d20.rs A Blog About Cypher System RPG https://d20.rs/ Mon, 20 May 2019 09:41:27 +0000 Mon, 20 May 2019 09:41:27 +0000 Jekyll v3.0.1 Finer Points on Destiny Crafting <p><em>This post will not make any sense to you if you’ve never read crafting rules from the <a href="https://www.drivethrurpg.com/m/product/240655?affiliate_id=1103911">Numenera Destiny Book</a>. To follow along open up Chapter 7: Crafting (page 117), Wright character type (page 22) and Builds Tomorrow focus (page 66).</em></p> <p><strong>Crafting Subtasks</strong><br /> Subtasks questions come up most often as it’s not clear how they work on first reading.</p> <blockquote> <p>Generally speaking, it’s impossible to apply sustained Effort over periods greater than a day, so Effort cannot be applied to any crafting task or subtask that exceeds 28 hours.</p> </blockquote> <p>Reading this bit explains the use of Effort on subtasks quite clearly, but the question remains if one can apply skills and assets on subtasks. This is not stated anywhere in the rules.</p> <p>The answer is no, you can’t apply skills and assets on subtasks. <a href="https://twitter.com/seankreynolds/status/1130196748641509376">This was also confirmed to me by Sean and Bruce.</a> Skills and assets are already applied to the crafting task level to bring down the assessed difficulty. If you try to apply them again on subtasks, you will quickly find that most of the lower crafting jobs, assessed difficulty 4 or less, turn into a routine even for a Tier 1 Wright. This is not intended as there is a Tier 4 <strong>Expert Crafter</strong> ability that allows Wrights to automatically succeed on any crafting tasks level 4 or lower.</p> <p>Main design balance of the crafting mechanic is time and materials. The sole purpose of subtasks is to eat these away.</p> <blockquote> <p>A failure means the time spent on that crafting roll was wasted, but the character can spend that much time again and then try to succeed at that same subtask. If the crafter fails twice in a row on the same subtask, the character can continue crafting but in addition to losing another interval of crafting time, 1 unit of iotum (of the highest- level iotum being used) is destroyed in a mishap and must be replaced before crafting can continue.</p> </blockquote> <p>So yes, that level 6 subtasks will be a huge waste of time and materials for a low Tier Wright, but due to special abilities, higher Tier Wrights will rarely need to attempt subtasks that high.</p> <p><strong>Extreme Example</strong><br /> The hardest crafting task in the game is building a level 10 true automaton or a level 10 true biological, with the assessed difficulty of 14. Remember that the task is deemed impossible if the assessed difficulty is bigger than 10.</p> <blockquote> <p>If the assessed difficulty for a crafting task would remain above 10 even after all modifications have been applied, then the installation or object cannot be crafted, at least not until some other help is applied to reduce the difficulty.</p> </blockquote> <p>Starting from 14 we can bring it down to the realm of possible by applying two skills and two assets. At assessed level 10 the task is “possible” but you will quickly notice that subtasks 7, 8, 9 and 10 can’t be rolled on a d20 die, so we need something more, and that can’t be Effort as the time between subtasks will be larger than 28 hours in this case.</p> <p>At Tier 3 Wrights get special abilities that lower the assessed difficulty even further. <strong>Adept Builder</strong>, <strong>Faster Builder</strong> and at last <strong>Rapid Builder</strong> at Tier 6 will bring down assessed difficulty to 7. With one level missing, we need to turn to the Builds Tomorrow focus and its Tier 4 power <strong>Fast Builder</strong> (not the same as <strong>Faster Builder</strong>) that allows that one last level drop to 6 subtasks, each of them taking about 10 days to finish.</p> <p>The hardest crafting task in the game can only be done by the highly specialized Tier 6 Wright who Builds Tomorrow. This is a good game design balance if you ask me.</p> <p><strong>Plans</strong><br /> One problem with the plans I found is that the new players, either to the campaign or the setting, don’t really have a good idea what kind of plans they will need at the start of the game. Depending on the focus and abilities they chose, a Wright character might start the game with up to 7 plans!</p> <p>Because I realized this too late in my first game that featured a Wright, I opted to leave the plans blank, until the player decided to craft something she needs. Better solution would be to tie these plan selections to her character background. So if she was working on vehicles in her past she will have one or two vehicle and several artifact and cypher plans useful for vehicles. If she has a background in civil engineering she might have an installation plan or two and artifact and cypher plans that are useful to communities.</p> <p><strong>Numenera Crafting Skill</strong><br /> Wrights will usually get specialized in numenera crafting as soon as Tier 1. For a player that wants to focus on a crafting gameplay that means she will be out of useful skill choices in her advancement path essentially from the start of the game.</p> <p>One solution might be to break apart the numenera crafting skill into a subset of skills in which she can train and specialize further. One way to break them up is according to numenera kind:</p> <ul> <li>Craft Cyphers</li> <li>Craft Artifacts</li> <li>Craft Vehicles</li> <li>Craft Installations</li> <li>Craft Limited Automatons</li> <li>Craft Otherspace*</li> <li>Craft True Automatons</li> <li>Craft Biological*</li> </ul> <p>* Otherspace and Biologicals are from <a href="https://www.drivethrurpg.com/m/product/256159?affiliate_id=1103911">Building Tomorrow book</a>.</p> <p>This way she will have interesting skills to choose throughout the game. Given that character has only two skill upgrade slots, you might remove general “Numenera Crafting” skill altogether, or allow only trained level, and have a player choose a more specific one for her specialization.</p> Mon, 20 May 2019 00:00:00 +0000 https://d20.rs/2019/05/20/crafting/ https://d20.rs/2019/05/20/crafting/ Ninth World Economy <p><strong>Barter</strong><br /> There is no standardized economy in the Ninth World. The most common system is barter. Here are some helpful excerpts from the <a href="https://www.drivethrurpg.com/m/product/144040?affiliate_id=1103911">Ninth World Guidebook</a> that address the matter:</p> <blockquote> <p>In other words, when the butcher tells the woman in the dairy that a certain amount of meat is worth 2 shins, she knows to give him 2 shins’ worth of cheese in payment, even though no shins or coins of any kind are exchanged.</p> </blockquote> <blockquote> <p>In heavily populated areas like the Steadfast, people might earn a daily wage in shins—anywhere from a few shins for a peasant to a few hundred shins for a merchant. Many people, in both populated and rural areas, work for something other than money, such as housing, food, livestock, or other necessities.</p> </blockquote> <blockquote> <p>When actual shins are used in trade, the party accepting the payment often refuses a small percentage of the objects as being worthless.</p> </blockquote> <blockquote> <p>When setting the price of an object, one should think about how common or rare the item is, whether it’s in high demand, and whether it has some special use to those in the area.</p> </blockquote> <p>These excerpts talk about common goods trade, but what about the numenera? How do you trade io, cyphers, or even artifacts? I like to think that there are two distinct markets in the Ninth World: the common goods market and the numenera market.</p> <p><strong>Common Goods Market</strong><br /> The common goods market uses shins or local coins. Players may play this by exchanging actual shins or common goods in shins value. I usually don’t present these scenes in detail. Players substract shins or equipment, get the goods and we move on.</p> <p><strong>Numenera Market</strong><br /> For cyphers, io, and low-level iotum, wealthy merchants, caravans, major city markets or Aeon Priests may have equivalent goods available for trade. These scenes are always played out as NPCs bartering with player characters. My players need to work the NPCs to get a good deal.</p> <p>At the other end of the numenera scale, artifacts, rare iotum, vehicles, and plans are not readily available and are reserved for story play. These transactions are the equivalent of “exchanging nuclear codes for diamonds”. Significant trade opportunities, these are story based intrigues that involve tense negotiations, backstabbing, and double-dealing shenanigans. Not available in your local store.</p> <p><strong>Personal Trade</strong><br /> So how many shins does an average person have for trade? We can use the daily wage table from the <a href="https://www.drivethrurpg.com/m/product/144040?affiliate_id=1103911">Ninth World Guidebook</a> (page 31). An average person should have 1 to 3 months worth of daily wages available for trade.</p> <p>A chiurgeon, for example, might have about 100 shins, but due to the nature of their job, they’re likely to have a few oddities and 1d4 cyphers. They would likely be happy to barter for numenera that helps them with their job.</p> <p>Professionals that travel, like captains or sailors, might have an exotic item or two. Craftsmen might be in a need of rare materials or special equipment. Look for ideas on pages 94 to 98 in the Discovery book.</p> <p><strong>Aldeias</strong><br /> Towns and aldeias don’t have such a wide range of offerings, but they will usually have one or two unique goods. Culat, goldgleam, and redstone are a few examples. Play the weird card if you need to. These exotic goods could be sold in big cities to nobles or rich merchants.</p> <p><strong>City Markets</strong><br /> As far as common goods go trade cities and big markets will most likely have a selection of rare materials like synthsteel, stronglass and others from page 93-94 <a href="https://www.drivethrurpg.com/m/product/240654?affiliate_id=1103911">Discovery</a>. They may also have rare equipment noted as special in the books. 1d6 cyphers per better merchant is a good rule of thumb. If you have players who are stuck with cyphers that are not useful or are highly situational, use this opportunity to allow them to exchange them for practical ones that will be used sooner.</p> <p><strong>Nine Rival Kings</strong><br /> Information about goods and trade is spread throughout the <a href="https://www.drivethrurpg.com/m/product/240654?affiliate_id=1103911">Discovery book</a>, so we created a table for quick reference. You will still need to open the book and figure out what these goods are and how are they woven into the setting. The table is a good starting point if you want to develop your Ninth World economy even further.</p> <table> <thead> <tr> <th>Kingdom</th> <th>Has</th> <th>Needs</th> <th>Trade City</th> </tr> </thead> <tbody> <tr> <td>Navarene</td> <td>food, lumber(redwood)</td> <td>liquid silk, synthwood</td> <td>Shallamas</td> </tr> <tr> <td>The Sea Kingdom of Ghan</td> <td>gallen, aneen, azure steel, ships and sailing</td> <td>lumber, synth</td> <td>Ledon</td> </tr> <tr> <td>Draolis</td> <td>equipment exotic goods, shiul, windriders, culat(wood)</td> <td>military tech, rare materials, blackroot</td> <td>Qi</td> </tr> <tr> <td>Thaemor</td> <td>– (no data)</td> <td>redstone, limnelwood, food</td> <td>Auspar</td> </tr> <tr> <td>Malevich</td> <td>fish, goats</td> <td>slaves</td> <td>Yenth</td> </tr> <tr> <td>Iscobal</td> <td>billam, skitters, game, dynafel cotton, textiles</td> <td>goldgleam, crovel</td> <td>Mulen</td> </tr> <tr> <td>The Pytharon Empire</td> <td>grain</td> <td>slaves, military tech</td> <td>Far Brohn</td> </tr> <tr> <td>Milave</td> <td>ghianche, floatstone</td> <td>agriculture machines</td> <td>Aian</td> </tr> <tr> <td>Ancuan</td> <td>grain, fish, game, salt, seagoing wares, submergines</td> <td>– (no data)</td> <td>Kaparin</td> </tr> </tbody> </table> <p><strong>Merchant Stock</strong><br /> The last thing you will need for your game is a good old random table. Pull out all the goods and materials from the books, list them out on a sheet and sort them according to rarity. Next, roll on the table below to determine how well the merchant is stocked.</p> <table> <thead> <tr> <th>1d6</th> <th>Stock Availability</th> </tr> </thead> <tbody> <tr> <td>1-2</td> <td>Common goods</td> </tr> <tr> <td>3</td> <td>All above + special equipment</td> </tr> <tr> <td>4</td> <td>All above + rare special equipment</td> </tr> <tr> <td>5</td> <td>All above + very rare special equipment</td> </tr> <tr> <td>6</td> <td>All above + cyphers</td> </tr> </tbody> </table> <p>What about you? Tell us what kind of crazy economy rules you came up with for your Ninth World!</p> Wed, 15 May 2019 00:00:00 +0000 https://d20.rs/2019/05/15/ninth-world-economy/ https://d20.rs/2019/05/15/ninth-world-economy/ New Monster - Thresher <p>This idea has been floating around in my head for a while, inspired by actual research that suggests that walking across physical thresholds acts as a cue for the brain to store and call up location-specific thoughts, which often results in forgetting why you walked into a room. Threshers are primarily meant for Science Fantasy games, but with a few tweaks, they would work in a Horror setting as well.</p> <p>Incidentally, a day after writing up the original version of this creature, the Ninth World Bestiary 3 came out and introduced the “dreamslake”, which skews incredibly close to this. I’ve done my best to differentiate the thresher without changing the original concept.</p> <p><strong>THRESHER Level 5</strong><br /> If you’ve ever walked into a room and couldn’t remember why you walked in, you may have simply suffered a brief memory lapse - or you may have had a run-in with a thresher. Threshers live solitary lives along the boundaries between spaces, which can be weak points between planes of existence or actual physical doorways. Always partially out of phase, they are adept at hiding in plain sight while snatching errant thoughts from individuals that cross their path.</p> <p>Threshers prefer high traffic areas like markets and taverns, where they steal surface thoughts from a large number of people. This increases their intelligence and slakes their curiosity, all while causing them to take on the averaged characteristics of their unwitting victims. Rare threshers that choose to live in remote areas are the most dangerous - they will feed on solitary individuals repeatedly until the person goes mad, wandering back and forth across the thresholds of their home, unable to recall what it was they were trying to do.</p> <p><strong>Motive:</strong> Feed on thoughts, remain undetected<br /> <strong>Environment:</strong> Urban high traffic areas like taverns, solitary homes in out of the way places (rare)<br /> <strong>Health:</strong> 16<br /> <strong>Damage Inflicted:</strong> 4 (see Combat)<br /> <strong>Movement:</strong> Short<br /> <strong>Modifications:</strong> Defends as level 6 from being out of phase; hiding and knowledge of the local population as level 7</p> <p><strong>Combat:</strong> A thresher prefers to stay hidden, and will go to great lengths to remain so. If it suspects its existence is known by a hostile threat, it will attempt to secretly steal that knowledge to protect itself. The target must succeed on a level 5 Intellect defense roll (possibly modified by surprise) or forget everything they know about the thresher, falling one step down the damage track from the mental trauma. If its existence continues to be threatened, it will flee, often to another place known to several of its victims. It will fight only if cornered, sending out mental bolts at short range dealing 4 Intellect damage (ignores Armor). The thresher can attempt to rip out chunks of an attacker’s memory once every few rounds, dropping them one step down the damage track if they fail an Intellect defense roll. Alternatively, it can attempt to copy a PC’s ability. The PC must be an immediate distance away and succeed on an Intellect defense task, or have an ability (chosen by the GM) copied. For the next minute, the thresher can use the copied ability once each round in addition to its normal action. Only one ability may be copied at a time. <br /> <strong>Interaction:</strong> Threshers are incredibly shy, but if approached privately with offerings of interesting thoughts or secrets, they can be convinced to talk. They can establish telepathic links to communicate, using a conglomeration of stolen thoughts as a makeshift language. Those that live off solitary targets or small groups often sound exactly like the handful of people they’ve stolen thoughts from, and younger threshers may only be able to communicate vague impressions.<br /> <strong>Use:</strong> Threshers can serve as sources of information, and ancient threshers may even capitalize on this and become information brokers. Those in out of the way places feeding off individuals can make for a more dangerous and weird encounter.