Hail and Kill the Techno Wizard

Salvaging an old G+ post!

Art from here!

The Hounds of Halthrag Keep is the first time I've seen roll under and roll over stat checks - you roll over your Strength to see if you can wedge yourself through a crevice, for instance. I thought this was brilliant (thanks +Noah Stevens !). I wonder if it's possible to have a Black Hack-ish hack where all the stats are explicitly for both rolling under and over.

Stats
-------------------------------
Murderous
Stubborn
Quick
Rational
Charismatic

Murderous is a combat skill, you roll over it if you're trying to blend in with non-adventurers or convince a constable that you're not some wild-eyed murderhobo on a cocaine bender, they went that way, swear on me mum's soul.

Stubborn, you roll over this to assimilate new information that you would normally find odious. New languages, maybe, or to recognize that these orcs aren't trying to kill and eat you. Roll over to understand something that breaks reality, maybe, roll over it to not lose Mental Health Points a la Perdition (out of mental HP, roll on some Mind Melting table).

Quick - roll over this to do something with steady precision. Surgery, lockpicking. For anything where slow is smooth, smooth is fast, I guess. Someone will say 'that's everything' but running needs to be quick.

Rational - roll under for tinkering, making clockwork automatons or the like, debating like a lawyer. Roll over for magic, reasoning with demons, debating from your dumb-ass gut.

Charismatic - oh God I can't get away from the original six stats, I'm a fraud, you knew it all along. Roll under because you can't come up with a better idea than 'I convince the sheriff these aren't stolen banners' (with disadvantage). Roll over to blend into a crowd or hide, or, hell, sneak around in general. Does this overlap with rolling over Quick well I just came up with this stuff. It overlaps with using rational to debate people, but you don't need charisma for debate, especially if you don't care about winning.

With this stuff you probably want some kind of 'WITHSTAND' save stat that you're almost never going to want to roll over (unless you're trying to get mutated in a radiation zone). Or just call it 'Save' and have it be your level plus 2 or the like, and you want to always roll under.

When you level you can probably try to roll over a stat to increase it or roll under.a state to decrease it, your choice. This is that 'improving crappy stats is easier than improving great stats' rule from the Black Hack but you can decrease, say, Rational, if you want to be a better wizard.

-------Monsters--------
Some monsters have a BULK stat they roll under to pick you up and throw you with. They roll over it to get inside a building.

Some animal-intelligence monsters can have an EAT stat. Roll over EAT to stop fighting the PCs and flee when they put up a good fight. Roll under it to eat PCs.

Demons could have stats like CORRUPT to try to seed you with cancerous thoughts or ideas that you have to Stubborn your way through. Or find someone with crap Rational who learned magic good and have them help you.

------Employees-
---
Hirelings could have a FOLLOW stat to roll under to stay true to their recalcitrant, mercurial bosses, or roll over to take their own initiative and do something wonderful for the PCs. (Or to stab 'em in the back!).

I would give hirelings one other stat - SKILL - and they roll under it to do what you hired them for (soldiers fight, trappers find or create traps, etc). Roll over it to do anything else that's risky, probably with a disadvantage so that you don't hire a shitty scribe to be your private assassin / engineer / starship pilot / magus. Or maybe they just can't roll over it for more than 1 thing a session, I dunno, that might be too much to track.

---------Later thoughts---------------

I think these stats are a bit too generic - I need to work on channeling a darker Thundarr vibe. Carcosa-ish. Numenera but scarier.

MURDER
LIE
CRAVEN (run away or hide, roll under. Roll over to face down horror)
OLD TECH (still make tech vs do magic)
CORRUPTED

only thing missing - what do you roll to scavenge? Maybe that's a flat 1-in-6 chance per turn.


Corruption happens to those who wander from (slowly failing, class stratified) settlement. When you fail a corruption roll-over your corruption decreases right then. And you may or may not have to roll on a mutation / corruption table. Some of these effects should be good, some should be neutral (but distinctive), some should be at least somewhat negative. Like you can't use your tentacle hand to wield a weapon for now (needs training from a mutant) but you can use it to grapple like crazy well.


There's overlap so maybe you are using your tentacle hand with MURDER or maybe it's CORRUPTION.

As the awesome Andrew Shields pointed out, this is basically an extension of ideas in Lasers and Feelings. He also urged me to use a die other than d20 for this, which seems reasonable.

