HD: 5 (22 hp) / AC: As chain / Attacks: Touch +5 (Anchoring) / Speeds: As a horse

• Fearless: Immune to terror, fear, & morale.

• Anchoring: When a Greggo is first seen, the viewer must Save or become anchored. Success grants immunity to anchoring from this Greggo (except via touch). Anchored victims possess complete false memories and will insist on the creature’s identity (”That’s Uncle Greggo”). They rationalize all contradictions.

  • Unanchoring: Anchored victims who are confronted with undeniable proof of impossibility (census records, extended isolated interrogation revealing contradictions, etc.) may Save again. On success, they remember everything and take 1d20 nonlethal psychic damage from the cognitive whiplash. On failure, they become violently hostile to interrogators.

• Errors: Greggo confidently states erroneous facts on a regular basis — birthdays, shared events, names of other family members. Anchored victims rationalize errors (i.e. “He always jokes like that”). Unanchored observers can notice the error, but the anchored will never believe it as being one.

• Feeding: A Greggo feeds on 1 anchored victim at a time, starting with the earliest victim. The victim becomes lethargic (disadvantage everywhere it’s applicable, including combat); Greggo attempts to remain within 100’ of that person (typically by staying in their home). After 1 week of feeding on the same victim, they die of “natural causes” & Greggo heals to full HP. Greggo takes 2 damage per night where no feeding occurs.

A relation or old friend. It’s just a normal person. Never describe it in clear or absolute terms. If players try to look close, emphasize the point. Greggo is just a normal person in plain clothes. They’re just plain clothes. He’s just a normal person.

A Greggo tries to build a network of anchors for self-protection, knows when someone hasn’t been anchored, tries to leverage their relationships with anchors against any immune hostiles, & flees if cornered.

I was (un)wisely reading Buttersafe today and found a lovely comic, and I just had to throw something together for it quick.

Merry Christmas!

Gamemasters learn patterns of play, and then transfer them across games, and find games that work better or worse with their preferred or pre-established neural architecture. Or they don’t, and they complain about it.

It is almost impossible to “teach” a new gamemaster. It happens more or less by chance. It’s often a master-apprentice thing where someone learns the dark arts from their own GM.

If you write a section in your system trying to explain how to run the game, it might be something like this:

[Perception:] There’s no such thing as a perception check, here – if information is obvious, just give it to them, especially if they ask; but that doesn’t make the PCs omniscient. Many many things are simply beyond their perception. Cultiatve [sic] a sense of mystery about what they don’t know, to invite them to solve that mystery. Many classes have the ability to force you answer specific questions about the world. Do so to the letter of the rules, but nothing more or less.

[…]

[World:] Don’t try to be a fan of the players. If you need to be a fan of anything, be a fan of the world. Don’t worry about if the players can ‘solve’ a situation (it’s only a “problem” from their perspective, and they are not the only important thing) that they’re in – worry about if the situation is described thoroughly and beautifully enough, whatever beauty means to you.1

This is not instruction. This is a filter. Some people will click with this; others will not. It’s a minority who picks up a block of rules like this & tries to learn from it & then successfully applies it. Most GMs have strong preferences for “storygames” or “simulationism” that develop naturally — possibly by deeper personality differences — and then they keep with those habits, because they are habits that are learned. You can’t actually plug-and-play habits on a human. It doesn’t work.

What do you think happens when a simulationist world-building mastermind tries a good-faith effort to run FATE?

My bet’s on entropy pulling him towards his habits. And even if he tries, he will find himself fighting himself at every corner.

What does this mean for me?

If you’re writing a system, it means that any “how to run the game” section that is not literal rules (which should be self-explanatory) is actually a filter to advertise what kind of game the system is meant to be. Hopefully, that aligns with the actual mechanics in play.2

Aside: In practice, I’d laugh & think 95% of us are re-writing the dungeon crawler game loop. You can’t escape the gravity of the dungeon crawler. Fun + ease + shared mythos. Put the money on Free Parking. Same thing.

If you’re not writing a system, you’ve probably already found one that matches your preferences closely enough, or kit-bashed it into that shape. But I’m curious if you can see the shape of that preference.

Peanut gallery remarks welcome.3

Last week, I re-launched my old tactical battlemap project as DnDungeon, alongside a suite of new maps, a work-in-progress total conversion for the Dungeondraft cartography tool, and a bunch more. If you’re not already a patron & you’re into tactical gridded combat, it is my strong personal opinion that you should enter the DnDungeon.

Become a patron

Ah, but I won’t shill without bringing gifts. So I made a huge pack of 80 free maps for you! Classics taken from my archives given new life mixed with brand-new works of art. Try them out! Throw ‘em in your VTT, print ‘em for your table.

Download the free map pack

Everyone who’s been subscribing lately has been getting the download for this pack in their welcome emails, but I especially wanted to let the older readers know that you can get these now! Let me know what you think. And if you like ‘em, I’d quite appreciate your support.

I’m also looking at getting some other projects out soon; I’ve got this weird experimental system I’ve been running test campaigns with for the last few months. I somehow crunched all the rolls down into a single 2d6-ish Save mechanic & the result is pretty interesting in play — although it might just be my dice obsession.

I’ve also made an entirely unrelated asset kit for Dungeondraft, release pending some polish. I’m tentatively calling it the Home Architect Pack 2 ( a sequel to the original, see below) Here’s some fancy spaceship maps for you that I made with it.

Oh, that last one isn’t a spaceship at all! But I’m sure you won’t mind.

Anyways, we’ll see once it’s done. In the meantime, if you’ve got Dungeondraft, you can download its predecessor, the original Home Architect Pack, for free below!

Download the Home Architect Pack v1

Now, back to our regularly scheduled not-advertising. Thanks for reading. More nonsense soon to come.

“Why?”, a curious reader may ask. “What’s the point of factions?” And to be pithy, the answer is “life”. But read on, anyways, because I made a free module for you that comes at the end of this rambling.

While running a sandbox campaign last March, I had made a goal out of trying to make the world feel alive. It’s all very well and good to have a sandbox world full of things to go and dig up and examine, but if things aren’t happening outside the players’ control, then they notice. And it doesn’t feel great.

But what makes your sandbox feel alive?

Things happening. Life happening. So many things that players can’t keep up with it all. The world is turning, it’s turning whether you’re there or not. It’s not about freedom. That’s Minecraft. Minecraft is freedom without dynamism, where nothing happens unless you do it. No player in their right mind would want to role-play in a world literally resembling the absent dynamism of Minecraft.

Non-party actors doing things is adventure fuel. I think from what little I’ve grasped of the BrOSR’s work that this is the most important underlining characteristic of their Braunsteins — many chaotic actors fighting each other. They sell their games as “factional”. You can react to another faction. You can fight factions. More importantly, they can fight back. They can surprise you.

How do you do factions as a singular GM, in a traditional game?

My naive initial method was to just try to wing it. I think this is what most GMs do when they run sandbox games; they’ll lay out their campaign’s groups and they’ll say, “okay, these guys want to protect this thing, and they’ll help fund the king so he can stop this invading horde.” And then they might run into a handful of roadblocks:

• It’s tricky to dredge up the motives of dozens of actors & envision their goals on-the-spot. There’s massive mental load to computing a large number of independent actors, especially when there’s no resolution mechanisms for any of the many forms of conflict all but guaranteed to arise from the endeavors of the actors.

• With no resolution mechanism, GMs are left adrift figuring out when & how factions should choose goals, act upon them, and succeed/fail at them.

• There’s a question of fairness intrinsic to the exercise if the GM has no consistent method for dealing with the decisions & activities of NPCs — specifically, fairness to the players, to who the GM (in theory) owes a consistent world. If the GM can simply make things up for how other problems are handled … can the judgement be said to be consistent & reliable?

But here, I think, is by far the most important point. By default, almost no system has:

• A systemic method for handling factions & their actions;

• That’s convenient & fast enough for a GM to use behind-the-scenes for more than a handful of factions at a time.

Now, many games have a faction system. I believe my readers are familiar with OSR titles, and have probably heard of Kevin Crawford’s works1, almost every single one of which features a faction system tailored to the system’s topic. Other systems include faction tools too, such as the delightful Mausritter. But the critical flaw I find with Kevin’s works as well as the other handful of systems I’m aware of is that they fall afoul of the second part of the statement. Take Stars Without Number as an example. In order to manage a single faction, you need to record, track, and manipulate their Force, Cunning, Wealth, their owned quantities of each of those values, their HP & maximum HP, their Income, their current Balance, and their EXP — and that’s just statistics! I discount the obvious need for goals, relationships, home base, the like.

The way I see it, most faction systems that people write up look an awful lot like they were mostly made for player-facing shenanigans. Players who want to tweak and build their faction like it was a second player character sheet. If you wanted to try to use the system as a GM to describe the world beyond the players, you’d need a spreadsheet (which appears to be the recommended method) and you’d still burn yourself out trying it (speaking from experience). Can you juggle a dozen PC sheets as well as the rest of the game world?

There’s just too many numbers. It’s annoying to have to keep track of everyone’s wealth and cunning. It often doesn’t even make sense if you cut the systems down to a small scale; systems tend to be built to assume that factions have, at the very least, hundreds of characters, and so are built to emulate faceless mass organizational dynamics rather than leader-based dynamics.

So factions are a critical thing. But we don’t have GM tools to handle them with. What do we do?

A quick jog down Taylor Lane

Taylor Lane2 is a brilliant lunatic & acquaintance/friend of mine. I genuinely cannot think of anyone who produces such interesting creations & so readily as he (although maybe he’s just more inclined to post it publicly). From mechanisms for revolutions to an undead campaign engine for almost any OSR title, most of his works are at least thought-provoking and more often than not excellent additions to your elf-games. It was around last March that I ended up in a very productive and meandering conversation with him, and in that talk some mutual agreements & several new surprises came to light:

• Speed is more important than anything. It’s very hard to use the faction systems of Worlds Without Number or Stars Without Number for anything other than the PCs’ own factions because you need dozens for a “real” living world, and if each faction is as complicated as a PC sheet, you can only manage a couple at most. Three stats per faction at most is probably a good upper limit; remember that every faction has tons of textual data that needs to be tracked as well.

  • As an aside, this might be why most node-based campaign management methods I see usually only focus on a handful of notable villains at a time.

• Faction systems should be scalable. I’m not quite sure who raised this point first because I know I was working on this problem beforehand, but factions can be as big as an empire or as small as a three-man adventuring party or mercenary lance. The chosen faction simulator should be capable of handling all possible scales, because even if you have no tiny factions, the PCs count as one and so often do their minions as well, and they will certainly be interacting with factions. The corollary to this is that…

• Factions should be interoperable with other characters. Many an occasion rises when a singular character should be able to have an impact upon a larger group, or vice versa — which means that factional interaction with other characters ought to be damned near mechanically identical to character interaction. To be specific, you need a way as a system to take your faction’s attributes, whatever they are & however they’re structured, and have that directly interface with your game’s core resolution mechanic(s) — the thing that all other notable character interactions are filtered through. If you’ve got opposed checks, your faction should be able to take its Size or Population or whatever and use it to make opposed checks when useful. Otherwise, you’ll be swimming in edge cases all day long. This is especially important because…

• Factions don’t exist. They are a mirage. Factions are socioeconomic relationships between NPCs (& sometimes PCs). Every faction taking an action is a leader ordering the action and its members carrying out that action. Rather than describing the structure (i.e. “this faction is a Republic”), you should be describing the relationships between the characters who make decisions (i.e. “this NPC leader de facto rules the Whig Party, and this one is the Prime Minister & leads the Bonnet Party”). This because there is always someone behind the mask, and someone is always ultimately making the decisions. (Even if you want to bicker whether this is the case in real life, it certainly makes for better drama, which means a better story, which is a better game. Humans build narratives intuitively. That’s what these role-playing games are.)

Taylor generously provided me a couple of sample faction systems he had built for his own home-brewed games. And the thing that most strongly struck me about them was that they were really simple. But the second thing was that they were entirely GM-facing. They could afford to be simple because the operation of a faction behind-the-scenes aren’t things that players see! Even for player-owned organizations, as far as Taylor was concerned, managing a faction should be like managing a real organization in real life: speak to people, get info from them, order them to their face. Real-world factionalism is always just a game in juggling a web of hierarchies. The leaders (& specifically their interests) are arguably more important than their ideological character or the mass group they represent.

Sidebar regarding simplicity: You don’t need to track money, cunning, or military force independently. They’re the same thing: power, derived from supporters of varying colors. Different flavors of power, sure; elites are tinged by the character of where they derive their power from. But this isn’t a substantive reason to categorize them differently. In certain circumstances, it’s an overriding factor. But here’s the thing: you don’t need to simulate that directly because players don’t see it. You aren’t simulating all the nitty-gritty. It’s not like combat, you don’t need to track every single swing & blow that goes into The Hero’s Village’s efforts to construct their new church. You can simplify it dramatically. Taylor built a system where each faction only had a single stat: Goal Progress. Roll 1d100. If you get under Progress, add your roll to Progress. At 100%+, the faction achieves their goal. And it worked. Ask him.

That one-stat Goal Progress thing isn’t the core of a faction system I’d recommend putting in just any game. It’s an explosive system. It’s designed to create rapid ramping-up that explodes at the end. It’s designed for a Weird Wide World where everyone’s a magical mini-cult working havoc upon reality. But the key is that it’s so simple that a GM can run dozens and dozens of factions simultaneously using it, and if you follow the other rules that play off that singular stat and your textual & narrative comprehension of the world & faction motives, you don’t need more than that.

