iron bars, one way in and out. It's run by the Boss, Shady Topper. There are a bunch of yes-men and quasi-useless folk, as well as his muscle, the Tonic Boys, who actually go out into the rest of the prison (but sleep in the Mess).
4. Spring: Water bubbles up from below. 150' of water down, there's a passage into the Underground, but it's a hard swim (STR save or die, advantage if you tie yourself to a stone first). Corpses have floated up before, and folks don't appreciate getting one of those in the prison's supply of free drinking water.
5. Exchange: The only area seriously engineered by humans, you can see daylight through the bars in the ceiling. Soldiers (5hp, d8 muskets) lower hoppers on thin ropes to get ore, and then throw down rations, overseen on the jail end by at least four Tonic Boys. They take the food back to the Mess and dole it out to hard-working prisoners.

Cast of Characters

• Boss Shady Topper. 9hp, fine saber (d8), 5 bombs (d12) to blow up food store if needed. 100 days of rations for the whole jail, a crate of booze. Wants to escape with a prisoner army, believes Honest Work will leave him with able-bodied soldiers.
• 7 Tonic Boys. Knives and burning oil (d6). d6+1 hp. Want to be as drunk as possible.
• 118 Prisoners in strung-out shape. Can get pickaxes (d6). d6 hp. Want to sleep, eat, escape, sometimes in that order.
• Other unique Jail-related NPCs.
• Ground-level soldiers. Unless an ore shipment is being picked up (every 2 months), there are only 11 of them. 6 hp, d8 muskets. Want to be somewhere else.

Honest Work

• You can work hard for a day and earn enough ore for a day's ration.
• You can push it (STR save) and earn d4 day's ration. If you fail the save, take d4 STR damage.
• When you work a week in the mines, make a STR save. If you fail, lose d4-1 points from a random stat. Also, roll on the Random Finds table.
• If you don't eat for a day, you get no benefit from a short rest and can't be taking a long rest.
• If you don't eat for a week you take d6 damage to each stat.
• Honest work in a prison mine is a slow death.

Random Finds

Either you did some Honest Work, or you had enough free time to be in the right place at the right time.

1. Someone nabbed a little TNT from the boss. You now have a bomb (d12) which can defeat the Mess doorway or the iron bars at the top of the Exchange.
2. You find a crevasse in the mines (or a map to one) that could lead out. Or to some underground hellhole.
3. You dig up a few ancient casks of preserved booze! You can live the high life, make a few dozen prisoners your best friends / willing Detachment, placate the Boss, bribe the Tonic Boys...
4. You wake up next to a corpse in the Barracks - he's still clutching a flask of poison! 4 doses, lethal if imbibed. 
5. You dig up an d4 oddities!
6. You knock some stone out and can see daylight! You can escape now, right now. If the Boss gets wind of the exit before you can escape, he could seal it off for his own Official Business or the like.

How These Tribesfolk are Different

Tribesfolk: 4d20 total, 2d10+5 fight-capable folks. They have d8 hp, d6 damage (spears and shortbows), 12 AC (elaborate stone-and-string jewelry/clothing/armor).

But these guys also

1. Use poisoned arrows (DC 14 Fort Save or 1d6+1 Agility damage, unconscious at 0 Agility).
2. Don't feel pain (x2 hp).
3. Beserk! At 0hp, 50% chance the warrior actually has 1hp.
4. Have d4+1 laser rifles (2d6 damage, 4 shots).
5. Have a flying disk (25' wide, 50' MV, can lift half a ton). Archers on it have 50% cover.
6. Have d4 trained triceratops mounts (30hp, d12 damage gore with horns, charge to double damage, 40' MV, +4 to hit, 14 AC).
7. Are actually an android hivemind (one tribesman will suss out PCs intentions, can be remade if her head makes it out intact, tribesfolk in constant communication with each other, typically surprise attack PCs).
8. Are ghosts, bound to keep a demon captive via blood sacrifice. Nonmagical physical attacks are not going to work, look up ghosts in DCC to see what these guys can do to hurt the PCs.

My Frozen in Time PCs are now stuck in a jungle, and will probably encounter other humans or human-ish folks in said jungle. Whoever they wind up close to could be very helpful allies, or, you know, terrible foes.

DCC After Action Report: Stealing Skyskippers part 1

The crew had infiltrated a derelict temple to Crom, overrun with Crab Folk settlers. They had alongside them a freed ghost, Belwin, who was friendly, or at least in control of himself, thanks to the crabs' Soul Thresher technology. They retrieved and buried his corpse, so he agreed to pilot a skyskipper for them, if they could steal it from the crabs.

The PCs walked into the temple's main entrance and the cleric, Foozy, attempted to negotiate an airship rental from two crabs, armed with electrical whips and faraday shields, idly tormenting a lightening-fenced ghost. The crabs agreed to go let their boss, Joyce, know that humans were about, and one was tragically slain. The other freed the captive ghost, Balda, and drove him towards the PCs, half of whom failed their reflex saves and saw Joyce murder them (-2 to all rolls in the initial presence of Joyce).