DOOM Oracle, Passages style

I got a decent bit of gonzo post apocalyptic play from my other Passages style Oracle, so here is one for DOOM.

Passages oracles work by rolling on this 3 times to construct a scene, but the Doomslayer wouldn't care for my petty rules and neither should you.

1. Flesh
2. Metal
3. Demon
4. Mortal
5. Distant
6. Close
7. Walls
8. Portal
9. Rage
10. Corporate
11. Military
12. Civilian
13. Blood
14. Sterile
15. Ravaged
16. Untouched
17. Hell
18. Earth
19. Treasure
20. Tear (as in Rip and Tear)

d66 Sci-Fi Horror Room Details

Because I've had DOOM, Mothership, Alien, Aliens, Teleglitch, et cetera on the mind lately, and because boring rooms are boring.

ONE

1. Flashing emergency lights
2. Hanging chains
3. Open electrical ductwork
4. Venting steam, 2 meters max visibility
5. Storage crates littered about
6. Private improvised work/rest area

TWO

1. Jury-rigged lighting
2. Large AC fans / vents
3. Schematics and printouts strewn about
4. Sealed capsule, 1000 kg. Contains Plastic Death Tree
5. Pitch black
6. Super loud

THREE

1. Weirdly tiered (about 1 meter difference, good for cover)
2. Metal grill over wire / steam pipes / liquid / drop
3. Effluent access, pipes
4. Broken mainframe materials
5. Extra flooring / wall / ceiling covers, some glass
6. Stacks of corpses in body bags

FOUR

1. 2d6 barrels of unstable fuel
2. Artificial park
3. Foundry re-flow, open, molten metal
4. Demon sigils carved everywhere, humming faintly
5. Graffiti'd with rumors
6. Emergency computer terminal 

FIVE

1. Large industrial bags of trash everywhere
2. Vaulted ceiling, thick columns
3. Large acquariums
4. Spare algae farms
5. Crates full of flour, (one secretly contains powder-based drugs, worth 30k credits)
6. Overgrown with lightvine, 3 meters visibility despite light as it hangs down from ceiling

SIX

1. Filled with acrid smoke
2. Lots of nooks and crannies, dim
3. Bright and very spartan
4. Shot up, ceiling panels creaking, falling
5. Narrow, twisting like guts
6. Loose floor panels

DOOM in an RPG

I wanted to play DOOM as an RPG. (Happy 25th anniversary, DOOM!) There are two things you need: Stay Frosty and Exemplars and Eidolons.

Stay Frosty is an RPG about playing a bunch of Doom Marines or Aliens' Space Marines running around, getting stressed, which makes you more competent until you make an unlucky save and then TENSION EXPLODES and you're murdering everything and ignoring tactics, possibly until you die. It's like if Mothership were about just playing marines and people panic by doing Billy-style last stands from Predator. Remove armor, throw away gun, attack big bad with a giant knife. The reason I don't just use it vanilla, is that the PCs are still fairly flimsy, _especially_ if you want to just run 1 PC against squads of enemies like a Doom Slayer.

To up the PC power level, I use damage, Gifts, and HP/HD from Exemplars and Eidolons.

Exemplars and Eidolons is about playing supernaturally-powerful thieves, wizards, or warriors. Your warrior can take on groups of 1 HD fools and destroy them all, punch through walls, never needs to sleep, that kind of thing. E&E evolved into Godbound, where the PCs are even more over-the-top, but E&E is perfect for what I want to play: solo Doom Slayer vs the first level of that game.

So your PC has 4 stats (Stay Frosty): Brawn, Brains, Dexterity, Willpower. Roll 3d6 and sum. You roll _equal to or over_ your stat: So Brains 9 is like '9+', and you want to roll a 9 or higher. If none of your stats are 5+, set one to 5+. Enemies try to hurt you (or terrify you) by rolling a d20 under your stat, and you subtract the difference between their level and yours from the roll.

Stay Frosty is a Black Hack hack that figured out to make everything the PCs want to do roll over. 20s are good! You use your stats to resolve attacks, unbreaking an APC's engine, wire electricity through a bulkhead, dodge falling rains of fire, that kind of thing.

Tension is as per Stay Frosty - you get tenser and better at kicking ass, until Tension Explodes and you flub your Willpower save and then you're fighting a cyberdemon with a knife. There's also critical hit and critical fail tables in there that I'll use. And enemies, mission generators, pointcrawling advice.