The final point to make is this: factions are actually motivated random event generators. We’re not really interested in the minutia of factional behavior. The players can’t see or benefit from the vast majority of it. What we’re interested in is the chain of cause-effect events that change the world in their passage & thereby create “things that happen” for your players to engage with. Every villain plot, every advice to “prep situations, not scenes” — autonomous factions are the apex of that. A good faction engine & appropriate population of a world with factions naturally creates the situations that things like node-based scenario design are meant to artificially replicate. And the two methods are powerfully complementary if put together.

Every faction system is personalized

The discussion I had was long and rambling, and I had to take a while to absorb it. And then I had to test it myself. In three campaigns now (Masks of Nyarlathotep, Mausritter, and a test campaign for a homebrewed system I hope to soon release) I have employed a tailored custom faction system, and the results are remarkable.

The core of each system is simple, although I varied the implementation based on the characteristics of the campaign. Each system had the following elements attached to each faction:

• Population: A means of distinguishing faction scope/scale/area/supporters. This merges the concepts of both “supporters” (i.e. collaborators & enablers who are not directly involved in factional action) and "soldiers” (i.e. active participants who do the metaphorical dirty work) together, because nearly every organization has a similar ratio of approximately 8:1 to 10:1 supporters to soldiers. The US Army’s own numbers will tell you this, and it applies outside of the military, too. Think of how many family members, businesses, and associates were needed to support a single Made Man. My favorite method was by logarithmic scale; each doubling or quadrupling of population added +1 to the stat, and you can convey that directly into an easily-scaling comparative bonus when factions or PCs fight each other.

• Aspects: Some of you would probably hate this, but I found the best possible way to clearly differentiate notable faction distinctions was to just slap a few FATE-style words or even a phrase down and have it apply like dis/advantage when necessary. Mausritter would call these your faction’s Resources, while Godbound calls them Features.

• A charismatic leader with a distinct agenda: Charismatic people rule the world, and they make for better stories (& more easily-remembered friends & foes) when they have interesting qualities. More to the point, charisma usually includes ambition, which means the character wants to change the world somehow, which is the only reason you’re bothering to pay attention to them, and an agenda means you can reason out why anyone would bother siding with them in the first place; their supporters agree with them.

• Goals & a progress stat: Your factions have to do things. When they max out their progress bar, they do things, automatically. No save-or-fail. They just achieve it. Even if that means something as dramatic & world-shifting as “they kill the king”.

That’s it. That’s four critical elements, only two of which are stats.

Each faction system also had a similar chassis for resolving problems in conflicts. Guidelines about how to choose goals. Recommended intervals for faction event checks. But the most important element is that each had an event generator: Every time a faction makes progress towards their goal, an event happens. Flat-out. The players hear about it, guaranteed. It’s a rumor. It’s in the newspapers. They see or meet people affected by it; they’re directly impacted by it. Something to make them notice.

Sidebar regarding Mausritter: Mausritter is two steps ahead of the other faction systems I know & it has this little note in its faction rules:

This is hinting at the same idea. This is, I feel, the real purpose of factions. But Mausritter doesn’t go far enough. I firmly believe an explicit rule as to when events happen is beneficial & I integrated such a thing into every system variation I tested. This whole system exists to generate events so that players know that the world is moving. I’d triply underline it if I could.

So when implemented, how did these systems turn out? Wonderfully, actually.

• I could trivially simulate with less than 5 minutes of faction turn work per session nearly 20 factions per campaign. I feel like this is on the low end of what’s possible. 50 is actually within reach, if you wanted to take 15 to 20 minutes between sessions.

• Players could not, in fact, keep up with the pace of events. The local cat killed the cornsnake! But there’s also missing children! The rats have kidnapped the baker’s son! This was a good thing. It made the game more interesting & tense that they were forced to choose between what to pursue as they hadn’t the time to deal with all the world’s chaos.

• It actually gave me a better grasp of all the moving parts of the world. Because every faction ‘turn’ required that I step through everyone’s motivations & current actions, I continually refreshed my mind on where they were at and how it was going!

The method isn’t entirely without flaws. The weakest implementation was in my still-ongoing Masks of Nyarlathotep excursion. MoN is already a lengthy world-spanning sandbox and most of it is set up as a “node-based” campaign sandbox for investigation. Retooling the factions as ‘mobile actors’ is more difficult than it seems, and rephrasing the fixed campaign timeline for more flexible faction-based actions was so much trouble that I felt limited to mostly adding additional actors or converting side stories or supportive characters into actors that worked alongside the main events of the campaign.

I also experimented with treating weather as factions. Winter plots to summon a blizzard! It didn’t strike me as a great execution the way I tried it, but if you really wanted to personify facets of the world as entities who are always acting within it, I feel like it could be done with a bit more tweaking than what I accomplished. I might have to publish a toolkit for that soon.

A Free d20 Faction System

I made a two-page faction system. It fits on one double-sided U.S. Letter sheet. I am giving it to you. It’s free on DriveThruRPG right now. It’s called The Faction Machine.

Download on DriveThruRPG

It’s probably compatible with anything. It uses a d20 die, but it doesn’t assume anything about the system you bolt it onto. That makes it sub-optimal in that you’ll have to adapt it to whatever you’re using, but flexible enough that you can probably use it no matter what. It’s just an example. Something to get you thinking. But it works — I know this because it’s a tweaked version of what I used.

I’m actually genuinely excited about this thing. It’s one of the best improvements I’ve ever made to my own game, integrating a system like this. If you try it out, I want to know how it goes for you. Tell me how it goes! Hell, even just make a faction or two & think about how it works. Whatever you choose, I hope it works for you like it has for me.

Renaming the Blog & A Preview

Now that I’ve finally come out of hibernation, I’m also shaking up something else. The blog’s been renamed! Nothing dramatic. We’re dropping the “Compact” in favor of simply being the Cyclopean Blog. In fact, I’ve already seen to it!

You might ask why, and the reason is that I’m preparing for a relaunch of my tabletop games projects as a proper business. I used to make battle-maps for tactical RPGs (i.e. D&D) as Miscellanea Maps; I’m resurrecting that as DnDungeon Maps and planning on much more. Cyclopean will be a company under which I hope to publish most of my backlog: Games, tools, modules, perhaps software. We’ll see how it goes. But stay tuned, more on that soon! In the meantime, go check out Taylor’s works. That’s an order. He deserves it. Do it for Taylor.

Anyways, the crisis of purpose aside. Today it is about saves. A brief history, first. Saving throws should have some differentiation between them. This, the editions of D&D have agreed upon.

• In the earliest titles, and most of the retroclones spawned by them, saving throws were a line of stats unrelated to the character’s other ability scores. Classes progressed in the scores at rates determined by their class; the Fighter had nearly twice as good a Breath Weapons saving throw at level 13 than the Magic-User did.

• In 3rd Edition, this was crunched into being indirectly based on a character’s ability scores. You now had only three scores: Fortitude, Reflex, Will. Each was modified by a single ability modifier. Differentiated class progression was retained in the basic scores.

• In 5th Edition, it was crunched down further. Saving throws now closely resemble ordinary ability checks. They can be made against any of a character’s abilities, although certain types tend to be favored, I believe. If classes are differentiated, it is only by way of discrete special features or by having chosen different abilities to prioritize. A wizard will have naturally high Intelligence, in most cases, and therefore will have better odds on such saving throws.

I, being an iconoclast, borrowed bits from the GLOG upon my discovery of it but refused to adopt the saving throw as presented. I was dimly aware of the history, but having come primarily from a system without the concept (Dead Simple RPG2 — a very simple free d20 clone made for homebrewing), I wanted to replicate the differentiated saving throws of old while retaining my familiar and preferred system.

So, like a fool, I did two things, as an experiment:

• I kept the saving-throws-based-on-ability-score/aspects that DSRPG had, which was likely derived from 5e, rather than keep the saving throw separate.

• I split the GLOG’s proposed Save score into two (Health & Luck), differentiated them by domain, and then added it on top of the saving throw.

Taiao’s save system was therefore set up to be like this, which it has largely not changed from since then: all saving throws are TN 15. With a d20, that’s about a 30% chance of success. You get a modifier from the aspect the check calls for — say, Intelligence — and you may add your Health or Luck depending on what the check is for. Critically, Health/Luck are not normally specified until the GM calls out the check, as I found it annoying to have to specify two differentiating features; I probably should have noticed what this meant sooner.

It has been approaching three years since I started this experiment. Here’s what I’ve discovered:

• It is, in fact, relatively annoying to have to specify whether to use Health or Luck. The conditions are relatively clear (Health for temperature, disease, bodily function, etc and Luck for everything else) but if there’s the slightest room for doubt and someone has an imbalanced set of scores players have the incentive to ask every time anyways.

• The scores are differentiated enough just by relying on a character’s aspect modifiers. Someone with +2 to +3 Intelligence is going to have an edge over someone with –1 Intelligence. That’s a 15% to 20% difference. Isn’t that fine enough?

• The two changes I initially made essentially achieve the same goals. This wasn’t clear to me at the time, because I didn’t have a firm grasp on the purpose of a saving throw, but splitting your save bonuses and tying them to aspects is silly redundancy.

You might be saying “well, the outcomes should have been predictable!” And you’re probably right! I’m not the smartest, and I spent a few years just feeling out the design space, learning as I went. I’ve played a lot more games now, and I’m a bit better at predicting outcomes.

I’m considering this experiment closed: it is not great to have two separate saving throw modifiers if you aren’t going to specify which one to use when. I thought it’d be cute to be able to improve a character’s Health score through unique means i.e. magical sources of health, or similarly with Luck, but frankly, that can be simulated with off-hand abilities granting numerical modifiers or advantage.

For now, the saves will likely be crunched into one. Perhaps I’ll consider further methods of differentiation, or maybe this will be its final evolution. Personally, I anticipate that I’ll stick with discrete abilities where I feel it’s necessary. From history, players seem to appreciate a free +4 on a certain category of saves more than they appreciate a gradual progressive bonus.

The only question is now: what do I call it? I still like the theme that the term Luck provides, but I believe those who argue for the old saving throws have a valid point in that the ambiguity of the terms and their disconnect from ability provides some more flexibility to the imagination. Calling it Save retains a bit of that, even if it is still attached to an aspect score; calling it Luck sounds nice it but may reduce that flexibility.

Slowly, but surely, I will re-invent the wheel.

Crush Blocks

HD 2, Defense 12, Morale N/A, Speed 120’, Armor 6, Initiative +2
Group Size: 1d4 group
Appearance: Armored metal cube that fits neatly into its native halls.
Voice: Grinding sound of rock on rock.
Wants: To crush intruders.
Morality: Nope.
Intelligence: Essentially none.
Attacks: ×1 slide (Slide)

• Slide: Crush Blocks can only move in straight orthogonal movements, like a rook in Chess. They move once per round, always in the direction of the easiest-to-reach enemy, or else to position themselves to attack in the future. They may move into or through a victim’s square, and when they do, the victim takes 1d12 blunt damage and must pass an Agility save to move to an adjacent free square and not be pushed along with the Crush Block. If they fail their save and the Crush Block has enough speed to reach a wall, the victim is transformed into chunky salsa.

• Immune to all types of damage except for blunt and acid, as well as damage dealt by pickaxes or other stone-breaking implements.

These are 5’ or 10’ cubic blocks of reinforced stone. Although typically found in Temple-Complexes (p. XX), some enterprising golem engineers have duplicated their design to varying degrees of success. They are most dangerous when other entities are distracting their soon-to-be victims.

Treasure: 1d10*10d in armored plates, plus a jewel core worth 2d20*100d which must be dug out of the center of the steel contraption.

1d4 - Eye Color & Level of Intelligence

1. Ruby. Only (and always) moves as a reaction whenever any entity crosses its orthogonal lines of sight, without any thought.

2. Amethyst. Will move only if doing so would either allow it to attack or set it up for an attack on the next round.

3. Sapphire. Intelligently sets positioning traps & avoids obstacles.

4. Emerald. Orders lesser Crush Blocks around to make traps deadlier. Forms large interlocked moving walls, calls reinforcements.

1d6 - Unusual Crush Block Roles

1. Giant chess pieces. Adapt other chess movement patterns too. Move a piece after each player’s turn. Only move each piece up to once per round.

2. Transport. Blocks have space for monster pilots or soldiers inside.

3. Shifting tunnel walls. Blocks shift while not seen to rearrange hallways and confuse player mapping efforts.

4. Possessed Guards. Blocks are ancestral soul storage. They can be spoken to and reasoned with, like one might reason with a guard.

5. Sliding statues. No chunky salsa crushing; instead, statues move across specially-prepared tile floors to engage with mundane weapons.

6. Firewall. Armor reduced to 0. Box is a hollow frame filled with fire. When it passes through an enemy’s space, they’re automatically lit ablaze and must pass an Agility save or be knocked prone.

1d8 - Why is There a Giant Angry Block of Stone?

1. They were meant to be elevators, actually.

2. It’s gotten loose from a nearby Temple-Complex1.

3. The engineer was an eccentric who dabbled in golems.

4. A local earth sprite has had enough.

5. An old curiosity was dragged out of storage and put to use.

6. It was originally a religious idol.

7. The pharaoh demanded guards who would live as long as his mummy.

8. A local Temple-Complex is unconsciously probing the surface.

Notes

Have you ever played Spelunky? You should play Spelunky.