<br /> <strong>Loot:</strong> An outnumbered or defeated thresher may offer crucial information or the location of a stash of cyphers in return for sparing it.</p> <p><strong>Image:</strong> <a href="https://www.artstation.com/artwork/A8Gkz">Art Station</a></p> <p><strong>Further reading:</strong> A research paper by Gabriel A. Radvansky suggesting that walking through doorways is linked to memory loss - <a href="https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/17470218.2011.571267">The Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology</a></p> Mon, 29 Apr 2019 00:00:00 +0000 https://d20.rs/2019/04/29/new-monster-tresher/ https://d20.rs/2019/04/29/new-monster-tresher/ Interesting Failures <p><strong>Task Resolution</strong><br /> Most of the time we resolve tasks in a binary fashion - it is either success or a failure. Cypher gives an option to graduate the success on failed rolls, aka failing forward technique. But what about all those times when fail is a fail, and we as GMs shrug and inform the player her attempt was not a success?</p> <p><strong>Dramatic Task Resolution</strong><br /> Cypher asks for rolls only when there is a chance of failure and a chance of success. If one of these two conditions is not met, there is no need for a roll. It is either routine or impossible.</p> <p>Most take this condition a step further where they ask for a chance of exciting failure and an exciting success for a roll to happen, reasoning if there is no tension in the scene, move the story forward to a place that has it.</p> <p>The main problem with the exciting part is that someone needs to figure it out. And by someone, I mean the GM. Here are a couple of examples that might help get into this kind of thinking, and later on we will touch some potential problems that come with interesting failures.</p> <p><strong>Example Scene</strong><br /> Player wants his character to scale a wall. A pretty simple scene, and as with any climbing tasks, it’s a perfect fit for graduated success, which we will take into an account. We already know the success outcome - the player character will be on the top of a wall. Here are some interesting failures to consider:</p> <ul> <li>She falls and loses some might points.</li> <li>For a graduated success example, she might scale it but damage it a bit so that it’s harder for others in a party to climb it after her.</li> <li>Critical fail might be that she falls and breaks her arm, or some of the gear she bears.</li> <li>She scales it, but her weapon drops.</li> </ul> <p>These are all interesting, but we can get even more ideas if we knew why she is scaling the wall, as we are missing her intent here.</p> <ul> <li>If she was trying to hide, she broke her stealth while climbing it too loudly.</li> <li>Trying to break into a property without tripping an alarm, trips the alarm.</li> <li>If she was scaling it to get a better attack position, that advantage is now gone.</li> <li>If she was running away from a thing, the thing catches up.</li> </ul> <p><strong>Interesting Complications</strong><br /> You can already spot the first problem here, yes? Some of the examples above are story complications, and we should consider using GMIs.</p> <p>Interesting failure must be a logical consequence of an unsuccessful attempt. It exists in a place between a fumble and a story complication. We don’t want to complicate the failure without handing XP.</p> <div style="text-align: center; margin: 0; padding: 0; margin-bottom: 25px;"> <img style="margin: 0 auto; display: block; margin-bottom:0 !important;" src="/images/posts/sad-climber.jpg" alt="Sad Climber" /> <span class="post__caption">I climbed the wall but forgot my lunch.</span> </div> <p><strong>Scene Tension</strong><br /> I already mentioned it is easier to figure out fail states when we know player intent behind an action. But there is also a question of scene tension. If the scene does not have any tension, it is much harder to come up with interesting states for player actions.</p> <p>If we put our wall in the middle of nowhere, no danger around it, no sense of urgency whatsoever, then we shouldn’t care about any failure states, and also our success state is not very meaningful. To quote CSR:</p> <blockquote> <p>Skip the boring bits.</p> </blockquote> <p><strong>Managing Risks</strong><br /> So we’ve set up our wall scene with tension around it. The danger is imminent; the environment is treacherous, the clock is ticking. Now we’re talking! Our imaginary GM can now glimpse into the unfurling of space-time and gauge the spectrum of resolution states, from fumbles and failures to successes and major accomplishments.</p> <p>Switch to the player side, and we come to our second problem. Failure being interesting now, it bears an additional risk. It’s not that our player doesn’t make her climb, it’s that something might bite her ass off now!</p> <p>This means that GM must telegraph the danger and potential fail states so that the player is allowed to manage the risk appropriately.</p> <p><strong>Not That Good:</strong><br /> <strong>GM:</strong> You see a wall blocking your path.<br /> <strong>Player:</strong> I scale the wall! <em>rolls without effort and fails</em><br /> <strong>GM:</strong> You don’t manage to climb quickly enough, and the monster bites your ass off!<br /> <strong>Player:</strong> WTF !? <em>table riot</em></p> <p><strong>Better:</strong><br /> <strong>GM:</strong> You see a wall blocking your path. Ground trembles, loose rocks are rolling down; devious groaning is getting closer and closer.<br /> <strong>Player:</strong> I scale the wall!<br /> <strong>GM:</strong> There is a chance you will not scale it fast enough before the monsters catch up. Loose rocks are also a problem; you might fall off and break something.<br /> <strong>Player:</strong> I use all the effort I have! <em>rolls with effort and fails</em><br /> <strong>GM:</strong> You grab a lose rock, it breaks and you slide down few meters towards the sharp, salivated teeth. You manage to stop just about their reach.</p> <p>Holly Monte, that was a tense scene!</p> <p>Sliding down was a natural consequence of a failed roll, and now you can complicate the scene further with GMIs, unless the whole thing was GMI-ed in the first place. Note how we didn’t let her slide all the way down into the hungry jaws, that would be a critical fail. We left the danger to loom over the scene until the beasts get their turn. Our player was aware of the risks, gave her best and failed. In our second example fail state was exciting but logical and danger was telegraphed in advance.</p> <p><strong>What About Combat?</strong><br /> Hitting and avoiding hits is one of those binary things, they either happen or not. Cypher recommends against using graduated success in combat, but lets shake it up a little.</p> <p>Consider a grappling move. Player wants to grab an opponent and bring him into submission. We already wrote about <a href="https://d20.rs/2019/02/18/combat-maneuvers/">Combat Maneuvers</a> in depth (spot how we deal with failed states in that article).</p> <p><strong>Player:</strong> I jump to grapple him in submission!<br /> <strong>GM:</strong> There is a chance he evades your move and gets into a better position for his next attack. If you critically fail, you might get your face smashed. For minor effect, his effort to break free will be hindered. On major success, you got the mofo, and get a free attack.</p> <p>What we did here is created an interesting and meaningful choice for the player. Her risky move can have a big payoff, but she can also get smashed really hard. Don’t take this grapple mechanic to heart, it’s for illustration purposes.</p> <p><strong>Social Encounters</strong><br /> The technique is a godsend for social, especially in situations where players are draining the life of your NPCs. Trying to haggle for better prices with a merchant? On a fail, you will get worse prices. Persuading some poor soul into your bidding? On a fail, he will nope out and lower his disposition. Bothering barista with a million little questions? There is a chance he gets actually pissed.</p> <p>Have failures bring life to your NPCs, and make them seem more real and exciting. It will be more interesting to players as well, as sometimes the risk will pay off, and sometimes they will be worse off.</p> <p><strong>In Conclusion</strong><br /> Thinking about failure states will help you craft more exciting scenes; make sure you include this information into your exposition. Keep failures as logical consequences of player actions, and use GMIs for story complications. Announce possible resolution states before the roll is made. Skip the boring bits.</p> Mon, 15 Apr 2019 00:00:00 +0000 https://d20.rs/2019/04/15/interesting-failures/ https://d20.rs/2019/04/15/interesting-failures/ Ultraviolet Grasslands <p>UPDATE: UVG Kickstarter is over. You can still get useful info from this post, for when the book comes out.</p> <p>Hello there science fantasy lovers, today I write about <a href="https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/exaltedfuneral/the-ultraviolet-grasslands/">a very successful KS</a> I backed, and I’m very excited about, which is ending in a few days. Here is the breakdown, so you may get excited too ;)</p> <p><strong>When the Long Ago ended and the Now began</strong></p> <blockquote> <p>The Ultraviolet Grasslands (UVG) is a rules-light rpg pointcrawl module inspired by psychedelic heavy metal, the Dying Earth genre, and Oregon Trail games. It takes a group of ‘heroes’ into the depths of a vast and mythic steppe filled with the detritus of time and space and fuzzy riffs.</p> </blockquote> <p>UVG is written and illustrated by Luca Rejec, a multi-talented designer, artist, and writer. You might know him for <a href="https://www.drivethrurpg.com/m/product/256916?affiliate_id=1103911">Witchburner</a>, Deep in the Purple Worm or illustration work he did for <a href="https://www.drivethrurpg.com/m/product/183439?affiliate_id=1103911">Misty Isles of the Eld</a> and <a href="https://www.drivethrurpg.com/m/product/257155?affiliate_id=1103911">What Ho, Frog Demons</a>.</p> <p>You can also <a href="https://bit.ly/ultravioletgrasslands-freeversion1">download a free 78-page sample of the UVG book here</a>.</p> <p><strong>Left End of the Right Road</strong><br /> What immediately drew my attention is very imaginative science fantasy Luca writes. I got all kinds of Moebius vibes while reading it, and they are the best kind of vibes.</p> <p>An old world at the edge of time. Humans of the later eras. Unkept technology and misremembered lore. Journey west into the unknown, and at the end of it all the Black City.</p> <p>One could slot this right at the center of the Ninth World and it would be a fit. <img src="/images/posts/caravan.jpg" alt="Caravan" /> <strong>Emptiness That Kills</strong><br /> This is, in essence, is a caravan game. Players choose their starting links and backgrounds, a travel quest, and off they go. Challenge is that the UV Grasslands are really big. And quite empty. Weeks of travels are needed between locations. The map, which is a playable artifact that players can write on, with all the locations and POIs is about 5 pages long.</p> <p>There are 4 mains constraints around which the gameplay revolves. Time, Inventory, Supplies and Misfortune/Encounters.</p> <p>Party gets a caravan sheet, on which they track all that, plus any henchmen, guards, animals, wagons, and all other expedition equipment they might have.</p> <p>UVG is rules light, descriptive and can be easily ported to any system. After the KS we will write how to use it with Cypher. Here is an example of a creature block:</p> <blockquote> <p><strong>Deathmachine</strong> (HD 6, fast, lasers). Born of a mad ghost’s crucible, this steel and carbon golem has dragged pieces of flesh over its metal skeleton, and used the Ritual Preservation of Living Tissue to keep it from rotting away entirely.</p> </blockquote> <p>Although a survival game, it takes extra care to properly abstract all the stuff that needs book-keeping, so it doesn’t become a bore for the players. A sack of supplies is an abstraction measure for all the food, water, gear, and other bits and pieces a human needs to survive for one week.</p> <p><strong>Ageless Spire of the Only Onager</strong><br /> Book provides great replayability value as well. Each section is full of random tables that you can either roll on or just pick a cool entry.</p> <p>One example is the factions. There are 8 main ones and each has a random table with rumors that give them a unique aspect. This is a clever way of laying out lore, as it allows a GM to suit it to their needs. One GM might take all rumors as canon, but others might roll once or few times on a table and weave a story from few bits of information.</p> <p><strong>Great Biomechanical Baobab</strong><br /> Most of the book is filled with locations and this in itself is a great value proposition in boring speak. They are varied and strange, filled with incredible jewels of imagination.</p> <p>There are 30 main locations and they come with maps, illustrations, weather, points of interests, directions, encounters, hooks, NPCs, mishap tables and what not.</p> <p>Even if you never get to run UVG, one can just open a location and pop it straight into their science fantasy game. It’s that good.</p> <p><strong>Kickstarter</strong><br /> If you got same vibes as I did reading this, check out the <a href="https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/exaltedfuneral/the-ultraviolet-grasslands/">Kickstarter</a>.</p> Tue, 09 Apr 2019 00:00:00 +0000 https://d20.rs/2019/04/09/ultraviolet-grasslands/ https://d20.rs/2019/04/09/ultraviolet-grasslands/ Cypher is OSR <p><strong>Weird Minds Think Alike</strong><br /> These thoughts sat for a long time in my drafts folder. Few days ago I mentioned it on <a href="https://discord.gg/8UAfQwJ">CU Discord</a> chat, and <a href="https://www.patreon.com/ganzagaming">Christopher</a> of Ganza Gaming fame said to me that he too has a draft on exactly the same subject. We shook hands and today you have two posts for your reading pleasure.<a href="https://www.patreon.com/posts/25929620">You can read his take here</a>. Enjoy!</p> <p><strong>My Angle</strong><br /> I am not an old school gamer. I started playing “new school” D&amp;D, Pathfinder and such. From there Numenera &amp; Cypher came into my life, at a point where I was reflecting about my experiences as a player and was struggling to pinpoint all the stuff that was bothering me.</p> <p>Everything clicked into place for me with Cypher. For every word Monte wrote, my brain screamed yes! It was like a cult thing. The world made sense again.</p> <p>And then I discovered the OSR community. The 300 blogs DIY army. Google+ horde. I was smitten by the amount of creativity and love produced and shared day in day out; all the crazy ideas, plots, monsters, locations, and tables. I realized I want to be like them, so the blogging part of my life started. I wanted to be a part of 300 Cypher blogs. To be a part of the Cypher Unlimited Discord horde. This cross-community insight changed my life.</p> <p>Somewhere along I figured out that the connection between these two communities is even more profound. This realization came the first time I read an ancient manuscript that outlined the sentiments of OSR gaming and confirmed when I found other people who think the same.</p> <p>So, let’s dive in and explore all the likenesses and differences between OSR and Cypher. Yes, the title is a clickbait. I am not sorry.</p> <p><strong>Principia Apocrypha</strong></p> <blockquote> <p>Elementary Axioms &amp; Aphorisms On Running &amp; Playing Tabletop RPGs In The Old School Style From Ben Milton &amp; Steven Lumpkin Assembled &amp; Amended By David Perry Illustrated &amp; Illuminated By Evlyn Moreau</p> </blockquote> <p>That was the subtitle. <a href="https://lithyscaphe.blogspot.com/p/principia-apocrypha.html">It’s free to download if you want to read along</a>. It is the best effort summary of OSR, though not the only one but generally held true, good enough for our purposes. Written by Ben Milton, Steven Lumpkin, and David Perry (with Evlyn Moreau).</p> <p><strong>OSR Definition</strong><br /> OSR sometimes struggle to define itself, and I assume because it encompasses a lot of different ideas across a broad spectrum. Booklet offers Ben Milton’s take as the least wrong one:</p> <blockquote> <p>The more of the following a campaign has, the more old school it is: high lethality, an open world, a lack of pre-written plot, an emphasis on creative problem solving, an exploration-centered reward system (usually XP for treasure), a disregard for “encounter balance”, and the use of random tables to generate world elements that surprise both players and referees. Also, a strong do-it-yourself attitude and a willingness to share your work and use the creativity of others in your game.</p> </blockquote> <p>Can you feel it? Straight from the start, we have a lot of overlap such as exploration-centered rewards, disregard for balance encounters, an open world. Some of these are generally true in Cypher, and some might depend on your styles of play, like high lethality and lack of pre-written plots.