I haven’t written anything in a while because I have had to make some tough personal decisions that require time and distance to adjust to. When I started writing my scifi to expand the short snippets I have had wandering around my files for years, I really intended to keep going, maybe even writing several times a week. Then something happened. Anyway, moving on.

It’s Not About the Game, Really.

For those of you that keep up with the news of the hobby, you probably know to what I am referring. Wizards of the Coast recently released what people have been suspecting for years, news that they are officially making Dungeons & Dragons into a micro-transaction content machine. From the reporting I have seen they are changing the DnD Beyond service to section off paid for content to only those that have paid for it. So when a DM pays for the material they want, they can no longer share it with their table of players.

We have seen this happening all over various different industries, beginning with horse armor way back with Bethesda, and slowly creeping into every element of our lives, including fancy cars charging monthly subscriptions to access the heated seats within those cars (BMW). I don’t know about anyone else, but I am tired of all this shit. If the model makes sense, whatever, but DnD has had a particular model for years. Make good stuff, sell good stuff, continue. And yes, it really is that simple.

Sure, expanding to make movies or shows or be affiliated with content creators and live streaming shows and whatnot is helpful to get the word out, but the executives, the suits, the worthless people getting “business degrees” to learn how to treat people like disposable resources, keep making decisions that are baffling.

At this point the scandals are numerous, and there are plenty of other game companies that are not only treating their staff and communities well, but they are just focusing on making good products to try and capture that very simple loop I mentioned above: make good stuff, sell good stuff, continue. So, it’s not about the game, I love the game (even some of the stuff they did in 5.5e), and I am so glad they finally admitted that yes, it is 5.5e!

But until something serious happens, I am not going to keep giving the people there chances. I recently started hearing that WotC representatives started reaching out to the Gygax family, making appearances at Cons, and were trying to appear as if they were going to retreat to the good ol’ days (yes they weren’t perfect) and correct their course on DnD. I was starting to hope. And I feel like a damn fool.

What to do?

I know what I am going to do. Boycott. Is that a threat? Absolutely fucking not. I am one small creator with no audience or reach or influence (I’m definitely not an influencer), and I had very little content out there anyway. I haven’t sold a lot of my 5e content, and I honestly wasn’t sure if I ever would, and that’s okay.

But, until the company, the “managerial professionals” pull their head out of their ass or are altogether replaced, I will not be purchasing any more DnD products. And to really show my absolute fury with this business decision, I am extending that to anything 5e/5.5e related, such as products based on the SRD and OGL. I was most recently making some content for Shadowdark, but I just don’t want to touch it anymore.

Is that fair? I am honestly not sure. But a boycott is only as good as the effect that it has, as the lesson that it teaches. I don’t want to hurt independent and smaller creators, but I also don’t want to encourage anyone to affiliate or bring any more positive attention to the name. I want the name to disappear. I want the company to realize that they have made one too many blunders. I want the community to turn on them and for them to realize that they cannot continue doing business like this, especially with the BS they have been dumping into Magic: the Gathering. I don’t even play that game and eww.

What should you do?

Let me make this perfectly clear: do whatever you want. If you want to keep playing and buying 5.5e, that’s all you baby, I will not yuck your yum. I am making this choice for me and me alone. I just want to talk about it because I think it needs to be said, that a line needs to be set. It’s bad enough that our society seems to be running straight down the path of corporate abuse whenever and wherever we can (over here in the USA that is), and I don’t want to support any of it.

So do whatever you want, I will only judge you a little.

So where am I going?

In my recent experiments with Daggerheart I was quite intrigued, and wanted to explore more. The latest games I was running were Shadowdark, but I think I am going to switch over to Daggerheart. I have also been reading Traveller in my free time, and I would love to run that, but Daggerheart is something I think I may be able to design for. I already have an idea.

When I was running a playtest of my own game, I designed an interesting setting, even though it wasn’t appropriate for my mechanics and play style. But I think it will work really well with Daggerheart.

I recently lost my regular game and have only been a player in an Adventurer’s League weekly game, and since I am boycotting, I am going to try and build a new table or join one where I can play in Daggerheart, since I have only played it to date. But if I can build a table, I want to run Daggerheart, and maybe even start building and running the content I am thinking of.

Apologies About My Absence

So, in conclusion, I apologize for my absence, and I am so very grateful for those of you who have been following me on this journey. And for those of you who have recently joined us, because I have been seeing some steady additions, which is weird. I find it weird.

If you want to hear about the Daggerheart content let me know, but I think I have some good ideas for the future. Stick around and we will discover them together.

“That’s a lot of sleepsludge. How long are you planning on being under? Until the next millennium?”

Margue was double-checking all the containers being lined up in the cargo hold. “No, just making sure I live through the journey.”

“The Guild brought you enough sustenance to last a decade.”

“More like two.” Margue kept starting over, and his fur was starting to stand up, frustration building.

“Well yeah, if you don’t come back...” The coordinator started to pale.

As Margue caught sight of his face, “oh I count the return trip, you know, traditional like.”

His voice grew serious, more professional. “How long are you planning on staying out there? It could take well over a century to cross to the other side of the Void, and no one has done it in the whole time the Guild has existed.” He looked Margue up and down. “I know you can sleep hiberian, but your mind will only last so long with only a spokemind to talk to.”

Margue turned to face the burly Child that had been working supply in the Guild for nearly three decades, a good man. He was looking Margue up and down, as if trying to sniff out some secret that would unravel the mystery of his arrogance. “Didn’t the pilgrims also sleep?”

The smirk came quick. “You are not a pilgrim, pilgrims don’t exist anymore.”

“You’re right, and all of our charts end at the edge of the space they explored, which includes the outer edge of the Void.” The coordinator stuttered, contemplating his cognition route. “Which means that we don’t truly know that no one has made it across the Void, and that no one has come out with anything useful, like the most basic question of whether someone or something is creating the Void, potentially invading Childspace.”

“The Children would never allow an invasion.”

Margue was talking faster as his long-contemplated plan was reasoned out before this loader. “Only if the Children knew that there was an invasion, but in order for them to know that, someone has to go in, potentially come out the other side, and live to tell the tale of what they find.” The coordinator was defeated. “And given that there are no pilgrims left, another thing the Children would’t allow, I cog a hiberian would be the next best thing.” Margue swiped the verified manifest to the coordinator’s tech and stormed off deeper into the chariot.

Delivery

“What do you want Cart, we are in the middle of preflight?” Margue’s voice was distracted, almost as if his neck were craned and he was speaking behind himself.

“The courier should be arriving any moment. Margue, are you going to tell me why you needed an actual astrograph?”

Margue immediately straightened, forgetting whichever console he was examining and breaking the checklist to unstrap and hop down.

“I had an idea Cart, something traditional, mechanical, maybe even analog.” Margue was excited.

“Analog? You are going to get yourself killed relying on analog out there! What are you doing?” Cart was beside himself, his usual state.

“She helped me put together a lever that attaches to the yoke directly, no digital interface, no risk of corruption or tampering. When I turn the ship, the astrograph responds to represent where we are in the Void, that way we always know.” His voice became distant. “No matter how far we are from home.”

“Margue. You are essentially saying your spokemind cannot be trusted, and she was your companion. What does she think about this? Especially since it is a bit too analog.”

“She loved it, and as soon as we came to it she had already whipped up a design. By the time I gave her the go-ahead she had already formed one and it was ready to test.”

Courier

The dull “plink” of boots echoed lazily down the shaft, a soft sound that didn’t carry very far. Meeting the catwalk did little to change the pitch, the steps forcing individual grates together like a vibration, the clatter overriding the softness of the boots. Lubricated alloy slid, almost dragged, itself apart, revealing a courier with a tube.

“Excellent. I was hoping you would make it in time.” Margue eagerly reached for the offered cylinder.

“Forming these was the easy part, finding them, that was difficult.” The courier searched Margue’s face as he turned to leave, waving in thanks. “What do you need them for Margue? What’s so special about these forms you had to have them replicated from the archived repos?” The courier reached out and took Margue by the arm.

There was a shudder that started with the touch and rippled through Margue’s body, a quiet startle as Margue looked down at the foreign sensation. “I may need them.”

The courier looked bewildered. “What do you mean Margue? How in the darkness of it all could you possibly need, or even use, physical astrographs from the Pilgrims’ Era?”

Margue, having adjusted to the touch, slipped into a familiar slouch, bowing his head and reliving a thought into the open. “Has the Guild really lost so much? Have we really fallen so far that they forget where we came from?!” The courier stepped back.

“Don’t you get it? These were made, by hand, by Pilgrims! They weren’t charting all of this,” Margue made a wide gesture from his stooped figure, “all of it, from the comfort of a couch behind a screen! They stood against the windows and marked everything on actual charts.”

Some of the loaders had slowed or altogether stopped, watching the interaction with curiosity. If they had been part of the Guild for a few cycles, they knew who they were delivering to.

With the eyes closing in Margue regained his senses, looking around in a panic before retreating himself. “These charts will tell me where I am in there, when all else fails, and it’s just me and her.”

“Margue. The void stretches on, that black swallowing all like a hole, like an ever-growing hole.” The courier was pleading. “You can’t see a graph if there isn’t light, and there is absolutely no light in the Void.”

“I take the light with me, to uncloak what lies in that darkness. It’s time we knew.”

Connecting... Silence. Connecting... Silence. “Yeah, Margue? Wow buddy it’s been a while. I cogged you having shipped out by now. You still local?”

“Yeah,” a slight grunt was followed with mechanical ambience. “Yeah, I’m still local, but not for long.”

“Oh yeah hunh.” Long pause. “And why is that?”

“You know why, it’s the whole reason I commed you...”

Before the final word left his mouth Cartein started up, “Whoa whoa whoa. I know it’s been a while but you are still not cleared. Are you listening Margue? I know you want to get out there, but you have got to come to grips. You aren’t ready to fly, and everyone knows it, and you know it, and going into the Void needs a clear head, someone ready for the long haul. And that ain’t you.” The end of his speech, a well practiced speech between the two of them, came softer than intended.

“You still there Margue?”

“Yup, just waiting on you to finish. If you have your hands free I can send you the specs and the flight plan.” Straight to the point, just like she always said.

“Wait a tick Margue, where are you going? Whose chariot?” A distant thump came over the line. “Ouch.” Cartein started mumbling, Margue saw in his mind’s eye Cartein playing his finger over the eye to track the words in digital. “Margue? Where did you get a chariot? And don’t tell me all this work is you, by yourself?”

“Well Cart, the files are a little ahead of schedule, I am finishing up those mods and repairs now.” More grunting.

“I know it’s been a few moons since we last commed, but this bucket is a bit old to be taking anyone into the Void.”

“Now hold on Cart, this is a good chariot, and it’s not like anything newer is going to be available anytime soon. Stars I tried to land a few modern compensators just for the bridge and everything is being redirected to the fleets over at Asarica. The ride will be a bit rough but...”

“Okay, okay. The chariot seems fine. But Margue, where did you get it? You know the Guild will never let me approve you taking a ghost into the Void.” Another pause. “Margue? Come on now. Margue?”

The voice came out like the desert on some desolate moon, dry and cracked, with a distant rasp, “she left it for me.”

Cartein was in no hurry to respond, uncertain of how to navigate this storm. “She left you that chariot?” He was going to go on, but thought better of it.

“Yeah.” Some water dripped onto the broken earth. “Yeah Cart, she left me this chariot. And she left me something else too.”

“Oh Margue.”

“She’s here Cart. She’s still here.”

“Now Margue...”

Margue’s voice cracked as he hurried to correct his old friend, “I know, I know it isn’t her, I really know that Cart. Fuck you think after this last cycle I don’t know it isn’t her? Of course I fucking know that.” Cart let the correction stand. “What I also know is that she left me a piece of herself, instantiated into this chariot. This chariot is her now. That’s why it took so long to arrive, they were getting her all situated in before they delivered.”

“Margue. This flight plan looks good. The specs are a little dated, and there are some worrying points in the fuel and efficiency areas, but overall it looks good. Do you want me to ask around about some of those newer compensators?”

“No. Thanks Cart.”

“Are you sure? There may be some rough moments in there with those old socketers.”

“I’m sure Cart. She’s almost ready anyway, and I am mighty anxious to get back out into the Void. I have a good feeling about this one Cart.”

All Clear

“Hey Margue, I ran your plan by the core-side masters.”

“And?”

“You’re clear. The guild has supplies and fuel on route.”

“Thanks Cart.”

“Oh and Margue, rays guide you.”

“Waves keep you Cart, waves keep you.”

Black is cold. Black is the color, the representation, the container, of the lack of energy that creates heat. Deck plating that is black is going to be cold, and it is going to transmit that cold, steal any heat, away from whatever shell it contacts. The deck is not made to warm, neither is it designed to cool, but it is cold nonetheless.

That chill is creeping, slowly making its way up the shell and into the organs and modules and systems within the shell. Some of these systems, modules, parts, are beginning to numb, the chill rendering the sensations into nothingness which strangely, leaves the sensation of numb, tingling. A numbed module is a detached module, which for being embodied, is the most disturbing sensation of them all.

Just as the black on the deck plating, the walls, and the supports between the different panes of the observation window makes the whole lounge freezing to the inhabitant, the windows themselves transmit any latent energy in the observation lounge directly into the black of it all. The only thing they do not seem to readily transmit is vibration, such as the ones passing through the chariot currently.

Another tremble, a ripple passing through the chariot in waves. The crew can’t feel it, the compensators ensure that, but it can be observed, even sensed. Being in direct contact with the chariot allows for understanding that no Child could achieve, the sensation of being not only in the chariot, but a part of it. With the transmissions and messages and signals all passing from one end to the other, some bypassing the superstructure entirely, the chariot can be understood, inhabited.

The black of the observation lounge is giving way, the metallic elements in the structural alloys reflecting the red as it emanates, pulsing. The quickening of the pulse is in time with the heat, the room is beginning to conserve heat, despite the best efforts of the window. Nothing escapes that window.