Hell, these are just thwomps. They’re everywhere. They’re a bit videogamey. I stuffed a bunch in an ancient automated religious complex (the aforementioned Temple-Complexes) and my players ended up dancing around them for about thirty minutes as they tried to figure out how to either get away or damage them. Their restrictions on motion (orthogonal on a grid, like a rook) makes them easy to avoid if they’re the only thing you’re fighting, but if you have other enemies that can pin players down I imagine they’re far more terrifying.

I would not imagine they’re satisfying to play with if you’re not using a grid. They’re as much a puzzle creature as crush traps in Spelunky are.

1. Quick: The design should be simple. It should take ~10 seconds to obtain an immediate result, maybe another ~20 for the victim to write it down.

2. Diegetic: The design should create specific wounds with clear effects. None of this generic “wounds” nonsense. I want people to lose their eyes.

3. Real: The design should approximate reality to an acceptable degree. Do you know how hard it is to chop someone’s arm off? It’s pretty hard. Most limb loss is due to necessary after-the-fact amputation.

4. Lethal: Taiao uses an HP system. Wounds tend to involve extending the period of time you’re active (because an arm cut doesn’t mean you can keep fighting). The system should not triple the number of hits a 1 HD creature can sustain before collapsing, as another & looser goal of mine is that the whole system is to be roughly backwards-compatible with other OSR modules (stat conversions notwithstanding)

So let me elaborate on that last point, because it’s the reason I have a wound system in the first place. While Taiao has HP, I try to be very consistent about what it represents: HP is your ability to fight back. It’s not meat points. It requires active protection & awareness. Sneak attacks (or traps), unavoidable environmental hazards such as gas or heat, and forced called shots can all bypass HP if the character can’t react to prevent it. This is why it’s backronymed to “Hit Protection”.

So wounds need to be capable of crippling someone without totally crippling someone. You shouldn’t die because you took a blow while unable to defend, but you should be at a pretty serious disadvantage. And they should still be capable of killing you eventually.

The Solution

Let’s see if I can translate this to something system-agnostic.

When you take damage, it can be roughly split into two categories:

1. Damage you could have theoretically protected yourself from (getting stabbed by an enemy you knew was there, even if you didn’t know exactly where; a dragon’s breath while you’re holding a shield).

2. Damage you realistically have no way of stopping (a sneak attack from a completely concealed enemy whose presence you were unaware of; a dragon’s breath when you’ve got nothing to hide behind).

The first kind drains your HP (until you run out). The second kind inflicts wounds. The first kind will also inflict wounds, but only once you run out of HP.

When HP drops to 0, the overflow damage is turned into a single wound. A wound sounds something like “Broken Left Arm 3”. The “Broken” part is the effect, “Left Arm” is the location, and “3” is the severity of the wound, which is called Shock. For every 5 points of damage you take (or part thereof), add 1 point of Shock to the inflicted wound. So if you take 11 damage at 3 HP, you’re reduced to 0 HP, and the remaining 8 damage becomes a Shock 2 wound.

Wounds caused by physical damage have location-based effects, but elemental wounds affect your whole body. For physical damage (blunt/slashing/piercing) whose location is not already known, roll:

1d8: (1: Head, 2-4: Torso, 5: Left Arm, 6: Right Arm, 7: Left Leg, 8: Right Leg).

Compare this against the Wounds by Shock/Location/Type tables and write down the effect:

And here’s the list of effects:

Finally, every time you take a wound, roll a Will save (substitute Constitution in other systems), using five times the wound’s Shock as your TN1. If you fail, you become incapacitated. If you critically fail, you die.

So, in short:

1. Calculate overflow damage and translate it into a Shock score.

2. Determine location if not already known.

3. Make a Will save to not become useless/die. You might have to make a second save or else roll a d6 depending on the wound.

4. Write down the wound, location, and Shock.

Nameless NPCs are automatically incapacitated if they ever have a total Shock equal to or greater than their HD (including if it’s split across several wounds).

That’s the basics. That’s everything that absolutely has to be handled the moment a character takes a wound. In practice, this system works pretty fast. I can resolve wounds in about 30 seconds and the player who suffered can write it down in the meantime. All additional effects are deferred, to avoid taxing the GM’s mental spoons and to provide tension/suspense - note the absence of a definitive wound duration.

Now here’s the extras that make the system work.

Blood Loss & Bleed

At the start of your turn, you take 1 damage per point of untreated Shock from blood loss/internal damage at the start of each of your combat turns. If any amount of blood loss would cause a wound, you instead tick up a Bleed score by exactly 1 point and then make a Will save as if you had received a wound, using the blood loss damage as your TN.

Your Bleed score is subtracted from all checks and saves.

Outside of combat, and while incapacitated or otherwise unconscious, the rate of blood loss is reduced from once per turn to once per 10 minutes.

Treating Wounds

Wounds may be treated on the field with medical supplies, 2 AP (one full turn), and an Intelligence check. Using makeshift medical supplies (such as torn clothing) forces disadvantage (or a –4 penalty). The check’s TN is equal to five times the wound’s Shock. Treated wounds do not cause blood loss/Bleed but are not set to recover yet.

Characters can attempt to mend their own wounds if they are capable of taking action (i.e. not incapacitated). It takes 10 minutes for a wounded character to treat a wound of their own.

Incapacitation

Incapacitated characters are unconscious, or effectively unconscious - they could be screaming and writhing on the floor, or simply stunned, so long as they cannot take useful action or process what’s going on. Incapacitated characters can roll a Will save (Wisdom? There isn’t a great equivalent to Will in the standard SCDIWC lineup) every 10 minutes to recover control over themselves.

After the Combat

“So,” you say. “This system doesn’t seem to achieve several goals so far.” And if you’re thinking that, you’re right. So you take bleed-out damage every round and it can stack a bad penalty. That’s not gonna keep you (or the vampire) down. You can fight for at least five rounds past 0 HP before Bleed stacks up to a –5 penalty, assuming you pass all of the Will checks (and don’t critically fail and die - a more likely outcome than you think). Why wouldn’t you?

The answer is that after you’re wounded, you’re not done making saving throws. A lot of deaths in ancient/medieval combat came from after the skirmish was over. Your real worst enemy isn’t the wound, it’s the…

Infection

Treated wounds have stopped causing further damage, but may still fester. At the end of any day where a character obtained a wound, or any day when a treated wound is exposed to putrid materials or a disease-fostering environment, they roll a Strength save once to avoid infection. If they fail, a disease takes up residence inside a random recent wound.

Diseases are predatory spirits. They want things: a laugh, for powerful men to die, wealth squandered, to spread themselves, a more tragic victim. You can bargain with them like a spirit, if you can find a priest or doctor able to commune with them like one. For each day that a wound festers, characters must pass a Strength save (plus their doctor's skill/proficiency bonus2; Constitution save for other systems). If they succeed, the disease is cured. If they fail, the wound's Shock increases by 1.

Death by Infection & Amputation

Once a festering wound has reached Shock 3 or higher, the wound cannot be healed. From here on out, the daily Strength saves made against the disease are for the victim’s life - if a save is failed, the victim dies from complications.

The only cure for a terminal infection is amputation - and for a head, torso, or elemental full-body wound (none of which can be non-lethally amputated), a desperate prayer to a god might be the victim’s last hope - or a real tough bargain with the disease responsible.

Healing Wounds & Bleed

Your Bleed score heals by itself at a rate of 1 per day, but wounds only heal with rest and care. A wound is considered rested if the party is moving at no faster than a slow pace over land (4 hours spent traveling per day) and the character doesn’t strain or test the afflicted body part in any way.

Once per week, characters may attempt a Strength save for each rested wound they have, adding their doctor’s skill and proficiency bonus. The TN is five times the wound’s current Shock. If they pass the check, the wound’s Shock is reduced by 1. When the wound’s Shock has been reduced to 0, it is removed and the character may gain a curious scar. If a critical failure occurs while testing to reduce the Shock, the wound is removed regardless of the Shock level, but the effects are permanent. Lost limbs, organs, and other permanent effects are always permanent even if the wound that caused them is cured.

Wounds do not inhibit HP recovery. You can regenerate HP even while wounded.

Death

Characters who die may have a funeral held by a priest to alert a psychopomp to ferry them to an afterlife (if any is granted by their god). This recovers 10% of the deceased’s XP for any surviving party members (and in the case of player character death, for the player’s next character).

If no funeral is held, souls will eventually fade, slip quietly into the sea, and sink down towards Hell’s abyssal mouths.

If a death was particularly violent, ironic, or absurd, a ghost may be created as the soul departs. A ghost is a curse-like effect upon the local environment that simulates and inflicts the cause of death upon others.

Curious Scars

This is something that I believe I borrowed from a mixture of Arnold (K) and the Angry GM. I believe Arnold had a much stronger influence here.

When a character heals a wound off entirely or survives a near-death experience, they gain a curious scar and advantage to save vs whatever caused the wound. If a hydra burned them, they gain advantage vs fire. Death rays give advantage vs magic, etc. Stretch this if you must. If they were mind-controlled but then stabbed (nearly) to death, give them advantage vs mind control attempts. If you absolutely cannot find a way to grant a suitable save bonus, give them something like +2 HP or +1 Health or +1 Luck.

You can only get one curious scar per specific near- death experience. Even if you get multiple scars from a single fight with a hydra, only one of them will be a curious scar. If you get into another fight with a hydra, however, then you might have a chance at a second curious scar.

How Does It Work Out?

In my simulations? Surprisingly well. In practice? My players appear to be too wily to take many lethal blows (and if they do, it is usually due to profound folly that inflicts instant death). We’ll see once things get rolling.

First, let’s talk about criteria. How does the system hold up against my original design goals?

1. Quick: This is actually relative. Is it fast to generate a wound on-the-spot? Yes! It’s remarkably quick - if you have those location/wound tables in front of you. I intend on preparing a print-out to be included as a printable to go with the system book. That’s the one hangup. Everything else is deferred until later, so it’s really fast for the variety of prognoses it produces.

2. Diegetic: The design does, in fact, create specific wounds with expected effects, largely due to the tables of severity/location/damage type. You might need to jot down some shorthand to remember an effect by the wound, though.

3. Real: It’s hard to judge reality, but the range of effects and the prognosis of a given set of wounds roughly matches my own expectations regarding the lethality of certain effects, and it also gives plenty of chances of success or failure that can occur well after the wound is received. So I’d say it’s good enough?

4. Lethal: Surprisingly lethal, especially if you bleed out too much, have a bad doctor, or have poor Strength/Will scores. How do I know? Let’s talk about some math.

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Some Math

I made some diagrams while plotting out the routes a wound could take. The one above is for all wounds. Some basic rough numbers for a person with absolutely no modifiers:

• A Shock 1 wound has around a 34% chance of resulting in death. Torso wounds are disproportionately more likely to cause death due to the penalty to physical aspects they cause (but also because amputation is impossible).

• A Shock 2 wound has around a 50% chance of causing death. Torso wounds, again, are slightly more likely, but it’s fuzzier since Shock 2 wounds have a wider range of possible effects.

• A Shock 3 wound has around a 75% chance of causing death - limbs can be amputated, but head wounds are instant death and torso wounds have a high probability of succumbing to infection.

Surprisingly high, right? Don’t you only die on a critical failure when you take a wound? Why’s it so lethal?

It’s infections. Infections cause the vast majority of deaths. If you don’t die instantly, odds are you’ll get infected. And what do infections cause? Repeated Strength saves over the next few days to avoid worsening the infection. Shock 1 wounds have three saves (save vs infection, save vs Shock 2, and save vs Shock 3) before they reach the terminal Shock 3. Shock 2 wounds have two saves. Shock 3 or greater wounds only get the initial save versus infection - if a Shock 4 wound gets infected, it’s already over.

These percentage odds are, again, unmodified. Odds are you won’t have a flat 0 bonus for your Strength saves. You may have anywhere from –4 to +4 thanks to your Strength score/modifier, but you’ll also likely have a doctor and possibly some Health from your class ranks to add to your saves.

A curious thing about the source of the lethality (repeated STR saves) is that modifiers have a much stronger impact on the lethality of low-Shock wounds. If you have a Shock 1 wound, a +2 modifier will be somewhere around 2 to 3 times as useful for surviving it than a Shock 3 wound, because it gets added to not one but three distinct saves, each of which can potentially save you from a grisly death. If you have a good doctor and decent Strength, the lethality of a Shock 1 wound plummets to as low as around 13%. The lethality of a Shock 3 wound is not quite as strongly affected.

The Role of Bleed

The Bleed score provides a counterbalance for players who want to keep fighting past the point when they should have quit. Its real lethality is hidden from view: you can fight for three turns at a –1, –2, –3 penalty; but can you pass three Strength saves with that penalty? The math says you won’t want to try. Your heroism might save your friends in the short term, but it might cost you an arm and a leg tomorrow. Or your life, if you’re unlucky.

Of course, Bleed also has a continuing ongoing odds of killing you anyways. Every point of Bleed causes a new Will save versus incapacitation, with a 5% chance of death on a critical failure as usual. Not a risk I’d really want to take.

Permanent Effects

If you get a critical failure while saving to reduce a wound’s Shock (during the recovery cycle), the wound’s effects are permanent. What does that look like?