You can carry 21 - Brawn items.

You have 8 HP and gain 4 per level. Monsters use their HD as their HP. Armor is ablative HP that gets ruined and replaced just like in DOOM. Back-and-breast armor has 2 hp, a helmet has 1 hp. You could probably cobble together arm and leg armor and have up to 5 hp - for a 1 HD soldier that's a lot of extra survivability. Perhaps too much, we'll see when I run this more.

Damage is: weapons do 1d6 to 1d20 damage, a roll of 1 is 0 damage, 2-5 is 1 hp/HD of damage, 6-8 is 2 hp/HD, 9+ is 4 hp/HD. A combat knife does 1d6 damage, a pistol does 1d8, as does a 1-handed sword, as do some cheap assault rifles. A good rifle or two-handed weapon does 1d10 or more damage - a chainsaw might do 1d12, as might a super shotgun at optimal range. A BFG does 1d20 damage to an area of enemies but has like 1-2 shots taking up inventory slots.

So the damage is one huge thing that ups a single PC's survivability. You start with 8 hit points, you can take out 1 HD enemies with 1 hit, you can probably go toe-to-toe with a decent-sized demon/alien monster and survive.

You get 2 Effort, from Exemplars and Eidolons. You spend that to use some of your E&E Gifts.

You get some of the Warrior or Generic gifts - 3 at level 1. So you might be able to fight large groups of your-HD-or-less monsters and only get attacked once, or you can rip bulkhead doors down given a few minutes, or you can spend effort for the combat to nat 20 hit your enemy. To me this is another thing that we see the Doom Slayer do all the time.

Passages of Planet Psychon

Rescuing this from Google+:

Here's a Passage-style oraclular list but for Planet Psychon or Ultra Violet Grasslands or whatever Heavy Metal / Moebius inspired thing you want. Some are from Passage, because it has a great list of words in there.

How To Use This: Roll 3d20 and make up a scene or thing or resolve some action using the Oracular Words! That's about it. 

1. Weakness
2. Might
3. PSI
4. Magic
5. Tech
6. Ancient
7. New
8. Crimson
9. Jade
10. Fuchsia
11. Azure
12. Light
13. Shadow
14. Memory
15. Hallucination
16. Walls
17. Portal
18. Discovery
19. Loss
20. Gods

The only thing that really needs explanation is the colors.

CRIMSON: Blood, Chaos, violence, brick, sky, rivers, motion

JADE: Wealth, vegetation, jungle, food, decoration, labyrinthine, complexity

FUCHSIA: Mutation, dust storms, sky, weather, skin, pools

AZURE: Sky, wind, air, starkness, openness, expanse, stillness in motion

Gods can be AI Gods, actual Gods, agents of Gods, false gods...

Memories or Hallucinations can be dreams, dream-quests, desires.

Planet Psychon has a lot of tables for weather, what the hex you're in looks like or sounds like, colors, etc. It's great, it's really vivid. UVG has some similar things going on with its illustrations and descriptions. Google them! They're AWESOME!

Passage is also pretty great. It's here: https://www.rpgnow.com/product/250996/Passage--A-Storytelling-Exploration-Game-for-Exactly-One-Player

Gamma World lives, Gamma World dies, Gamma World lives again

Gamma World 1e is for sale again! I have Metamorphosis Alpha from Goodman Games, but it's nice to see 1e GW back in pdf and print, all legit.

GW streamlines the subsystem-happy Metamorphosis Alpha - not as much as I would myself, but enough to make a difference. No longer are there different 2d6-for-bows and 3d6-for-laser-guns to-hit rules. I can kind of see the appeal of them - it makes some weapons feel very different! But practically when you're dealing with lots of different armor classes, it seems like it would get clunky.

To streamline GW further you could take the 6 stats - Physical Strength, Dexterity, Constitution, Mental Strength, Intelligence, and Charisma, and run using roll-under rules, Black Hack style. Or roll a d20 + stat >= 20, so you're back in Roll High or Die land. Psychic combat is just two fools rolling their mental strength against one another, radiation is just rolling + Constitution, minus the radiation intensity level.