</p> <p>After a definition booklet gives us a “cardinal rule”:</p> <blockquote> <p>Your Table is Yours</p> </blockquote> <p>If I were to tell you that Monte Cook said this, it would not be a lie. <a href="https://www.montecookgames.com/table-solutions/">Because he did.</a></p> <p>We are already on the right track, so let’s check out some of the principles. I will not go through all as some are just plain ol’ good GM advice.</p> <p><strong>Rulings Over Rules</strong></p> <blockquote> <p>When you encounter a situation that the rules don’t seem to cover, don’t get distracted searching for it. Instead, make a common-sense ruling within the spirit of the game and move on. It doesn’t have to be perfect. Later, if you find there is in fact no rule and it could come up again, make a note of the ruling and apply it consistently.</p> </blockquote> <p>This one might’ve been copied straight from the Cypher books, right? CS is designed from the top to bottom to allow GMs adjudicate using logic.</p> <p><strong>Divest Yourself Of Their Fate</strong><br /> There are two things here, and we find our first difference between Cypher and OSR.</p> <blockquote> <p>As GM … you are not an antagonist to the players or characters. Nor are you an author writing their story. Portray the world and embody its denizens genuinely, as they would react to the characters’ behavior. Don’t set out to tell a story, let one emerge from the characters’ interactions with the world.</p> </blockquote> <p>Cypher supports this principle and although GM can intrude in the story, he is limited as his intrusions can be refused by players.</p> <p>Antagonistic GMs are directly called out in the Cypher as well:</p> <blockquote> <p>GM intrusions are not a way for an adversarial GM to screw over PCs or players. They are not a means of punishing players. They are not the means to make PCs constantly fumble and look like idiots.</p> </blockquote> <p>The main thing that is going on here is to stay impartial, a neutral “referee” has only one option which is to rely on random dice rolls. Cypher recognizes a problem with this; random dice rolls are not equal to fun, or good stories.</p> <blockquote> <p>Don’t randomize fun.</p> </blockquote> <p>You can learn more about this philosophy in this video:</p> <div class="embed-container"> <iframe src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/jKkmpu3uZKQ" width="700" height="480" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen=""> </iframe> </div> <p>Cypher system empowers GMs (and players!) to nudge the story to make it more exciting, interesting or just to make more sense. Mind you this not a hard rule; GM is free to prepare random tables and roll on them if she’s inclined so. It is but an option, a tool available for crafting better stories.</p> <p><strong>Leave Preparation Flexible</strong></p> <blockquote> <p>Don’t prepare a plot for the players to follow.</p> </blockquote> <p>A good, general GM-ing advice. In the words of Justin Alexander: <a href="https://thealexandrian.net/wordpress/4147/roleplaying-games/dont-prep-plots">“Don’t prep plots, prep situations.”</a></p> <blockquote> <p>Don’t overdo the preparation! Keep your situation ideas loose enough that they can be adapted to the PC’s choices and the flow of the game.</p> </blockquote> <p>Above principle is supported directly by CS as an “instant adventure” format. If you ever read <a href="https://www.drivethrurpg.com/m/product/148098?affiliate_id=1103911">Weird Discoveries</a> or <a href="https://www.drivethrurpg.com/m/product/167343?affiliate_id=1103911">Strange Revelations</a>, you know what I mean. (if not get these books, you are missing out big time)</p> <p><strong>Embrace Chaos…</strong></p> <blockquote> <p>Listen to that capricious muse, the dice. Relying only on your own imagination can become exhausting and predictable, and can feel less like a concrete world to the players.</p> </blockquote> <p>Cypher System setting books come with loads of tables. <a href="https://www.drivethrurpg.com/m/product/218646?affiliate_id=110391">Ruin mapping engines</a>, <a href="https://www.drivethrurpg.com/m/product/127774?affiliate_id=1103911">weird things</a>, <a href="https://www.drivethrurpg.com/m/product/124816?affiliate_id=1103911">monster</a> <a href="https://www.drivethrurpg.com/m/product/211086?affiliate_id=1103911">tables</a>, <a href="https://www.drivethrurpg.com/m/product/133608?affiliate_id=1103911">“wondrous items” and artifacts</a>, all kinds of card decks… It’s all there, ready for rolls, but again CS extends this and allows GMs and players to nudge the narrative, in a mechanically sound way, if they choose so.</p> <p><strong>…But Uphold Logic</strong></p> <blockquote> <p>But don’t use random results to the extent that the world feels nonsensical. If there is an obvious choice, consequence, or cause, use it. This can help maintain verisimilitude and let players make reasonable plans. It also emphasizes the surprise and intrigue of the instances of randomness when you do use them. You might also customize random tables to give a more cohesive feel to your game’s setting.</p> </blockquote> <p>Exactly! It’s as it almost says “Don’t randomize fun”. Right?</p> <p><strong>XP For Discovery &amp; Adversity</strong></p> <blockquote> <p>XP-for-treasure is like the fuel of the game’s engine. Player decisions almost always hinge upon it. It’s also an effective control knob. By adjusting the amount of treasure available, you can control the rate of PCs leveling. And you can tailor the focus of your game by adding value to exploring wilderness, saving prisoners, acquiring books, artisanal brewing ingredients, crystallized memories…</p> </blockquote> <p>XP for discovery always made more sense than XP for killing. It is THE standard nowadays. Let’s just pretend it was always like this. It is the only way to get XP in CS apart from GM intrusions.</p> <p><strong>Player Ingenuity Over Character Ability</strong></p> <blockquote> <p>Old school PCs are very minimalistic because the character sheet is mostly there for when players make a mistake. Players are not meant to solve problems with die rolls, but with their own ingenuity. Therefore, present them with problems that don’t require obscure knowledge, have no simple solution, but have many difficult solutions.</p> </blockquote> <p>Personally, I always liked this. In CS this kind of play is regarded as a default driven by how the task resolution works. A player tells the GM what she wants to do. GM adjudicates. Only then the player looks at her sheet to check if there is anything that might help her lower the difficulty of the task, not if she can do or not do a thing.</p> <p><strong>Cleverness Rewarded, Not Thwarted</strong></p> <blockquote> <p>Clever solutions to a problem should usually work, as long as they are within the realm of possibility. Be generous. If the action is unlikely or dangerous, call for a save or ability check, but only forbid a creative solution if it is clearly impossible.</p> </blockquote> <p>Cypher difficulty system directly supports this, it’s how the game is played. Ranging from routine tasks where no roll is needed to the impossible ones, where again no roll is given. Everything in between these two extremes lies in the realm of possibility, and players can try and bring it to reality.</p> <p><strong>Ask Them How They Do It</strong></p> <blockquote> <p>Encourage players to interrogate the fiction of the environment “manually”, asking them to describe the manner in which they interact, rather than eliding their actions via a roll or assumed character ability. You can always grant them a roll for a discovery or insight if they give up.</p> </blockquote> <p>Because in Cypher a roll (if needed) happens last, and before that appropriate pool needs to be selected to determine a cost (if any), the first thing that player needs to do is describe her action. Another out of the box OSR feature, let’s move on!</p> <p><strong>Good Items Are Unique Tools</strong></p> <blockquote> <p>A good tool doesn’t (only) increase PCs’ damage or add an ability bonus; it does an odd, very specific thing that is only powerful when used cleverly. This turns every problem into a puzzle and encourages creative solutions. Just don’t let magic items become superpowers that trivialize every challenge. Give them a downside, an interesting cost, or a chance to deplete each time it is used.</p> </blockquote> <p>Oh, you are talking about the cyphers, ok.</p> <p><strong>Deadly But Avoidable Combat</strong></p> <blockquote> <p>Combat in old school RPGs is often neither balanced nor fair, and PCs should encounter foes far more powerful and numerous than they are. Players should learn to treat combat like real-world warfare and use ingenuity, preparation and underhanded tactics to rig the results in their favor. Encourage the players to outsmart and out- plan their enemies if they want to survive.</p> </blockquote> <p>Now, the deadliness of combat in Cypher can range depending on how you utilize the damage track. Characters can have a big buffer in their pools, but they are always 3 steps from death on the damage track. Some CS games are super deadly, like <a href="https://www.drivethrurpg.com/m/product/223730?affiliate_id=1103911">Vurt</a>, and some just depend on the GM and the tone of the game. One more thing that increases deadlines in CS is that there are no fudging as players roll for everything. Few bad defense rolls can get a character straight from being hale to being dead, in what initially seemed like a harmless situation.</p> <p><strong>Keep Up The Pressure</strong></p> <blockquote> <p>Whether it’s through random encounter rolls when time passes, or because the dungeon is filling with sand, or because a PC will die in 10 turns from poison, keep the players desperate and on a clock. Maintain a tension between the desire to explore and loot, and the terror of remaining too long.</p> </blockquote> <p>As noted above, whether you prepare random tables, or even better use GM Intrusions, Cypher has you covered.</p> <p><strong>Combat As War, Not Sport</strong></p> <blockquote> <p>Don’t expect encounters to be “balanced”. Approach combat with as much trepidation and preparation as you would in real life. Nor are encounters self-contained. Think outside the box, outside the encounter area, outside the dungeon. Think like Sun Tzu. Think laterally or die.</p> </blockquote> <p>There are no challenge ratings in Cypher, and no balancing apart from general guidelines for Tier 1 characters survivability. CS characters that engage in combat have no guarantees of survival whatsoever.</p> <p><strong>Power Is Earned, Heroism Proven</strong></p> <blockquote> <p>Unlike many modern RPGs, your character starts with little power. Your meager means and abilities at first level encourage lateral thinking to get you out of trouble. Rising to a challenge (or fleeing it) means more when their life is on the line.</p> </blockquote> <p>Finally a substantial difference, phew. Cypher characters start the game at Tier 1 which is not your meager Level 1 in D&amp;D speak. They are already accomplished and above average. Think Level 3 or 4 in D&amp;D. This is a conscious design choice by the system, where you start with a couple of abilities and can already accomplish minor heroic things and have fun from the get-go. That being said, the system does not prevent you from starting as a lowly peasant with nothing but pitchforks, for those low fantasy grinds. You don’t even need to hack the system just customize your characters and abilities to suit.</p> <p><strong>Devil is in the Details</strong><br /> Nowadays when people ask me to define Cypher System, I tell them it’s an old school way of play with modern storytelling tools baked right in.</p> <p>Of course, there are a lot of mechanical details we didn’t cover here. Such as redux of stats from classical 6 to 3, spending those stats as pools instead of hit points, static DC numbers, and other innovative mechanics that actually separate Cypher from traditional and old school games. You may or may not like these. They click for some, like me, but seem horrible abominations to others.</p> <p>The sentiment on how the game is played, what is fun and what works is shared with OSR, but mechanically Cypher is a modern system that is not afraid to break the mold and offer a new take on our favorite hobby.</p> Sun, 07 Apr 2019 00:00:00 +0000 https://d20.rs/2019/04/07/osr-cypher/ https://d20.rs/2019/04/07/osr-cypher/ Bestiary 3 Preview <p><strong>Table of Contents</strong><br /> In part 1 of the book, we see all the usual good stuff that we came to expect from the <a href="https://www.drivethrurpg.com/m/product/124816?affiliate_id=1103911">previous</a> <a href="https://www.drivethrurpg.com/m/product/211086?affiliate_id=1103911">bestiaries</a>.</p> <p>Part 2 is interesting with three new sections: “Common Wild and Domesticated Creatures”, “Companion Creatures by Level” and “Mounts”. It will be interesting to see if they will port over companion rules from <a href="https://www.drivethrurpg.com/m/product/214180?affiliate_id=110391">Predation</a>, which I find super fun!</p> <p><strong>Creature Index</strong><br /> The index contains the list of all published so far plus 150 new ones. Let’s count how many new ones there are!</p> <ul> <li>Level 1 - 6</li> <li>Level 2 - 21</li> <li>Level 3 - 30</li> <li>Level 4 - 45</li> <li>Level 5 - 32</li> <li>Level 6 - 21</li> <li>Level 7 - 16</li> <li>Level 8 - 4</li> <li>Level 9 - 4</li> <li>Level 10 - 1</li> </ul> <p>Total here is 180 monsters, so I assume they are not counting the ones already published in other books like <a href="https://www.drivethrurpg.com/m/product/214180?affiliate_id=110391">Predation</a>, <a href="https://www.drivethrurpg.com/m/product/218646?affiliate_id=110391">Jade Colossus</a> and other supplements.</p> <p>During the counting, I noticed a lot of dinosaurs added and creatures marked as megafauna. A quick check later and yes, we are getting dinosaurs from Predation!</p> <p>Apart from dinos, I spotted a couple of familiar names as well. <strong>Trilling titan</strong> and <strong>Awakened relic</strong> are two examples. I like the fact that creatures across the books are getting compiled. One might not have all the supplements, and if you want just creatures, all you need are the Bestiaries.</p> <p><strong>Creatures</strong><br /> There are six creatures presented in the preview, and they are as imaginative and horrific as expected from the weird brains at MCG. Sometimes I wonder how these people sleep at nights.</p> <p>Each has a large image, a layout improvement that came with <a href="https://www.drivethrurpg.com/m/product/240654?affiliate_id=1103911">Discovery</a> and <a href="https://www.drivethrurpg.com/m/product/240655?affiliate_id=1103911">Destiny</a>. MCG is improving their presentation with each new book they publish. Sidebars are useful as always with links to other books and filled with GM Intrusions.</p> <p>Something I also like is how lore and mechanics are weaved into the creature descriptions. Just in these six examples, I found mentions of installations, iron wind, midnight stones, mutations, salvaging and Lattimore. They genuinely feel as a part of the Ninth World, however strange that sentiment might sound.</p> <p>If I were to pick a favorite, it’s the <strong>Mego</strong>. An absolutely terrifying monstrosity. A bastard child of A Quiet Place and Annihilation.</p> <p><strong>Mounts</strong><br /> In this section are listed types of mounts and a rarity table. It looks useful, a go-to place whenever characters require mounts. It lists areas where specific mounts can be found.</p> <p><strong>Conclusion</strong><br /> This little preview shows that MCG is continuing to spoil us with top quality content, and still somehow manage to up the ante with each new book they publish. If I find Predation companion rules in the full book, I will jump from joy, and if not, I will continue to pretend they are a Numenera canon.</p> <p>You can download a free preview or preorder this book at <a href="https://www.montecookgames.com/ninth-world-bestiary-3/">MCG Webstore</a></p> Thu, 04 Apr 2019 00:00:00 +0000 https://d20.rs/2019/04/04/ninth-world-bestiary-3/ https://d20.rs/2019/04/04/ninth-world-bestiary-3/ GM Intrusions <p><strong>Narrative Tails</strong><br /> Let’s quickly cover the basics and establish a good point of reference. High Lord and Savior, Father Monte says this:</p> <blockquote> <p>GM intrusion is the main mechanic that the GM uses to inject drama and additional excitement into the game.</p> </blockquote> <p>In the <a href="https://www.drivethrurpg.com/m/product/128960?affiliate_id=1103911">“Taking the Narrative by the Tail”</a> glimmer, narrative nature is further emphasized:</p> <blockquote> <p>The GM intrusion is motivated solely by making the story more interesting.</p> </blockquote> <p>We also get a clear signal on what they are not:</p> <blockquote> <p>GM intrusions are not a way for an adversarial GM to screw over PCs or players. They are not a means of punishing players. They are not the means to make PCs constantly fumble and look like idiots.