Well, it’s not so pretty. Recovery checks are made against five times the wound’s Shock value, so low Shock wounds are far faster to heal - and wounds get quicker to heal as time passes, since a success on a Shock 2+ wound just reduces its Shock by 1 point. But there’s still a possibility you might have to make that check again. And even a Shock 1 wound will always have a 5% chance of becoming permanent. That is, for every single Shock 1 wound, you have a minimum 5% chance of sustaining permanent brain damage, torso injury, or limb dysfunction.

That’s pretty nasty. How do you minimize it? The answer is that it’s hard to. The best you can do is either reduce the Shock level of the wound faster (as every failed check is another 5% chance of permanency) or somehow get advantage on your checks. Advantage is tricky in cases like this, as it’s normally reserved for immediate situational bonuses rather than permanent effects (which are usually numerical modifiers, which do not reduce the odds of a critical failure).

That said, the chances of a permanent wound are somewhat offset by curious scars. You actually have a good chance, if you survive the infection, of coming out from a wound with a bonus. It might not be enough to offset a permanent broken limb, but hey - that’s what we’ve got magical prosthetics for, if you can afford one. And if your players still don’t want to play a cripple, I’ll be redoing some retirement rules too.

Summary

This system works according to my design goals. But is it suitable for your game? It’s comparatively lethal, but I’m not sure it’s more lethal than the system that most GMs already use. For NPCs with a lot of HD, it’ll give them a few more turns to live on, but it gives the same thing to your players. The difference is that for players, those turns might end their careers a few days down the line when the Bleed penalty catches up to them.

Also, incapacitation saves will eventually cause a character who’s bleeding out to get knocked out anyways, and NPCs with low HD have no additional resilience as they’re automatically incapacitated once their total Shock is at or above their HD - so there’s little mental math required for the mooks.

I expect it will maintain strong tension, both in and out of combat. If you’re in a dungeon, and it’s a few days back to civilization, you’re on a race against the clock to get to someone with proper medical knowledge. Wounds are more deadly while in the sticks than they are in civilization.

The Challenge

Jot down a character. Give them a Strength and Will modifier from –4 to +4, and roll 2d10 (take the lowest result) to generate their doctor’s competency. They take a wound of 1d10 severity and bleed out for some number of rounds. Run through the procedure, and figure out when they get infected and if they survive or perish, and then share their misfortune in the comments. Tell me how it feels.

And, of course, tell me if you try it in person.

Someone1 got me thinking a month or two ago about an alternative method of implementing air rifles, one that uses a resource die-like system for damage. It actually only took me a couple of days to decide to implement it, but it’s only now that I got around to making the accompanying 1-rank bonus classes too! So it’s now that it gets posted.

New Air Gun Rules

Gunpowder cannot exist on Aia2, but there is no reason that this would stop military innovation. A Girardian gun is a semi-automatic air-powered firearm, originally developed by a Nerepholian inventor. They have rapidly proliferated owing to recent wars, but are still exotic in most places.

Air guns require a replaceable air canister, attached to the weapon as the stock of the rifle for air rifles, and attached to/part of the grip for air pistols. These canisters are fragile, and will rupture if impacted or abused.

The special rules applicable to Girardian guns and their canisters are as follows:

• Air Level Dice: Each air canister has an associated air level die. Air level dice size shifts along the following track: d0 » d4 » d6 » d8 » d10 » d12. The air level of the canister attached to a gun determines the gun’s damage and range.

• Canister Size: Pistol canisters are smaller and hold less air. Their air level dice cannot go higher than d8. Rifle canisters explode if attached to a pistol.

• Damage: Equal to the air level die, except every time the maximum value of the die is rolled, another die of the same size is added (a “dice explosion”). These additional dice may also explode, and will continue doing so until the chain of maximum rolls ceases.

• Range: Equal to the air level die times 10 in feet. For example, if the air level is d6, the current range is 60’.

• Air Reduction: Every time an air gun’s damage die comes up as 1, the attached air canister’s air level die is shrunk by 1 size.

• Canister Replacement: Replacing an air gun’s canister in combat requires an entire turn of active concentration, during which nothing else can be done.

• Canister Refilling: An air gun maintenance pack can refill either kind of canister with 20 minutes of pumping. They also contain cleaning tools, a bullet mold and lead melting pan, and space to hold two spare air canisters.

Air guns have a remarkably quiet report and no muzzle flash. They are not silent, but it is extremely hard to locate a hidden shooter outdoors. Unlike bows, they may be fired while prone.

Weapon & Equipment Stats

• Girardian Air Pistol (Hands 1, Weight 1# (~5lb), Damage 1d8(!) blunt (maximum), Range (air level ×10’), Cost 150d (150 days of an unskilled laborer’s wage))

• Girardian Air Rifle (Hands 2, Weight 2# (~10lb), Damage 1d12(!) blunt (maximum), Range (air level ×10’), Cost 150d)

• Lead Slug (Cost 12 slugs for 4d)

• Air gun maintenance pack (can hold 2 air canisters) (Weight 1# (~8lb), Cost 20d)

• Pistol Air Canister (Pressure d8 maximum, Cost 30d)

• Rifle Air Canister (Pressure d12 maximum, Cost 50d)

What’s Changed?

I took the damage system and replaced it with a scale based on air canister pressure. You track air canister air levels in dX increments now, from d4 to d12. Pistol canisters cap at a lower pressure level (d8) while rifles can reach d12 at most.

Air gun damage dice still explode, so their damage doesn’t drop off as harshly as you’d think. A d4 is a lot more likely to explode (25% chance!) than a d12 (~8% chance!).

I also corrected my original apparently incorrect assumption of an hour to refill. The new time of 20 minutes is probably easier for players to manage. And added a bit more detail regarding what, specifically, the maintenance pack is for.

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The Classes

These are one-rank ‘bonus’ classes. Use them for your GLOG, or as like prestige classes or something as an option instead of the usual bonuses for leveling up. I partially made them for the sake of letting players start with the weapons, since they’re very expensive at character creation (coming in at 50% and 100% more than the default starting funds) and are tricky to obtain otherwise.

Ranking bonuses are added once per rank taken in a class. Since bonus classes only have one rank, they can only be obtained once.

Duelist

Starting Equipment: Air pistol (1#), air gun maintenance pack (1#), 2 pistol air canisters (d8 max), melee weapon of choice, 2d10×100d in unpaid gambling debts or otherwise.

Prerequisites: Must be from or familiar with Nerepholia WHEREVER AIR GUNS ORIGINATE FROM IN YOUR GAME, and/or if taking as a rank after character creation possess proficiency in Girardian Air Guns.

The duelist has mastered a new style of fighting, one whose grounds have not yet been tested and whose techniques are still evolving: the art of the pistol. The recent invention of air-powered arms have provided a potent weapon comparable to the gunpowder that Aia lacks, and the duelist has taken that and combined it with the ancient art of melee combat.

Ranking Bonuses

Taking Duelist grants +1 Attack, +1 Defense, +1 Luck, and +1 Initiative.

Rank 1

Dances With Blades » You do not invoke opportunity attacks from enemies when making ranged attacks inside their reach so long as you’re making them with one-handed air rifles.

Dual Technique » Once per turn, if you’re simultaneously wielding both a one-handed air rifle and a one-handed melee weapon and perform an attack with one of them, you may take a free bonus attack, performed with the other.

Lancer

Starting Equipment: Air rifle (2#), air gun maintenance pack (1#), 2 rifle air canisters (d8 max), 2d10×100d in unpaid gambling debts or otherwise.

Prerequisites: Must be from or familiar with Nerepholia WHEREVER AIR GUNS ORIGINATE FROM IN YOUR GAME, and/or if taking as a rank after character creation possess proficiency in Girardian Air Guns.

Nerepholia’s development of the air gun perhaps benefited the assassin most of all. Here was a weapon that is not much louder than a crossbow, and that can fire thirty shots in as many seconds at twice the range! One whose accuracy is unparalleled, and whose only limiting factor is expense and difficulty of use; there is no better weapon for a skilled professional.

The Lancer is a sniper, likely employed at some point by a mercenary company or city guard. He has mastered the Girardian air rifle, a weapon invented less than half a decade ago, and he earns his keep through its effective use. His skill and need for independence lends itself to an independent, adventurous lifestyle; it is no surprise that many end up in rogue bands of travelers as another killer for hire.

Ranking Bonuses

Taking Lancer grants +2 Attack.

Rank 1

Sharpshooter » Your effective maximum range while using an air rifle is doubled.

Double Tap » Once per turn, after making a ranged attack with a two-handed air rifle against a target, you may perform a free bonus attack against that same target.

Notes

These should be playtested. Lancer’s stat boosts might be too weak compared to, say, a warrior. I’d like to give them each a non-combat ability if possible, but I’m not sold on any yet and they might deserve a bit more flavor. Suggest me some!

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Did you know I have a glossary? If you’re confused about terms, it’ll help with conversion to other systems.

I have a document that outlines Aia’s setting themes. High-level and low-level stuff; things the world touches on, repeating beats in its history and its underlying physics.

The low-level things are titled “dinosaurs” or “magical biology”. I wanted giant lizards, and I wanted biology not driven by modern science but by elemental ingredients. Blood is blood, not hemoglobin and gas.

The high-level themes outline important fundamental concepts. Things like “pre-apocalypse”. Aia as a setting is designed to have shatterpoints. I never liked the idea medieval stasis. When a GM picks up the book, they will be given ways for the world to change in both gradual and abrupt fashion, and those ways will mostly involve the world spiraling into chaos. Divine war spun out of control, the return of the living jungle, proliferation of a new magical industry once suppressed by a dead god.

The theme that’s relevant here is about faith.

Clap Your Hands if You Believe

gods are born from the fires of the mind - why aren't nightmares, too?
would the world shake if you believed it did?
can gods have faith in themselves?

It’s not an original idea that your mind makes reality. I think there’s a TV Tropes page over it, in fact. But it’s one that’s stuck with me for a while. Fool enough people into thinking that illusion is real, and it starts acting like it is. The lines can be blurred between truth and fiction.

The youkai does not exist until you believe it does, and once it exists, it must keep you thinking about itself, lest it vanish. Gods need prayer badly. But maybe a youkai can think about itself, or a god believe in itself. Does that supplant the need for the “more real” human belief?

Are humans more real than a god is?

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The Interpreter

Starting Equipment: Iridescent robes (1#), grimoire (a prism and lens, 1#).

It is a tight-kept secret that faith makes reality. People understand that faith makes gods. But the world? Hasn’t it always been there?

Perception can rewrite truth. Aia’s history is a nightmare of tangled loose ends and faded myth. Schools of the Interpreter are sponsored by some empires for their intellectual ability – providing studies of history and language in exchange for protection and funding – but they are also kept for their power in persuasion, manipulation, and propaganda. Other empires persecute them ruthlessly, working to expel them as affronts to their rule. Others still have fallen entirely under Interpreter reign, and became cult-states governed by puppet kings loyal to their sorcerer viziers. For a time, at least, until the inquisitors came knocking.

An Interpreter doesn’t just specialize in spoken illusion. Light, color, sound, and visual perception are also in their ballpark. They play with perspective and subjective experience to achieve their goals. Interpreters interpret the world for others, in order to benefit themselves.

Perk & Drawback

Perk: All of your spells can be cast essentially silently, without apparent speech. Only fellow magicians can recognize your hand motions and lip movements as being magical in nature.

Drawback: If you are unable to see, hear, or speak, you cannot cast spells. If you are permanently rendered deaf, mute, or blind, you are permanently unable to cast spells.

Cantrips

• You can change the apparent color of any small object you’re touching. It lasts for a few minutes at most.

• You can distort and twist your voice like a trained voice actor.

• You can create bubble-like prisms and concave or convex lenses stretched between your fingers.

Mishaps

1. SD only return on 1 or 2 for the next 24 hours.

2. You suffer 1d6 damage.

3. Random non-lethal mutation for 1d6 rounds, and then make a Will save. If you fail your save, it becomes permanent.

4. You glow like the sun for 1d6 rounds, blinding everyone nearby.

5. Become blind, deaf, and mute for 1d6 rounds.

6. You become incorporeal for 1d6 rounds, during which you cannot cast spells or otherwise affect the corporeal world.

Dooms

1. For a day, you are unable to see or hear any living creature.

2. Your ability to alter the world is failing. People see through you. Forevermore, all those bar yourself who observe your magic must fail a Perception check in order for your spells to work. Otherwise, they fizzle immediately. You also go slightly loopy over this.

3. You become the only one genuinely convinced by your magic. None of your spells have a real impact upon the world, but you are convinced that they do, and should, and will rationalize away any evidence to the contrary. A knight who apparently survived your fireball? They must be immune to fire. This is a sad kind of madness, and generally ends up being lethal sooner or later.

This doom may be avoided by turning a truly grand illusion or lie into truth, such as by convincing an entire realm that they are descended from mermaids until they start manifesting mermaid traits, or by bringing a new god that remembers prehistory it wasn’t around for into existence.

Spells

1. Lensing Warp » R: 120’ T: self D: N/A

Caster teleports to the target location. This spell requires line of sight, but it can be warped by mirrors, reflections, etc. Binoculars double the spell’s range.

2. Suggestion » R: earshot T: [Sum] HD creatures D: [Sum] hours

Target(s) are charmed to follow a course of action or idea proposed by the caster. The suggestion may not be longer than a sentence or two, and it must be phrased in such a way to make the idea sound reasonable to the listener(s). The victim will only realize that a spell was cast if they succeed on their save, or if the spell’s duration terminates and the action was outlandish or unusual enough to justify concern.