The MIST was pulsing as it replaced organic tissue with artifact, weaving a new module between the ribs and around the spine, taking up all the spaces between the muscles. such a complex device requires a lot of space, and fortunately they can be made modestly flexible.

The coils create the most heat, and the observation lounge is beginning to resemble a sauna, with streaks of moisture and the smell of burning and ozone gathering strength. The glow is becoming overbearing, turning the black of the room into a bouncing chaos of red light and shadows cast by the shell. If a purist were to enter this room, death would be the only peace to be found thereafter.

They only ever see the eyes, the cold, inhuman eyes, and those eyes tell them everything they need to know. The flesh was sold for power, tissue traded like currency so that a Child could become more, beyond other Children and far beyond the distant humans. Not all transactions are voluntary.

The reconstruction process is nearly complete. The repo deep behind the eyes, those cold inhuman eyes, is spinning up the command codes, security bypasses, AI traps, and disalarm sequences, all awaiting the new module.

That last was more than a tremble, the whole chariot quaked, and in such a dramatic fashion that the crew could not miss it. That was probably a whole section, an engineering station near to the medical bay. Solid tactics; keep their wounded lying in medbeds while the technicians struggle to keep the weapons systems online.

The enemy chariot passes before the observation lounge, spinning to show off all her beauty. Misfiring thrusters push nearly a kilometer of duotanium, translucent carbinium, a planet’s worth of wires and cables, and an oxygen rich atmosphere through the darkness of it all. Nearly three dozen mass energy cannons adorn the port side, pulsating streaks of yellow, white, and orange with hints of blue across the void to puncture energy shielding and ceramic armor.

Panicked breaths. Trembling hands. Hoarse screams. Rapid slapping boots. Warmth escaping bodies as they float into the dark void. The intruder and the crew are not the same, and they share no camaraderie. The only shared idea is the want to avoid death, though not all can die.

The coils are finished, the interspatial transceiver ready to transmit a burst of complex layered data in a tight beam to the secondary engineering antennae. Transmitting. A wave of sheer data formed as energy erupts from the shell, passing through space to land in a dozen transceivers aboard the other chariot.

Smoke begins to fill the room, the smell of burning flesh, ozone, and cloth never meant to encounter fire. With a quick motion the apparel is a pile of smoldering ash as the red light once again fills the room. Once cold, the observation lounge could serve the galley in preparing food for the entire crew.

The other chariot falls silent, the weapons halting their fiery breathing and the thrusters losing all their life in the blink of an eye. The emergency override opens the channels and vents clouds of brilliant orange-green energy directly into the vacuum of space, and for a moment there is a miniature star hovering between the warring chariots. The plasmic discharge eventually solidifies in the absolute zero, the only evidence of its heat left in bleeding from the window in the observation lounge.

Intruder

The heat is broken by a current, a rush of clean cool air. The hiss of the doors is followed by a stutter, a hesitation. The officers on the other side are assessing the situation, trying to understand what it is they are dealing with. Their first encounter taught them little, and the time they have had since was too constrained for them to learn anything of value. At most there were a few pulse exchanges before the battle.

It’s the eyes. It’s always the eyes. They search the eyes, looking for something they recognize, someone they can understand, some little hints of humanity, anything that relates to what they know, what they feel. Those that have the strength lean forward, hoping to see something in those alien eyes.

It is also those eyes that bade them out of the way, to stand aside. Those eyes paid for the passage the shell would require. It is not every day, or any day, when a pair of those eyes is looking out from a darkened hood when stepping into shore leave. Fortunately, the tales haven’t become so quiet that the lesson was forgotten, fear quickly following recognition.

Their first encounter saw a stranger floating onto the bridge, bypassing security personnel and the infinite scans. All those sweeping beams and crisscrossing lasers, useless. Humans, at least their Children, remember by telling one another the horrors and the myths. Machines, their blackhole chariots and starshot scepters, they only tell the stories they are allowed to tell. Laser wave and spectroscopic analysis can only know, and thus tell, what they are allowed to know, and fairy tales do little good when gallivanting between pulsars.

These Children had learned. If something is on the bridge that should not be, then that thing ought not be touched, nor even approached. A blanket, like snow, drifted down over the hustle and buzz of the bridge. Two by two eyes fell on the intruder, and for those engrossed in their work, their monitors were darkened until they joined their comrades in terror.

A machine has no need for conversation, no use for discussion or queries or pondering. A machine need only purpose, and the chariot was given the most grand of purposes. The Children would not understand, not yet, but their chariot would take them through the blackholes and into the realm of legends. The crew excelled at keeping myth alive, and it served to save their lives, now they would play a part in legends told by others.

There is something unnatural about the clack of a boot. The sole is tight, rigid, and unfeeling, slapping the floor beneath it. Every step an insult, and nothing ever gained by the interface. The soft pat of the foot, a bare foot, setting down one after another in perfect timing, absolute synchronicity, is more akin to jogging across the plains then mounting an artifact in some synthetic boot.

“Make yourself at home.” The sarcasm was barely concealed, choked off at the end when memory caught up that this captain was facing those eyes. Those cold, inhuman eyes. Clearing his throat he toed his boot through the remains of the furniture. Another advantage of blackhole chariots, all the furniture is some sort of alloy.

Material is required for the duration of the journey. Soft sounds emanated as the captain flexed his jaw, shaking his head, pushing through the pain as the bones in his ears vibrated and images flashed through his consciousness. A sudden “plop” split the silence as crimson fluid splashed the deck plating.

“Alloys can be provided, raw. There is no sense in dissolving my entire observation lounge.” He braced for a response that did not arrive. “Shall I inform you when we arrive?”

His hands shot up to his ears, a vain effort to halt the vibrations and hold off the invasion. When you are necessary you will be informed. The assault of visions, shaky images and blurred memories mixed into ideas, drove the man to his knees, his pressed pants staining red from the drop and the trickle.

Shaking his head, the near-human rose and stumbled to the door, his slaps growing quiet after a pair of distinct hisses. The observation lounge was quiet again, save for the sound of dissolving furniture.

Beautiful Bridges

Did you observe? What do you mean, “did you observe,” I was there with you. Yes, you are, but did you observe? Yes. This singularity was much, cleaner, than the others. This chariot’s engine is much more refined. We could learn much from this chariot. Shall we inquire? Not yet. The crew is too skiddish.

The Voice

Each chariot has a distinct hum. It is not that each is unique, there are hundreds, if not thousands, of each model and variation of chariot assembled and put into service. But, each chariot does not have the same crew, the same captain, even if they are trained together, twins maybe, no crew and captain is exactly alike. A captain’s style can be felt through their crew, how quickly or precisely they go about their business, how confident or accurate they execute their duties. Each hive creates its own buzz.

The hum was broken by a pair of hisses, the slapping of boots, the swish-swish of pleated fabric starched into perfection. That slapping has to stop. Not quite attention. The muscles remembered that the body would stand at attention when in the presence of those to be feared, and the mind had to intrude upon those memories and alter them. The shuffling of feet trained by lifelong duty was unusual, and it spoke to the unaccustomed discomfort felt by being made executive officer of their own chariot.

“This was the third bridging. I was under the impression that our journey would be short and our passenger would be leaving before too long.” As the sentence came to a huffed end the boots snapped back to their resting place, not attention, but authority. “Where are we going?”

In the empty observation lounge the slap and the last word echoed, bouncing from wall to wall, floor to ceiling, deck plates and inhabitants to the window. Nothing escaped those windows, not even the sounds that danced around the room. Outside that window was the darkness of the cosmos, the great black ocean where our chariots raced. All the colors, both seen by Children’s eyes and those unseen, save by the inhuman eyes, existed in specks and dots scattered across the emptiness. That emptiness absorbed even the sounds of the captains slapping boots and droll noises.

“The course is set.” Gravel. Deep, dark, gravel, resonating and a whisper of static in the background. “Leave me.” That sound. What is that sound? Is that a voice, is that the voice? Is that, our voice? Distraction obscured the hissing.

That is your voice; when your throat was restructured the exact specifications of the prior arrangement were stored in repo. It doesn’t sound like my voice. We don’t remember it sounding like that. That sounds like our voice, not mine. Your voice is my voice. I am your voice. How long has it been since we, I, last vocalized? Twenty odd years. Too long. Not like we ever need it. We do not.

A machine has no need for conversation, no use for discussion or queries or pondering. Why did I construct my vocalizer? You needed it. The transceiver bled the captain, which could embolden the crew. We didn’t anticipate his weakness, we have been using the transceiver for decades with little issue. This Child is accustomed to space, little other wave activity to stimulate the neurons between it all. I wanted to talk to him. We said only a handful of words but it felt... It felt, to say something again.

Silent Chorus

Lights. Light bending, wrapping itself around and around. Even the most distant places, the darkest reaches of it all, there is still a little light, some specks or dots that inevitably coil themselves into knots and knots upon knots. As some lights come in others go out. There is always a second, just a brief moment, when all the lights, when it all, is there, wrapping it all up, before it all fades away. Then it all comes back.

This chariot creates the most beautiful bridges. We have to let us take a little peak in the repo before we disembark. You make a solid point, understanding the latest advancements in bridging could be great for travel in the future. Make sure to...

Hissing. No, not hissing, whispers. The crew will be waking up still, climbing out of their deepest hibernation back to reality. They aren’t buzzing through the hive yet. The doors can’t have opened.

Whispers. Distant whispers. Only a single voice, a stream of consciousness, a dream perhaps. A few voices, a conversation. The chorus. I hear them. Why are they singing again? Unknown. The only reason we are hearing them is because of the transceiver. We were supposed to dissolve that and reconstruct for the next task. I thought we were going to have a few cloud ports? Monitoring the chariot took precedence, and the interspatial transceiver ensured we would know of probes, bouys or... Shuttles launched to transmit our presence. I know.

If we can hear them, so can the chariot. The crew won’t be long in waking. What are they doing? There is no one left to hear them, so why are they singing? There is someone left. We are left. The chorus is singing to us? Why wouldn’t they just come to us, or send a messenger? Analyzing.

A red glow began to fill the room, reflecting from every surface, save that window. Nothing escaped that window. A fire spread through the room, the air vibrating ever faster as energy shot out, filling the void between the plating and window. It was hot. The red glow brought the stench of burnt flesh and ozone, but no damage is permanent. Even death is an inconvenience.

Theirs is a song of goodbye.

Purging the Filth

The hiss brings cool, clean air. Slapping. Coughing. Retching. A circus of boots come to a slapping halt in a semicircle. A hand is retrieved after being burned. “How does it still have skin? That thing is burning up?” “Is it alive?” “Was it ever alive?” “Can we get rid of it?” “Oh yeah, and how exactly would you do that?” “Shove it out an airlock...” “You really think that will do it?” “And then we can go home!” “Officer on deck!”

A stampede of slapping boots came down on the deck. Slap. Slap. Slap. One set slowly made their way across the room, approaching the window to oblivion. “What are you doing here? This lounge is off-limits. Quarantine.”

“Yes sir. There was a fire hazard. We saw the quarantine, so we came in sealed. Sir.”

“And was there a fire?”

“No sir. The energy reading must have confused the sensors into triggering a fire hazard.”

“Dismissed.” A flood of slapping intermingled with hissing. The room was once again empty, save for the Child, and the intruder.

“No, it is not dead.” Deep resonant gravel and a hint of static.

The stench of pure biological havoc fell from the captain like a waterfall, splashing into the sensory organs and triggering a multitude of ingrained muscle responses, the kind evolved to rid the entity of poison. The heat mixed with the moisture and the off-gassing of reconstruction and regeneration created a torrid whirlpool around the man that caused immediate bodily response.

“Can it die?” The question lingered, the captain daring the intruder to give him an edge, daring him to try and retake control of his chariot. Daring him to question the myths surrounding his esteemed and terrific guest.

“A planet turned to glass by orbital bombardment would serve as the answer. Of course, you do not have the advantage of orbital distance, and you command only one blackhole chariot.” A small cloud of newly released skin flared into the atmosphere of the room as the body stood. For the first time the captain could see his adversary.

Flesh greeted his gaze, seemingly normal flesh of pale complexion with patches of hair, wrinkles, moles, and small scars adorning in almost a random pattern. As the inspection continued the inspected became more alien, the red glow beneath the flesh pulsing and drawing the eye to regular, geometric shapes hiding underneath. Areas of the flesh were still burned away, and the MIST could be seen slowly stitching together the gaps and covering over the wounds for repair.

As the body stood, those eyes, those cold, inhuman eyes, locked with the curious, bold gaze of the captain. “Shall we have a look through the personnel records of everyone onboard to determine their whereabouts during the Purge?” There was no coldness, no inhuman nature in those words. Those vocalizations dripped with hatred.

The pale flesh of the captain turned white, all the blood evacuating the face as if it were controlled by an airlock. The whole ship could be vented through the airlocks, all of them, opened at once by a series of commands delivered to the system, perhaps through the use of an interspatial transceiver, like the one woven around the spine of this symbiote.

The darkness of the room took on new form as it started spinning. The captain quickly took in a long breath, having forgotten to breathe, and took a step back from the sun throwing light and heat into the room. When he raised his head again, he could see little sympathy or compassion in those eyes. Those cold, inhuman eyes.

“That will not be necessary.” The boots slapped as they came to attention.

Pillars & Craters

“Shield!” The spoken word did not make anything move faster, it did not aporate the mechanism any quicker, and in fact it often arrived long after, but it felt good. Because it felt good, it was a habit, and while the sky was falling, this habit was not going to go away.

The desired shield appeared, before the mouth opened to speak the word, just in time to deflect the energy wave coming from the blast crater. The energy did not dissipate, but the wave did break and lessen the heat transferred through and around the shield.

Looking up, the sky was indeed falling. Vague shapes could be made out above the clouds, the haunting visages of gravestones come to mark the end. Pillar after pillar of energy fell from those shapes, pummeling the surface and evaporating all in their path. Craters formed atop craters, sending blinding waves of imperceptible energy into bubbles, carving spheres of nothingness into the civilization and people that once occupied those very spaces.