</p> </blockquote> <p><strong>GMIs &amp; Player Agency</strong><br /> Reading the rules, you will find that the matter of a player being able to react to the intrusion or not is left open. Both are viable options, and choosing one depends on the situation and story needs.</p> <p>From practice, I can tell you that there are players sensitive when GM removes their agency, not allow a saving throw in old speak. If this is true for your table make sure that your GMIs always leave room for a reaction (defense) roll. As a rule of thumb, you should allow a reaction roll every time a target of the intrusion is a character pool, damage track or any kind of status effects. Think: falling, getting poisoned, getting smashed, teleported, eaten, dimensioned and other horrible stuff that might impact the character in a major way. GM always have an opportunity to apply states and effects directly without a reaction rolls, when fumbles occur, if narratively appropriate.</p> <p>Further, some may be yucky to the meta nature of the mechanic, and complain how something that comes from GM suddenly vanishes if refused. If you have old grizzled vets like that at your table, make sure that your intrusions have an in-game reason to disappear if refused. This is of course assuming GM tells what is an intrusion before the player accepts, which we discuss further down the article.</p> <p>With two problems described above here is an example (simplified) of a none meta, agency friendly GM intrusion:</p> <p><strong>GM</strong> (holds 2XP): Past the corner, a group of bandits suddenly show up on the road ahead. They don’t seem to spot you yet. (this last part is essential as it allows a reaction)</p> <p><strong>Player</strong> (takes XP): I signal the party to stop and disperse before I jump into the ditch by the road to hide. (rolls SPEED)</p> <p><strong>GM:</strong> You hide in time, bandits pass you without noticing.</p> <p>Same example intrusion refused:</p> <p><strong>GM</strong> (holds 2XP): Past the corner, a group of bandits suddenly show up on the road ahead. They don’t seem to spot you yet.</p> <p><strong>Player</strong> (hands over 1XP): No thank you, evil!</p> <p><strong>GM:</strong> In that one moment you thought you were toast, but fortunately they took a turn left and went the other way, without noticing you. You sweep the sweat from your forehead and kiss your lucky charm. (look ma, no meta!)</p> <p>Apart from being meta-player-friendly, this intrusion example introduces the “wandering monster” into the scene at the most appropriate moment (GM hopes). I might have prepared a table with random encounters, but using GMI, I can quickly pick one that fits the scene best. As Father Monte likes to say: “Don’t randomize the fun, my dear child. The chaos will come from within.”</p> <p><strong>Complications vs. Plot</strong><br /> Sometimes players complicate situations for themselves, no GM needed. Once I was asked what is the difference between a plot/scenario and a complication?</p> <p><img src="/images/posts/consequences.jpg" alt="Consequences" /></p> <p>The trick here is to be transparent with players how their actions affect the world they interact with. They pissed off the king, and sure he will send his guards after them, but at which point exactly will the guards catch up with the party, is the scope of the narrative that the intrusion will handle the best.</p> <p>PCs killed someone? Detectives will show up in exactly the GMI time on their doorsteps, asking questions.</p> <p>That merchant they robbed? His brother is the guy who has the information they need desperately. What a small world.</p> <p>Boy they saved? His father is the High Lord, it turns out.</p> <p><strong>Deepening the Narrative</strong><br /> Usually, the target of the intrusion needs to handle the complication, but let’s switch things up a bit.</p> <p><strong>GM:</strong> Arrows start zipping around you, it seems they are coming from your left, what do you do?</p> <p><strong>Bruce:</strong> I take cover behind the pillar.</p> <p><strong>GM</strong> (offers 2XP to Diana but talks to Bruce): You peek around the pillar and see that archer has Diana in sight. Diana has no time to react. What do you do?</p> <p>Here we came up with a complication for Diana and offered her 2XP, but the reaction is on Bruce as Diana has no time to act. We created additional tension in the scene where players need to extend their team play in order to tackle offered complication. Will Bruce react and jump to save Diana, or not? Will Diana pass that 1 XP to him if he does it or not? We’ve set the scene up and posed an interesting question that players need to answer. Their actions may bond their characters or affect them negatively. Either way, we are deepening the narrative.</p> <p><strong>Tell or no Tell</strong><br /> There were discussions on whether a GM should announce the specifics of the intrusion or not, but I am not sure if the community arrived at any conclusion or consensus, god forbid. I actually do both, depending on a few factors.</p> <p>When I want to “sell” an intrusion to players, I tell. I want to “sell” an intrusion every time I feel strongly about it. When I really feel it will enrich the narrative and need my players on board. I might even up the ante and do a group intrusion, which is more costly for the group to refuse.</p> <p>I don’t tell when I just want to tease a player or have an intrusion which is not that important for the narrative, but might be a fun twist that happens. I also don’t tell intrusions that if refused I might re-use later on, the general purpose ones.</p> <p>So if it’s a specific story thing, that revolves around a player narrative or a scene, I like to tell and get players excited, but if it’s a regular off the mill intrusion that can be re-used, I don’t say, only tease by waving <a href="https://www.drivethrurpg.com/m/product/156919?affiliate_id=1103911">the XP cards</a>.</p> <p>You might also be in a situation where players have a high level of trust in you and your narrative style, that you don’t need to say it, as you know that they are on board with your GM-ing ways, and tend to accept them most of the time.</p> <p><strong>Tracking Things with GMIs</strong><br /> Another great use is that we can delegate most of the tracking to GMIs. No need to worry if your players are tracking ammo count. Wait for that critical shot, that crucial moment where a hit is a matter of life and death. Of course, there is only one bullet left. It’s just good storytelling.</p> <p>If you are not playing a survival game, tracking food and water is a bore most of the time. Wait for that perfect opportunity to jump scare their mounts, and off they go with all of the supplies. I swear there is one such scene in every book I read.</p> <p>Are the characters encumbered? It’s probably not crucial until dragon gives chase, and they need to run for their lives and also carry all that gold they stole from him. Now that is an exciting complication - will they don the gold to save their lives, or the greed will be the end of them?</p> <p>The initiative mechanic is also one of the things I solve with GMIs. Who goes first? Well, if I want to surprise attack my players, that is a GMI right there, else they always go first. If I want to interrupt their order - GMI. If I feel that the monster action economy will turn the encounter short and bland - group GMI for some extra special attacks to spice up that encounter.</p> <p><strong>Using GMIs at the Table</strong><br /> The main problem I had when starting out with Cypher was to remember to use GMIs. Here are a couple of tricks that will ease that task.</p> <p><a href="https://www.drivethrurpg.com/m/product/151765?affiliate_id=1103911">Buy and use GMI deck</a> for those games where you are low on inspiration. Just flip a card, and you are good to go. The deck covers combat, social interactions, and miscellaneous situations. Cards are color-coded, so you always know from which pile to pull a card.</p> <p>Start each session with a GMI. Matt Colville once said that the hardest thing for him is that moment where he needs to move from friendly chat to the start of the session. I do it by grabbing a <a href="https://www.drivethrurpg.com/m/product/156919?affiliate_id=1103911">handful of XP</a> and hand them over to the players. Oh, you can bet your shins that everyone immediately shuts up and starts looking at their sheets.</p> <p>This is a great way to start the game on a positive note and get players interacting with the world, without that slight awkwardness when shifting from reality to fantasy.</p> <p><strong>Player Intrusions</strong><br /> This great addition came as a part of <a href="https://www.drivethrurpg.com/m/product/240654?affiliate_id=1103911">Numenera Discovery</a>, where each type has a couple of options for intruding into the story for 1XP. If you have problems with players hoarding XP for character advancement, this along with other options for short and mid-term XP spending should hopefully sort the problem. Additionally, I recommend you print all XP spending options and have it available at the table, as an incentive.</p> <p>Here is one more trick you can use for those tier hungry folks. Allow your players to spend XP to activate a higher tier ability. I stole this idea from <a href="https://misdirectedmark.com/category/podcasts/cypherspeak/">Cypher Speak podcast</a>, make sure to check them out, Darcy and Troy are full of wicked idea gems.</p> <p><strong>XP Economy</strong><br /> Heed these words of warning: Do not offer more than 2 XP for a GMI, as you will set an expectation that the amount is negotiable. As a GM you will lose out on that in the long run, which will make you do fewer intrusions, which in turn will screw up your XP economy. Stick to the fixed price of 2XP.</p> <p>Four GMIs per session is a recommended amount by Monte. Make sure to keep that XP flowing, as you don’t want to create an inflation of XP value (by scarcity). Inflation will lead players to hoard XP, spending it only on Tier advancements. Players should get 2 to 4 XP per session.</p> <p>Let me know in the comments about cool ways and techniques you use intrusions in your own games.</p> Wed, 03 Apr 2019 00:00:00 +0000 https://d20.rs/2019/04/03/GM-Intrusions/ https://d20.rs/2019/04/03/GM-Intrusions/ A Breath of Fresh Air 2 - Fungicide <p><strong>Previously</strong><br /> Badooks swarm forces the players to enter a giant automaton they manage to summon from the depths of the Rift. Nano dies after he activates a time reset cypher.</p> <p><strong>Complications</strong><br /> I mentioned last time that one of the players missed the first session and that I “left” him in the “village” near the Rift. In the meantime, I got a new player, a Glaive as well, that was supposed to join us in the second session.</p> <p>I was low on ideas on what to do with two Glaives outside of the adventure. Badooks siege came to mind. Fortunately, Janek gave me an excellent idea: “Just give him a cypher that can teleport them into the Golem.”</p> <p>Oh, you can bet your shins that such a thing already exists: <a href="https://www.drivethrurpg.com/m/product/133608?affiliate_id=1103911">Teleporter (Mass) Level 3</a>. I loosened up a bit some restrictions on the cypher text, and the new player was good to go.</p> <p><strong>The Prep</strong><br /> The reason why I spoke with Janek was that the interior of the automaton lacked vivid descriptions. I wondered if he used any handouts. He didn’t so I chose to use some of the Deadspace concept <a href="https://www.pinterest.com/pin/138345019789220977/">art</a> I <a href="https://www.pinterest.com/pin/138345019789220968/">found</a> <a href="https://www.pinterest.com/pin/138345019789220965/">appropriate</a>. Amazing works of Jason Courtney.</p> <p>I also decided against adding more rooms to the Automaton, as I didn’t feel it would add any meaningful impact to play.</p> <p><strong>Descent</strong><br /> The descent was a change of pace, from desperate battle to the careful exploration humdrum.</p> <p>I opened up the scene with a GMI when the giant moved, and everyone had to roll SPEED to grab onto something, most of them failing. The new Glaive got teleported mid-air and suffered a ten points damage fall.</p> <p>I wanted to open up with a bang, but the scene also served as a great reminder on why exactly they can’t explore the interiors while the giant is on the move.</p> <p>Glaive that was missing from the last session didn’t show up for this one either. The new Glaive though “met” him in the village, and got briefed on the situation, which gave him enough of info for the teleport action.</p> <p>By the time they landed on the bottom, the party had explored all of the main rooms and got a good grasp on how the Colossus works.</p> <p><strong>Fungoids</strong><br /> While this was the part I was most excited for, it turned out to be a challenge, and I am afraid I didn’t do it justice.</p> <p>Fleeing from the swarm above, players reacted negatively to the appearance of yet another endless proceeds of alien creatures.</p> <p>I started with communication attempts, and although players figured it out - sending emotions back and forth, there was no real attempt to further this communication.</p> <p>The toxic environment outside didn’t help, so they stuck to the insides of the Golem.</p> <p>With rising tension and lack of ideas (and air) on how to progress, they finally decided to wake up Roh’dak-tun. Once he was done with his spiel and they learned the history and truth about the Fungoids, players chose to terminate him straight away, reasoning he might pose a threat to their plans. A fight ensued, and after a couple of rounds, he was dead again.</p> <p>A new plan was formulated, to repair the escape pods, and GTFO.</p> <p>It was not that simple though, and they had to fight off five waves of Fungi warriors, while un-stucking the pods. Escape pod working again, they managed to loot the control room for an artifact and launched themselves out of the abyss.</p> <p><strong>Conclusion</strong><br /> Players were generally satisfied with the experience, though not with the amount of loot they got away with. They spent a significant amount of cyphers and ended up with two artifacts and 2-4 XP each.</p> <p>I on the other side was left with a bitter taste in my mouth, as I felt I failed to bring about that last part of the adventure into play. For any future runs, I will need to revise my approach on the emotional communication part.</p> <p>I will finish this review with words from one of the players: “Although I was aware, it never felt like we were playing through a written module. It felt organic and logical throughout.”</p> <p>Definitely worth a buy, make sure to <a href="https://www.drivethrurpg.com/m/product/207703?affiliate_id=1103911">grab this gem on DTRPG</a>.</p> Sun, 24 Mar 2019 00:00:00 +0000 https://d20.rs/2019/03/24/a-breath-of-fresh-air-part-two/ https://d20.rs/2019/03/24/a-breath-of-fresh-air-part-two/ A Breath of Fresh Air Review Part I <p>When Janek reached me about writing a review for <a href="https://www.drivethrurpg.com/m/product/207703?affiliate_id=1103911">one of his books</a>, I realized that I already own most of his <a href="https://www.drivethrurpg.com/m/product/203852?affiliate_id=1103911">Numenera</a> <a href="https://www.drivethrurpg.com/m/product/226759?affiliate_id=1103911">supplements</a>, but read none. What can I say, I’m a Cypher System hoarder, and there are no cypher limits on my sheet.</p> <p>Apart from “preview reviews” I did for <a href="https://d20.rs/2019/02/19/priests-of-aeons/">Priests of the Aeons</a> and <a href="https://d20.rs/2019/02/19/slaves-of-the-machine-god/">Slaves of the Machine God</a>, which I did out of boredom and for fun, I never thought about writing reviews on this blog, and never even imagined someone might request one. Flattered, I accepted the challenge.</p> <p><strong>The Deal</strong><br /> I feel that a good review needs a playthrough as well, so I asked my group if they would like to do a short campaign break and play the module for the purpose of this article. I originally planned to do it outside of their world, but players insisted I weave it into their ongoing narrative.</p> <p>This decision created a couple of problems for me. The first one is that they have an airship, which automatically breaks the adventure, a story about a descent into an abyss, that puts a moral decision at the core of the question of how will the characters ascend back up. The second one is that they just came out of a heist with a mother-load of iotum and quite a number of ideas on what to do with it. The only good thing was that they just got to Tier 2 for which this module is written.</p> <p>But let me first introduce the adventure, before I tell you how I tackled these initial problems.</p> <p><strong>A Breath of Fresh Ideas</strong><br /> This Numenera/Cypher System supplement is written by a long-standing Cypher System author <a href="https://twitter.com/janek_sielicki">Janek Sielicki</a>, who also writes 5E modules. My first impression, when I opened the PDF, was that it follows well-established MCG standards of laying out what’s a book about, with first few pages dedicated to story background, synopsis and several ideas on how to get players involved.