3. Illusion » R: 60’ T: [Dice]×5’ diameter D: [Sum] minutes

You create an image of whatever you want. It can move as you desire, but it cannot create sound or smell. Illusions can only add to an environment, not subtract. At 1 SD, you can create a normal ~6’ tall humanoid. Illusions are “solid” if desired, but they pop when whacked. A Perception save is granted if someone has a reason to be suspicious.

4. Perception Share » R: 60’ T: [Dice] creatures D: [Sum] rounds

Target creatures have their sense of sight, sound, and smell replaced with the caster’s. If an Intelligence save is passed, the spell is negated; if all targets are willing, the effect lasts for [Dice]×10 minutes instead. The link has unlimited range, but all targets must be within the spell’s range when the spell is cast.

5. New Vision » R: touch T: single D: [Dice]×10 minutes

Target sees in infrared or ultraviolet vision. Infrared vision can see warm shapes as blobs of light at a range of 60’ in the dark; ultraviolet vision can see patterns on flowers and the outlines of magic.

6. Cipher » R: LoS T: text D: N/A

Encrypts or decrypts language or text. The spell TN should be stored alongside the encrypted text. If you are decrypting magically encrypted text, your [Sum] must exceed the spell TN created during the encryption. Non-magical texts are automatically decrypted. If your [Sum] exceeds 10, you may interpret the function of a magical item as if you had successfully studied it.

7. Confusion » R: 30’ T: creature D: [Sum] rounds S: INT

Target creature becomes unable to coordinate themselves. They suffer disadvantage on all applicable rolls, and cannot communicate or act on complex plans. “Run and smash thing” is workable; anything beyond that is not. Complex tasks like spellcasting are impossible. An Intelligence save negates the spell’s effects. Alternatively, an orb of confusion may be produced, which hovers in place and applies the effects of the spell within a 15’ radius.

8. Ventriloquism » R: audible range T: N/A D: N/A

You may project your voice and audibly warp it to sound as you wish it to. At 1+ SD, it’s your ordinary voice, cast to a point in your line of sight. At 2+ SD, it can sound like anything, at any relatively safe volume.

9. Pain to Wounds » R: 60’ T: creature D: [Sum] rounds

Pain often feels worse than the wound that caused it. This spell amplifies pain to drain HP. If the target can feel pain, they take [Dice] extra psychic damage every time they take damage.

10. Substitute » R: 60’ T: object D: N/A

Fake objects have a [Dice]-in-4 chance of functioning if the end user believes it to be a true functional object. A wooden pickaxe strikes like metal; a sugar pill becomes medicine. The spell flat-out doesn’t function if the target (or their player) is aware you possess the Substitute spell and its function.

11. Invisibility » R: 30’ T: [Dice] D: [Dice]×10 minutes

Target creatures become invisible. Your shadow remains visible. Casting magic or taking damage will break the illusion. At 2+ SD, your shadow is concealed. At 3+ SD, noise is muffled. At 4+ SD, you can cast while invisible.

12. Mirroreye » R: [Dice]×100’ radius T: reflective surface D: concentration

Allows the caster to gaze into a reflective surface and view another such surface anywhere within the range of the spell. The caster is made aware of potential surfaces in the rough area around their target. The image is only as clear as the surface is reflective and still. Visible black spots appear on the reflective surface to match the number of eyes looking through it. At 2+ SD, the caster can also hear through the surface, and at 3+ SD, they can also speak through it.

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Notes

I personally believe suggestion/charm/illusion magic to be by far and away the most dangerous kind of magic, and not necessarily because of what a low-level player might get into. It’s outlined in the text above - the real danger of an illusionist is what they can do when near a seat of political power. There is nothing more dangerous than controlling what the man on the throne hears and sees.

Some games have very powerful charms that can essentially enslave the target for long durations, or even permanently. These should logically result in the creation of magical slave-empires as the de facto political force on any world where they’re present. If there is little or no cost or limit for a magician to secure permanently loyal thralls, you should expect that every throne is held directly or indirectly by a form of sorcerer.

As a result, I am very hesitant to include this kind of magic in my games and the Interpreter, with its limited Suggestion, is about as far as I’m willing to go with it within Aia. I find the limitations on Illusion - inspired by Skerples’ spell of the same name1 - to be just about right.

More generally, I find it a good exercise to imagine the most practical use that a tyrannical dictatorship could get out of a spell. Stretch its limitations, consider what resources such a state might theoretically exercise. If you don’t like where it’s going, figure out what’s wrong with your magical paradigm and make your tweaks as you need to. The main thing keeping an Interpreter from being a threat to the world is that Spellcasting Dice are untrustworthy, and that magicians tend to blow themselves up by virtue of how spellcasting works.

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Specifically, I’ve been toying with Dungeondraft, and with making an asset pack for it. It’s such a curious program. It’s interesting, playing with it and seeing the seams where the technical debt has grown up, and where the developer’s priorities have fallen over time.

For instance, Dungeondraft has two methods of drawing walls. One is with the Building tool, and the other is with the Wall tool.

• The Building tool is close to my ideal setup - you draw boxes, and the boxes get walls and interior floor fills automatically. You draw multiple boxes that overlap, and they link together and form a single room composed of multiple boxes.

• The Wall tool is a point-and-click tool that draws a straight wall from point to point. It’s obnoxious because it’s hard to ‘draft’ things with it. You can’t sculpt; you have to know exactly where to click, or else do a lot of tedious editing after the fact.

The thing is that the Building tool is janky, and nobody really uses it except for niche applications. It’s impossible to draw buildings with rooms with it, for one. All subdivisions have to be drawn with the Wall tool. And on top of that, the floor patterns that the Building tool uses have nothing to do with the textures that the Pattern tool has access to. They operate differently and, frankly, because of how the Building patterns operate, it’s almost impossible to make nice custom assets for them.

It seems as though that at some point, the Building tool was given up on as a way to support certain features. If you want a wall now, you pretty much have to use the Wall tool.

There are multiple other examples of this, of features being mostly ignored by custom editors due to their weird implementation. The Cave tool was for the longest time incapable of being customized, and once that feature was added, it was still better to use paths for the job since they don’t distort the texture quite as weirdly. The Roof tool was added in a functional state, but it’s still simply not as functional or as flexible as patterns and paths2. You can’t even do many roof shapes with it; hope you like gable and hip, because that’s all you really get.

The difficulties with working with many of Dungeondraft’s more complex features (materials, caves, the Building and Water tools) has resulted in the curious phenomenon where it seems that almost every task the program should be capable of handling is better handled through the use of a path, object, wall, or pattern (in order, a repeating texture that can warp smoothly, a single texture, a repeating texture that’s rigid and smooth, and a repeating texture that’s flat and arbitrarily shaped).

And even though that may be the case, these aren’t optimal solutions where workflow is concerned. Look at the image above. That water is composed of a pattern (the blue water itself), dozens of paths (the white foam lines), and objects (the shadows underpinning many elements). Dungeondraft does not have a functional tool to envelop “water”. This is partially because the features required vary extensively based on artistic style; compare Crosshead’s3 water style to mine, or a photo-realistic water render. The techniques are different, and rendering them automatically in a 2D environment like Dungeondraft would generally require different approaches for each style. Fair enough that it’s doable at all, though.

But I don’t mean just to rag on Dungeondraft. It’s a cool program. It’s not like anyone else has made a digital map editor quite like it. I’m still ambivalent on the lighting and dynamic wall systems of VTTs like Foundry and Roll20 (sure, it’s neat, but it’s a lot of extra prep time to set up…) but Dungeondraft does a fair bit towards making that more manageable. The Universal VTT format is probably one of the best things that’ve happened to map editors.

And it also touches on something that I care about. One of the reasons I quit making maps professionally was that I felt like I was selling a weird luxury drug that everyone wanted but that nobody really needed. It’s nice to have useful art with a functional purpose, sure. But I can count on one hand the number of times a game I ran has genuinely benefited from having a battlemap, and (far be it from me to judge people who spend their money on my artwork4) I never really understood the appeal or the expense. Would you believe me if I said I only used my own work once in a home game, and only because my players demanded it over a curious coincidence?

But Dungeondraft is interesting because you can just do it yourself. Grab a neat asset pack or use the default ones and just make shit. And you own it. You’re not getting unknowable maps from a Patreon that may or may not make what you need (and maybe, this bothers me more than it did my customers? They did pay me for it, after all.) You can do exactly what you need for a game. It largely just works.

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And what I like is that freedom of ownership that Dungeondraft gives the end user. It’s the same reason I’m using Dungeondraft and not Inkarnate or some other software-as-a-rent-seeking-scheme platform. I’ve made some decent money on royalties for the maps I made and own, but I’d really rather give my fans the power to do what I can do themselves.

So some time ago, I was working on a Dungeondraft overhaul. And I’ve picked it up a bit again. I can’t promise it’ll be done any time soon. But maybe I’ll put the early access up. Maybe here, maybe on Patreon again, probably both. It might be a subscription thing for a while, while it’s still incomplete. Maybe I’ll take suggestions, or maybe I’ll work belligerently and single-mindedly like I normally do. Certainly won’t be as fast as I used to be, with a career and a game system (hello, Taiao!) to develop. We’ll see.

What do you think I should do? Do you want to subscribe? Leave a comment, leave a like. Bother me, tell me about your maps, your preferred tools.

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1. Prophecy: A group of seers are consulted to predict which men will be the most successful in battle. Only those who draw auspicious omens are to be conscripted.

2. Lucky Coins: A large pile of coins is placed in the town square, and all able-bodied men are allowed to take as many as they desire. The coins are of varied value; the higher-valued ones are more likely to be marked. If someone draws a marked coin, they’re conscripted.

3. Chicken Run: All able-bodied men are lined up on one side of a field, and a batch of chickens is released on the other side. Any who catches a chicken is exempt from conscription, while the rest are conscripted into the army.

4. Dance-Off: All able-bodied men must compete in a dance competition judged by the village’s most prestigious dance experts. The best dancers are exempt from conscription, while those with two left feet are conscripted into the army.

5. Wheel of Misfortune: A giant wheel is set up in the town square with the names of all able-bodied men written on it. The wheel is spun, and whoever the wheel lands on is immediately conscripted.

6. Beauty Pageant: All able-bodied men are lined up in the town square. Those that the town’s women rate the most eligible are exempt from conscription; the less fortunate contestants are conscripted.

I have spent all week researching history for army recruitment & management. I’m not sorry.

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The map was loosely based, I believe, off the map of Catan included on the backs of Catan cards, while the setting contents were based loosely on the idea of 17th-century British colonists lost on a fantastic island resembling their home. I intended it to be usable as-is for the start of a home game, so you might get some mileage out of it too. I’ve got the Wonderdraft map file lying around if anyone wants it; just leave a comment and ask.

My interest was in having a single document that contained as much useful information as I could possibly cram onto the paper. That meant text describing the purpose of regions, major routes, barony and county borders, and town & faction allegiances. Since this was a printout, the map was mostly monochrome grey, but I realized that color made things pop and could be fairly cheap if done lightly.

I didn’t actually get around to running the game for more than a session, but what this exercise gave me was an interesting idea. Why not just make the map itself into an encounter table?

All of the red names on the map are local monsters. Here’s how it works: you roll 1dX against the map, and count the closest red encounter names to the players’ location. If you roll 2, pick the second-closest encounter name.

• Upsides: Looks neat, doesn’t require table cross-referencing, reasonably fast to rule, “feels” integrated because encounters are physically keyed to map locations.

• Downsides: Sometimes it’s tricky to tell which encounters are closest. You sorta have to go with your gut on that. You also don’t necessarily have the space to fit enough encounter material in. You might want to keep a secondary table on hand, roll a low die like d4 or d6, and roll on that if you get the maximum result.

It was pretty neat in the very brief play-testing I did. Tell me what you think.

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I always had a fondness for highlighting my aspects in a bold red, and character attributes in blue. Why? It draws attention. It’s very easy to scan a paragraph of rules and find the task check associated with it. It’s like highlighting the important bits in a module. The aspect or attribute isn’t always the most important part of the text, but more often than not it sits next to it, since they’re only called upon for mechanical functions.

But the PDF is also in landscape. Why?

Why?

Back when I was just making a system to play with, landscape was pretty appealing. My monitor was 1680×1050, cutting down on vertical space a bit more than was usual. I was tired of squinting at huge A4 PDFs in my viewer - you can fit about 2/3rds of them at most on a screen. I understood the reasoning, of course. If you’re making a book, it’s expensive and painful to make a separate layout for a screen. But I was writing my own PDFs now, and eventually I realized that I could orient them any way I wanted.

Landscape offers some peculiar benefits over portrait. Line widths can be wider, so tables can be more complex while occupying less vertical space, and a single page fits more easily on a computer monitor, which are just about always landscape-oriented. Besides, it’s not like it’s unheard of. Yoon-Suin1 did it. And that was enough for me, since none of the drawbacks were relevant at the time.

But as I’ve developed the system out over the years, I got the idea in my head that it’d be nice to have a physical copy of the system around, and that it’d be nice to have something publishable. Turns out those are two things that landscape doesn’t do so well. If you’re not big into printing, the reason is twofold and rather simple. Landscape orientation means less edge to bind, means each page has a looser connection to the spine. Also, landscape books are comparatively awkward to hold.