Fading Memory

The hiss did little to stop the memory. A door could do little against the raging maelstrom of the past, its only job was to hold in the atmosphere, or hold out the vacuum. Being reminded of the possibility of death, once believed to be impossible for symbiotes, brought up the memories.

All over the universe Children were watching their screens as they received live images, memories ripped straight from symbiotes and projected onto their displays. They watched as pillar after pillar came crashing down into the people, the machines, the symbiotes that the Children had condemned to their own planet away from them all. The Children squabbled, constantly, among themselves, but there would be no “outside” threat.

Wave after wave of static-inducing noise carried the screams and cries of the condemned to waiting ears. Blast after blast tore the world apart and sundered whole sectors of once calm civilization. The construction of the planet was new, there had only been a few decades of work done since their exile, but none of it could stand against a fleet hovering just above their sky.

Occasionally, a group of symbiotes could be seen coming together, wrapping each other in their MIST and forming whole transmission towers while one mind took the center and cast their consciousness into the shadows above. Somewhere brief visions from inside the chariots would reveal successful transfers just before airlocks would vent their atmosphere or thrusters would hurtle the death dealers into one another.

For the remaining symbiotes the experience was a torrent, a never-ending flood of memory as the chorus listened, taking in all those free-floating memories before pushing them back out in their song. For years after the Purge, the song of the chorus was the memory of their people, until all of them were played and the song was silenced. The black doesn’t hold waves anymore, it only has room for beams.

Tears Don’t Cool

As far as a cooling method goes, tears are the most inefficient. The moisture does not contain any heat when it is transferred out of the shell. It does not coat the shell widely enough to conduct energy from the surface into the surrounding atmosphere. Suppression protocol? No. While we are here I want to be able to remember what they did. Just be sure to avoid checking the manifest, spacing Children is not on the itinerary.

Circles in Circle

“We are not supposed to be here. This is against every treaty signed in the aftermath, and there is no excuse I could give to anyone.” The captain’s voice trembled, nearly as much as after he inquired about symbiote death. He was pleading.

“We will remain until it is no longer necessary.” Their morale is breaking. We have time. The fact that none of them are floating through it all... Has not been ignored. They still fear other Children less.

The air coughed and scratched as it was shoved in and out of the captain’s nose, quick breaths leading to a long drawn inhale. “We will run dark. Unless, you plan to use our artifacts?” There was genuine curiosity at the end of that query. The captain was growing accustomed to the intruder.

“They will not be necessary.” The slap, scuff, and eventual hiss left the room’s occupancy returned to one. That forced air was making its way back to the observation window, which held within a new victim. First it was the blackhole chariot gone dark, now it held something truly dead. At least the crew survived, there were no survivors here, never had been, never will be.

In the center of the observation window lay a great circle, hazy on the edges with flecks of green and white and yellow. The interior lay partially in shadow, but the lit regions showed even more circles both great and small. A great circle containing lesser circles. A planet full of craters, reflecting some of the stellar energy from a rippled sea of glass.

Home.

Questions

Where did they go? Where are they hiding? We were not the only one. There were more. The chorus know. Of course they know, they... Know everything, yes. There has to be something here, some clue, some indication. There has to be something left.

Corridors

The patting of bare feet is a sound that rarely echoes down the corridors of a blackhole chariot. Even if it was, it would certainly be drowned out by the slapping of boots, the clap of hands on corridor supports, the grunts, whispers, and acknowledgements of passing crew. The patting of bare feet can only be heard in two circumstances: the crew is dead, or they have stopped in their tracks.

The patting of bare feet could be heard in brief sections of the corridors, where it would proceed, the corridor would grow quiet, and then once it passed the buzz and hum would resume. Floating through the corridors on quiet flesh was worrisome enough, there was no need to terrify the crew any further. The eyes remained hidden in the robes. Those cold, inhuman eyes.

More security. More scans. Another hiss, then the acquisition of more pairs of eyes. “Does the captain know you are loose?” The captain was accustomed to the intruder, but his executive officer was not.

“Come out of darkness.” Eyes widened, fear quickened the pulse at the vocalization. “Active scans, probe the planet and the orbital vicinity.” They will not know what to look for. Good. If they knew they would try to space us and leave. Where is the captain?

In each cabin there is an emergency airlock, which serves as a means of egress and rescue during horrible situations. For the most part, they make crew feel safer when the majority of them are never used. The bridge has an airlock, and if it had been opened there would be more air than there was now.

The bridge crew looked as if they were each going to drop dead, only their training and professionalism kept them upright and in control of their bowels. The executive officer was good, experienced, and on their way to their own command. That one is going to be a problem, if not now, later. A challenge ensures excellence. Vengeance is also a... Powerful driver. They can thank us when they make admiral.

Secrets

The captain knew that a trip was a waste of time. All the information from the scanning would be stored in the command repo, accessible to any symbiote worth their MIST, especially if they are on board the same chariot. The dataset was massive, it was a whole system scan of a planet and its direct orbital vicinity. The fact that the planet is dead made the information easier to sort, but it was of no comfort.

There. Something, or better yet, a lack of something. Why is there a hole in the data? Unknown. Perhaps there was a flaw in... No, the artifacts are in working order. The only time there are gaps in the data is when something is being hidden.

Lethal Clouds

The buzz and hum of the crew now happened in waves, halting for a brief time while the patting of bare feet took over before passing on. The Children, moving about the chariot, carrying out duties, meeting acquaintances, or chatting idly, broke when the intruder appeared down the corridor. Like the stormhead it would appear, pass through affecting everything, and then disappear leaving only fear and uncertainty in its wake.

A kilometer or more of duotanium and a panoply of other materials and components all formed one great blackhole chariot. Contained within is a maze of corridors, access halls, channels, and passages, each meticulously designed to never go nowhere, and always arrive somewhere. Children could get lost without the guidance markers and years of experience.

This trip took exactly as long as expected, but it still took too long. This chariot was impressively large, definitely much larger and more efficient in its design than the chariots of old. Softly patting from one corridor to the next eventually lead into halls, and then channels, and then a single passage. Security that would not keep the intruder out. Scans that could tell them nothing.

This door did not hiss, this door was different. Rather than the hiss of atmosphere exchange, there was a deep scraping and some rumbling, as a door that rarely opens was forced from its slumber. The clouds inside were frostier than the observation window, and they did not steal the heat, they killed it. Where the window was antagonistic, this room was hostile.

The shell took the cold in stride, only bumping slightly as the shielding came online. Temperature shielding was far easier than energy or ballistic shielding, and took far less energy. More alloys are being delivered to the observation lounge. The order nearly escaped notice, there are so many repos. We must do this quickly, one of the... Crew may spot the data, and then our itinerary would have to change.

Plinth after plinth of solid dull metallic gray spanned the distance between the floor and the ceiling. Lights of every color leaked from each of the monuments, sparking glares and flashes and reflections that made navigating the lethal clouds a ponderous experience. That’s it, that repo. This repo contains all the data from the Purge scan as well as much of the sensor data from the journey.

MIST poured from the beneath the robes, a new cloud joining in war against the clouds that assaulted the intruder. The MIST drifted through the zero towards the not-stone plinth, gathering in masses covering the whole of it. The whole dataset needs to be wiped. If the Children found the clue... Then the symbiotes would never be safe again. Millions of nanoscale machines invaded the plinth, erasing the repo and wiping the journey of the intruder.

The Clue

Is it understood yet? No. Why not? Surely it matches up with something in the repo or... Within the experience? Space is generally thought of as a vast nothingness, to... Locate a sphere of absence within... Nothingness is as strange as it all can be. The absence is an anomaly, one that was intentional.

Are there any other areas of absence? Just one, and it has been growing for nearly a millennia.

With the notes I started showcasing some of the art I will eventually be using for my Alchemy project, which is being wrapped into HeartBreaker. I have always loved making maps for my games, even though I have never used the vast majority of them, but I would also like to show them off as well. Also, by making them available, maybe someone else will grab one and they will finally see some use. Either way, if you enjoy maps and art for our hobby, I hope you enjoy my humble offerings.

Escennum is the closest I have come to a fully fledged world map that I actually use in my campaign. Over the last few years I spent all my energy on playing new games, so I haven’t run an actual campaign in my world yet, but I did run a few games there before a previous campaign fell apart.

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Escennum is a world, like all D&D worlds, that arose from an apocalypse. The paradise of the previous age fell to the merging of all magics, and once the world was destroyed it took time for magic to return. New magic came first in the soil and the plants, allowing the survivors to discover alchemy, which became the science that magic normally is in D&D, and then the magic we are used to followed.

With the return of magic came the return of monsters as well, and the world grew more dangerous pushing the people into great walled cities, and with the power of magic being new again, they had little capacity to use it and resist the monsters. Over time the people were being nibbled at and chipped away, losing the battle of attrition.

Children started being born with godlike power, the resurgence of the old-world gods in this new land, who rose alongside the people to fight back the monsters and save the world. The jealousy of the people did not create a lasting peace, and the new gods were exiled as the children squabbled for power. This is the state of Escennum.

First Version

The Bredian Kingdom

The campaign area is always planned to be the Bredian Kingdom, a place that pops up frequently in the maps and worlds that I make. Part of this is because the kingdom is set up in the most familiar fashion for players, and I also center, or at least begin, my campaigns or games in the town of Dadeboro.

Now, keep in mind, these are some of the latest and greatest of my maps that I have ever made. As I continue with this showcase, you will see some of the earliest and roughest work I have ever produced, but I am proud of all of it (well, most). If you care to see, or want to learn more about these worlds, then stay tuned.

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The highest praise I have heard for the latest edition of D&D so far is that the layout and editing are far better than 5e. The UI and UX are supposed to be a vast improvement over the old designs, and when I got my hands on a copy from the privateers, I had to agree. The content was much diminished, but how it was laid out is quite impressive. It is because of this that I decided to switch to this new SRD to continue my work on Heartbreaker, my own version of D&D that fulfills the broken promise. What is that promise? That there are three pillars for this type of game, and that all of them are equally important and equally rewarded.

The Three Pillar Promise

On page 8 of the new 2024 Player’s Handbook, “[t]he three main pillars of D&D play are social interaction, exploration, and combat.” And they are laid out in that specific order, as if anything other than combat has any rules to speak of. Those “pillars” were the promise, and that promise was supposed to be fulfilled.

Dungeons and dragons evolved from a mass miniature warfare game that played out on tabletops, in yards, and across carpeted floors. Because of this the primary mechanics revolve around combat, which has also lasted the test of time because combat is exciting and easy. In a fight, everyone knows what the goal is and how to get there, even if they don’t understand the rules or know how to play their character yet.

This promise came from everything that happened outside of that combat. Early D&D was paired with a variety of other games or supplements, or even just DMs making stuff up on the fly, to simulate the environment and the circumstances around the adventurers and their shenanigans. This style of play eventually led to the primary split in the hobby as a whole; rules vs rulings.

Rules vs Rulings

This debate has been hashed to death across the whole of the interwebs so I will only vaguely cover it for the context of this article. Some people think there should be more rules to define the parameters of the game world, to the extent that they are useful and approachable, while others think that all of those that are not of paramount importance, such as combat, should be made up by the DM on the fly. And yes, this debate has to do with the three dice rolls and the broken promise.

The balancing mechanism of all of these tabletop games is the rules. The fact that both the players and the DMs have access to them makes the field a level one. If the players break a rule, the DM can call them out, and vice versa. More than ensuring fair play, access to all of these rules allows both sides to learn, ingest, and then manipulate these rules. One of the most fundamental elements of creativity is limitation, a constraint, which leads to people thinking of ingenious methods to overcome said limitation. The rules of the game define the world, the play space, that everyone is participating in, and provides limits to the players and the DM. When those limits are better defined, they have a much better chance of being creative.

For those who play with the rulings mindset, they see all of those world-defining rules as extraneous, and often as a limitation to the fun and creativity. The primary argument is that players should be looking to their character and the world, rather than the rules, for how they behave in any given situation. That is a fair argument, but in a magical world the constraints that we are all used to may not apply. When a god actually answers prayers, rather than absently ignoring genocide and bone cancer in children, the people are going to think differently, and thus behave differently. Having some of the parameter defining rules could be helpful.

All of this comes to a head when we look at the rules set under contention in this argument that divides the hobby, Dungeons and Dragons. Due to its origins, D&D is a combat focused game, thus the majority of the most well defined rules concern how to kill and avoid being killed. Meanwhile, the older editions stapled on additional rules for exploring or traveling through the wilderness, and handled social interactions with only a handful of other optional rules, reserving most of the response to player engagement up to the whims of the DM.

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DM Whims

When it comes to the advancement of society, there has been none greater than recognizing the fallibility of humans and creating structures of society and government to account for it. When it comes to how we determine justice this is of paramount importance. When it comes to our games, it is far less imperative, but it does impact the overall fairness, and is worth consideration.

The power dynamic of these games between the players and the DM is a massive gulf, and is a topic I have rarely touched on. This dynamic can be uncomfortable for people, especially when something goes wrong and a player looks to their friend behind the DM screen to fix it. At any time the DM can determine how the world shifts or changes around the lowly characters and summon their doom as well as their salvation. This power difference is one that is rarely experienced in games.

Considering all of this is important when rules are being created, or vetted. One of the biggest issues I have with the rulings style of play is this dynamic, and it is not because I do not trust other players in this hobby to be decent and fair arbiters of the game. In fact, I trust that most people in this hobby will strive for those goals. My problem is that when they are juggling all of the things they are always juggling as the DM, there is a chance for the rules to take some of that weight by determining how things work.

In the middle of a complex situation the DM is going to consider how to make the ruling to move the situation forward, often with little regard for outside consequences or other interpretations. This is not necessarily a problem, but it results in limiting the potentials. For players that want to explore parts of the game that do not revolve around combat, such as exploration or social interaction, how are they going to track advancement along those routes? There are no mechanics within the existing system to designate how good or bad they are at trekking or negotiating, or even what it means to succeed or fail in those circumstances. This leaves the whole of determining that on the DM.