'There's no attempt to scale things to the players' - Mearls on Gamma World

Also, in the vein of Gamma World returning: Mike Mearls is playtesting a new Gamma World, as a 5E DnD hack. It's funny because I'm not super into 5e, but this is really cool. It sounds like Mearls is nailing the gonzo crazy stuff that happens in GW, and also trying to make it not just a 5E DnD game - it sounds more like you go in gameplay loops of exploring, scavenging, discovering, and kinda-sorta base building. That's over here.

More of the system is described here - this char creation is brilliant and right in line with a Black Hack style game. Take 18 dice, distribute them among your stats, roll and see what you get. You can roll 5d6 for one stat and 1d6 for another. The Tech Level stuff is also great - roll under Intelligence, but you better roll _over_ the 1d4, 1d6 or 1d8 you roll for the tech level, or you have a Big Problem. The teddy-bear-shaped claymore mine explodes in your face! The gun starts firing and will not stop! The tank is moving backwards now and accelerating to 60mph! I think that in Mearls' system you're probably rolling over and the 1d4, 1d6, etc is just to make some low roll failures really bad, but I could also see making it 'success with problems' where you figure out how the thing works, but now you have to survive activating it badly!

I am impressed that just a few details about this hack by Mearls are so evocative of GW and so easily transportable to other games, but that's the beauty of these systems - they play off one another and are highly modular. It's easy to take some components from something based on 5E and throw it into a Black Hack hack.

Quill: Troika Edition Rev 1

I really love Quill. For solo gaming, it really paces things perfectly for me. This is an attempt to use Troika! and Quill White Box together.

Before each paragraph, roll a Luck check as normal. Within the paragraph, make an appropriate Skill check of some kind based on what you're writing. At the end, decrease or increase your Stamina. Once per letter instead of decreasing stamina you can take some other form of consequences - you use up some gear, you get in a worse situation for subsequent paragraphs, etc.

Pass Luck Check

• Pass Skill Check: +2 Stamina!
• Fail Skill Check: Damage as club

Fail Luck Check

• Pass Skill Check: Damage as dagger
• Fail Skill Check: Damage as sword

Between letters you can regain 2d6 stamina and 2d6 luck, and test for learning / improving skills. For the reader, a random amount of time passes: d66 1) minutes 2-3) hours 4-5) days 6) months 

This might be a bit too 'you died' for some folks. I picked clubs forgetting that they actually can do quite a bit of damage. But the idea is that if you fail 1 of the 2 checks, there's some kind of negative consequence, if you fail both, it's really bad. Of course, this also disincentivized casting spells, as they use up stamina, so some more thought is probably needed.

In the next rev I imagine luck tests will be to find / acquire needed gear which may give bonuses on skill checks, at the cost of 3 Luck per check (rather than 1). A failed skill check may or may not lead to Stamina loss, depending on the fiction.

Scenarios

Crashing Into Troika

Scenario: You are the lone awakened being aboard a Pilgrimage Barge. Row upon row of plinths house the frozen Sleepers awaiting the day of religious awakening. But of course, your peaceful days of loneliness and holo-dueling are coming to an end. 

Good Phrase / Bad Phrase

Sleepers / endless rows of freezing coffins

Yowling Alarum / strange warbling music

sluggish controls / dead stick

Impact Throne / trash-filled escape pod cavity

Cracked, beached barge / smoldering ruin

Helpful robed being / angry wizardling

Space Tick / warp monster

Cracked Firmament / rent skyway

free Hospitallers / drunk barber chiurgeon 

Bumbling local sheriff / flint-eyed lawman

rent-controlled under-hostel / lower bridge tarp-dwelling

-----------------------------------------------------------------------

Tilting Windmills

Scenario: The local lightening-generators, a series of windmills, stand still in the becalmed air. Power rationing cripples the area and makes for angry mobs. You must somehow marshal some ineffable (or otherwise) force to prevail upon these conditions and make them tolerable again, lest the local constabulary burn you as a witch.

Good Phrase / Bad Phrase

Utterly becalmed / annual stilled months

Rolling brownouts / blackened city blocks

Angry mobs / riotous ruin cultists

Local Giant Labor Council 7734 / uncooperative officials

Massive whale sandwiches / silo of gruel

Plasmic air-condensors / Glimmer Empire artifacts

Gold-burning backup generators / picky power-shitters

Winning hand / Falsified cards

Giant electrovores / mutant underground leach-eels

Quick caravan / slow lines of refugees

Generous Noble House / tittering sentient-hunters