</p> <p>These are immediately useful and provide a necessary context needed for further reading and understanding of the material.</p> <p>Rest of the book is divided into six scenes, which is something I also like, as I tend to think in scenes when running my games. If we were to think in arcs the book has three:</p> <ul> <li>Initial, against the odds, fight that acts as a narrative tool to get the players to enter a prior world structure.</li> <li>Descent and an exploration of the prior world structure.</li> <li>Dealing with an alien species and figuring out how to ascend back.</li> </ul> <p>I like this structure very much. It starts with a bang, which my players enjoyed immensely, switches into an exploration mode, then turns up the weird to eleven introducing the “aliens”, all the while slowly weaving a seed of a burden, that hits the players head on in the final act</p> <p>The brilliant thing is that although the players are forced in and for some time trapped at the bottom of an abyss, final act opens up imposing a well thought out moral choice upon players, at which point it lets them free.</p> <p>With no prescribed ending, no boss fight (optional though), it turns the standard adventure structure on its head, leaving players to deal with the morality of their past and future decisions.</p> <p>Janek masterfully ends the book with these words:</p> <blockquote> <p>“This adventure is about making tough choices, about becoming better – or worse. It is a journey to an alien world, one that doesn’t have to be, one that perhaps can’t be fully understood, weighed and counted. It’s about making sacrifices for no tangible rewards. I hope you and your players have enjoyed it! “</p> </blockquote> <p><strong>The Prep</strong><br /> On the game day, I took a couple of hours to prep and wrote about 5 pages, covering scenes one, two and three, and printed out several handouts.</p> <p>That night we managed to play through scenes one and two, albeit twice, but more on that later on. <img src="/images/posts/prep.jpg" alt="Prep Sheet" /></p> <p><strong>Flashbacks</strong><br /> First thing I needed to figure out was how to take away the ship from the players and the loot it carries. As I already had their agreement to play this module, I decided to heavy-hand it and jump them through space and time, straight into the adventure.</p> <p>I started from scene one and used flashbacks to explain how they got there and why.</p> <p>Reason for that is if I was to start them with a hook, knowing they have a ship full of loot, they would take their sweet ass time to poke around the edges of the adventure, looking for a risk-averse way to engage with it. Time which they have in their sandbox-style campaign, but a time I didn’t want to allow here, as I wanted to run this as intended, for the purpose of writing an honest review. Not to mention that my group consists of professional derailers, who enjoy breaking up premises and turning the world on its head, wrecking chaos wherever they go.</p> <p>One of the said players, a Nano, recently mentioned to me that he would like to do one honest heroic thing, not burning any aldeias to the ground in the process, if possible. So for him, a hook about saving missing children that went to investigate the Rift was a perfect choice. A hook that he found he “accepted” through a flashback scene, of course. The second player, a Wright, is a sucker for prior world stuff, the bigger the better, so a mere rumor of a giant automaton, was all it took. With these two settled, third player, a Delve, would just follow along.</p> <p>I was relieved at play to find these flashback hooks worked really well, players were on board with them, although I did take their agency away. This would not be possible had I not known my players well, and without their blank approval to run this adventure for them.</p> <p>The ship stayed at the nearby (made up) village, as during their recon mission (another flashback), they found out the fumes coming out of the Rift negatively impact it’s flight abilities, and decided not to risk it falling into an abyss. This went well and served a secondary purpose for storing an absent Glaive character, whose player couldn’t make it to the session that night.</p> <p>For GMs who would run this adventure in a standard fashion, there are several things to consider:</p> <ul> <li>The adventure will not work if characters have any kind of flying/teleport means or abilities. The book states this up front.</li> <li>You need to remove any flying/teleport cyphers from play.</li> <li>If you have a Wright and/or a Delve in the group as I have, make sure that they don’t find or possess highest level materials that allow for creating any kind of flying artifacts or vehicles.</li> <li>Once the players take the hook, whatever it might be, in the first scene they need to realize that the only way to survive is to activate the portal and go down the abyss.</li> </ul> <p>These points are super important, and if you don’t take them into an account your players will either break the adventure or die horribly.</p> <p><strong>Play Report Scene 1</strong><br /> Janek’s writing is top notch and very easy to create scenes from. I used his words as a starter for my first scene, as written:</p> <blockquote> <p>“Wind howls among the long-forgotten burial mounds, old yellow bones dot the reddish ground and up ahead hot air shimmers and twists as clouds of hot fumes rise from the Rift, as if some gigantic beast was hidden in the prehistoric depths, slowly breathing and waiting for the right moment to wake up. “</p> </blockquote> <p>I switched between present time and flashbacks as soon as any of the players asked something along the lines of: “Why we are here?” “Where is the ship?” and so on…</p> <p>I framed the initial scene so that Delve was keeping their backs safe while Nano and Wright were trying to activate the portal that leads to the Rift. Originally it was supposed to be Glaive who kept the threat at bay, so this was the first thing I had to improv that night.</p> <p><strong>Swarm of Troubles</strong><br /> Badooks are the main early threat that forces players down the Rift. They are essentially a Zerg swarm. I statted them as suggested in the book, and they work. Weaklings are easy to kill but come in greater numbers and are an annoyance, while Warriors are a threat to Tier 2 players. The Matriarch, stats as a Tyrannosaurus Rex however, is a walking TPK machine.</p> <p>Although the Glaive was missing that night, I decided against tweaking the challenge levels.</p> <p><strong>A Puzzle for a Life</strong><br /> While Delve was keeping initial, light Badook waves in check, Nano and Wright were trying to activate the portal, knowing it is their only chance to save themselves from the surrounding swarm.</p> <p>The “portal”, actually a device that summons a giant automaton from the depths of the chasm, is a simple two INT tasks puzzle. If I was running the adventure from an actual hook, I would’ve expanded a bit on it to make it more engaging. I did plan to print out some cabalistic symbols as a handout but forgot to.</p> <p>Wright and Nano easily passed two required INT checks, activated the summon, and symbols on the device changed into a Predator-style countdown - unknown symbols apparently counting down to something. At that point first, unexpected, player curveball happened. Nano asked if he can decipher the symbols to figure out how much time it will take for the counter to reach “zero”. And I said yes.</p> <p>Knowing that the countdown time is not stated in the book, that I need to introduce the Matriarch to the scene, and keep the pressure rising, it was the first difficult, on the fly decision I had to make that night. I decided from my gut, and said to the player, once he succeeded on this INT task, that the counter will stop after 3 or 4 rounds.</p> <p>This proved to be a good call, although I had to introduce the Matriarch before the giant came up, as opposed to the book, which introduces the Matriarch in the same instance when the automaton appears. Rising tension of the creeping swarm kept the players engaged, adrenalin levels going through the roof.</p> <p>Delve who retreated back towards his comrades gave his buzzer to the Wright so he too could shoot at the encroaching Badooks from a range. At his first attack attempt, Wright rolled a 1, which made all his disc ammunition spill to the ground. The significance of this scene will come about later, so read on!</p> <blockquote> <p>“The mists boil over and the earth begins to shake, responding to the rhythmical strikes. A gargantuan arm emerges from behind the edge, trailing wisps of mist marking its trajectory, and then with a mighty crash the hand comes down, splattering the hapless Badooks that didn’t manage to get away. Slowly, inexorably, the rest of the mountainlike construct heaves its arms and upper body over the edge, the claws on its hands anchoring deep into the rockbed…”</p> </blockquote> <p><strong>King of Golems</strong><br /> As the construct emerged from the depths, Wright decided to role play his mechanical background. While everyone scuttled around trying to avoid getting crushed by a giant hand, he was in a weird Numenera frenzy ecstasy, sitting at the top of the summoning flower-stone, believing Golem to be his to command.</p> <p>Earth shook as the hand smashed next to him, and I had him roll SPEED task not to fall off the structure. He rolled major success, and things started to get weird from this point.</p> <p>Nano decided to join this craziness, by trying to hack into Wrights mind telepathically and stop his self imposed frenzy. After one failed attempt, they both got the same number on their opposing rolls and got stuck in this ill-timed battle of the minds.</p> <p>At this point the swarm is on top of them, Delve standing at the Automaton entrance, trying to fend off the swarm, not believing what the other two are doing. He picks up a shin from his pocket and tries to hit the Wright with it a couple of times, but Wright is on the roll, and both attempts to awake him fail.</p> <p>Nano manages to flick a cypher bomb into the swarm that buys them a few rounds. When telepathy fails, a good slap across the face does the job, and Wright finally back to his senses, manages a stellar battle retreat through the frenzied swarm, and the whole party, badly damaged is finally in the construct’s head, together with at least a dozen of Badooks that disperse into the darkness of the machine.</p> <p>As the entrance slowly closes up, the Matriarch manages to sweep through the opening with one of her giant claws. Delve manages to avoid the devastating attack, Wright fails and drops to debilitated state with only a few INT points left. Nano, thin across all three pools, realizes his destiny, and instead of a defense task, he tosses the Reset cypher over to Delve, and dies a heroic death, going straight from hale to dead.</p> <p><strong>The Reset</strong><br /> I knew they had the Reset, a cypher that once activated, resets the time 5 minutes into the past, with only the user retaining memories of that prior future. I just did not expect they would use it in the opening scene!</p> <p>I was not exactly sure where are 5 minutes in the past at that point, so I chose the most narratively appropriate solution:</p> <blockquote> <p>“Wind howls among the long-forgotten burial mounds, old yellow bones dot the reddish ground and up ahead hot air shimmers and twists as clouds of hot fumes rise from the Rift, as if some gigantic beast was hidden in the prehistoric depths, slowly breathing and waiting for the right moment to wake up. “</p> </blockquote> <p>We go back to the very beginning of the night, and I repeat the opening scene word for word, exactly as I did it at the start of the session. Players are ecstatic and I am super happy, as these kinds of awesome crazy stuff can happen only in the Cypher System!</p> <p><strong>The Dice Gods</strong><br /> Our Delve now hurries back to his mates, not wasting any time, and tries to persuade them he saw the future. Nano seeing his Reset used up realizes Delve is telling the truth. He also scans his surface thoughts, only to find out about his own gruesome death.</p> <p>One of the most sublime scenes of the night happened at this point. Delve, as before, hands over the buzzer to the Wright, who tries to shoot at the Badooks, and rolls a 1. Again. I play the same intrusion as the first time, his ammo spills to the ground.</p> <p>The table erupts as our collective minds get blown to pieces.</p> <p>Knowing what the future brings, this time they managed to deal with the swarm more efficiently, and finally, enter the construct without major problems. Giant’s head closes up, a shudder shakes the interior and the thing begins its slow descent into the abyss.</p> <p>I end the session.</p> <p>Calaval’s eyes, what a night! When dice meet the narrative, peak RPG experience happens. It was so sublime that I dreamt about the session that night.</p> <p><strong>Closing Thoughts</strong><br /> This first part of the adventure is a bit railroady, as the adventure needs to trap the players in order to do its thing. Towards that goal, however, the setup works really well, and tension was building up throughout the night.</p> <p>As I already mentioned there are several important prerequisites that need to be met in order for the story to work as a whole. Because of that, I feel that it’s easier to run this as a standalone mini-scenario, compared to plopping it somewhere in your ongoing campaign. Requirements would also be a non-issue if the adventure was made for Tier 1 characters - no need to worry about flying that way.</p> <p><strong>Coming Soon</strong><br /> Next session we will be playing the second arc where characters are exploring the Automaton. This, in essence, is a mini point-crawl between 5 locations. Here are some thoughts I had while preparing this part:</p> <ul> <li>Decent lasts several hours, so I will need to manage time more closely.</li> <li>There is not much in it besides these 5 locations, so just in case I will prepare some additional rooms using <a href="https://www.drivethrurpg.com/m/product/218646?affiliate_id=1103911">Jade Colossus</a> mapping engine.</li> <li>I will need to track how much damage characters will do to it, as that will come into play in the third act.</li> <li>As this part will be somewhat calmer than the first one, I need to remember to shake them up when the Colossus is on the move.</li> <li>Aliens introduction scene is important, needs a good prep.</li> </ul> <p>One thing that I am looking for to play with is the innovative communication mechanic, I didn’t mention here, but will write more about in the second part. “Aliens” communicate via emotions, so that will be a really interesting challenge for the players. Adventure provides a list of emotions states spread across three columns on two pages - there are a lot of them. Unfortunately for me, I will need to translate this list, as my group is not playing in English.</p> <p>So far this adventure was a breath of fresh air (sorry not sorry) to my little group of slying seskii. What will happen next, only Calaval knows.</p> Fri, 08 Mar 2019 00:00:00 +0000 https://d20.rs/2019/03/08/a-breath-of-fresh-air-part-one/ https://d20.rs/2019/03/08/a-breath-of-fresh-air-part-one/ Maintenance Rolls <p>The first problem I have is that in the whole first season, of which the ship was present for the half of it, weekly depletion roll came up only once. Yeah, it was an action-packed season.</p> <p>Second thing, as I have a Wright and a Delve at the table, I am using Destiny rules. In Destiny, Depleted state counts as a Major Object Damage (page 123), which is a whopping 50% of time and difficulty of original crafting requirement and requires the highest level iotum replacement.</p> <p>So it happens rarely but when it does, it’s crushing. I would like to change that, but what do I want to achieve exactly?</p> <p><strong>Design Goals</strong><br /> First I would like to recreate situations from SW, Firefly or Cowboy Bebop, where characters have to do constant maintenance on their rust buckets, which in turn creates interesting situations and decisions they need to make.</p> <p>I would also like a more gradual degradation system so I can have classic tropes from when a car won’t start at the worst possible time, all the way to scenes where it just stops dead in the middle of nowhere.</p> <p>I would like to have ongoing maintenance cost that, if not paid, will influence the type of damage ship might take due to negligence. This should be an interesting resource management type of play, in the same sense players already have with stat pools.</p> <p>In the end, I am hoping this will give the ship a certain character, or charm, similarly how Millennium Falcon has one.</p> <p>What I don’t want is to complicate rules too much, but stay in line with Cypher System design philosophy.