Fortunately, I’ve learned a lot about my publishing tools since then - and about design in general. So after some experimentation, I came up with a new design - one more refined, and that would better reflect the Renaissance theme that very loosely runs through the default setting of Aia.

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The New Book

Look carefully, because the following page also counts as the gameable content for this article. (I’ll make a separate Cadavore post later, but it is just a ghoul variant.)

While the earlier PDF’s style was utilitarian (to be generous), this was a style I explicitly prepared as a final design. I wanted something good enough for a published product, not just a draft. Since I was starting to plan out artwork ratios, I needed to radically reorient the entire document. And since I was preparing a product for print … landscape had to go. So long as the core rules remained as a landscape document, no planning could be done since the ratio of everything - the columns, the space the text occupies - is different. So I swapped it all to portrait.

Turns out that’s really painful. You’ll note I swapped to a serif font; it’s tighter, but all the measurements are different. Every single page got a bit longer or shorter when I initially updated the style, and suddenly all those carefully laid-out landscape tables were thrown out of proportion. It took a lot of effort, coercion, and extremely tight editing to make most of them fit in the portrait page that had once held them fine in landscape. Worse was the shrinking margins; while the landscape PDF had been designed with tight margins as it was only to be viewed on a monitor, when you’re designing for a book you have to account for both the gutter and how someone will actually grip the page. All of that eats up valuable real estate.2

I was (and still am) fairly proud of this design, but the problem I encountered with it was that it just didn’t work with the kind of art that I could produce for it. Though I had imagined a style similar to botanical sketches or watercolors would be nice to pair with it, in practice it turned out that my lack of experience in both made it difficult to supply the art myself, and commissioning for a project as large as two game books is outside both my means and interest.

So, a few weeks ago, I opened up the rework document and redid it all again.

The New New Book

So this came about when I was splattering some ink on a canvas trying to figure out the cheapest way to make a sketch look good. A comic style that’s cheap and quick to draw, one that’s fun rather than a chore. I may be slowly preparing Taiao for a professional publication, but I’m not about to let what is fundamentally a labor of love become an unprofitable hassle over some artwork. I mean, more unprofitable than it already likely is.

The Ghost - as covered in Ghosts, Expanded - ended up being the first piece of artwork, mostly by coincidence. I happened to be thinking about it at the time, of course. At this time, I was still looking at the previous iteration’s layout, so the heavy inked artwork didn’t look right sitting atop the book as it existed. Rich layout, thin gold lines, and a big splatter of black ruining the view. Yeah, right. But I was so in love with it that I went and stripped the entire book style down to its bones and rebuilt it anew to match the image I had made.

Along the way, I took the time to patch up and fix a bunch of the book’s other flaws. A new polished encumbrance system, an entirely new magical school, a clearer character creation chapter and some tweaks to bring the system more in-line with other OSR titles. I also brought the ability score/modifier back after a long period of experimenting with just keeping the modifier around. Obviously enough, they have their uses after all.3 I suppose I’ve just had enough of being an iconoclast.

I was later told that the new art direction rather resembles Index Card RPG, which I found to be rather amusing. I wonder if it’s a case of convergent evolution and similar priorities? But I can only speculate.

Tell me what you think, what you’d like to hear more about. Like and subscribe if you haven’t! And check out the old ugly Taiao PDF on the website before I replace it with the new pretty one, and get some spoilers on future blog posts while you’re at it.

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Firearms have an uneasy place in medieval fantasy and for arguably good reason. The advent of the cannon had a deleterious effect upon many mainstays of the genre, from castles to plate armor. Also, gunpowder’s mere presence in a setting often implies a degree of change that it seems many authors dislike. OSR settings often assume an almost timeless and stubbornly static world where major innovations rarely change the world and if they do so, it is usually by way of causing a calamity and turning civilization backwards for a time.

Excuses vary for fantasy gun control, but they typically take two forms.

• Removal, where gunpowder is outlawed, held in contempt, or physically impossible.

• Ignorance, where the secrets of black powder were merely never uncovered, or more uncommonly and perhaps implausibly never put to military use.

Providing an alternative to gunpowder doesn’t seem to be so popular, for some reason. Perhaps it defeats the point? Gunpowder is an inconvenience to an author the same way that smartphones have become one. A lot of potential stories dependent upon an information arbitrage are ruined by the omnipresent connectivity of a modern phone.

Also, I’d note that are specific problems with the usage of gunpowder in tabletop games that aren’t often covered or understood by GMs or players. Black powder is unwieldy. It wets easily, it’s a pain to handle, black powder produces a lot of smoke, and an arquebus (and its close descendants) are notoriously hard to handle to say nothing of the reload time. None of these things are easily emulated by game systems, although I have seen drafts that treat wheellock and flintlock firearms as one-and-done items that can’t be reloaded in a close skirmish.

I don’t intend to provide a “solution” to an author who wants guns gone. Instead, I want to propose a fun alternative - one that I’ve enjoyed playing with in my own campaigns.

The Girardoni Air Rifle

Invented in 1779 AD and for some time utilized by the Holy Roman Empire, the Girardoni Air Rifle1 was not so much an improvement upon the rifles at the time as it was an alternative to them. Although fussier and more fragile than their black powder cousins, the air rifle had some curious advantages over it.

• Being entirely powered by air, the air rifle had no powder to be wetted by rain, and could be used more effectively under poor conditions.

• Because the rifle could hold dozens of leaden balls at a time, and because the reload mechanism required no mucking about with manual powder loading, the Girardoni rifle was the first true repeating rifle and also extremely fast to fire. We’re talking fast enough to be useful repeatedly on the time-scale that RPG combat takes place at. You don’t even have to bend the fiction that much.

• The weapon had no muzzle flash or smoke clouds, allowing the operator’s view to remain clear and unobstructed despite the incredible rate of fire.

• Without a muzzle flash or smoke clouds, and with a remarkably quiet report, the rifle was well-suited for snipers who didn’t want to give their position away. In fact, this characteristic gave the rifle a sort of black reputation as an assassin’s weapon.

  • This was further enhanced by the fact that the weapon could be fired repeatedly while lying prone; rather than require that the operator stand up to reload, he could simply pull a spring-loaded chamber bar to slip a new musket ball inside.

Unfortunately, the weapon also had several drawbacks that prevented its immediate and enthusiastic adoption:

• The brass air reservoirs the Girardoni rifle used were difficult and expensive to make at the time, with what metallurgy was available. Making a pressurized metal container that could hold a great deal of air in an 18th century blacksmith is no mean feat.

  • As a compounding and related problem, the reservoirs were fragile. Smashing your rifle’s butt too hard against a rock might crack it open, rendering it worthless - not a great feature in an outdoors environment.

• Refilling a pressurized container with air might be easy today, but at the time all you had to work with was muscle power. The cart-powered pumps and smaller hand-pumps could take an hour or more to refill a single reservoir, and one reservoir only managed around 30 shots at lethal pressures. And reservoirs, as covered above, weren’t cheap enough to be manufactured easily.

• Finally, the things required skills to operate that most soldiers couldn’t be easily trained to possess. Someone who knew how to operate a black powder rifle was lacking several skills needed to handle an air rifle.

But you know what? The way the air rifle operated sounds awfully similar to how I’ve seen black powder rifles handled in games already. Nobody bothers with powder smoke, do they? And the drawbacks don’t mean anything to player characters who are already skilled, cut-above-the-rest professionals. So here’s the fantasy air rifle.

The Fantastic Air Rifle

In Taiao, I call them Girardian2 weapons, after their supposed inventor. They're a new invention, exotic anywhere except for the warring states where they were invented, and coming into prominent roles in warfare. They come in two forms.

• Air Pistol: 1-handed, Weight equal to a dagger, Damage 1d6! blunt3, Range ~235’

• Air Rifle: 2-handed, Weight equal to a sword, Damage 2d4! blunt, Range ~275’

I don’t include prices since everyone’s is wildly different (and I vary them even within a campaign), but the air rifle is generally about the same price as a longbow, or four times as much as a sword. Both can only be found in large port cities or other places where exotic curiosities are found.

All Girardian weapons follow these rules:

• Air guns require a replaceable air canister, attached to the weapon as the stock of the rifle for air rifles, and attached to/part of the grip for air pistols. These canisters are fragile, and if violently impacted, dropped, or otherwise abused will rupture (I break 1d4 fragile items in a pack every time one gets dropped).

• Air canisters can store up to 30 shots’ worth of air before recharging.

• Air guns have a remarkably quiet report and no muzzle flash. They are not silent, but it is extremely hard to locate a shooter outdoors. They may be fired and reloaded while prone.

• Refilling an empty air canister takes 1 hour.

Unlike most OSR firearms, Girardian guns require no reload step and may be fired as frequently as the user can attack.

Air canisters are considered ammunition and are sold individually for 33% of a pistol’s price (or 25% of a rifle’s price). A maintenance pack with air pump and cleaning tools is sold separately for a modest fee, weighs as much as the rifle, and is required for recharging the canisters. Lead slugs are about four times pricier than arrows and will put a bigger dent in a new PC’s wallet, too.

It should also be noted for anyone doing some system conversion that blunt damage in Taiao ignores damage reduction, so these things punch through most of plate armor’s protection and a bit of mail too. It doesn’t ignore Defense/AC increases though, so armor is still worth something. Air guns aren’t as powerful as gunpowder, after all.

1d4 Magical Air Gun Mods

There is no way there aren’t magicians who have seen a gun and wondered how to improve it.

1. Wind-magic reservoir that refills itself. Probably also reinforced so that it won’t rupture as soon as it’s whacked against a rock. Or maybe it isn’t?

2. The firing chamber imparts an elemental effect (fire, lightning, necrotic poison) upon the leaden ball as it leaves the gun.

3. Multiple additional firing chambers have been bolted together and modulated by a magical wind-directing structure, creating a double- or triple-barrel gun with correspondingly increased damage and muzzle retort.

4. The gun literally fires blasts of wind, which are harmless but automatically knock victims within 10’ prone.

Quick Edit: Neat Video

If you’re interested in the full details on the real-life gun, here’s a good complete explanation. You’ll also get a look at how wrong my rules regarding pump time were - the real air canisters only take about 20 minutes to refill by hand. Whoops. But an hour rounds easier in the dungeon for time-keeping, and your players don’t have to know either way.

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I chose to run the game in Foundry VTT. For that, I needed maps, because I haven’t ever managed to successfully wean my players off of them - but also because the fog of war tools are in my eyes one of the handful of redeeming features of Foundry. Fortunately, I had designed a handy Dungeondraft toolkit for that, but it’s still a lot of work to transcribe an entire castle over seven-something floors.

The interesting thing about drawing a map in Dungeondraft is that it’s almost impossible to misalign items between floors. You can swap between them at any time and they’re always aligned just so. So imagine my curiosity when, in the midst of laying out the catacombs, I discovered that something refused to align itself anyways.

Ravenloft has several large spiral staircases that pass through almost every level of the castle. The largest of these is referred to as K18: the High Tower Staircase. It passes directly from the catacombs up through and past the Larders of Ill Omen, all the way up to the highest of the castle’s two primary towers. It also contains a hole directly down the center that plummets some 380 feet to the catacombs.

On the catacomb level, the staircase occupies a cylindrical tube inside a 40’x40’ square area. The landing is neatly aligned, in the above image, with the central hall of the catacombs, which runs down the center and descends two flights to reach K6: the Tomb of Barov and Ravenovia. Outside the windows here is a direct view of the area behind Ravenloft, jutting out of a large cliff overlooking the rest of Barovia.

If you look carefully, you can see that the bay windows are positioned directly beneath K6: Overlook, and it’s flanked on both sides by the symmetrical stone supports that hold the overlook up. The overlook itself also fits with the bilateral symmetry of the castle’s grand design. It’s aligned with the main doors, the body of the castle, and the drawbridge and main entrance on the other end of the castle. And inside the castle…

It is also naturally aligned with Ravenloft’s main hall.

But wait. There’s a problem here.

The green box I’ve drawn on the blueprint indicates the profile of the High Tower Staircase on the main floor. It’s still a 40’x40’ square area, that’s not the problem. The problem is that it’s not aligned with the bilateral center of the castle anymore. Look again at the basement floor. I’ve marked the castle’s mirror axis this time, in cyan.

The staircase and vertical shaft, on the basement level, is 20’ north of where it should be. (North is to the upper right of all these images.)

This is a curious thing, and I think in my drafting work in Dungeondraft I accidentally stumbled across the reason why this could have come to be. Setting aside the enormous complexity of Ravenloft’s layout, the catacombs don’t actually have anything that necessarily ties them to the rest of the castle’s structure. They’re far underground and the supports for the castle overlook are the only easy method I found for aligning them properly. All of the other staircases in the castle are in their proper place, assuming we treat the staircase locations as correct and not the location of the catacombs & bay window. (If we take the catacomb hallway to be correct, then it should actually be 20 feet south and not at all in line with the castle overlook, which is not artistically depicted anyways.)

Or, in simpler words, for the rest of the castle it’s much easier to make estimates based on the actual shape of the castle. But for the catacombs, it’s all underground. There’s no obvious external building measurements to point to and realize an error was made. The overlook support structures don’t even exist in the blueprints, just in the artwork.

The funny thing is, this error has been repeated over every subsequently published version of Castle Ravenloft. Here’s the same issue in Expedition to Castle Ravenloft, for 3.5e.