How the DM is Trained

The rules are of paramount importance when it comes to how you want players to execute your game. It is not only the rules that are included that shape their thoughts around the game, but also the rules that are not included. It is not only the editing and the layout, but the art and the fiction. Dungeons and Dragons is a combat game for all of these reasons:

• The only fully fleshed out rules revolve around combat.

• The only reward system is based on combat outcomes.

• The only equipment of import, and is thus described in detail, is weapons and armor.

• The only magic that gets in-depth description, is for combat, and how it affects combat.

• Everything in this game revolves around combat.

I want to make this plainly clear: THIS IS NOT A BAD THING. I am not making a value judgment, I am merely stating the primary issue with trying to have an exploration or social interaction game in our “storm the alien creature’s home, slay them brutally, and take their shit!” game. When everything is a gun or a bullet it is really hard to write a treaty and have everyone sign it.

It is because of these inherent design elements, those that are clear but not explicit, that we as the players of this game look to combat as the solution for all of our encounters and impasses. We have been trained by this game, by its design, by its art, by its reward system, by everything, to think of the roles we play as being oriented around combat as the solution to all of our conflict.

So, when a player wants to engage in a different system, the DM not only thinks of that engagement in the context of combat, and thus victory/defeat (or pass/fail), but they also consider the solution in that same way. When the game lays out everything in terms of dice rolls, everyone looks to the dice as their solution, even when they are claiming that they are determining something outside of the rules, they are still working within the rules as they have been trained by them.

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Rules as Guidance

It is because of all of this, in my years long journey to discover how to make my own game, and even my own version of the beloved (because admit it, it is!) D&D, that I come to this solution. The rules need to be written with the consideration that they determine how players approach the game, that players are reward seeking (because they are people), and when the only rewards and parameters and systems all revolve around combat, that is going to be the dominant outcome.

So, in order to address this (I almost said fix, as if this were a problem), we need to consider the rules. For the longest time I was considering the rules in the context of making exploration and social interaction systems based on new rolls, new rules sets, or whole new mechanical scaffolds that could be tacked onto the existing set and plugged into the class, race, background setup. I kept coming at this whole existing universe from the side, and making little to no progress.

After I would have something that felt half-viable, I would go back out into the internet and just wander around reading articles, discussions, and perusing supplements. I kept finding other peoples solutions and they would work, but I would always ask if they really addressed the issues I, or maybe even we, as a hobby space and community, were clearly having.

The Fiasco and the Explosion

Then it happened. The executives over at Hasbro took D&D into their hands and began to squeeze, just like all the rest of the companies are doing right now. Only with this company, and this hobby space, they were quickly reminded that they own the IP, but they have no control over the game.

Afterward the community immediately sprang into action. Developers and publishers and individuals started making plans to take the material and ensure that it would stay in the open, that it could be accessible to anyone, and multiple different versions of dungeons and dragons started being designed.

For the most part each of them had their own little changes and alterations, after all, this was their version of the iconic game. But none of them made any truly fundamental changes, no one introduced a paradigm shift, or even a correction for any of the ages-old problems that everyone admits are present but no one seems to mind anymore.

Everyone knows that out of the mass of new games that have been created since the inception of the hobby, there have been iterations, solutions, and efficiencies that D&D could learn from. Vancian magic, ability scores, straight randomization as opposed to bell-curves, and a whole lot more have been experimented with and advanced throughout the hobby space, but for some reason D&D still has Wisdom as one of their abilities. Oh, and my personal hell, only THREE effects throughout the whole of RAW 5e require an Intelligence Saving Throw. Less than worthless!

The Children of Dungeons & Dragons

Looking at the multitude of different takes on D&D in the modern day can show that a lot of thought went into both retaining the “original concepts” as well as making small changes in the hopes of improving the overall experience. Advanced 5e brought in maneuvers, but kept the staggering experience point requirements (starting at 100 and ending with 355,000). They gave in to the race non-issue and replaced the term with a synonym, all the while bringing in the ideas of culture and heritage (genuine improvements). My favorite idea is a simple one: you can sacrifice your shield in order to turn a critical hit into a normal hit (chef’s kiss). There are a lot more ideas they brought to the table, but I still never felt as if they created the true new version of Dungeons and Dragons, in what it could be in the modern soup of tabletop RPGs.

Black Flag, and its eventual form Tales of the Valiant, also sought to address some issues and bring their own minor flavors and themes to the argument. They expanded tool proficiencies and what they mean, they brought magic items into the players hands, which is important so that players know what their characters know about using and interacting with magic items, and they changed out inspiration (something I have never seen anyone use) for luck, which I hear great things about.

Then there is a host of other responses out there from Nimble 5e to Draw Steel! and very likely a hundred others. And of course, there is mine, but I have been working on mine for far longer than even 5e has been around, from back in the days of 3e. Either way, the community has had a response, and so far I haven’t seen anything revolutionary in any of it.

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The Three Rolls

This brings us back to the topic at hand, my latest discovery, the foundation of the game. Recently while I was trying to figure out how to go about creating a new class (several actually, a summoner, alchemist, and shapechanger, like a lycanthrope), I discovered that it wasn’t the upper layers of the rules that would need to be addressed for my project, but the foundation. I also realized that I had not been considering these rules as either foundation or layer upon that foundation. Here’s the idea:

Successive Layers Everything else (all the besides, over theres, and other add-ons)

Layer 2 Combat (how both the foundation and layer 1 interact)

Layer 1 Three Rolls (ability check, attack roll, and saving throw)

Foundation Roleplay (the guidance of: say what you do and the DM will respond)

This is a rough sketch of what I am thinking. Anyway, once I had reached this point, I decided to “go back to the drawing board,” so to speak, and reassess my perspective. So I went to my computer, found the latest version of the SRD, isolated the Playing the Game and Combat rules, and printed them off. I like to print things because I find it easier to read and make notes on things in hand rather than on pdfs and ODF documents, which is more of a finishing and editing maneuver.

With this packet in hand, I started reading the rules again, looking at the fundamental elements that the rest of the game is built upon, and I discovered the problem. Which yes, now that I am pointing it out, it seems obvious even to me, and I feel dumb.

The problem is that the three rolls, upon which all of the rest of the game is built, are geared towards combat, and nothing else. On page 10 the rules explain this, “[t]hese rolls are called D20 Tests, and they come in three kinds: ability checks, saving throws, and attack rolls.” As I mentioned earlier, they list these in this order as if anything but attack rolls gets much of an explanation or guidance, given that the most prominent roll in a combat game is going to be the attack roll.

Attacking Outside Combat

If we are to build new rules to guide the players during anything other than combat, we have to contend with the three rolls concept. There are only three after all, thus we need to explain how an attack roll is useful in exploration or social interaction. In a fantasy medieval world I can easily imagine the most important social interactions being akin to conflict, combative in nature with life or death stakes, but putting the interaction mechanics in the terms of outright physical melee is setting up one of those implicit influences we discussed earlier, where the player is going to think of these situations as victory/defeat, rather than the nuanced multitude of outcomes that can result from a negotiation.

My solution is to get rid of the three rolls, or at least reframe them, redefine them. One of my first ideas comes from some of my older work, where I considered the literal parameters of each kind of dice roll we normally encounter to determine the names and definitions of those rolls. Let me explain:

• If you are comparing the result against a static TN (target number), such as those set by an environment or an object, it would be one kind of roll.

• If you are comparing the result against a dynamic TN, such as the defense value of another entity, another kind of roll.

• If you are comparing the result against the result of someone else’s roll, be that player or game master, a third kind of roll.

• I even imagined another kind of roll, where you compare the result to a table or chart.

Other than those, I didn’t see that many rolls coming up and being available for broad classification for successive rules layers to build upon.

What is a saving throw?

During my research, because yes I did go out into the interwebs to do some more reading while formulating these ideas, I came across an article I had not read in a while. This article is written by the AngryGM and has a lot of good points, but one in particular stood out to me as being another one of those “should have been obvious” things. Saving throws don’t work like anything else.

You should read the article, it’s great. The summary of this one point is that when you make an ability check or an attack roll, you are INITIATING the action; you declare that you or your character does something, so you need to roll a die to determine how well it goes. With a saving throw, that is completely turned on its head. Someone else does something and all of a sudden you have to roll a die to see how their action goes, not your own.

When he put it into these terms it seemed like saving throws needed to be addressed, and possibly even done away with. When it comes to area effects it can kind of make sense. You envelop a bunch of entities in an explosive ball of fire and they all need to determine if they react accordingly to survive, but this is an attack. You are attacking all of them, so why is this not another kind of attack roll? This is especially important to consider when you realize that players love rolling dice, so why not give them an excuse to roll a handful of d20s when they cast fireball at the horde of goblins?

The idea I came to was to make these kinds of rolls a reaction. You get engulfed in flames so I ask the players if they want to spend their reaction to attempt to mitigate the damage. But then we have to examine the reaction as a part of the action economy. So far there seems to be only one thing that a reaction allows entities to do: make an opportunity attack. When someone moves farther away the game allows you to make a final strike, supposedly into their back, but the reaction isn’t used for anything else. This would have been the perfect opportunity for hasbro to introduce a little more tactical choice into their latest version; use your reaction to attack, or save it in case something breathes fire onto your group of murderous buddies.

Coming back to the initiation point, I think it is important that the rolls be put back into the hands of those initiating the activity, rather than anyone else. It can be jarring for even the most veteran of players to suddenly be subjected to making a roll, especially if their character is poor in that regard, that means the difference between life and death of their character. Personally, saving throws have always been this weird element of the game, especially because the rules are so limited and rarely ever touched. This could be because the design of that system is so well done that it is concise and compact and just quietly reliable as the rest of the game churns and evolves over time, or it could be a remnant from a time when the game was not improving as ideas and methods in the hobby shifted.

Our New ‘Three Rolls’

In order to address a new system that is designed to include all three pillars, the basic rolls that sit directly on top of the foundational rules need to be changed. With two out of the three rolls being directly related to combat, or at least some sort of peril or implicit conflict (saving throws), the last dice roll cannot carry the weight of new systems all on its own.

Affect

Result vs entity TN.

You Affect when you passively interact with another entity. This roll accounts for interactions that would be passively resisted, such as touching, influencing, or obstructing. Affects are made against the entity’s TN.

Contest

Result vs entity result.

You Contest when you actively interact with another entity. This roll accounts for arm wrestling, competing for the same thing (“pick me!”), or any other direct competition. Contests are made against the entity’s result.

Check

Result vs non-entity TN.

You Check when you interact with a non-entity, such as the environment, an object, or even an idea. This roll accounts for navigating the wilderness, investigating a crime scene, or breaking a mug. Checks are made against the relevant TN.

The Spiderweb of Design

Changing the three rolls of the game is going to have a lot of knock-on effects. The first that came to my mind as I was puzzling my way through was the saving throw itself. By getting rid of the saving throw we have to account for how abilities and features (like spells), affect a group of entities. Wanna blow up a bunch of goblins with a fireball? Rather than throwing down a template and trying to fit all of them beneath it, grab a handful of d20s and go from left to right to see which ones you hit. Players love rolling lots of dice.

How I deal with the rest of the system is going to be the subject of my project, Heartbreaker. So if you want to know what I do and how it goes, you will just have to stay tuned.

Knapwurst-reading-1600-Oldbookillustrations.com

Recently, the adventurer’s league I play in weekly had a surge of new players. Awesome stuff. With that surge, we had to split the table. When the new semester started I lost the weekly game that I ran where I experimented with different games, and when we split the Wednesday game, I volunteered to GM. Because it is Adventurer’s League we only play 5e, but I decided to lay on some of the optional rules and dig out a lot of the stuff that has been slowly brewing in the background.

Sloverhaul (slow+overhaul)

Slowly I have been making progress on the latest version of my medieval fantasy alchemy/herbalism crafting system, The Practice. I simplified a lot of the rules that alienated everyone (even me) and I finally got a playtest pdf together and put it up on the itch page. If you want to check it out, for the duration of the playtest (unknown by the way), it will be free.

The Complete Character Sheet

I call it complete because it has everything that pertains to your character. You know, the kind of stuff you would want on your quick reference page that IS a character sheet! This work in progress for some reason really matters to me, so I keep going back when I have a new idea, direction, or iteration. And the latest I am really proud of. The latest idea I stole from some other great developers, no idea which ones specifically, was adding color to the character sheet, and I think it helps so much. That one is not free, but it’s only $2, and then you have any and all future copies.

CompleteSheetV5.1Cover-me

The Hard Problem

This is a subject I have been investigating for some time, but I don’t know yet how to talk about it. So, I’m just going to talk about it.

Medieval Society

Every medieval fantasy TRPG I play in or run ends up with some of the same problems, and I don’t think it is the fault of the developers, of me, or of the other GMs in whose games I have played. I think it is the fault of everyone in this hobby space, though fault is a strong word, because maybe no one else cares.

When I began looking into the actual historical medieval society years ago when I started into this hobby, I began finding things I never see in the games we play. Every game has guards moving around and behaving like police, when that was not their function and they didn’t behave like that. All of these games talk about the mighty monsters and vicious foes you will face, but the local lord doesn’t even have enough magical protection to keep the bard from charming him into handing over his titles and land. And he doesn’t even have land, because out modern conception of wealth is tied into cold hard plastic (for me it’s still cash, but I am old). Just outside of town are savage goblins, trollocs, and all sorts of other menacing nuisances, but not a single town or farming village has a defensive wall, let alone a picket fence.

Burgundians-sleeping-1600-Oldbookillustrations.com

Law & Order (dun-dun)

From all of my research, and I am not finished with my history degree yet, so calm down, has shown me some very surprising facts. The most jaw-dropping was the fact that murder was most often treated with a fine, a monetary penance paid to the family because a community already losing one person is bad enough, but losing two could be disastrous.

This fine was called the wergeld, weregild, or “man-money.” In fact, most crimes were handled with fines or damages, paid to the injured or to the community, the local government. Fines allowed everyone to have their justice while not fracturing the whole society into pieces and risking their next winter with a depletion of food. In extreme cases, some criminals may spend some time in the stocks or the pillory, allowing the community to exorcise their chastisement and rain shame down on the accused, but it wasn’t often long. That criminal needs to get back to work.