</p> <p><strong>What can we play with</strong> <br /> Let’s check the rules and see what can we play with. I already mentioned object damage states. These are Disabled, Minor, Major and Destroyed. Depleted is same as Major. These look granular enough, so I want to use them as they are.</p> <p>Next thing that is important is a depletion roll itself. I used “Flyer” plan specification (p. 174) for my airship, which states a Depletion Roll of 1 in d20 once a week.</p> <p>What are the other depletion ranges though? I found those listed on page 113 : 1 in d100, 1 in d20, 1 in d10 and 1 in d6, not counting automatic depletion and no depletion options.</p> <p>When we look at these from a probability perspective they actually have a nice range: 1%, 5%, 10% and 17% chance of depletion.</p> <p><strong>Putting it all together</strong><br /> So if my Flyer starts with 1-d20 (5%), a properly maintained state, on a depletion roll I can assign Disabled state and degrade the depletion dice to 1-d10 (10%). 1-d10 depletion would trigger Minor Damage and degrade the dice further to 1-d6(17%). 1-d6 depletion would finally cause Major Damage. I don’t want depletion to destroy the vehicle so we don’t use that state.</p> <p>Repairing the damage caused by depletion will not upgrade the dice unless maintenance cost is factored into the repair.</p> <p>I degrade dice on purpose here, as these depletion rolls are already in the game so I don’t have to worry about the statistical impact (much). The Second benefit is that I can use one set of dice with a distinct color to represent maintenance status, so no need to keep track of depletion ranges if I were to use only one dice and just increase depletion range.</p> <p>The Hard part is figuring out the time interval. I noted that weekly roll did not work in the first season, but I don’t actually know if the second one will be action-packed as the first one. This is something that I will need to playtest. For start, I will set it to daily roll and see how it goes.</p> <p><strong>Maintenance task</strong><br /> I read somewhere that luxury yachts upkeep is about 10% of the total cost, so that looks like a good base for the maintenance cost in iotum.</p> <p>Maintenance task is a craft task. It takes one or more hours to finish. Difficulty is the level of the vehicle. Required iotum is 10% of total vehicle plan iotum. Which for a Flyer would be:</p> <ul> <li>io (1d6) - I will leave this as a roll</li> <li>Responsive Synth - 1 unit</li> <li>Synth Steel - 1 unit</li> <li>Parts - 6 units</li> </ul> <p>For now, this looks good as a rule of thumb, but will need some playtesting to get right.</p> <p>This task can be done when the ship is landed and charging. Once the task is done the dice is upgraded to next better size. I will also use charging time to roll depletion die, so that way I have only one daily thing to track. Die is rolled after any maintenance task is done.</p> <p>Problem here is what to do with a maintenance when the die is d20? We can assume that players will want to have the ship in a tip top shape. Does that mean that d20 can’t be degraded, and how often should they do the task in order to keep it tip top?</p> <p>I will start with this: If maintenance is done daily when die is d20, on a depletion roll there is no degradation to d10.</p> <p>On a fail roll or if there is not enough iotum, die is not upgraded, and in case of d20 it can degrade on 1.</p> <p><strong>Depletion Damage</strong><br /> One other complication I have is that the ship has various subsystems that are artifacts on their own. Think med-bay, ship core, sensors, weapons and other upgrades to the ship that players install.</p> <p>For now I plan to roll randomly to see which subsystem is affected once the depletion number comes up, which means they come into play only if a damage status is applied and use repair rules stated in that table.</p> <p><strong>To Playtest</strong><br /> It feels a bit clunky at the moment, maybe to complicated but I think there is a good system hiding in there somewhere. A list of things to playtest:</p> <ul> <li>Depletion timing - daily, weekly, on usage?</li> <li>Maintenance cost - 10% might be too cheap or to expensive, maybe some better system comes up to determine the cost</li> <li>Is this engaging to players? Is this a meaningful choice or just a ship tax?</li> <li>Should I just use d20 and increase the depletion range?</li> <li>Should I scale the maintenance cost in iotum depending on the ship depletion die?</li> </ul> <p>Let me know what you think about this little hack. Once I playtest it, I will update the post with further thoughts and ideas.</p> <p>Look at your car now. Oh no, the engine light is on! //hands out 2XP</p> Thu, 28 Feb 2019 00:00:00 +0000 https://d20.rs/2019/02/28/maintenance-rolls/ https://d20.rs/2019/02/28/maintenance-rolls/ Slaves of the Machine God by Bruce R. Cordell (preview review) <p>UPDATE: <a href="https://www.drivethrurpg.com/m/product/264882?affiliate_id=1103911">The book is now released</a>. This review is based on a free preview that is available for download.</p> <p><strong>Table of Contents</strong><br /> Straight from the start, we can see that this book will have two parts that can be combined together into one grand campaign. The first one is called <strong>Relics of the Machine</strong> and is divided into 9 Chapters and the second one is called <strong>Amber Keep</strong> and is divided into 8 Acts.</p> <p><strong>GMing Advice</strong><br /> From the introduction we learn that this distinction is intended as Amber Keep will contain Destiny play, and as such will contain more downtime activities, where the Relics of the Machine is a straight up Discovery style adventure.</p> <p>Great touch here is that although they can be played separately, there is a flowchart included that explains how to mesh the two together seamlessly, with additional callouts on time management and tier advancement.</p> <p>This is immediately exciting and shows MCG’s intent to support both gameplays, while still allowing you to pick it apart and chose one over the other. My brain is already melting.</p> <p><strong>NPCs</strong><br /> Next spread shows pages 16 and 45 from chapters 1 and 3 and presents two, assumingly, major NPCs that also might be followers - Radius and Chord.</p> <p>Note how Radius has 3 stages, showing his character development across the adventure. Again I like what I see, this info is immediately helpful for GMs bringing this character to life. Further on we get callouts and details on how Radius and Chord react to each other and to some events depending on their motivations.</p> <p>On this spread is first of many “read aloud” paragraphs, which shows that they had beginner GMs in mind while writing this book.</p> <p>Lastly, we see Order of Healing and Guild of Purity mentioned, a hint that this book will weave Ninth World organizations into the narrative.</p> <p>Looks like Bruce is in superb form with MCG at the top of their game. My pressure is rising already.</p> <p><strong>Chapter 6: Expedition to Weal</strong><br /> We get a look at one location called Weal that is introduced toward the end of the Relics. Again we see “read aloud” section that helps new GMs describe the place.</p> <p>It seems that Weal is full of various kinds of not so friendly machines, and on page 65 there is a mention of a <strong>Weal Encounter Table</strong>, which generates social, communication and appearance aspects of machines encountered there. Old School stuff right there, I can see it being very helpful for bringing the place to life.</p> <p><strong>Act 6: The Kindness of Strangers</strong><br /> After the Weal spread we are thrust all the way towards the end of Act 6 of the Amber Keep part of the book, where we get a glimpse of Destiny play in action. There are some refugees seeking shelter in Amber Keep, and players need to deal with both a looming threat and the internal strife within the Keep. Looks like a good mix of community play and adventuring, with just the right amount of details. We also learn about Radiuses disposition towards some potential PC decisions in a callout, great touch again.</p> <p>One notable section here is an example of overland travel of a few days, that showcases weird of the Ninth World in a nice, concise way.</p> <p><strong>Act 7: Meeting of Minds</strong><br /> Last spread we get to see deals with another location called Medulla, which is a psychic colossal tree, from another dimension. Truly fantastic location, weirdness galore.</p> <p><strong>Conclusion</strong><br /> I am very happy with what I saw in the preview. The promise of the book is sky high, but I have not one iota of a doubt that Bruce can’t pull this off, master crafter that he is.</p> <p><a href="https://www.drivethrurpg.com/m/product/264882?affiliate_id=1103911">You can order it at DTRPG</a> and <a href="https://www.montecookgames.com/store/product/slaves-of-the-machine-god/">MCG web store</a></p> Tue, 19 Feb 2019 00:00:00 +0000 https://d20.rs/2019/02/19/slaves-of-the-machine-god/ https://d20.rs/2019/02/19/slaves-of-the-machine-god/ Priests of the Aeons by Sean K. Reynolds <p>UPDATE: <a href="https://www.drivethrurpg.com/m/product/271023?affiliate_id=1103911">The book is now released</a>. This review is based on a free preview that is available for download.</p> <p><strong>Table of Contents</strong><br /> Calaval’s Parable looks like a new lore piece. I welcome this. I want to know more about Calaval and his grandniece Doroa of the Silent Song.</p> <p>In Part 1, apart from new descriptors, foci, and equipment, there is one interesting entry on <strong>Character Aspects</strong>. I wonder if this is something new or just an introduction chapter rehashing character concepts?</p> <p>Part 2 deals with Numenera devices, cyphers, and artifacts. Part 3 is all about Aeon Priesthood, Part 4 contains 2 adventures and several adventure seeds, and finally, Part 5 lists creatures and NPCs.</p> <p>191 pages thick with new material, this is shaping up to be a worthy supplement. I already like it.</p> <p><strong>Introduction: The Stewards of Truth</strong><br /> This section mostly describes their goal of not tearing down GM’s sand castles, trying to dig into the details, and still make room for GMs to do their own thing with the Order. This is in line with general MCG concept of leaving space in their games for creative GMs, reaffirming they are staying true to that design principle.</p> <p><strong>Chapter 7: Artifacts</strong><br /> We are presented with <strong>Focusing Suits</strong>, craftable artifacts rewarded by Aeon Priests. The suits augment character Focus powers depending on their level. Really cool idea and a great motivation for players to work for the Order.</p> <p><strong>Chapter 10 &amp; Chapter 11</strong><br /> Just a small glimpse on beliefs system and a list of things characters might do once they join the Order.</p> <p>It seems the Order needs some guinea pigs for testing new equipment and other dangerous endeavors, which reminds me of the Wasteland Survival Guide mission from Fallout 3. These tests look really fun, for example:</p> <blockquote> <p>Be a test subject for an experimental substance…</p> </blockquote> <p>I can already smell the hilarity :&gt;</p> <p><strong>Chapter 15: Adventures Overview</strong><br /> Listed are 7 adventure seeds and they follow the theme of things going horribly wrong, with PCs tasked to investigate and sort out the mess. I personally like this comedic aspect to the Order. I didn’t expect it, but it sounds really fun and engaging.</p> <p>Two adventures are <strong>Into the Amber Monolith</strong> and <strong>Cerulean Hate</strong>.</p> <p><strong>Into the Amber Monolith</strong> is a rescue mission that has characters breaking into the most famous Ninth World monolith, which still seems to be unreachable from back when Calaval found a way to enter. Using THE legendary symbol of the Ninth World for an adventure location is a bold move, but I think it’s the perfect time to uncover it’s secrets. This better be mind-blowing Sean!</p> <p><strong>Cerulean Hate</strong> deals with a telepathic god from a prior world that wakes up and starts wreaking chaos. I am getting a feeling that Aeon priests cause more trouble than they solve.</p> <p>Finally, on the last page, we see an Aeon Journeyman NPC with some interesting modifications. Apart from the regular ones, they also have one specialization based on their training focus. This is a great idea and can be expanded on to other organization NPCs.</p> <p><strong>Conclusion</strong><br /> With almost 200 pages, not only is this book full of new content but judging from the preview, it is fun, bold (^^) and engaging.</p> <p>It seems to me that Sean crafted a magnificent supplement well worth a buy. You can order it at <a href="https://www.montecookgames.com/priests-of-the-aeons/">MCG web-store</a> or <a href="https://www.drivethrurpg.com/m/product/271023?affiliate_id=1103911">DrivethruRPG</a></p> Tue, 19 Feb 2019 00:00:00 +0000 https://d20.rs/2019/02/19/priests-of-aeons/ https://d20.rs/2019/02/19/priests-of-aeons/ Combat Maneuvers <p>Imagine a player saying: “I jump on a shield and slide down the stairs shooting arrows into the Uruk-hai…”</p> <p>Everyone at the table gets really excited and they imagine a scene that looks like this:</p> <div class="embed-container"> <iframe src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/CaGZnLyCPXw" width="700" height="480" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen=""> </iframe> </div> <p>To which GM responds: “Well, you would need <strong>Fleet of Foot</strong> and <strong>Successive Attacks</strong> to pull that off as one action. Do you have those abilities? Too bad. You fire one arrow into the Uruk-hai horde dealing 4 damage. Next.”</p> <p>At which point table excitement went down the well.</p> <p>Congratulations GM, you know the rules by heart, but you just robbed your players of an awesome scene, and what’s even worse you are training them to play from their sheets instead from their imagination.</p> <p>When I think about what kind of stories we retell from our games, whether they are epic achievements or epic fails, it’s never, never: “…and then the GM spent 30 minutes going through the rules to determine if my move was legit. It was not.”</p> <p><strong>Empowering Player Imagination</strong><br /> <strong>Player:</strong> “I jump on a shield and slide down the stairs shooting arrows into the Uruk-hai…”</p> <p><strong>GM:</strong> “OK. Sliding down the stairs will require a balancing check (DC 6). If you fail you will fall into the horde, on a critical fail you will fall into the horde and impale yourself. You can make a hindered attack if you spend effort. You must pay an initial cost of 3 Speed points.”</p> <p>In the above example GM thinking went along these lines:</p> <ul> <li>very creative move in the domain of possible, could make an awesome scene!</li> <li>epic moves have epic fails, let’s state some possible fail states</li> <li>this needs to be more expensive compared to doing the same with any abilities, so effort spends and initial cost are required.</li> <li>apply <strong>Attacker is Jostled</strong> rule - attack is hindered unless trained in balancing</li> </ul> <p>All in all, we ended up with an action+attack(hindered) on a successful DC check. Not quite Legolas level of epic, but still enough to make a scene work. It comes at a hefty cost and great risk, so we don’t have to worry about any potential abuse.</p> <p><strong>Concerns</strong><br /> While I like to empower my players, I still want to maintain diversity at the table and not devaluate similar abilities that other players might have or are waiting for them at higher tiers. I mentioned <strong>Fleet of Foot</strong> and <strong>Successive Attacks</strong> already, but what if I had a character <strong>who Fights With Panache</strong> at the table? I would need to take into account that similar ability <strong>Mobile Fighter</strong> becomes available at 4th Tier for her!</p> <p>In that case, I would probably say: “No Gimli, you can’t do that as one action, but Legolas might give it a go…”</p> <p><strong>Digging Deeper</strong><br /> If we abstract this as an Action+Attack type of move we might find some further use for it.</p> <p>Consider this move:</p> <div style="position:relative; padding-bottom:calc(56.25% + 44px)"><iframe src="https://gfycat.com/ifr/ForcefulBraveAustraliankestrel?autoplay=0" frameborder="0" scrolling="no" width="100%" height="100%" style="position:absolute;top:0;left:0;" allowfullscreen=""></iframe></div> <p>I can imagine a player saying: “I want to do a feint high attack, close the distance and do a takedown.”</p> <p>Stated like that, takedown would be an actual melee attack, and DC would go on the risky part of the move, which is feinting to close the distance. With that settled we move on to the failure states. One is on the feint and the second is on the attack.</p> <p>If the feint fails we can say that the opponent read the intention and successfully moved herself to a better position, which enables her some sort of advantage. This advantage can be a swift counterattack, where the player character just takes the damage or it could be a hindered defense on her next turn. Critical fail might be both damage + hindrance.