One crab escaped (I started rolling twice for encounters). The PCs wandered the twisted paths of the temple, ignoring desecrated statues and wondering about Crom. The thief, Gipp, managed to keep the PCs out of one combat with fast lockpicking; in another case, the party's henchperson of note held fast a door so that opium-addled crabs could not pursue them. They stole a brick of opium, found a secret door, and ascended to a skyskipper hangar, from which they are currently planning a distraction. They can get to a control room, visible from the hangar, but filled with crab guards or Joyce himself. So, distractions are in order.

(Skyskippers look like a wooden nautical ship, but instead of a mainmast, a giant plant trunk rises up to what looks like a dandelion seed head. The tiller of the ship is a root system. They have to park in water periodically to refuel. They have cannon and can take cargo and so on.)

This doesn't have grappling rules, does it?

That was a question from a player, during a game of Into the Odd. They had run out of the Underground and into Bastion, having stolen an Arcanum from two old doddering cultists. They had gone to a local bathhouse and met a contact, Grer, who they knew could move Arcanum, but Grer lowballed them (they felt). Grer said they could always take it over to Laugher, Laugher pays well, but he's crooked and a double-crosser. So to Laugher they went, and almost immediately (after an offer of 45 silver), began shooting Laugher and his two men.

Laugher had Tyrant Rod'd one of the PCs into fleeing, and his men were in turn forced to flee - via stealing said Rod, using a Pain Wire oddity. Laugher got the drop on the remaining PC and their two companions. All were down, but above 0 strength. The last PC came back as Laugher was humming to himself and sharpening a long knife, comatose people slumped about his office.

"Oh, there are grappling rules," I said, "what're you trying to do?"

Well, throw Laugher out the window of his top-floor tenement building. I figured this was just a strength save, rolled up Laugher's strength (14), and watched as the dice said he passed a strength check. He grabbed the window frame to keep himself from falling out, and tried to do this to the PC in turn, who made a strength save as well to stay in the room and alive.

(Laugher went back to stabbing with his knife, won, killed the companions, and sold the PCs into slavery. They awoke shaved, branded, and in a mine. My first TPK - though everyone kept their strength above 0, so no PCs really died.)

This is a real strength of Into the Odd - if you can figure some way to grapple and throw a human NPC (or a reasonably-sized nonhuman) into instant death, you can try - but you're not guaranteed to succeed. Whereas damage is going to happen, against unarmored people, but it's going to take longer. Slow but reliable, faster but chancy. To me they're very well-balanced, different approaches. I don't want combat maneuvers to be 'sweep the leg' or the like, unless that's done the way DCC does it. Warriors (and dwarves!) can sweep the leg and do damage. And at higher levels, the leg is gone.

To me that makes combat feel real, like, really dangerous. When I've had rounds where all players and I whiff, it makes combat droll. I mean, if you're enjoying everyone just missing, that's fine. It just makes me feel like I'm doing something horribly wrong. It should be quick and tense. Whiff rounds take it in the opposite direction.

And then I try to figure out how to take this and stick it in my DCC campaign

Even with the absence of to-hit rolls, I want combat to always be moving somewhere dramatic. Maybe I just need something like Detect Magic's Scary Combat Choreography, or, for DCC, a modification to +Claytonian JP's super-sweet Things Hurt and Armor Soaks houserules. Clay has been running it with the soak roll going on in every round (every round a 1 HD monster rolls a d8 to see how much damage it absorbs). I was thinking of it like soak being your 'not getting hit' points, restorable with an Into the Odd short rest, and your Con being your static HP. Pretty sure a Star Wars RPG has been set up this way.

(I also really like how Clay's rules mean you crit on rolling max damage! No more 2-hp-damage crits.)

The problem might be scaling - how does a 3hd monster in chainmail roll soak? 3d12? Averaging, what, 18? I just don't want soak to become another HP inflation. I'm also leary of computing a constitution score for every monster. Probably some will just have soak, and one hit past that, they are DED. Others will get CON scores and take wounds like the PCs.

Other people who have thought about this: B/X Blackrazor has a good post about auto hits in B/X DnD where armor changes the damage die an attacker rolls.

Necropaxis might've done this in the simplest way with Damage Symmetry. Every miss means the enemy hit. Unlike Clay's rules, this will not Make Daggers Great Again (1/4 chance of a crit!), but it does mean less thought goes into changing things up. Maybe. Or maybe since low-level PCs miss half the time, it makes Everything a Meat Grinder.

For now I'm going to get through level 1 before hacking the DCC combat rules much - I feel like once we got away from a massive 0-level funnel of scrubs, combat has been more interesting. But we'll see.

Gameable Moments: Master of the Flying Guillotine

(I own nothing, I uploaded nothing, etc etc. I imagine people who see these things will be inspired to go buy them, because they are awesome.)