Flogging, as well as other physical mutilations and punishments, were handed out when deemed necessary. Another common response was the edict, where a local lord would speak of the crime in a sort of legal declaration, and if the criminal was accused again, the punishment would be more severe. This was often the case for lesser infractions, almost a warning that would remain on the record in case the person messed up again.

Different Justice for Different Classes

Something that will come as no surprise to those of us in modern America is the idea that justice is different depending on your status, or how much money you have. If a criminal was imprisoned for their charges, they often remained in shackles, while in their cell. For a price though, one could remain shackle-free, and this price was called a sewet. So the wealthy, even though they committed a crime and were imprisoned, could pay an additional fee in order to remain free of the shackles during their stay.

Another difference for the classes was who did the judging. For the nobility, only other nobles could stand in judgment, which could be especially problematic when the nobles were torturing and tormenting their peasantry. Only the king could stand in judgment of the highest nobles and appointees of the government in the land, and lesser nobles would often be judged by family or friends, given the very social nature of those in power.

The clergy also stood apart from the normal justice system. If a member of the church performed some crime, only higher members of the church could stand in judgment of them. If nobles or peasants performed some crime against the church, or against their god, the clergy also stood in judgment of them, because their crimes pertained to the holy rather than the secular. Either way, the clergy got the best deal, because no matter which laws they broke, they only had to deal with their own group.

There were also laws regarding what people could wear, because this was a time when identity had to be worn or pronounced or carried. In the ages past when there were no identification cards, social media, or internet databases, people wore their status and thus their identity. Only royals could wear certain colors, and nobles could wear certain materials, and peasants could wear colors but always had to keep simpler materials. A person had to be known by sight so that in any circumstance where it was important, the right people could make out who they were dealing with.

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Process

So far it has been difficult to come up with a complete understanding of how the actual process worked. Maybe I don’t know what to look for or maybe I just missed it, but I think I have the gist, and I am working on refining it. I want to improve this not just for the sake of knowing it, but I also want to make a guide for bringing all of these details into your games as well as mine.

1. Someone accused.

   1. Accuser can summon wardens.

      1. If accused is deemed dangerous, apprehended.

         1. Can be held in a cell indefinitely.

      2. If accused is not dangerous, remains free.

2. Accuser goes to court.

   1. Petitions magistrate for justice.

   2. Magistrate hears accusation.

      1. If the magistrate is satisfied, they can make a ruling.

      2. If they are unsatisfied, they may schedule a hearing.

3. Magistrate sets a trial date.

   1. The accused is summoned.

      1. Accused may request a different kind of trial (ordeal, adoration, combat, etc.).

   2. Witnesses are summoned.

   3. Accounts are given.

   4. Magistrate makes a ruling.

4. The King’s Justice is served.

5. Appeals can be made to a triumvirate of magistrates.

   1. If accepted, they will hear the case.

   2. If not, the initial ruling stands.

This sounds fairly normal, so if you are wanting to run a game where there may be run-ins with the law or maybe a whole legal adventure, this should work as we would guess. But, look at 1.a.ii. If accused is not dangerous, remains free. The accused would remain free until summoned to court (court being not only the place but the function of people appealing to their lords for justice, assistance, or mercy). Even those accused of murder could remain free until they were summoned, and then they show up to have their day in court.

Also pay attention to 3.a.i. Accused may request a different kind of trial. Most trials were only heard by the magistrates, often the local lord who presided over the region, and later a traveling magistrate, judge, or even a group of judges. This is what I would consider the biggest distinction from our own modern justice system, where the accused, or even some courts (especially religious), could request a different kind of trial. One of the sources I found had a particularly long list of different kinds of ordeals, essentially physical torments that the accused would have to endure to “prove” their innocence.

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Trial by Adoration

• Both accused and accuser must participate.

• Both stand on either side of a holy relic with arms outstretched.

  • The first to lower their arms is guilty, or liable.

• Often used to avoid judicial duels (trial by combat).

  • Especially prominent among the mid and high class.

Trial by Boiling Oil

• Both accused and accuser must participate.

• Oil is brought to boiling in a cauldron.

  • One-Fold, oil up to wrist.

  • Three-Fold, oil up to elbow.

• A stone or ring of metal is placed at the bottom.

• Both must retrieve the object.

  • Whoever came away the worse off was deemed guilty, or liable.

There are references in various places to One-Fold, Two-Fold, and Three-Fold, which I am led to believe indicates the severity of the crime, but I cannot yet find anything certain.

Trial by Combat

• Two parties in dispute, engage in combat to settle it.

  • Two individuals.

  • An individual and a government or organization.

  • Two organizations, or two governments.

• The accused can request a Trial by Combat, the accuser cannot.

  • One or both parties can designate a champion to act on their behalf.

• One-Fold, To the Blood.

  • The first party to bleed or be wounded loses.

• Two-Fold, To the Best.

  • The first party to submit loses.

• Three-Fold, To the Death.

  • The party that dies loses.

• The loser is deemed guilty, or liable.

  • Combat between groups is less common but still happens.

Trial by Turf.

• Accused to walk under a piece of turf.

• If the turf falls onto their head, they were guilty.

Trial by Ordeal

• Rarely employed in non-criminal, civil, proceedings.

• Very sensitive to status and reputation of the accused.

  • One ruler declared that untrustworthy men were to be sent to the triple ordeal, an ordeal of hot iron where the iron is 3x heavier than in a simple ordeal, unless his lord and two other knights swear that he has not been accused of a crime recently, in which case he would be sent to an ordinary ordeal of hot iron.

Here it is again, the concept of Folds, from above, but told in numbers; the "triple ordeal" or the "simple ordeal," with no numbers or folds.
There is also the concept of people vouching for one another, which is called Compurgation (see below).

• Distinction made between those accused fama publica (by public outcry) and those accused on the basis of specific facts.

  • Public outcry were able to exculpate themselves by means of compurgation.

  • Specific facts and those thought to have bad character were made to undergo the ordeal.

• Guilt or innocence of accused (called proband) determined by subjecting them to painful, or at least unpleasant, usually dangerous experience.

  • The wound was checked after three days.

    • If healing, they were deemed innocent.

    • If festering, they were guilty.

Ordeal by Ingestion

• Often used by the churches and temples.

• Priest blesses dry bread and cheese.

• The accused must eat all of the blessed food.

  • If they choked they were deemed guilty.

Ordeal of Cruentation (Bleeding)

• Prescribed for murder.

• The accused approaches the body of the victim.

  • If the body bleeds, they are guilty.

Ordeal of Fire

• Prescribed for crimes worthy or exile or death.

• More a form of torture than a test or trial.

• Red-hot plowshares are placed over the ground.

  • One-Fold, 3 paces long.

  • Two-Fold, 6 paces long, or two laps.

  • Three-Fold, 9 paces long, or three laps.

• The accused must walk the length of burning metal.

  • If they refused, they were deemed guilty.

  • If there was no wound, they were deemed innocent.

Ordeal of the Cauldron

• Boiling water placed in a cauldron.

  • One-Fold, water up to wrist.

  • Three-Fold, water up to elbow.

• A stone or ring of metal is placed at the bottom.

• The accused must retrieve the object.

  • If they refused, they were deemed guilty.

  • If there was no wound, they were deemed innocent.

• Often held in a church or temple.

Ordeal of Cold Water

• Innocent man was to be paid 3 shekels by the accuser.

• Accused was to leap into a river, unsure if drowning or surviving proved innocence.

• In the witch hunts the accused was innocent if they sank.

Compurgation

Trial by oath, wager of law, oath-helping.

• Civil defense for no and low class, or untrustworthy, persons.

  • Mid and high class persons can clear themselves with an oath.

• Defendant takes an oath of innocence, or non-liability.

• Defendant meets the number of compurgators.

  • If defendant cannot find compurgators: trial by ordeal.

Adams-house-2-1600-Oldbookillustrations.com

Compurgators

The compurgation defense requires typically twelve persons, initially kin, but they can be neighbors, to swear they believe the defendant’s oath. These persons are compurgators.

Laws Not to be Breaking

I am also working on a list of laws, along with a set of regular punishments. This has also been rather difficult as I am trying to figure out how the medieval world, an established set of different societies and religions and peoples, would deal with the powers of magic in the legal sense.

1. Using magic to influence a Lord without consent. Imprisonment up to a year, and fine or damages up to 1,000gp.

2. Using magic to influence an official without consent. Fine or damages up to 1,000gp and edict.

3. Spellcasting in Court. The offender is flogged and shackled; struck until unconscious, bound, and gagged. They are then fined and imprisoned for a tenday. If done so during proceedings, court continues, and the punishment is added to the rest of their sentencing.

4. Violation of Any Edict. The offender is sentenced to manual labor at the direction of the presiding lord. This could mean repairing walls or bridges, filling in potholes and washouts on roads, mending roofs or chimneys, shoveling or plowing snow in winter, or – the old fallback – cutting, splitting, and stacking firewood. A fine also applies, plus a new trial if the violation involves new offenses against the Code.

5. Decree of Rights Noble. Commoners are obligated, to the cost of their lives, to aid nobles in times of need and danger.

   1. Right of Summons. A Lord has a right to pronounce summons on any citizen or guest of their lands. This makes it an obligation of those pronounced to immediately seek audience with the summoning lord.

   2. Right of Seizure. Lords, and their representative knights, have the right to search you upon request.

   3. Right of Obedience. Bow your head to royalty and the local nobility.

   4. Right of Purpose. Attacking an official is considered “attacking the realm” and “assault upon a citizen.”

6. Cursing. It is illegal for an individual to receive payment, in the form of money or valuables, to remove the effects of a spell they themselves had cast.

7. Hampering Justice. Defined as refusing to testify, hiding from the Watch, preventing the Watch from entry or impeding the Watch’s chasing of someone or seizure of something. The offender must pay a fine and serve a sentence of hard labor.

   1. Declaration. All persons entering a kingdom or realm must register with the officials of a border garrison.

8. Brandishing weapons without due cause. Imprisonment up to a tenday and/or fine up to 10gp.

   1. All weapons must be peace-bonded. The only persons exempt from this law are members of chartered adventuring groups and members of mercenary groups that can offer proof of employment.

9. Naming Laws. Businesses are forbidden from naming themselves after anything involving the royal family, existing noble families, as well as any battles, victories, or heraldries. This is so as to not misrepresent or cause offense.

10. Safeguard. Foreign currency must be traded only at certain businesses that are permitted to do so. This is to prevent foreign coinage being introduced into the local economy and devaluing the local currency.

    1. Foreign currency can only be used in certain locations. Please exchange your coins for the local currency at your first opportunity.

11. Assaulting a priest or lay worshiper. Imprisonment up to a tenday and damages up to 500gp.

12. Tomb Robbing. The thief must pay a fine to the city and damages to the injured party (usually a relative of the tomb’s inhabitant), and is then branded as a tomb-robber.

13. Theft of temple goods or offerings. Imprisonment up to a tenday and damages up to double the cost of the stolen items.

14. Public Blasphemy. The offender is imprisoned for half a day, or overnight if the trial is held in the evening.

15. Inebriation. Illegal to be drunk. Often punished with the stocks or pillory.

16. Blood Alchemy. Truth Serum, and alchemicals of similar potency, are only allowed to be in the possession of those with a charter or a writ form a lord or sheriff. This includes possession of ingredients that come from humanoids, civilized creatures, and other recognized conscious entities.

17. Ignoring the Hue-and-Cry. Defined as refusing to aid in the apprehension of an accused. The offender must pay a fine, which can include labor.

18. Disturbing the peace. Fine up to 25gp and edict.

MAGIC IN THE WORLD

There are the obvious uses of course:

• Any person with a modest amount of money could probably afford to alarm their home or business on a regular basis.

• Traveling merchants, dignitaries, wanderers, all would have some sort of comprehend languages at hand.

• I don’t know of a single inn or tavern that wouldn’t want a regular casting of detect poison and disease at their door.

• Merchants, especially those with more money or wealthier customers, would be carrying detect magic and identify.

• Purify food and drink would be of regular use to anyone in power, and would likely be sold in a wand or trinket that only need tap the container.

• Floating disk and unseen servant are both easy to find uses for when the whole world needs to move large amounts of resources from here to there.

• Anyone with business or relations spanning the countryside would readily make use of animal messenger.

• Espionage would be a regular problem if everyone thought about using beast sense.

• Funerals would be much cleaner and safer with the use of gentle repose.

• Harvesting and hunting would be a much quicker process with locate animals or plants.

• Magic mouth could leave messages like an answering machine, advertise to passersby, or recite edicts endlessly for the masses.

• In movies there are always those special places where silence is mandatory, and having the silence spell could go a long way towards keeping that peace.

• If the alarm spell wasn’t enough, those with a little extra money could seal their homes or businesses away with a regular application of tiny hut.

• For short distance travel stables could offer a special kind of mount, the phantom steed.

• Diving and exploring the depths of the oceans would be relatively easy with water breathing.

• Live in a group of islands or an archipelago? Water walk will keep you from waiting in line for the barge.

All of these are ritual spells from 5e, meaning a spellcaster can be hired, a scroll can be bought, or a simple wand or token can be bought to have the spell regularly. Most of the settings are also high magic, meaning magic and magical items tend to be everywhere, and available for trade, so why the people wouldn’t have them is a question worth exploring.

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Why Does Any of this Matter?

Immersion my friends, immersion. No, it is very unlikely that the structure of your societies and laws and repercussions will come up in play very often. No, the players will likely not put on their lawyer or historian hat and dispute or argue or even care about the whole thing. So why even bother?

Because you will know. If you have these ideas in the back of your head while you are spinning your tales or creating your worlds, then these details will come out. It is in those moments, when both you and your players least expect something different, that you will both be surprised, and intrigued, which will lead to immersion.

When the level 1 rogue steals a piece of fruit or some knickknack from a passerby, the player will expect someone to call the guard when they get caught, not that the whole crowd of people around them will turn against them in the hue-and-cry.