</p> <p>On a successful feint player now needs to do the actual attack - grapple for a takedown. Failure here might range from an opponent slipping away, to critical miss where the player might find herself lying on the floor instead.</p> <p>Now that we have failure states sorted, we can think about the cost. As this is a two-part action, or two actions move if you like, we want the player to expend her resources. So one mandatory effort use for the takedown attempt and a static 3 point Speed cost for the feint, should do the trick.</p> <p>In this example, we need to take into an account the level of an opponent. Takedown DC should be same as the NPC level, but I would mod it to +1 for larger/heavier ones. For the feint part I would think about the swordsmanship level, and add either +1 or +2 for experienced swashbucklers.</p> <p>So for Town Guard (2), feint DC would be 4 (experienced so +2), and takedown DC would be 3 (in heavy armor so +1).</p> Mon, 18 Feb 2019 00:00:00 +0000 https://d20.rs/2019/02/18/combat-maneuvers/ https://d20.rs/2019/02/18/combat-maneuvers/ Traverse the Worlds <p>“I just don’t see how you gonna do it? I could instantly be anywhere!” he gasped.</p> <p>Don’t worry my little world perambulating friend, as you will peregrinate worlds as no man decussated them before!</p> <p>Here is how I’m gonna do it.</p> <p><strong>The ability</strong><br /> Let’s open up <a href="https://www.drivethrurpg.com/m/product/240654?affiliate_id=1103911">Discovery</a> page 43 and check what the fuss is about.</p> <blockquote> <p><strong>Traverse the Worlds</strong><br /> You instantaneously transmit yourself to another planet, dimension, plane, or level of reality. You must know that the destination exists; the GM will decide if you have enough information to confirm its existence and the level of difficulty to reach the destination…</p> </blockquote> <p>😱</p> <p><strong>Fabric of Reality</strong><br /> There are three limitations in total, but for prepping purposes I am only interested in two:</p> <blockquote> <blockquote> <p>“You must know that the destination exists;”</p> </blockquote> </blockquote> <p>and</p> <blockquote> <p>“…the GM will decide if you have enough information to confirm its existence and the level of difficulty to reach the destination. “</p> </blockquote> <p><strong>Destination knowledge</strong><br /> So my player needs to know that the destination exists, and also have some information about it in order to try to crossbeam there.</p> <p>There are two ways a player can get this knowledge required for the power to work.</p> <ol> <li>Character backstory</li> <li>Knowledge gained through play</li> </ol> <p><strong>Extracting known locations from player’s backstory</strong><br /> Locations could live on a character sheet, or come out of the blue in a case when player uses her XP and buys herself one. Both might be problematic for me, as they could be anything really.</p> <blockquote> <p>“I traverse back to my parents’ house”</p> </blockquote> <p>As a GM I mostly have no idea how character’s backstory stuff looks, but it’s not my job to know that anyway. It is on a player to tell the table how it looks. There is a nifty technique on how to handle this, and it’s called the Flashback.</p> <p><strong>Flashbacks</strong><br /> At the exact moment when a player character imagines her childhood home (in order to activate the ability), we freeze the time and delve into her mind…</p> <blockquote> <p>“An image of your parents’ kitchen comes to life in your mind. You are 12 years old and are looking at your granny preparing you a breakfast. What do you do?”</p> </blockquote> <p>During the flashback, I could guide the player’s mind into reliving this location. Go in deep as needed: Why do you remember this day in particular? What happened that day? Play it like a therapy session, and try to get some insight on how it looks at present, if possible. Is the location still the same at present day? Who might be there now?</p> <p>In order not to bore down other players, I could have them improv as characters from her memories, or as figments of her imagination. These she might need to overcome in order to create an accurate and vivid memory.</p> <p>I can also use flashbacks when a player decides to prepare her mind meditating, prior to the translation. She might expend a recovery slot, at which point I can play out the flashback, get all the info I can while allowing a player to lower the teleport DC.</p> <p><strong>Locations visited through play</strong><br /> Location knowledge gained through play is much easier to handle, as I know everything about them already. Have a list of all locations visited or learned, and add additional notes on what changed there in the meantime. Create a random table or two, to get some ideas.</p> <p><strong>A Place yet to be</strong><br /> A player might do some active research on a new location during play, which may turn into interesting adventure on its own. Other than that this research can be also done as a downtime activity, or out of game via chat.</p> <p><strong>With great power comes great failure</strong><br /> Traverse the Worlds doesn’t mention what happens on a fail roll. I would reckon that fail still produces the transferral but misses the destination by some mark, depending on a scale.</p> <p>If the players are planet hopping and miss the DC by some margin, they jump to the neighboring planet or a moon. If the destination is a place on their current planet, they might miss it by a number of days walking, etc…</p> <p>On a roll of 1, I would upscale the miss distance, so if they wanted to traverse to a faraway village, they are now on a random planet. If they were planet hopping they are now in a different dimension, etc…</p> <p>This might be a little too harsh, so would probably scale it down accordingly. Also, I can always rule that on a failed roll they don’t go anywhere, but rather just stand in a circle like some fools holding their hands together. It’s funny, but a bit boring. Players are T6 at that point, they should get in some serious trouble!</p> <p><strong>GMI Ideas</strong><br /> One interesting direction to think about this is once the characters appear on a new location, what kind of activity they interrupted? They might show up in someone’s bedroom or bathroom and cause some awkward scenes. They may interrupt some important and tense negotiations. Appear in the middle of a battle, or in a hazardous environment.</p> <p><strong>Additional Numenera Materials</strong><br /> For materials on parallel worlds and dimensions I would grab <a href="https://www.drivethrurpg.com/m/product/204712?affiliate_id=1103911">Into the Outside</a> and <a href="https://www.drivethrurpg.com/m/product/205336?affiliate_id=1103911">In Alternate Dimensions</a>.<br /> For planets there is <a href="https://www.drivethrurpg.com/m/product/158526?affiliate_id=1103911">Into the Night</a>, and for deep sea locations I have <a href="https://www.drivethrurpg.com/m/product/182872?affiliate_id=1103911">Into the Deep</a>.<br /> For prior world ruins, <a href="https://www.drivethrurpg.com/m/product/218646?affiliate_id=1103911">Jade Colossus</a> or the <a href="https://www.drivethrurpg.com/m/product/263732?affiliate_id=1103911">Ruin Deck</a> are perfect. For…<br /> Wait a minute. Did MCG design this ability just so I would need to buy all the books?</p> <p>Curse you, Monte Cook! Curse you! ::shakes fist::</p> Mon, 11 Feb 2019 00:00:00 +0000 https://d20.rs/2019/02/11/traverse-worlds/ https://d20.rs/2019/02/11/traverse-worlds/ How and When to Tell Difficulty Levels <p>In short, the book says you can tell them, but you don’t have to and that it’s good telling DC to starting players.</p> <p>Here is how I do it.</p> <p><strong>Starting Out</strong><br /> When you start a game, whether it’s with new players or old ones, you should disclose task difficulty. It will allow players to get a feel for the world and internalize how their resource spending will look. What is hard, what is easy, when they need to spend effort. It is important that players grok that from the start.</p> <p>Keep that up for the whole first session and once the finale comes, stop. This will have a nice secondary effect where your finale will have more tension.</p> <p>Here is the first catch that you need to look out for. The Scan ability. If you have a player with Scan, you don’t want to invalidate his ability by straight up telling DC numbers.</p> <p>There are two ways around this in the first session. You either remind the player to always spend his action to activate Scan or treat it like an Enabler for the first session (sans finale), sparing his actions. You will need to communicate this decision to the player beforehand though, in order to avoid confusion later on.</p> <p>So now that your players have a good sense of how things work in your world, we come about the second catch.</p> <p><strong>Character Expertise</strong> <br /> Characters will have a sense of challenge for some tasks even if players don’t. Here is an example: If you were to stand next to a tall wall (in real life), you would have a good sense of how difficult it would be to climb it. If you were a trained climber, you would know exactly.</p> <p>This means that you need to think if any of the characters can determine the task difficulty “passively”, on their own, taking into account their background, story progression, and any skills. This is something you want to train your players to ask as well. “Can my character discern this difficulty, because he is such and such, did this and has that?”</p> <p>Because you will forget.</p> <p><strong>More General Levels</strong><br /> Soon enough you will get into situations where characters or players have a more general, not that precise idea how difficult a task is. In these situations, I split the range in two or three and say something like: “It looks challenging, but it might be easier” for 1-5 or: “It looks challenging, but it might be worse then it looks, even impossible” for 5-10. Same approach if you split the difficulty range into three parts. It’s worth noting here that although I give an in-world description of the perceived difficulty, players know what it’s about on the meta level, so as soon as I say: “Looks demanding, but might be not”, they know, without a doubt, that I mean DC 3 or lower.</p> <p><strong>Impossible Difficulties</strong><br /> As stated in the rules DC 7-10 are not rolled, unless a player can bring it into d20 range. In practice, it means you must communicate this fact to players at one point. You don’t want to wait for the player to spend all she has, roll a natural 20 and only then shrug and tell her, sorry not enough. That’s a fun breaker right there, don’t do that :)</p> <p>Every time you have a DC 7+, after the player states all her Easings, but before she rolls, if the target number is not in a d20 range, you stop and say: “Unfortunately that will not be enough for success.”</p> <p><strong>A Bit of Psychology for the End</strong><br /> When the DC is unknown players will tend to overspend their pool points, due to uncertainty. You can use this to great effect when presenting new monsters or weird prior world magic in order to keep suspense in the air.</p> <p>Sometimes even Scan will not pick up crazy prior world stuff.</p> Mon, 04 Feb 2019 00:00:00 +0000 https://d20.rs/2019/02/04/difficulty-levels/ https://d20.rs/2019/02/04/difficulty-levels/ We Broke Into the Ninth World Monolith, Here Is What We've Found! [PHOTO] <p><strong>A Prelude</strong><br /> During our character creation session, one of the players stated his (custom) initial link to the starting adventure: “I am looking for some kind of code for automation.” I ruled it as a worthy goal to pursue, nodded in confirmation and forgot about it.</p> <p>Two sessions in, he activates a cypher giving him a connection to the Datasphere, and asks for the location of the code.</p> <p>And the Datasphere answered.</p> <p>At that point, I told my players that the location would be available next session, as I needed time to prepare. Here is how I did it.</p> <p><strong>Location</strong><br /> I knew from the start that the code was inside a monolith. It had to be. I checked the map and there was one available relatively near their location, tucked into the slopes of the Black Riage, west of the Ausren Woods.</p> <p><strong>The Code</strong><br /> Figuring out how to represent the code was dead easy - a plan seed. I opened up the <a href="https://www.drivethrurpg.com/m/product/240655?affiliate_id=1103911">Destiny PDF</a> and looked up installation plans about automation.</p> <blockquote> <p><strong>Fabricator</strong><br /> ..If provided with a plan… and all the requisite iotum… it will create the desired object…taking only half the time that crafting the object would normally require…</p> </blockquote> <p>PERFECT!</p> <p><strong>The Monolith</strong><br /> I was totally clueless about what might be inside the thing. Ideas - zero. It seemed like a perfect opportunity to try out the Ruin Mapping Engine from the <a href="https://www.drivethrurpg.com/m/product/218646?affiliate_id=1103911">Jade Colossus</a> book.</p> <p>I wanted the monolith to be a huge, imposing, fear-inducing, chills down your spine sight, hundreds of stories high and floating ominously in the darks of the Black Riage.</p> <p>What I didn’t want was to map it out completely. I wanted a quick series of rooms so the players could grab the seed and get out. They could always return later and delve deeper if they were up for it.</p> <p>I started rolling on the Ruin Engine tables, got some rooms, corridors, interstitials and a couple of weird things that sparked my own imagination engine.</p> <p>The first roll gave me a room with a time anomaly inside, where you would get a strong sense of deja vu and always end up in the same place from where you started. An interesting mini-puzzle. The second roll gave me a room with some mirror panels that reflect backward in time.</p> <p>At that moment I had a theme for my monolith. It was a Time Monolith. Or at least that part of it was. I disregarded some weird none time-related rolls and reskinned the remaining rooms to follow the time theme.</p> <p>One of the rolls was an interstitial space with various random sized pyramids lying around. With that idea in mind, I created a room past it that had a huge upside-down pyramid held afloat by several beams of light. Inside the pyramid was the plan seed, and the idea was for the players to disrupt the beams so that the pyramid would smash down (but not on them) and reveal the seed.</p> <p>Now I had two themes: pyramids and time. They sort of go together and I was happy with the pyramid part. I had some difficult terrain (the interstitial space), a puzzle, and the loot. For the time theme, I had some difficult terrain (the anomaly room), a puzzle (the mirror panels), but I was missing loot.</p> <p>I opened up the <a href="https://www.drivethrurpg.com/m/product/133608?affiliate_id=1103911">Technology Compendium</a> and under Chapter 5 looked for “Time Devices”. The first entry is a level 10 cypher called Reset, a perfect prize for my Time Monolith delvers.</p> <p>With all that in place I adjusted the layout of my map to take advantage of the vertical axis so the whole thing wound through parts of 3 floors somewhere in the middle of the monolith.</p> <p>The last thing to do was to decide on monsters. With my “keep it simple” philosophy, I knew that I wanted only one monster type that somehow fits in. I spent some time reading through the <a href="https://www.drivethrurpg.com/m/product/211086?affiliate_id=1103911">Ninth World Bestiary 2</a>, and in the end settled on using the Dal. They are dimensional telepathic beings, not quite time-related, but I had one character who Commands Mental Powers and one who Steps into the Outside, so it seemed very fitting and I was curious to see what kind of interactions and situations would emerge from their eventual clash. I was not disappointed!</p> <p>Here is how the prep sheet looked at some point. It shows both the horizontal and vertical layouts. It’s ugly, I know, but it’s not meant to be shown to players. <img src="/images/posts/monolith-prep.jpg" alt="Prep Sheet" /></p> <p>It turned out to be difficult finding just the right monolith image, but in the end, I presented my players with this: <a href="https://www.pinterest.com/pin/138345019788006508/">Monolith</a></p> <p><strong>Session Notes</strong><br /> The mere sight of the monolith instilled fear into the hearts of my group. Some were definitely not happy going in but soldiered on and supported their fellow player’s side quest.</p> <p>Time shenanigans were successfully weird and the theme worked out quite well.</p> <p>Dals proved to be a challenging enough encounter for Tier 1 players. As I predicted the encounter was memorable and involved telepathy and dimension hopping and our “I’m looking for code” player nearly died. He rolled a 1 on the Dal’s special attack and got dimension snatched with 0 Might points left.