And in 5e’s Curse of Strahd:

It’s interesting to see this have escaped notice for multiple generations of artists and writers. I really don’t think I would have ever noticed it myself were it not for the specific nature of the tool I was using. For the record, this is how I chose to fix it:

I shifted the entire catacombs 20’ north to bring them in line with the actual castle, and added a short hallway leading from the High Tower Staircase just north to the crypt’s main hall. I also had to add a diagonal hall behind the one crypt’s door north of this, highlighted in magenta, to adjust for it.

Another Minor Staircase Issue

I did find a few other questionable bits in the architecture, but I can’t blame the artist or the designers for these issues. They’re comparatively minor.

The worst of the least is the grand staircase. It’d be a pretty frightening sight the way it’s depicted in the module. It’d be such a frightening sight, in fact, that the module artist actually had to cheat themselves just to make it fit. Closer to the inner wall of the spiral staircase, the width of the individual steps would shrink until you were virtually facing a wall. You can try fanning out a deck of cards if you want to see this effect for yourself - stairs get wider the further they are from the inner wall. If the staircase maintained a full 20’ width all the way up, it’d be impossible to climb them if you were walking up by the inner wall.

For my map, I just shrunk the staircase into a more reasonable 10’ width, giving ample space for the inner wall to curve without making the staircase unwalkable. This is essentially what the GM’s map depicts anyways.

Maps? Maps!

Yeah, I made maps. I made Dungeondraft maps for all the floors of Ravenloft. And now they’re here for free in Universal VTT format, straight from MEGA, or at least until I clean out my MEGA account someday.

Download the maps!

And if you’d like a preview or just want to use the raw images for a VTT that doesn’t support the Universal VTT format like Roll20, you can grab them here on Imgur. I’d note that they’re pretty wastefully sized if you’re not using them for a VTT, since they’re spaced to be accurate to the spatial positioning (other than for the tips of the spires, which have too many little maps to be worth doing that for) rather than to be space-efficient.

Also, the maps are huge, so you won’t be able to use them with a free Roll20 account unless you squash the JPGs some more. They’re about 9 megabytes each.

Let me know what you think!

These grand and mighty devils,
they are less than men;
broken hearts laid bare and empty, unable to hold what they once held dear.
Insincere malice, however deadly, hides only puppets cutting with desperation and futile hate at their strings;
mere spirits minding their soul’s prison

Starting Equipment: Black or brown robes with no clear markings (0.5#), 4 sheets of spellpaper1 or equivalent in magical components, codex (leather- bound tome, 1#)

Description

Most people know where Hades is (down). Only a diabolist knows the details.

Hades, like all afterlives, is a physical place. It is located at the bottom of the Grand Disc, where Hell clings to its underbelly with its great and fiery engines rooted and bolted into the rock above. Hades is located at the bottom of the world because that is where abandoned souls eventually wind up, after years of slumber and slipping down through the abyss.

Diabolists make deals with the demons that live in Hell. They make deals for power, and by lust for gold. Devils are often very agreeable. They are eager, even, to grant mortals power. They can wait decades for a payoff, and those asking a demon for power are rarely a bad investment.

Unlike organized schools, diabolists don’t have a singular driving philosophy. They are driven by their own curiosity, lust for power, lack of inhibition, and/or desire to thwart their role in life. Generally, diabolists are often self-destructive and unstable individuals who are fundamentally at odds with their society. They may or may not attempt to justify their actions to themselves or to others.

Perk

Masterless undead will approach and ask to serve you. You are fluent in the language of demons. Whenever someone breaks an agreement they made with you, you intuitively know that they did.

Drawback

All of your spells leave a distinct lingering crackling smell of sulfur and ash in the air. Barring extreme circumstances, you can never enter the afterlife of most gods. Your soul will, over the course of years, slip down with the waters across the abyssal ocean floors and into the depths of Hell.

d6 - Mishaps

1. MD only return to your pool on a 1 or 2, for 24 hours.

2. You suffer 1d6 damage.

3. Random mutation for 1d6 rounds, and then make a Will save. If the 3 mutation isn’t lethal and you fail your save, it becomes permanent.

4. Sheer writhing incapacitating agony for 1d6 rounds.

5. Instead of casting your spell, a (1d4: lemure, devil, imp, demon lord) is summoned, with variable temperament.

6. 1d6 nearby corpses (if any) reanimate and attack for 1d6 rounds. Take 1 damage for each absent corpse.

Dooms

• Fool’s: You become possessed by an imp for a day.

• King’s: You become undead, if you weren’t already. Your flesh starts rotting. You have enough willpower to avoid decay. You will become a zombie in 1d6 days, and then a skeleton one month later.

• Final: Your patrons in Hell have had enough of you. Every corpse within [Level] miles of you reanimates and converges on your location. A demon lord and his immediate lieutenants are summoned by their nearest loyal point of contact on the surface to join the hunt. Even if you survive, you will never be able to summon devils or raise the undead (by summoning souls) ever again2.

You can avoid your doom by becoming a Lich, by slaying a demon lord and his immediate lieutenants, or by performing three major acts in the service of a demon lord’s agenda and then finding a way to become a devil.

Notes

Diabolists are summoners. Their playstyle revolves around demonic deals and abusing their relatively cheap minions. The majority of their utility and combat spells don’t bother or even benefit their undead and demonic summons. On top of this, they have an unpredictable flexibility if their player is creative enough, as summoned devils can be asked for many services beyond acting as mere combatants.

It is perhaps possible to play a diabolist as a fundamentally good character, but their themes make it a difficult proposition. If the GM has a distaste for evil games, the diabolist may not be a suitable school to play.

d12 - Spells

These spells are designed for the GLOG’s magic system. Casters get (usually) 1 Magic Dice (MD) per level, added to a dice pool. They can add as many MD to a single spell-cast as they have, and then roll the invested quantity of MD. The sum total of the dice (plus their Intelligence, in my preference) becomes the variable [Sum]. The total number of dice rolled is [Dice]. You can get extra MD from wearing a wizard’s robes, among some other sources. Doubles and triples cause the Mishaps and Dooms described above, respectively.

While reading the spells’ bar, R: range, T: targets, D: duration, S: save.

1. Animate Corpse » R: 30' T: corpse with intact skeleton D: [Dice] days

Summon a soul, a shade, or a lesser demon from Hell to possess a corpse. The contract lasts for [Dice] days. Whenever the spell is ended, there is an HD-in-8 chance that the undead is willful enough to stick around afterwards.

You can raise any kind of undead so long as their HD is equal to or less than [Dice]×2. Incorporeal undead still require a corpse, but the corpse is obliterated as the soul is summoned. There are two ways to make permanent controlled undead:

• You may keep your MD invested into the spell. They will not refresh from sleep until divested from the spell.

• Cast the spell with 3+ MD. This allows you to make a HD 1 or 2 undead that is permanently under your control. At 4+ MD, you can make permanently controlled HD 3 or 4 undead.

  ---

2. Command Undead » R: earshot T: undead D: [Sum] rounds S: INT

Shout a single clear order to a group of undead whose combined HD is [Sum] or less. They obey until the order is fulfilled or for as long as the spell lasts. If they’re under the control of someone else, their current controller may attempt an Intelligence save to prevent them from listening to your command.

3. Summon Devil » R: 30’ T: flat surface D: [Dice] hours S: WIL3

Summon a devil from Hell whose HD is [Sum] or less. They will not be under your control, but they are not usually outwardly malicious without reason. Devils are contained by unbroken circles of salt or silver. They perform services in exchange for services rendered.

You can banish a devil that you summoned by ordering it to leave, but if it doesn’t want to, you will have to pass a Will save to be rid of it.

4. Inflict Disease » R: 30 T: creature D: N/A S: STR

Summon a disease of [Dice]×2 HD or less to possess your target. They get a Strength save to negate the attempt. Diseases are sprites that can theoretically be appeased.

5. Possession » R: touch T: creature D: [Dice] hours S: WIL

Target must pass a Will save or be suppressed and put to sleep. Your soul occupies and controls their body for the spell’s duration. Your body is left crumpled in a soulless coma. If either your target or your body dies during the spell’s duration, your soul will be stranded forever.4. Inflict Disease » R: 30 T: creature D: N/A S: STR

Summon a disease of [Dice]×2 HD or less to possess your target. They get a Strength save to negate the attempt. Diseases are sprites that can theoretically be appeased.

6. Personal Sigil » R: N/A T: spellpaper D: N/A

Draw a personal sigil upon a suitably conductive medium (spellpaper or any equivalent usable for a scroll) through which the owner of the sigil can be summoned. Anyone can activate the sigil, which will instantly bring you to a safe location near them regardless of distance, or into a nearby trap such as a circle of salt if any are present. The sigil cannot be duplicated. Anyone who can read Arcana can identify it as your sigil if they know your name.

7. Demonic Cry » R: earshot T: [Dice] targets D: N/A S: WIL

Inside a bellowing war cry, the caster intones a demonic sound audible only to his targets which inflicts fear in them. In addition, all non-demonic characters who hear the cry must pass a Will save or lose their footing and collapse prone. All demonic characters who hear the cry gain advantage on Strength and Will checks for the next [Sum] rounds.

8. Ash Cloud » R: 60’ T: area D: [Dice]*10 minutes

A [Dice]*10’ radius area is filled with a blast of hot sulfuric smoke that chokes all who breathe it in. While inside the cloud, characters take [Dice] fire damage per round and cannot see greater than 5’ around them. The cloud will eventually settle on the ground in the form of a thick gray ash. It can stain clothes and leave trails of footprints.

9. Flamethrower » R: 30’ T: 90° cone D: N/A S: AGI4

Spray an area down with fire. Anyone inside is ignited and takes [Sum]+[Dice] fire damage, and may try an Agility save to halve the direct damage.

10. Godless Oath » R: touch T: willing person D: until irrelevant

Oaths are normally made with a god’s oversight. This is a blasphemous form of oath that is made between two mortals without a god involved. Both caster and target must agree to the terms of a deal and the terms for violating it. The terms are magically enforced in the form of a spell or spell-like effect that either party is capable of producing at a strength no greater than what this spell is cast with, to be inflicted upon the first violation of the pact’s terms.

11. Darkness » R: [Dice]×10’ radius T: area D: [Sum] rounds

An area around a designated point within 30’ is filled with a supernatural pitch darkness. Light cannot penetrate, and light spells fail if their [Dice] is lower. The darkness can be seen through by anyone who can see in the dark.

12. Summon Lemures » R: 20’ T: flat surface D: [Dice] hours

Summon a big pile of [Sum]×2 lemures, which are very weak sad gelatin demons. They will do anything you ask, and can be banished with a thought.

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This resonated with me at the time for two reasons. I was unable to invest a lot of time or money into games at the time, so the simplicity (and price tag of $0) was appealing. The second is because the designer focused a lot on stripping out everything that you can strip, and just asking the question: what is this game, at the core? What does it need?

I don’t go for such extreme minimalism, these days, and anyways I based my earliest hacks off of the 8th Edition draft, which bloated the player’s manual to a whopping 16 pages (exacerbated by the draft’s formatting, which was not nearly as tight as the earlier editions). Classes got five features each. You start with two, and could get the rest later through the analogue for XP points. I took this idea and ran with it for a while. Classes in those systems of mine got a set of what were essentially feats, and often they were poorly balanced, or else mere stat/skill modifications. +5 for your horseback riding, or a second attack.

Too Much Design Space to Fill

By 2020, I was working with a different, custom system. I had scaled pools of features that could be purchased, separated by level. No longer satisfied with the flat singular pool for each class, I was now trying to define several full pools balanced against each other. Imagine three abilities to choose from for levels 1 through 5 each, for three to seven classes. On top of this, I was keen on giving each weapon type its own abilities. Having so many talents causes problems. You run out of design space. You don’t have enough unique features to give to each level, to each class, to each weapon.

Lots of FPS titles have skill trees these days. Most of them are very similar, and very plain. +15% to fire rate, +10% to damage. FPS games don’t usually have the mechanics to differentiate their skill trees more than what they already do. You can’t unlock a grappling hook through the skill tree, usually, and if a grappling hook exists, it might be put onto some other advancement mechanism - you find it in the world, or you purchase it, or it’s unlocked at a fixed point in the narrative. While a tabletop game can feature a dozen native ways to allow players a grappling hook, video game design is tighter in that overlapping features become redundant much more quickly2.

Where things like skills or classes come around, though, I dislike having lots of systems that fill the same niche. Look at the Eldritch Knight class. What’s it doing? Nothing that a wizard or fighter can’t do themselves. It’s filling a niche that only exists because you can’t merge the wizard and fighter (and that can’t happen, because D&D’s mechanics are fundamentally tied to its brand identity). But I wasn’t working with a fixed design. My pools of class abilities and weapon type-bound skills were doing nothing but creating noise. They had low conceptual density. Here’s an ability that gives you a +2 average damage increase in one way, and here’s one that does it in another. +15% damage, +15% fire rate.

Aggressive Consolidation

I started looking for ways to overcome the bloat I had inadvertently developed. I had abilities that ought to be shared between classes, and a bunch of samey feats tied to specific weapon types. I had, on an unrelated note, an unworkable power point magic system that wasn’t mechanically interesting.

The first thing I did was start looking for ways to share individual features between classes. Pools that multiple classes could draw from? Free-floating talents, and a classless system? I have never been fond of classless systems because they seem like more trouble than they’re worth, in terms of bloating character options. While player choice is important, I try to aggressively minimize the number of pointless choices that are made, and avoid ‘design traps’ that seem enticing to a player but are useless in practice. “Feat taxes” are an example of this. Classless systems, it seemed to me, inevitably develop both in great quantity.