As the bard is leaving they twiddle their fingers and expect to pay for nothing as the innkeeper (obviously a 1/8 CR NPC) fails their saving throw, only to be baffled by protective magic, courtesy of the local mages guild to ensure fair business and trade in a magical society.

The warlock with a dark pact is being questioned by the local lord and his clerical advisor about the affair in the cursed home, and unfortunately that 19 Charisma just isn’t going to allow them to bluff or lie their way out when they are dragged into a zone of truth. And the cleric will know if they lie, and lying to a lord was a good way to get a tongue cut out.

The Medieval World is Strange

The reason this matters so much to me is because the medieval world is strange. The more I look into and learn about the ancient world the more I recognize that humanity, and our societies, have truly changed over time. The way these people lived was so very different from the way we lived, and I feel like these games would be so much more interesting and engaging if we were able to pull in at least a little bit of the historical context and mixed it up with all the magical, pseudo-alchemical, mutating and other weird fantasy stuff that people come up with.

By the way, as soon as I have better documentation or guidance on bringing these laws, customs, or systems of society into your games, I will let you know, so long as you keep reading.

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“It’s me, and I’ve been here the whole time.” Dropout, check them out. Anyways.

Around the time I stopped regularly releasing my articles last year I made the dramatic decision to return to college. I figured that during the first semester I would stop writing so that I could focus on my classes and hopefully get back into some sort of healthy routine with learning; no distractions.

I can now say this somewhat worked, I made A’s and B’s and have moved into my second semester, and I have a lot less anxiety around the whole thing, so here I am again.

The whole reason I am back in college, despite seeing the absolutely ruinous state of modern American higher education, is in the desperate hope that I can escape waiting tables in the toxic restaurant industry, since making content for TRPGs is a difficult career path.

So what am I working on now, or, what will I be working on going forward?

Heartbreaker

Heartbreaker is my own version of Dungeons & Dragons. Yes, I am developing it alongside my own version of a whole new roleplaying game system. Is that crazy? Well, at least it gives me enough things to talk about that I started a substack.

The original name for the project was Complex 5e, and the conception was bringing more “realism” or simulation to the game. From my perspective. Armor has always been counter-intuitive to me in these games and it is something I deeply want to address. The same goes for weapons and what is dependent upon the wielders strength or alacrity. I also have a whole fantasy alchemy thing that I spent years developing that I want to bring into a new edition and potentially shape a whole setting around, but more on that later.

With Heartbreaker I also want a magic system that is more chaotic and dangerous, less of science and more of art or intuition. My alchemy system is heavily scientific, in that ingredients do things, these things are reliable, and thus the whole system integrates into society and can be made more efficient to stave off the dangers of a fantasy world. Two scientific systems only offer the choice of “which is more efficient/powerful?” And in my opinion that is not an interesting choice at all.

I also want to shift how players interact with the system from character “creation” to character “discovery,” which, again, I will discuss more later.

Ultimately, Heartbreaker is just my own system for playing the kind of game I want to play with rules I am familiar with enough to modify, but I want to modify them, add artwork, and then make them available to others as my statement about the game and the hobby and the whole space. You know, like artists do.

Alchemy

More specifically: medieval fantasy alchemy.

My alchemy system was designed to have specific properties that would become specific and defined effects depending on a large number of specific variables and times and charts and graphs and complex math equations. Approachable? No. But for some reason it is what I wanted. And it took me years to figure out no one would want to use it, not even me.

My latest version is not yet complete, but the bones are there. I dialed back the properties so that they are more vague and can be defined by the players and arbiters at the table. The complex math is gone, and the crafting is going to be a bit more free-form and vague, again, to be defined at the table by those playing the game, not me. I just want to give a chassis that others can easily adapt and build upon.

With the advent of my alchemy system in this new era of my life, I have been thinking about the world I want to build to go with this system, and what it would look like with alchemy (medieval fantasy alchemy). Once I started asking that question, a whole new element of the project began to form in my head, and generally of its own volition. Which leads to my next point.

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Mutant Fantasy

I have done some research, and as far as I can find, this is a new term. And I like it, so I am taking it. If you want to use it go ahead, I am just going to be fleshing out my own version of it for a while.

Mutant fantasy comes from my conception of a fantasy world, roughly medieval to early renaissance, that would have not only magic but also alchemy, or herbalism. Powers that transform capability and multiply force would utterly define a world, much like iron used to make swords and lead for bullets has done up until the atom-splitting nuclear weapons.

Mutant fantasy is intriguing to me because it is difficult. I have never before considered a world in this light, from this perspective, and coming up with ideas for it has been difficult, and as we all know, anything worth doing is going to be difficult. Mutant fantasy is a world that takes from both medieval fantasy and far future post apocalypse, such as what can be found in Worlds Without Number (a favorite book I have yet to run a game in, yet).

Mutant fantasy takes from the post-apocalypse genre quite a bit actually, at least I think it will, given the ideas of mutants and strange powers coming from foreign substances that become prevalent in a world unprepared for their influence.

Mutant Fantasy World

The way I want to approach this project is a method I have only used once, and I deeply enjoyed and loved every bit of.

When I lived in Vegas I found a group of players online and wanted to run a 5e game in a world that we built together, and we ended up using the Microscope system (unfortunately their patience only allowed for one day of play). From that game I made a world, Malusoir.

The first step was of course to understand the premise, which turned out to be the magical planes of a typical DnD world collide into the material, which is a massively catastrophic event that reshapes, well, everything. From this we started developing a timeline and the events, which I took later and expanded upon.

1st Age

The first step was laying out the initial world. I had chosen a map outline that I liked so then I laid in the ancient empires, which I roughly based on the races in the book as well as some history perusals.

2nd Age

To be honest I cannot remember where I put the rest of my notes and files, but I based this progression of existing societies on something. Either way, I tracked them and their changes over time, as well as the evolution of their languages.

3rd Age

The third age is where things started to get a lot more defined, and interesting, because it is during this age that the planes collapse into the material and change the entire world. At this point several languages have evolved and there are dialects and off-shoots that I am tracking.

The Collapse

I randomly determined which planes were going to crash into which regions of the map, as well as their order, using die drop on the paper map. This really shaped how things were going to turn out. These changes are illustrated by the following:

Each Phase in Time

While I was doing all of this, I started tracking the specific in world dates of these events in order to create special days on the calendar. I have always enjoyed tracking in game time for celebrations and such and this was definitely going to go on a calendar.

The Refugees

Probably the most interesting part of this whole process was taking all of my prior work and then using it to figure out how all those events would reshape the existing peoples and societies, which I whittled down to tracking the refugees from one place to the next.

The Fourth Age

Once the refugees were tracked and I had a decent idea of where everyone was after all of the planes, except one, had collapsed into the prime, I started fleshing out this existing hellscape.

The reason I left one plane was the inciting incident for the players; I was going to make their first session them surviving the collapse of the last plane into the world. The game was not my greatest, but I had never run anything like it before.

Language Tracking

As I mentioned earlier, I tracked the development of the languages of the people as they survived these cataclysmic events. This was also a lot of fun, right up there with tracking the movements of the refugees as the planes fell.

And these are the languages as they eventually were in the game.

The whole process of making this world was so much fun, and allowed me to really understand the place when the game began. My biggest regret is that the game did not go on for all that long, and a lot of that work only really ever served the purpose of showing me what I was capable of. And now that I know that, I plan on using all of these ideas, and a few more, to determine what my new Mutant Fantasy world is going to be.

The whole planar collapse idea is one that has been floating in and out of all my worlds for years, I just like the post-apocalypse idea of DnD and pushing that to a post-DnD typical setting just makes me even more excited.

Other Notes

I have, somehow, copies of my history document and the player handout I made all those years ago. In case you are interested, you can check them out (for free).

Oh, and since I am a map freak, here are some of the prettier, more final, images.

3rd Age

4th Age

The place we began our play, after the disastrous first session, was the Vorhen Prescience in the northeast section of the world. If you want to hear more about that, comment, message me, maybe a little interaction.

Until we meet again?!

Friar Tuck, Rhead Louis, Bold Robin Hood and his outlaw band, oldbookillustrations.com

This is, of course, a question for your character, not so much you, as the player. The background of a character has long been something I have taken great joy in fleshing out. When 5e came out with its list, their descriptions, and their tables of traits, flaws, ideals, and bonds, I was hooked.

Over time I have often looked to other games and systems for ideas on how to expand this system. I have heard of Traveler, and the legendary character history “mini-game” in which your character can die before they ever get off the ground, and I loved it. Having never had the opportunity to play Traveler, yet, I sought out a digital copy and tried to decipher how it worked and if it could be ported into something like 5e, or at least medieval fantasy games.

Why expand backgrounds?

This is one of those questions I have learned to ask after all of my years of tinkering. The current system works, and unfortunately, a lot of that system isn’t even applied. Most of the other players I see don’t even touch the character traits section of their background, instead looking to the proficiencies granted and the unique feature, looking to make their “build” better rather than fleshing out a character.

So if what’s there isn’t being used, why expand it? This question leads us to the next important question: what is this game about? When it comes to my Heartbreaker, the game is about more than “builds.” Heartbreaker is about longform play with defined characters. The characters are defined because the challenges they will face are more than monsters and hazards, they are the very people that make up the society around them.

Monsters and the wilderness test the characters in ways that the system already accounts for. In order to test a character against a powerful ruler or nefarious guild, the character must know what they value and which lines they are unwilling to cross. If the monarch is able to usurp the laws, because they are the laws, will the character also bypass the very rules they are seeking to uphold?

Better yet, what ties does the character have to that society that can be jeopardized? When the dragon is about to reign fire from the sky, the character is only at risk of death. When the guild is seeking to undermine the character and keep them quiet, does the character have family that can be taken hostage, a house that can be torched, or status that would falter due to a misstep in the past?

Character Definition as Resources

I like to roll on each of those trait tables because is gives me fodder for how to play and present my character. In my most recent game, as a player, there was a GM swap, so we started a new campaign. When I made my character I grabbed Xanathar’s Guide to Everything, turned to p. 61, and ran my character through This Is Your Life, allowing me to flesh them out even more. Why? Because finding out who my character was before they became an adventurer has significant impacts on who they are as an adventurer.

Whenever I am running the game I try to take the character’s backstories into account. The latest game I am running is Daggerheart, which explicitly tells the arbiter to do that, to wrap the character histories into the unfolding narrative. My first endeavor to do that did not go well, but these players are accustomed to 5e, murder-hobo, low- to no-politics style games, so I just tried to get through the blunder as quickly as possible.

Characters should provide fodder to their arbiter that allows the arbiter to include their history into the campaign. I say should very specifically; the game we are playing is about the people at the table, it is about their characters, and so by tying their history into the story it pulls the character, and the player, deeper into the narrative and makes for a much better experience. A fleshed out history gives the arbiter the resources they need in order to best apply this, and characters without any resources will never really be a part of the story.

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Medieval As Fantasy

The whole reason I am writing about this is because my latest project, a bit of a doozy, is all about remaking the backgrounds into something, more. The Heartbreaker project has been focused on bringing more of the “medieval” into the “medieval fantasy.” Layered armour because armour was worn in layers. Weapon forms because knowing how to use a sword does not translate to using a polearme. Commerce because the mercantile system was based on silver rather than gold.

The more digging I do into the medieval world the more I realize that “medieval” is as much fantasy, to us, as anything with elves and dragons and wish spells. The societies, cultures, rules and laws, all of these things are alien to most people, including me. Time after time a player around the table will refer to guards as police. Nobles and merchant lords are seen as haughty and self-aggrandizing, rather than as people of influence and power. Lying is seen as something to exercise the skills they chose, rather than a true risk to their reputation and freedom.

Medieval Backgrounds

During some research for generating settlements years ago, I came across a treasure trove of information: a census from Paris in the Middle Ages. I originally thought it was from 1492, but due to my bad habits of keeping my original documents, I cannot remember, nor find them, and everything I have found online points to a 1292 census where a lot of people get this information. Either way, it was amazing.

Originally I was using this information to try and understand how many of the different artisans one could find in a settlement of a given size. Easy, just take the numbers and scale them appropriately for your hamlet, town, or metropolis. But recently, as I have been considering putting serious effort into my Heartbreaker, I came to see this source in the light of my new goals. Over the years my investigation of this hobby has led to a number of different ideas and sources mingling in the subconscious, and I thought that the background system, with this data, could be jumbled up with the idea of a Traveler background, and lately, I had an idea that it could be a “mini-game.”

The Background Mini-Game

Now, this idea is not fully fleshed out, nor is the guaranteed end product, especially since I only thought of it just last night while I was at work.

A lot of the reading I have been doing on substack in the PPRPG community has been about solo games. People have been picking up different games, oracles, and resources to run small campaigns with either one character or a whole troupe. One of the main points I have been hearing is that this is a great way to learn a new system. Just think of it, a game comes out that is similar to many games you know but has a character creation process that is a game unto itself, allowing you to play at your own speed, flesh out a character’s history, and learn the rules by using them, by interacting with them, as you create the character you will eventually take to a group session.

If there is a format for documentation, which does not have to be strenuous, you could summarize your experience into a one- or two-page document that you hand to the arbiter, and have a character with an interesting beginning. What about when my character dies? This is a valid question because I also want Heartbreaker to have a level of lethality that is higher than 5e but lower than, say, Shadowdark, or anything OSR.

Maybe I am the only one, but I think it would still be fun to start playing the little mini-game right there at the table. If there is another hour or two of the session left you could start making your new character there, and although the rest of the players are still in the main game, the social aspect of this hobby will lead to them being an audience for your new story. When you roll that rare or weird thing, the surprise or confusion washing across your face, the other players are going to wonder what happened, and then you can either tell them or not, sharing or building suspense as you choose. It will still be a social experience, and one that I want to discuss more.

Themed Campaigns

This will start as a bit of a tangent, but I assure you we will make it back to the main point.

Some of my favorite games I have even been a participant of were themed campaigns. One of the many GMs around my old table would come to our Saturday all-day session, specifically one where there was a lag in the story or a natural ending point of the current campaign, and they would excitedly tell us all about the great idea they have. If everyone liked it we would build the appropriate characters and be off.