</p> <p>The Loot turned out to be a great choice, plus they managed to scavenge some additional materials.</p> <p>They expected many more rooms and more delving time. I failed to include descriptions of additional pathways in my exposition. I should’ve said something along the lines of “You see potential pathways leading deeper into the structure that you could open up given time and resources”.</p> <p>To spice it all up I had a surprise waiting for them when they came out. Remember that time anomaly?</p> Mon, 28 Jan 2019 00:00:00 +0000 https://d20.rs/2019/01/28/breaking-into-the-monolith/ https://d20.rs/2019/01/28/breaking-into-the-monolith/ d12 Weird Tattoos <p>In a rare moment of artistic brilliance, I pulled out 2 XP and presented my player with the following GM intrusion:</p> <blockquote> <p>You now have a magical tattoo that always shows the face of the person who loves you the most.</p> </blockquote> <p>The table erupted and no one was interested in a +1 Armor tattoo anymore.</p> <p>Unfortunately for me, my rare moment of artistic brilliance passed and I was out of ideas. I felt terrible for disappointing my players, so I promised I would come up with more cool tattoos before the next session that they would be able to pick from.</p> <p>I’m not sure if I rose to the challenge, but I came up with the following table.</p> <table> <thead> <tr> <th>—</th> <th>d12 Weird Kuipania Tattoos</th> </tr> </thead> <tbody> <tr> <td>1</td> <td>Face of the person who loves you the most</td> </tr> <tr> <td>2</td> <td>Face of the person who hates you the most</td> </tr> <tr> <td>3</td> <td>Tomorrow’s weather</td> </tr> <tr> <td>4</td> <td>Last thing someone said about you behind your back</td> </tr> <tr> <td>5</td> <td>Your eventual epitaph</td> </tr> <tr> <td>6</td> <td>Face of your unborn child which ages in real time</td> </tr> <tr> <td>7</td> <td>Last lie someone told you</td> </tr> <tr> <td>8</td> <td>3 words that are really important to say at some point in the next 28 hours</td> </tr> <tr> <td>9</td> <td>A shin showing the side on which it will land next time you flip it</td> </tr> <tr> <td>10</td> <td>A rumor</td> </tr> <tr> <td>11</td> <td>Names of all who are looking at you at the moment</td> </tr> <tr> <td>12</td> <td>Daily fact from the Datasphere</td> </tr> </tbody> </table> <p>Any weird tattoo ideas? Share them below in the comment section.</p> Mon, 21 Jan 2019 00:00:00 +0000 https://d20.rs/2019/01/21/d12-weird-tattoos/ https://d20.rs/2019/01/21/d12-weird-tattoos/ Meaningful Choices <p><strong>The “Quantum Ogre” Problem</strong><br /> Whichever path you take, the GM will slap an Ogre encounter on you.</p> <p>In a classical interpretation, if you’re playing a game that is about making meaningful choices, this is wrong.</p> <p>So if I, as the GM, have one Ogre encounter ready, and the players have two paths, what is the correct way to play?</p> <p><strong>Collapsing The Wave Function</strong><br /> Everything not already set in the world’s reality, is in a state of possibility. Theze possibilities exist in the GMs mind, in random tables, and in player interactions. The trick is to recognizing the moment when these limitless possibilities collapse into a single reality.</p> <p>What is the right moment in our two paths example? As “Ogre” is an inherent attribute of one of the paths, as soon as the players discover, or learn about the paths, before they make a choice, our possibility wave function collapses and both the paths and their attributes are set and now part of the reality.</p> <p>One has an Ogre encounter, second does not.</p> <p>The usual counter argument is that if you pull off the “Quantum Ogre” correctly the players will not know they’re being railroaded. It doesn’t matter if they are oblivious, this is a matter of principle. In a game of meaningful choices you should not steal the meaningful part from your players, whether they realize you’re doing it or not.</p> <p><strong>The Narrative Way</strong><br /> What about a narrative way? Narrative games teach us that an Ogre will show up in the most appropriate dramatic moment, usually the worst one from a player perspective.</p> <p>As a Cypher GM I can introduce the Ogre as a GM intrusion, whichever path the players take.</p> <p>Again based on our definition of meaningful choice, this is not the correct answer. In a narrative game players should be the main weavers of the narrative, with the GM balancing things out on the side. Players still need to make those meaningful choices, and you need to make sure that your GMIs don’t invalidate them.</p> <p><strong>Meaningful Choices</strong><br /> Meaningful choices need to have meaningful consequences, an impact on the world and on the player characters. This, I think, is the greatest premise of tabletop RPGs.</p> <p><strong>A Better Example</strong><br /> The Ogre is not a great example of what is actually at stake here and the impact it can have on your game. Here is a real world example that comes straight from the old Numenera core book.</p> <p>The adventure is called Tne Beale of Boregal, <a href="https://www.drivethrurpg.com/m/product/253970?affiliate_id=1103911">now free to download</a>. It was the first adventure in the original core book, with step by step instructions for new GMs to follow.</p> <p>In the opening scene, players are forced to make a choice (assuming they accept the scenario hook). They can either escort a girl to safety, or go with her brother to help him defend their village, or split the party and attempt both tasks. The trick is that the girl doesn’t want an escort and urges PCs to help her brother, and her brother urges them to escort his sister so he can return and fight.</p> <p>This is such a great setup, that unfortunately has no impact whatsoever on the story. This is probably on purpose as both the NPCs are children and the consequences are rather grim. Either the girl doesn’t make it, or the village gets destroyed (or the party splits and someone dies). But these outcomes don’t get a mention in the book.</p> <p>So who is Ogre in this example? The Ogre here is an absence of consequences from the player’s choice, thus making it meaningless. And it was a big choice, one of those where there is no right answer, a moment which defines a movie or a book, a Butterfly Effect, a proper Inciting Incident.</p> <p><strong>How to Make it Better</strong><br /> You can probably already tell what the is answer to that.</p> <p>Follow the boy:<br /> The girl dies. Her brother hates you. Her mother hates you. You are not welcome in the village anymore. You are not the heroes you imagined you are. This decision will haunt you. You are different now. And so is the world.</p> <p>Follow the girl:<br /> The girl lives. But everything she had, everyone she loved is now dead. She is alone. Broken. Her hatred towards you burns with a strength of a thousand suns.</p> <p>Try both with partial success:<br /> You tried to save them all. The girl, the boy, the village. They survived. But sadness fills you for your lost friend. She gave her last breath so these people could live. She was a true hero. And like all true heroes, she is gone. You hate the girl, the boy, the village. They are not crying with you.</p> <p>Try both, with total success:<br /> You made it! Calaval’s eyes, you made it. Everyone gets a medal except you, Boregal.</p> Mon, 14 Jan 2019 00:00:00 +0000 https://d20.rs/2019/01/14/meaningful-choices/ https://d20.rs/2019/01/14/meaningful-choices/ Skill Challenges the Cypher Way <p>Challenges are briefly mentioned in the <a href="https://www.drivethrurpg.com/m/product/148997?affiliate_id=1103911">Cypher</a> and <a href="https://www.drivethrurpg.com/m/product/240654?affiliate_id=1103911">Numenera</a> rules under “Special Situation: Chase,” but here we will go further and customize the rules for our own unique situation. I call this skill challenge “Ship in a Storm” and it can be reused for any kind of crew in trouble. You might notice that skills aren’t actually the focus here. In a Cypher game, these challenges are more about players expending their stat pools. There are also bits that were specific to my game, included here for inspiration.</p> <h3 id="ship-in-a-storm">Ship in a Storm</h3> <p><strong>Challenge</strong><br /> The players have an air ship that is currently stuck in an electrical storm that is discharging balls of electricity. They need to perform three maneuvers to clear the storm (each could have a different DC, for example DC 9, then 8, then 7). If the pilot doesn’t perform a maneuver on their turn, lightning automatically strikes the ship.</p> <p><strong>Failure states</strong><br /> On each failed maneuver one ship subsystem is hit. Scene starts with autopilot subsystem fried with first hit (works as exposition to explain danger, and prevents AI to fly the ship)</p> <p><strong>Skills</strong><br /> The ship can be flown by one pilot either by stick (a Speed task) or jacked-in (an Intellect task). Helpful skills include: Understanding numenera, Reflexes, Coordination, Piloting, Machine Interfacing, etc…</p> <p><strong>Assets</strong><br /> Two positions on the ship, the co-pilot seat and sensor post, provide single asset to ship maneuvers if occupied. The ship AI is on the core subsystem, providing optimal power distribution to ship systems.</p> <p><strong>Complications</strong><br /> There are plenty of complications you can introduce. For example, in my game the hover-quad in the ship’s hangar was not secured, and on each maneuver would smash against a wall. If not properly secured it would be destroyed after 3 rounds. Another example is water spilling out of the hydroponics garden, which if not attended means the food supply would be lost…</p> <p><strong>Subsystems damage</strong><br /> A random subsystem is hit on each failed or missed maneuver.</p> <ul> <li>Solar Spike: On 1st hit the batteries can’t recharge. 2nd hit empties the batteries.</li> <li>Gravity Crane: If hit, this hinders maneuver tasks. If operator is at the post, this can’t be hit.</li> <li>Engines: If AI is moved from the engines, maneuver tasks are hindered. Each hit to the engines hinders maneuver tasks by one step.</li> </ul> <p><strong>GM Intrusions</strong><br /> These can be run in between each maneuver depending on the situation.</p> <ul> <li>A storm hit causes Intellect damage/stun to anyone who is jacked in to the ship.</li> <li>Sudden jerk throws anyone not buckled in at their posts.</li> <li>Hover-quad can pin a person if someone is trying to secure it.</li> <li>Sudden electrical discharge fries a subsystem.</li> </ul> <p><strong>How to run</strong><br /> On the first electric hit, the AI performs some exposition: we get a damage report (autopilot is fried), storm dangers, the number of maneuvers needed to escape it, and warnings about complications. Players then scramble between managing maneuver DC and solving complications. After each maneuver run one GMI. Once they clear the storm, the players can assess damage and determine how much time and materials are needed for repairs.</p> <p>Capping a challenge to a fixed number of maneuvers will make determining task difficulty and failure states much easier to manage. I am also not using a “more successes than failures” because the outcome is not binary - between crashing and coming out of the storm unscathed there is a range of possible states.</p> Mon, 07 Jan 2019 00:00:00 +0000 https://d20.rs/2019/01/07/skill-challenge-cypher-way/ https://d20.rs/2019/01/07/skill-challenge-cypher-way/ Easing & Hindering <p><a href="https://www.drivethrurpg.com/m/product/240654?affiliate_id=1103911">Discovery</a> page 103 has the rules on how the players do it:</p> <blockquote> <p>By using skills, assets, and Effort, you can ease a task by a maximum of ten steps.</p> </blockquote> <blockquote> <p>…no task’s difficulty will ever be reduced by more than four steps without using Effort.</p> </blockquote> <blockquote> <p>…free level of Effort can exceed the Effort limit for your character, but not the six-step limit for easing a task.</p> </blockquote> <p>So far so good. We can imagine these as slots. At 6th Tier, ten easing slots are available to the player:</p> <ul> <li>Skills 2 slots [ ] [ ]</li> <li>Assets 2 slots [ ] [ ]</li> <li>Effort 6 slots [ ] [ ] [ ] [ ] [ ] [ ]</li> </ul> <p>But then you come across an ability like this:</p> <blockquote> <p><strong>Parry (5 Speed points)</strong><br /> …for the next ten rounds you ease all Speed defense rolls. Enabler.</p> </blockquote> <p>Where does this fit in the slot system we laid out? Is it a skill? By the time Parry comes into play at Tier 5, you might already be specialized in Speed defense, and have your 2 skill slots filled in. In this case, if we choose to treat Parry as a skill, it’s useless unless we add a 3rd skill slot (which clearly goes against the rules above).</p> <p>And some abilities would really go against the rules if we regard them as skills:</p> <blockquote> <p><strong>Psychokinetic Attack(5 Intellect points)</strong><br /> …the task is eased by three steps compared to breaking it with brute strength.Action</p> </blockquote> <p>There are other examples in the rules like:</p> <blockquote> <p><strong>Cover</strong> <br /> If a character is behind cover so that a significant portion of their body is behind something sturdy, attacks against the character are hindered.</p> </blockquote> <p>So what’s the answer? For cases like this, all modifiers that are not called out as an asset or a skill are taken into account by the GM when determining task difficulty, and do not expend any slots. This easing and hindering happens before the player’s skills, assets, or Effort come into play.</p> <p>A player activates Parry? The GM eases their Speed defense DC for the next 10 rounds. No skill slots needed.</p> <p>Lunged into cover? The DC is eased by the GM. No asset slot is used.</p> <p>Note that there are some abilities that do specifically use asset and skill slots. As an aside, I don’t generally like abilities that use up these slots. When designing scenes I make sure to think about several assets for players to find and use, so my games benefit from keeping those slots open.</p> <p>For reading: <a href="http://www.montecookgames.com/beyond-the-book-asset-limits/">MCG blog post on asset limits</a></p> Mon, 31 Dec 2018 00:00:00 +0000 https://d20.rs/2018/12/31/easing-and-hindering/ https://d20.rs/2018/12/31/easing-and-hindering/ About <p>There aren’t many Cypher blogs. Or we can’t find them. No idea why. Look at all <a href="https://github.com/funkaoshi/osr-opml">these OSR folks</a>, they have almost 300 blogs, it’s ridiculous! Each day a thought, an adventure idea, a monster. One would think they would run out of stuff to write by now. But they keep it up somehow.</p> <p>Yes, we are jealous. Positively jealous. We also <a href="https://www.patreon.com/d20_rs">support some</a>, because they are awesome. Definitely on a lookout for Cypher creators to support, we think it’s important. It is such an awesome community it’s time to grow it and we want to be a small part of that.</p> <p>If you check the blog you will see we have a lot to say. Thoughts happen. Some of it will be bad, but we hope at least a few things will be good, be an inspiration to someone. We aim to ramp up from theory-crafting to adventure seeds, small scenarios, cool art and other useful and practical materials that anyone can use at their table.</p> <p>Feel free to speak to us, mention us somewhere, do a social thing, that may or may not involve human thumbs or hearts. We will not judge.</p> <p>You can support us on <a href="https://ko-fi.com/F1F7TETP">Ko-fi</a> and <a href="https://www.patreon.com/d20_rs">Patreon</a>.</p> <p><strong>Credits</strong><br /> Writing: Koan</p> <p>Editing: MrVekyl</p> <p>Code: Noundoable</p> <p>GM Sensei: Zlee</p> <p>Lab rats: Delivering Unit crew</p> https://d20.rs/about.html MCG Fan Use Policy <p>The Monte Cook Games logo, Numenera, and the Numenera logo are trademarks of Monte Cook Games, LLC in the U.S.A. and other countries. All Monte Cook Games characters and character names, and the distinctive likenesses thereof, are trademarks of Monte Cook Games, LLC. Content on this site or associated files derived from Monte Cook Games publications is © 2013-2017 Monte Cook Games, LLC. Monte Cook Games permits web sites and similar fan-created publications for their games, subject to the policy given at <a href="http://www.montecookgames.com/fan-use-policy/">http://www.montecookgames.com/fan-use-policy/</a>. The contents of this site are for personal, non-commercial use only. Monte Cook Games is not responsible for this site or any of the content, that did not originate directly from Monte Cook Games, on or in it. Use of Monte Cook Games’s trademarks and copyrighted materials anywhere on this site and its associated files should not be construed as a challenge to those trademarks or copyrights. Materials on this site may not be reproduced or distributed except with the permission of the site owner and in compliance with Monte Cook Games policy given at <a href="http://www.montecookgames.com/fan-use-policy/">http://www.montecookgames.com/fan-use-policy/</a>.</p> https://d20.rs/fan-policy.html