Discovering the GLOG in 2020 was awfully convenient, and a little frustrating. I said at the time that I was a week away from re-inventing the wheel. Here was exactly what I was after: a way to consolidate class bonuses, multiclassing modularity, and feats together into one package - or several, actually. I reworked my class ranks, from the pool system I had into a template-like structure. The handful of mechanically functional abilities I had made it into the new system; the rest I gradually re-evaluated, mutated, or replaced as I read more and from larger reference pools3.

More Space Desired

One of the things I kept from the earliest versions of Taiao, its predecessor system documents, was the five-rank structure. The GLOG is very fond of four templates, and most GLOG hacks I’ve read also like capping the ranks out at that point. You get four, and no more. If you want Template D in one class, you’ll never get a template in a different class. It’s a curiously common preference for a low character power level.

Although I empathize with the preference for comparatively low character power, it’s never quite been to my tastes to limit it so much. I like low-level adventures and human-like characters, but four is unlucky and too low. Something is appealing about an odd number. Three is a natural end-point. Five is, too. But two, or four? Three is definitely too low, and seven is too much - at that point, you get into the habit of spacing abilities out on an every-other-level basis, a major goal of mine to avoid.

A distaste for hard caps on character power comes from another place. It’s not dissimilar to disliking the rigid class system inherent to D&D. It feels artificial. I don’t entirely disagree with the principle - by level 5 or 6, you’re just about getting beyond the point of ability that should be sustainable by heroism/tomb-robbing. I solve the issue of needing a “cap” by making it implausible for common thieves to manage to reach higher levels. The XP costs for each level is 5 times as much as the previous level, and when you hit level 5, you either move to more profitable ventures or suffer a severe slowdown in rate. Players can choose to retire if they prefer the small scale, or graduate into robbing entire realms if they like domains.

The theoretical maximum in this system is around 12 or 13, which is approximately where Alexander the Great should sit having conquered all that he did. Levels 14 to 15 might require more wealth than is normally found in my campaign worlds. I’d be (pleasantly) surprised to have a PC reach that point some day.

The Warrior

Not like I’d end this post without giving an example. Here’s my local Fighter variant.

Starting Equipment: Weapon of choice, wooden shield (1#), leather armor (1#)
Prerequisites: None.
Example Skill/Proficiency: Soldier, Mercenary, Town Guard, Tribal

Warriors are fighters, soldiers, guards, and other individuals dedicated to the art of combat and war. They’re almost universally peasants by birth, though some more rambunctious knights with looser training may fall under the category of Warrior too.

Ranking Bonuses

Every Warrior rank taken grants +2 Stamina4, +1 Attack, +1 Health5, and proficiency with any two desired weapon groups. In addition, your followers also gain a permanent and irremovable +1 Morale per Warrior rank.

Rank 1

Personal Technique » Every time you help defeat a character, make a tally mark tagged with the kind of weapon you used (spears, swords, bows). At 10 20, and 30 victories, you may choose to increase either your damage or Attack bonus with that weapon group by +1.

At 40 victories, you may instead design a 1st-rank elemental item effect6 that is always applicable while you are wielding a weapon of that type. See the Elemental Crafting & Magical Items chapter for specifics and examples.

Parry Training » Once per day, you may reduce an enemy’s attack damage by 1d10, if the attack was aimed at you. While doing this, you may choose to sacrifice your shield to guarantee a reduction of incoming damage by 10 instead of rolling.

Rank 2

Lunge » On your turn as a free action, you may move up to 10’ towards an enemy outside your melee weapon’s reach, so long as this puts them within your melee weapon’s reach and is immediately followed by a melee attack against them.

Double Attack » You gain an extra bonus attack that can be used for any weapon, which may be used for melee or ranged purposes, or else used to perform an additional opportunity attack between your turns.

Rank 3

Trained Bodyguard » Once per round, if an ally within 10’ of you would take damage from a direct attack, you may make an Agility7 save, using the enemy’s attack roll result as the TN. If you succeed, you move towards your ally and take the blow instead. You cannot be targeted by opportunity attacks while doing this.

Charge » You may lose 1d4 Stamina to double your Speed8 for a single move action.

Threat Assessment » By spending 10 minutes observing/parleying or 1 round fighting a sapient target, you can identify their two most important desires. Completing the mission, finding a new boss, food, wealth, prestige, love, revenge, amusement, to shame you, a formal meeting.

Rank 4

Resilience » You gain a passive natural +1 Armor9 bonus. If somehow lost, it heals itself after a night’s rest.

Monster Hunter » Once per day, you may add a damage bonus to a successful physical attack’s damage equal to the greatest HD value of the monsters you’ve helped slay.

Rank 5

Indomitable » You gain advantage on saves vs fear and mind-altering effects. Your mundane weapons can harm creatures immune to non-magical damage.

Combat Reflexes » You always move before the enemy in combat.

Cleaving » Whenever you kill an enemy with an attack, you may immediately make another attack against any valid target within your weapon’s reach/range.

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Ghost

HD 4, Defense 10, Morale N/A
Group Size: 1 solo
Appearance: A looping psychic recording of an unfortunate moment. Flickering, broken apparitions of distended body parts and warped faces.
Voice: Dead silence, quiet whispers, or chilling shrieks.
Wants: Everyone nearby to meet its fate.
Morality: None.
Intelligence: None.
Attacks: None (although a manifestation can cause harm).

• Illusion: Ghosts are not incorporeal or undead – rather, they don’t exist at all. Their manifestations cannot be attacked or targeted even by magic. A ghost is a curse, not a creature that can be struck. In order to target a ghost, their corpse must be located and targeted. Their HD value is only used for spell calculation and rewarded XP.

Ghosts are not monsters. They can’t be attacked, they aren’t elementals, and they have no soul. Ghosts are not spirits. They’re recordings of a violent, messy, painful death. They’re the psychic residue left splattered on the wall of reality. When they manifest, it is a shattered image of what transpired.

A ghost is composed of four elements:

• The corpse, which must remain intact for the ghost to manifest.

• The premonition, which is a brief emotional, audible, or visible warning that precedes a ghost’s manifestation. Describe it to the players.

• The manifestation, which is a deadly phenomenon closely related to the traumatic event that created the ghost.

• The satiation, which is the primary method for satisfying the ghost (usually by interacting with the corpse) and ending its manifestation.

Ghosts can always be satiated through the specified satiation, but there's a few other ways to do it. In my system, you don't have holy water, so you've got three options:

• Attempting to remove a curse from the corpse. This will permanently destroy a ghost if applied to the ghost’s corpse.

• Destroying the corpse. This will end a manifestation immediately, but put a major curse upon the destroyer.

• Holding a funeral overseen by a trained priest. A divine psychopomp will be attracted to the funerary rites, and they will take care of the ghost.

I’ve personally found ghosts to be an excellent substitute for magical traps. Put it this way: traps require a degree of what is often implausible intention. Who would build such a complex magical device in a dungeon, just to kill the occasional passerby? The ghost is a handy solution. Its placement wasn’t intentional; it was sporadic, accidental. It can be disarmed, if you’re clever, and it’s thematic in ways that a simple flamethrower just can’t be.

1d20 - Table of Ghostly Manifestations

Have fifteen-ish new free ghostly manifestations (and some reworks of Arnold’s, whose ideas I’ve borrowed in spots). I’ll note that “round” refers to combat rounds, 6-10 seconds, which I approximate in gameplay to a handful of actions a player might perform in that span of time.

1. Abandoned

● Premonition: Lights leaving, laughter fading. Crushing loneliness creeping in.
● Manifestation: Lights slowly go out, party quickly grows deaf.
● Satiation: Bring ghost’s corpse to the surface, or to friends’ corpses, or leave another nearby.

2. Abyssal Dark

● Premonition: The night is closing in. Demons lurk in wait. The dark isn’t safe.
● Manifestation: Roll encounters & burn fuel once per round (6-10 seconds).
● Satiation: Give a light to the ghost’s corpse.

I assume a ‘mythical underworld’ structure. This one might be hit-or-miss if your players intuitively treat the dark like a friend.

3. Beheaded

● Premonition: A sharp, tearing pressure on one side of your neck that builds rapidly.
● Manifestation: Blood starts leaking, cut forms rapidly. Fatal in 1d4+2 rounds without extreme magic.
● Satiation: Reattach head of ghost’s corpse to its body.

4. Betrayed

● Premonition: Hear whispers from party, paranoia creeping. They’re plotting against you.
● Manifestation: Flee from your friends. Make an Intelligence save at every room you pass to end the effect.
● Satiation: Remove the weapon from ghost’s corpse, or destroy betrayer’s corpse (if present).

5. Betrayer

● Premonition: Envious, hateful gaze upon least liked ally.
● Manifestation: Sneak attack them at nearest opportunity.
● Satiation: Destroy the ghost’s corpse.

6. Buried Alive

● Premonition: Pressing, straining against stone coffin roof.
● Manifestation: Sink underground in 1d4+1 rounds.
● Satiation: Remove ghost’s corpse from sarcophagus.

7. Burnt

● Premonition: Searing heat, blazing hot air and smoke.
● Manifestation: New severity 1d10 burn wound every turn.
● Satiation: Soak ghost’s corpse in water.

8. Crushed

● Premonition: Walls pressing in, extreme claustrophobia. The ceiling is coming down on you.
● Manifestation: Every round, ground speed is halved (rounded down) to 5’ minimum. At 5’, take 1d4 damage per round.
● Satiation: Reassemble ghost’s corpse. Takes 1d6+1 full turns split between up to 4 participants.

9. Drowned

● Premonition: Choking, gasping, sinking down and down. The bubbles of your last breath slipping.
● Manifestation: Fall into the water. You are unable to leave it. It will rise to drag you back in if you try.
● Satiation: Remove ghost’s corpse from the water.

10. Eaten

● Premonition: Licking of a tongue, the crunch of teeth biting limbs in two. The horrible constriction of a throat.
● Manifestation: Unable to move when facing a predator.
● Satiation: Extract corpse from the belly of (potentially still living) monster.

11. Falling

● Premonition: Horrible vertigo, painful aching in your limbs and bones.
● Manifestation: All attempts to climb fail at around their half-way point. Grips slip, pitons loosen.
● Satiation: Reassemble ghost’s corpse, twist bent parts back into shape.

12. Freezing

● Premonition: Heat rushing out from your limbs, the crack of ice underneath. Your fire doesn’t aid you. You’re so cold.
● Manifestation: Hands lock up, unable to hold anything. Gain a level of weariness every 10 minutes.
● Satiation: Move ghost’s corpse near a source of heat, or set it ablaze.

13. Impaled

● Premonition: Sudden wet shlick and crunch of something stabbing through your ribs.
● Manifestation: Pinned in place by a heavy, painful, penetrating pressure upon your chest.
● Satiation: Remove ghost’s corpse from source of impalement.

14. Imprisoned

● Premonition: Weighty iron digs into your ankles and wrists. You are going to die here.
● Manifestation: Your wrists and ankles are unable to leave the room.
● Satiation: Cut the iron chains binding the ghost’s corpse.

15. Lost something

● Premonition: Frightening vision of having lost a treasure. It’s down here somewhere, it has to be...
● Manifestation: A random item disappears from your pack (but not your hands) every 10 minutes.
● Satiation: Return envisioned item to ghost’s corpse. Items are found in a pile soon afterwards. Ghost’s corpse might be tricky to locate.

16. Parasite

● Premonition: Something’s growing inside you. You can feel it. You know it’s there. It has to die, before it eats you inside-out.
● Manifestation: Every 10 minutes, Will (or CHA) save vs drinking poison and ripping at your flesh and stomach to get the parasite out.
● Satiation: Find and kill a member of the species that infested the ghost’s corpse.

17. Petrified

● Premonition: Heavy pressure on your skull; reaching out for something and never touching.
● Manifestation: Limbs lock up and petrify as rounds pass. Continued human touch restores you to life.
● Satiation: Move the ghost’s statue to whatever it was trying to reach before it was petrified.

18. Terrified

● Premonition: Sharp, sheer terror that cripples and shocks you. Overwhelming paralysis.
● Manifestation: [Level]d4 psychic damage per round. At 0 HP, make Will (or CHA) saves vs heart attack.
● Satiation: Physically comfort the ghost’s corpse as you might a scared child (or equivalent).

My system assumes 0 HP is non-lethal. Your systems may differ. You might consider raising the floor to 1 HP.

19. Sacrificed

● Premonition: Black shouted chanting, wisps of oil smoke, the rest of a dagger’s tip over your heart.
● Manifestation: Victim compelled to lie down on altar, heart carved and ripped out after 1d4+1 rounds.
● Satiation: Reassemble nearby jarred organs inside ghost’s corpse, or sacrifice an ally/treasure.

20. Starving

● Premonition: A gnawing, ravenous hunger intensifies by the second. You haven’t eaten anything in weeks.
● Manifestation: Eat every 10 minutes. If you skip a meal, gain a level of weariness (or your equivalent fatigue system) from starvation.
● Satiation: Place food inside the ghost’s corpse. The relief will last as long as the food does.

Thanks to Arnold K for his similar article on Ghosts, to which this is an expansion.

This is the first entry in what will hopefully be a fairly long experiment. I've got a lot of backlogged notes I'd like to get out in front of some kind of audience. If you're interested in seeing, feel free to stick around. I’d be glad to have you.

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