Sweet Crom, Master of the Flying Guillotine has an incredible soundtrack. Neu! provides an awesome intro to the villain (who has mastered the art of the flying guillotine) with this song:

And really, the whole villain intro is just wonderful. The villain is entering the story because the hero, a one-armed boxer, has killed two men. These men were apprenticed to the imperial assassin, the flying guillotine wielder, and before their final fight, sent off a clay tablet bearing a drawing of their nemesis (the master is blind, so, gotta have tiny clay tablets). Have to love consequences of the PCs slaying folk, even if said folk deserved it.

HNNN that opening. The downside is that it's hard to describe some evil villain just straight-up coming to kill the PCs from afar, absent some prophesy, mushroom-tea hallucination, astral beast whispering, poison save vision, or near-death out-of-body experience. Which of course are things the game should be filled with, so, just keep them in mind for having some little 'cut to' part where the next villain is described, briefly but awesomely, practicing martial arts and burning down his own fucking house to come after the PCs. 

Crab Temple Random Encounters

So my PCs for a DCC game went through the Time Portal in Frozen in Time. The time and world they arrive on is somewhat inspired by a Dungeon Dozen post and contains Marlinko and the Slumbering Ursine Dunes. But all that worldbuilding ain't where we're at; we're in a crab temple! The upper levels contain ships that fly through the sky (thanks to a large fluffy plant stalk embedded as the main mast); the lower level is full of somewhat hostile crab folk.

Crab Folk Stats

They're about 4 to 5 feet tall crabs wearing belts, with spears or crossbows. They have wet sponges and 1d6 coppers in their belt pouches and bleed blue blood. They can speak to humans via translator orbs (a chittering-to-Common Ioun Stone, DC 19 to steal, AC 19, hp 2), if they bother to have them.

HD 1d8. +1 to hit. 12 AC. Mov 30' (or whatever a human can do). Spear (1d8) or Crossbow (1d6) and 10 bolts. +1 to all saves.

Max HP: Elite. Has a d3 attack/damage bonus, 14 AC in built-up excess temporary chitin. Can use Mighty Deeds as a lvl 1 warrior.

Tactics: Pincer attack! Flank! Fall back! Defend crossbowmen! Acquire human ghosts! Deploy Horseshoe Crab Dogs! Establish outpost and grow another Crab Folk City!

Horseshoe Crab Dogs

HD 1d6. 12 AC. +1 Atk. 1d6 damage (biting). Mov 40'. 

Max HP: Extra aggressive. Attack has 50/50 change to either cause 1d4 damage from bleeding or knock victim prone (DC 17 Reflex save to stay on foot).

Temple Encounters

1. Crab tourist family. Dad (crossbow crab). Mom (spear crab). Daughter (gas grenade, DC 15 save or blinded for 1d4+1 rounds). Son (2 short swords, 1d6 dmg each, 2d16 to attack). Want to escape alive, parents will save kids over themselves. All kitted out in religious paraphernalia of their god, Brachyura.
2. Horseshoe crab trainers (2) armed with crossbows and knives. 2d8 Horseshoe crab dogs on leashes. One trainer has a training gong.
3.  Wandering ghost. Use a reaction roll, higher means not dangerously insane. Or less so.
4. Old man pacifist crab. Translator orb, 6 smoke bombs (humans in the smoke are blinded, infravision works through it), dagger. Wants to find snacks. Comes in and out through panels that connect him to the sewers below the temple.
5. 6 crossbow crabs with two spear-bearers. Just back from target practice.
6. Priest (blunted spear, 1d6), bearing a ghost in a lead bottle. 3 guards with lightening whips (1d4, double damage to ghosts). Priest can cast Word of Command (language difference won't matter in the eyes of Brachyura) and Paralysis. +5 to cast rolls. 3x spells a day, or can use the spell slot to cause/cure 1d6+1 HP. The ghost is as above, only 50/50 chance of being hostile, but a) the crabs can drive it about with their lightening whips and b) its hideous countenance requires a DC 12 Wil save or you freeze up for a round. The crabs are used to ghosts and do not have to make this save.
7. Stray Horseshoe crab dog. Reaction roll for hostility! Can be bribed with food; potentially a loyal and happy ally, though has a 50% chance of running off if ordered to attack crab folk.
8. 2d4 Crab sneaks. Slingshots (1d4, 2d20 action roll to use, or x2 attacks per round). +5 to sneak and picking pockets. Good at running - DC 18 to catch in a chase. Backstabbers - crit on a sneak attack.
9. 1d6+2 Opium-addled crab folk. -1 to hit (other than any Warriors). Reroll HP with advantage (pick higher of two) when rolling HP. Want to repel invaders and PARTY!
10. 1d6+3 patrolling guards. Escorting a human prisoner (level 0, occupation: sky skipper crew) to the Ghost-maker chamber for deconstitution.