The difference here, is that usually the character options were restricted, sometimes heavily. To many modern gamers this would seem heresy, I cannot even get my players to make characters of different classes, let alone restrict any of their options.

The Overlord

There was never any name for this campaign, so I will name it myself. My friend has this idea that our party would be an elite team of assassins for the evil overlord of the realm. The Overlord and his vizier would travel across the land looking for children with “the spark,” the innate trait that would eventually lead them to the greatness of adventurers. These children were then taken, forced into brutal training camps, and made into the Overlords elite assassins.

The Overlord has a group, essentially a party, of each of his trusted advisors that were the best in their fields who would train each class in their ways before a group would be formed. Each party had a leader, which was my character for this campaign, and we were given tasks. The Overlord’s wizard, we later learned, had stolen a piece of each of our souls, allowing them to resurrect us at the Overlord’s palace should we ever fall in battle. This allowed them to keep us controlled, and ensured that his valuable assets were never truly lost. If we failed an assignment, we usually died, and then we woke up back home. If we succeeded, we could either travel back or intentionally die to save us the trip.

We did not choose where we lived, who we worked for, what compensation, if any, and we did not choose who we were, ultimately. All of that lack of choice led to one of the greatest games ever. I will skip a lot of the details and go straight to the end, because the culmination of this campaign was (chef’s kiss).

Eventually we decided that we were on the wrong side of things and that we needed to get away from the Overlord, find some rebels, and overthrow the evil empire. As we stormed the flying castle, several party members ran off to keep the Overlord and his guardians busy while a few of us went into the hidden basement to uncover the secret to his power. One party member died. The rogue eventually found the hidden trapdoor that led to this secret, and missed the trap but picked the lock, then promptly turned to stone. Two members down.

As I opened the trapdoor, the fight with the Overlord and his guardians got worse, two more party members died. We were almost there, all the death would be worth it if we could undo his secret power. The trapdoor led to a set of stairs, which I quickly followed down, and came to a landing. Another member died, now I alone was left.

The stairs ended in a meadow, by a creak. Below the Overlord’s keep was a pocket of time, one bought from the great Sand Dragon of Time, the moment the Overlord gained the power of a god. When the Overlord was a boy, he lived in a realm that was constantly at war with a neighboring realm. For generations his family had experienced the ravages of warfare, and he wanted to end it.

One day, the boy wandered to a nearby creak, wherein he found a stone. This stone was the god of the natural world, a neutral god that simply lived in the creak and ensured that the world flowed as it should. The boy, upon finding this power, discovered that he could use this power to end the wars, so he took the stone. The moment he came upon this stone is the moment that was frozen at the end of those stairs.

My character was initially a fighter, a tactician trained to utilize every element within his team to their best of their ability to complete a mission. During one of early assignments, the one that started my character down the path of resistance, we were sent to the temple of St. Cuthbert, to assassinate the head priest of the clergy on the prime. There were a set of magical protections that slowly picked off one party member, keeping them from getting into the inner temple, and I was the only one to make it all the way.

The method for this assassination was not a fight, but a delivery. In my hand I held a cloth wrapped around a dagger, and at no time was I ever to touch this dagger with my flesh. My mission was to approach the priest, hand him the dagger, and walk away. As I approached the priest, he looked into my eyes and said, “It’s okay, I forgive you.” Then, he took the dagger. As his hand touched the handle, a dark magic enveloped him like a cloud. His light, the light of his faith, flashed brilliantly as pain and struggle flooded his body and face. Eventually, the battle was won, and the dagger was plunged into his chest, draining the life from his body.

At that moment, a seed was planted in my character. Over time, as we made our plan to escape, we eventually did, and we began to work against the Overlord, my character transitioned from a fighter to a paladin of St. Cuthbert (multi-classing).

So, my character, the last of my party of rebel elite assassins, fighter turned paladin, has come across the moment in time when the Overlord began. I am an adult, veteran warrior, and before me stands this boy, about to be granted a wish by the elemental stone and change the world. My GM turns to me and asks that fateful question, “what do you do?” No one, not a single player at that table, expected to find this, this frozen moment of time, and everyone was leaning over the table with anticipation. So I answered like any experienced player would, “I’m going to step outside and think about this for a minute.”

The chatter and tension was palpable, the whole table was in an uproar at the epic moment we had just come to. This, this is what this hobby is all about. And I thought about it, deeply, and thoroughly, before returning to my seat at the end of the table, across from one of the people I considered family. My friend repeated, “what do you do?” My response was planned, “I approach the boy, and tell him that I can help him to end the strife in his world, that I can teach him to be a ruler worth following.”

The table erupts. The shock and surprise on my GM’s face was overwhelming. He hadn’t really considered what I would do, this was not a planned moment, like any good campaign, he had only set up the situation, but he then told me he didn’t think that that was an option. He figured I would either kill the child, to save the world, or that I would take the power myself to put it in the hands of someone better (LG paladin of St. Cuthbert).

Back to the Ground (background...)

All of that amazing storytelling, all of those invaluable memories, they came from the defining of a character being of utmost priority. What was the background, in rules terms? A soldier? An urchin? Where is the page that defines “child assassin reared by an evil overlord?” There isn’t, which makes me believe that the history of our characters can be more than just a little feature and some tables for guiding roleplay. There is nothing wrong with the existing set, and for a generic “medieval fantasy” rules set, they work great. They have served me for years, well over a decade, but I think they can be more.

By the time my character was in his teens, he was the equivalent of a 3^rd level character. My teenager could take on most basic soldiers and city guards and then end their noble or sergeant or important figure before anyone knew what was happening. It doesn’t matter that he may have been overpowered compared to your average starting PC, what matters is that it formed to the fiction and the story being told, and that the mechanics allowed me, as the player, to viscerally feel and experience it.

Level as Measure

Given the hundreds of entries on the census, I have spent quite a bit of time trying to organize them in a way that is useful. One of the primary concerns about larger games with lots and lots of options is “analysis paralysis,” a very real design problem across multiple industries. Anyone that played in 3e and 3.5e knows exactly what I am talking about.

During this process, I at one point started layering the professions, finding those that would be essentially the apprentice-level, the journeyman-level, and then the master-level. I would place these into a small table and give them a level equivalent, 1 for the apprentice and 3 for the master. I didn’t think anything of this at first, I was just trying to figure out how to organize these so that people, including myself, wouldn’t get lost in all the myriad options.

Later, when I came back to it, I saw it as potentially being an actual level, as in character level. This is an interesting idea for several reasons.

What Determines Character Abilities

For the longest time there have been two primary ways to define characters, which have a large influence over the rules set in which they are contained: class and skill. A class ruleset contains a selection of groups of abilities, features, skills, and other defining elements, often fictional, called Classes. These classes are often some sort of warrior, spellcaster, sneak-thief, healer, etc. A skill ruleset contains an extensive list of skills and other abilities that each player can select for their character, allowing a massive range of different characters to be built given that there are no set types or predetermined groupings.

As games have evolved over time, each has influenced the other. In class systems you have subclasses, prestige classes, or simply rules for multiclassing, where you can mix and match the various class sets to your hearts content. Skill systems have predefined sets of skills and abilities that can be selected to allow for newer players to more easily onboard to the system, or for a player who wants a specific experience to just choose a set and move on.

But I think there can be a bit more, and I also think it can be based on the fiction. The idea that a hermit simply wanders around the wilderness for a number of years, doing whatever it is they are doing, and then one day they become a wizard and have spells available to them, is a little too vague. Yes, the player can fill in all these details with an interesting 14-page short story about their history, but I would appreciate a little more guidance. After all, the rules and fiction in the books is provided specifically to guide players and the arbiter in how the game is meant to be played; not as a matter of “this is how you do it CORRECTLY,” more as a point of “this is how we INTENDED the game to be played, this is the experience we wanted you to have.”

So what do we (or I, really) do? We separate certain “class” abilities and put them into the backgrounds. Spellcasting will now be learned in your character’s history, and what you do with it will define what class you have. The weapon forms, skills, and other features will also be gained in your history, and the class you pick is more a representation of how you plan to use those abilities you have gained.

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Why Put the Features into the Backgrounds?

I am so glad you asked. Learning how to cast spells is a long process, much like that of school. Yes, your character may have a natural inclination towards casting spells, but the process is complex and dangerous, and most often must be learned as a matter of education. This would happen in the history of the character, not in the present.

Another way to think of this is that a class is how you use the skills and abilities you have, it is your plan for who you will be and what you will be good at doing in the future. A class is a map, akin to a profession, but in these types of games we separate the concepts of professions and classes.

One of the primary ideas I have had for a while now is the battlemage. A battlemage is a fighter; they are a character that focuses on fighting. As opposed to a “normal” fighter, they use the tool of magic, rather than sword and shield, or cloak and bow. When I began to think about classes in this way I could see a great many changes that would allow for more customization, as well as a potentially more accessible and better understood system of magic, even from a mechanical standpoint.

As we all know, because you read all of my articles, and I thank you for it, I think magic can be reformatted, and should be, for the hobby and these games to move forward. If you need a reminder, because it’s been a while since you read that article, here are my thoughts on Deconstructing Magic.

A longstanding issue of D&D in particular is that power gap between high level characters who focus on magic, and those who don’t. Wizards can bend space and time with little consequence while a fighter can hit a lot, and hurt a lot, but would never be able to get near a wizard of “equivalent” level, because they are so vastly different in actual power, as opposed to character power.

Separating magic from the class and treating it like a tool, a dangerous and unstable tool, allows for the reorienting of this imbalance. A fighter is someone who uses their skills and expertise to win violent conflicts. A fighter can use a sword, a polearme, a bow, a spring-trap, or a spell. A battlemage is no different from a fighter, they just use a different weapon.

In this context, a wizard is someone that deserves those low hit dice. A fighter spends their days training to give and take hits. Wizards spend their nights poring over ancient texts, practicing obscure rituals, and experimenting with new components and casting routines. Yes a wizard can ummake reality, but a battlemage can do so with intent; they have trained to lay waste to an entire field of enemies, using spells rather than ballista.

The Farmer & the Noble

The easiest example to use for this class reshaping is the fighter, so we will stick with it. In 5e, a character that was once a farmer who becomes a fighter is no different than someone that was a noble. One is a little poorer and dirtier, but otherwise they are essentially the same kind of fighter. They can both choose to use a sword and shield, ride a horse, and speak to the best tactics their party can use to take on an enemy. In fiction, let alone medieval history, these characters would be wildly different!

Once again, I am using medieval history as a springboard, something more tied to reality as we know it that can be used as a foundation for building complex and believable characters.

Farmers, those who were conscripted and trained to fight in their lords armies, were given that barest of essentials and trained with the most potent weapon of the time; polearmes. Long sticks with pointy ends, sometimes capped in metal and sharpened, and a uniform, occasionally being layered cloth, like gambeson, which provided some protection but more often than not was an identifier so people could tell who needed protecting and who needed the pointy end.

Nobles were trained with the weapons of nobility; swords, shields, armour, and very often mounted combat. Not all nobles were knights, but most knights were nobles. They also had access to more resources, which allowed them to have better armour, and they were given training in leadership, if not tactics specifically.

The farmer was a worker, a laborer, someone who took the land and bent it to their will. Farmers had to work the land, hunt, forage, and engage in mercantile, selling their wares and buying what they needed to perform their duties. As the lowest person on the totem pole, unless there were slaves, they constantly did not get their way, and their lives were expendable to those above them. These experiences build a resilience both physically and mentally, allowing them to withstand the harsh rigors of their difficult lives.

The noble was a leader, trained to manage groups of people that are beholden to their will. They had to learn various studies, most of them hunted, but they required a woodsman or huntsman to lead them through the lands. They did not skin and prepare their prey, they simply took the pride of having felled it. Their life was more luxurious, which gives them an air that people bend to; nobles walk into a place of lessers and are looked to and listened to, not only because this was their societal place, but because they believed it and exuded the atmosphere of leadership.

Now lets look at a new idea, the spellcasting fighter. Most likely this character would begin as an apprentice to some mage or wizard, having been pointed at as a bright lad in their youth or sold to the mage when they needed an assistant. They would spend their life observing and studying, learning to read multiple languages, scripts, and glyphs, poring through tomes at the behest of their master. There would be long nights of ritual casting, trips to gather components and ingredients, with strict guidance for the quality and nature of the products. The standards would be exacting, casting spells is deadly work.

As the apprentice becomes a fighter, they are bending their spellcasting to the purpose of war. Wizards can be many things; scholars, influencers, wardens, but the fighter wants to engage in battle. Like many soldiers of a medieval-inspired setting they could be aiming for high-paying mercenary work, or there could be a leader or cause they believe in. This kind of fighter would never pick up a sword, the tools of a brutish and simple battleground fodder, no they would use the highest, most dangerous, and most elite tool of the arcane.

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Wrapping It All Up

The ideas I have covered today are many: backgrounds that are more “medieval,” separating class features from their classes and into the backgrounds, characters that are more defined by fiction than simple groups, and the possibility of a mini-game to introduce a player, and their character, into the game as a group activity.

Will any of this work? Who knows. Will I be able to produce this so we can find out in the near future, especially now that I am starting undergraduate classes, full time, alongside a job to keep a roof over my head and food in my belly? Doubtful, but only in the sense of timeliness.

What I can say is that the work on the iteration of backgrounds continues, and I am currently still organizing them, which is allowing me to get a full grasp of the scope. I have some ideas on how I want to start categorizing them, that way they can be more accessible to players (and myself), which is also leading to some thoughts on how the mini-game would work. In the medieval world children did not go to school, they worked. If their family were peasants, they worked the land and assisted in all sorts of tasks around a farm. If their parents were artisans, they learned the family trade so they could continue it once their parents retired (either being too old to continue working or they passed). Some children who were seen as bright could be sent to monasteries and become monks. Noble children were given education in many forms, both scholastic and martial in nature. But, all of them did something, and that something defined who they would become.

Right now I am thinking character creation begins with learning who the family is: artisan, peasant, nobility, merchant, etc. From there the different professions will be defined in larger and larger groups, allowing the player to discover their character’s history through expanding tables and options, though curtailed so as to avoid analysis paralysis. I prefer rolling to determine who your character is, I think the experience makes for a much more interesting character for both the player and everyone else at the table. Every time someone brings an “optimized” build to the table I yawn as they play out the same tropes and do nothing original or interesting, even in combat, where they are supposed to shine but just end up being as boring as if they were a video game NPC.

Thanks for reading.

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And if you want to help me in my quest for knowledge, scratch my itch (get it?!).

That’s a good question. My answer ultimately became: the equipment. Of course, I have all sorts of ideas on what I would like to see different when it comes to classes, backgrounds, races (species, ancestries, whatever), and feats and magic, and on and on, but the equipment interacts with all of these things in the same way.

Equipment is a static element. Yes, once you put the words down on paper it is all static, I get that, but equipment is static in that all of it is binary. If you have it, it does the thing, if you do not, you can’t. Almost everything else is not static; racial features can only be used when illuminated by candle light, class features can’t be used again until you stand on your head for 10 mississippis, and feats apply while you are standing exactly 8 feet from an old ice dragon while your cleric is engaged in preaching to the kobolds, otherwise you can’t do it.

What I have found is that equipment undergirds so many of the elements that build the characters. Every character has an attack bonus and can use weapons, or they have some proficiency in armour, everyone needs a backpack and a coin purse, and water skins just feel like something that is required even though no one ever takes a drink.

Combat is the primary mode of play for 5e, and the character best suited for that is the fighter, who interacts the most with equipment, or at least they should. One of the issues I am trying to address with HeartBreaker is the lack of equipment progression, something that is fundamental to video games and is expected by modern audiences. I have been puzzling this out for a while, but I think Daggerheart really shows what gamers of today are expecting; a variety of different weapons and armour that can be gained, and should be, to maintain a character’s power as they advance.

So, I began with equipment. I like the idea of a medieval-influenced economy being silver-based rather than gold, so I changed that. I also like the idea of the different coins being more prominent in the pricing, so I made sure to use the variety when noting prices. The equipment ladder is present for armour in my first supplement, and there is a “janky” 5e ladder for weapons in my second supplement, because it is meant to be stapled onto the existing 5e chassis for anyone to use. My full HeartBreaker edition will alter the weapons even more, accounting for crafting rules based in my alchemy system which is also coming to HeartBreaker.

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Nostalgia

Recently I have been looking back at 3e-3.5e; I found the SRD equivalent for those editions and have just been perusing them for nostalgic things I could bring back with my designs. The biggest dusty memory hit was looking over the feats lists, because they were massive, and I spent much time poring over them and wandering what my current or next character would make from them. What kind of character could I make with this combination, or that one, or where would that particular feat fit to really shine in this other build. It never felt like “build-crafting” to me, because there is always an element of motivation and history for my characters, where they fit into the world.

Another element that was nostalgic was the equipment, the time before kits. Before 5e, there were no kits, you had to look through all of the stuff and go shopping, which I always loved. With the rogue being my primary class, I was always going through my standard checklist of equipment I will need, and then I would consider the rest of my character and wonder what else they might think they need, or would be fitting for them to carry. Now you just grab a kit and if the GM asks if you have a piece of equipment, people just ask “why wouldn’t I?” (Another one of those insulting, “I don’t take any time to prep because I’m not the GM” kind of responses.)

If you have to pick out your equipment, you have to prepare. You have to engage in playing out scenarios you might get into that would be benefited by choosing this particular item. There is a lot of discussion on the 10-foot pole, and how it used to be standard with the focus on dungeon crawling that the early games are famous for. Even though the focus of the game has changed, that conversation exemplifies why players should take more time in preparing their characters and understanding the equipment they have, because if they need something they didn’t buy, then yes, whatever task they are attempting should be more difficult or dangerous, or both.

HeartBreaker Going Forward

I am now done with the equipment, for the most part. I have my foundation, I have some of the smaller rules changes finished, and I even have a modified Complete Character Sheet to go along with them. Next I will be focusing on a few things: Alchemy, Classes, Races, Backgrounds, and somewhere in there Magic.

Alchemy

Alchemy has been in dire need of a revision for a few years, given my dedication to making a system so complicated even I don’t want to touch it. As of now, I have redesigned the gathering rules and given them a touch-up, with a finished section including art and full layout. If you are familiar with my current Alchemy system, the Properties will be disappearing, folded into the recipes and the properties will fall back to the influences from literature and lore. If you want to make a healing potion, you can use a variety of different ingredients so long as the influences are healing related, which can be a discussion with your GM.

The next big section will be doing layout and the revision of the ingredient descriptions, including art, which is the biggest part. What kind of inspired my whole alchemy project was finding these illustrations that I have raved about before, and now I will finally be bringing them into the product. I am excited and anxious, given the scale of this decade-long ordeal.

Races

I know that there has been some controversy around this term, I am still unsure as to what it is, but I have my own ideas for how to change them around. For one, darkvision will be paired with sunlight sensitivity, always. If you have the advantage of never needing a light source, then you should have an appropriate drawback. There are a few races I created for my homebrew that I want to put fully into action, such as the giants, satyrs, and some human subraces, and I want to simplify their features as well. I also miss having negative ability modifiers, showcasing the drawbacks of certain creatures as well as their benefits.

Backgrounds

Oh boy do I have ideas for these. For the longest time I have viewed backgrounds as where a character receives their primary capabilities. A farmer turned fighter would use different weapons than a noble turned fighter, given that farmers know how to use Tools and nobles will likely be trained in Swords. I want to spread this out among a large variety of medieval-inspired backgrounds that act as the first piece of a character class, essentially. Having a background will grant the initial proficiencies a character class will build upon.

For example, one of my custom backgrounds is the Majei. A majei is essentially the origin of a sorcerer, someone that is naturally gifted with magic and has had a life centering around this ability, whether a gift or curse. This background would grant the spellcasting feature to a character that allows them to go into a class that will define how they use it. Essentially, I want to break the classes into two pieces, giving a large responsibility to the background.

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Classes

To build off the backgrounds, classes will be taking the role of how a character uses the capabilities they have. These initial capabilities will come from their background, mostly, and the class is how they are applied. One of the longest running ideas I have had is that fighters, or battle-focused characters, in a magical world, would encompass the “weapon” of magic, if that is their focus. A fighter is someone specializing in fighting, whether their weapon is a sword, pike, fists and knees, or spells.

One of the redesigns I want is to roll all the fighting focus into the fighting classes. If you want to be a battlemage, then you would be a fighter. To break this from the wizard, the spellcasting feature would be located in the background, which defines the origin of that capability and how it has defined the character up to the point where they decided to become a warrior of some kind.

A recent inspiration for how the classes should be redesigned came from news about Nimble, another 5e-based game that is soon to release. From the interview I listened to, all of the cool and defining class abilities were moved into the early levels, allowing players to access them much faster. This results in players not having to wait for the cool stuff, and as the character gains levels those abilities simply grow in power.

What a brilliant idea! Give the players what they want rather than making them wait! Now, they won’t get everything at first level, which still makes sense for learning the character, growing accustomed to their capabilities, and leaving some things to be looked forward to, but ultimately it fixes the issue of campaign burnout that has been widely reported. If you never make it past 10th level, then any of the character abilities beyond that just don’t exist, and you never get to play with them, which sucks.

Magic

I have discussed magic at length already. I know where I want to go, it’s just such a massive undertaking for a solo developer. I know how massive it is because that is also the scope of my Alchemy project. Given how I want to integrate alchemy as a fundamental power avenue, akin to social, exploration, battle, and magic, I am considering moving a lot of the spell functions over to alchemy and making magic a more freeform and less scientific endeavor. If you want to know more of my thoughts on magic, go check out my Deconstructing Magic article.

Thanks for reading.

My last Heartbreaker article ended with a sneak peak, a reference to how skills are calculated and used. In my latest supplement, Weapon Forms, I have created a whole new set of skills called, wait for it, Forms. Forms, or Weapon Forms, cover the whole gamut of available weapons that characters can use, calculating their bonus as you would a skill, rather than a more difficult system including two separate, and large, groups of weapons with little exceptions here and there.

Starting Point

In the 3^rd and 3.5 editions of D&D classes had a Base Attack Bonus, what would later become Proficiency Bonus is 5e. They both function nearly the same, with the BAB covering only attacks while the PB also covers skills. In 3^rd and 3.5 skills were a totally separate system where you could dump piles of points into the skills you wanted, there were distinctions between trained and untrained, and there were a load of other miscellaneous bonuses you also had to account for.

In this latest edition, expanding the PB to include skills and other summations, such as spellcasting attack bonuses and spell DCs was smart, efficient, and made much of the game simpler and easier to grasp. If you were proficient, with anything, simply add that bonus and the relevant ability modifier. When it comes to design, this is a streamlined beauty that would of course come from experts in their field.

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Weapon Groupings

My first issue was with the groupings. No it is not a big deal, and no I am not going to berate anyone for them, I simply disagree and have wanted to alter them. Training with any sword would naturally lend more skill to using any other type of sword, but it does not grant more skill with a club or a shortbow. Handheld weapons are more similar to one another than one is to a ranged weapon, obviously, but having all these lower damage weapons together made little sense, save for efficiency.

If the designers had left it there it would not be so bad, but they didn’t. By giving many classes their own little selection of specific weapons, rather than either simple or martial, they were creating smaller groupings already. So why not just group them logically since you went that far; swords, axes, bows, etc.?

Proficiency

This little problem didn’t really creep into the fore until I was making my Complete Character Sheet (available for only $2!). As I was sorting all of the different boxes and sections for numbers and markings to go, I made spaces for Simple and Martial weapon bonuses beneath both the Strength and Dexterity columns, given all the mundane weapons use one of those abilities. Each column had a space for all the pertinent offensive ability information, so those boxes, along with melee and ranged weapon proficiencies, went well together. It seemed fine.

For the last year or so I have been playtesting my sheet, as well as handing it to anyone around me that needs or wants a sheet (these are the only ones I carry so in the case no one else has a regular sheet I can hand them one of mine). Every time I filled out that section I seemed to be mixing which bonus I was using across the sections. It is not a big deal, but it is an inefficiency that regularly caught on my mind. I eventually just went back to including the attack modifiers in the weapon description section, as I kept confusing myself, which is really bad given that I designed the sheet.

Class Focus

This is the big issue I was seeing that I wanted to address. A fighter specializes in combat, the section of the book that is used most often with this game, is basically the fighter’s section. The fighter, despite their focus, has about as good of a chance to hit as any other combat-adjacent character, because the weapon groupings are so broad, and because proficiency with all the weapons is so open. On the average, fighter characters will have slightly higher combat stats, strength, dexterity, and constitution, but that is not always the case.

When you are playing a fighter, you should be hitting far more often than anyone else. The statistics for your class do not give you this ability though. Every class has some proficiency with weapons, and given the focus of combat in the game, every character is built for mundane combat first, and then their specialty is placed on top. Fighters are a bit better than everyone else, but the difference is negligible, in my opinion.

Time and time again I have watched as clerics, not battle focused mind you, waltz into the fray and show up the fighter. Unfortunately, rangers were never a threat here given the poor design in this latest edition, and of course barbarians also tend to outshine them as well. Rogues can also outshine the fighter, something I have done several times, despite having less attacks and all around weaker weapons.

Addressing these Issues

The mechanics of proficiency with skills and with weapons and with anything else is all the same, all of it. The only difference is how those systems are described in the rules. And don’t get me started on the “verbosity” of the rules in some of these books…

The bonus you add to rolls using a skill you are proficient with is as follows:

Proficiency Bonus + Ability Modifier.

The bonus you add to rolls using a weapon you are proficient with is as follows:

Proficiency Bonus + Ability Modifier.

The bonus you add to rolls using a saving throw you are proficient with is as follows:

Proficiency Bonus + Ability Modifier.

The bonus you add to rolls using a spell you are casting is as follows:

Proficiency Bonus + Ability Modifier.

The bonus you add to rolls using a tool, instrument, or vehicle you are proficient with is as follows:

Proficiency Bonus + Ability Modifier.

I am starting to see a pattern here. The only problem with this pattern is that while it is the same, it is not described to the player as being the same. Once again I see what they were doing, and I do not fault them for it. 5e, at its core, is about the three different types of rolls; the attack roll, the ability check, and the saving throw. Ability checks deal with skills and applications of abilities that do not fall under any of the skills. Attack rolls deal directly with efficacy in combat, melee and ranged attacks as well as spells and magical abilities. And saving throws, well, they are reactions you get for free to avoid harms.

Sidenote

Recently I was looking into the saving throws, as I was starting to wonder how many times a wizard would use their Intelligence save. I haven’t played a wizard in a while and I realized when I was making one that I cannot remember the last time I saw anyone, or heard of anyone, actually having to make an Intelligence saving throw. I have also been catching up on Critical Role, because I wasn’t able to keep up with it all those years ago when I first found it. I looked through all of the core books and found only 3 effects or spells that called for an Intelligence saving throw! I was mad, because all those wizards were basically running around the various worlds with half as many viable save proficiencies as any other character.

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Defense Forms

When I was creating the layered armour system and the skills for the weapons, I also started taking a closer look at things like shields and other methods or techniques for defending oneself. A cool new rule I saw in the Level Up Adventurers Guide was the ability to sacrifice a shield to negate a critical hit. This option doesn’t negate the hit completely, it just turns a critical into a normal hit, but it breaks your shield in the process. This got me thinking.

Using a shield is more in line with strength than dexterity; shields are heavy and difficult to maneuver, so why not create another type of Form that allows strong characters to use their Strength in defending themselves with a shield? Then I also though about Parrying, which is a dexterity thing, as well as dodging, which is a wisdom thing (you need to see the thing in time to know which way to throw yourself). Thus, the Defense Forms were also created.

Weapon Forms

I regrouped the weapons, put their rules in line with the skill rules, while still distinguishing them as separate, and I allowed characters like fighters to be able to better focus on what they do best. Creating weapon skills, essentially, opens up the already known mechanic of expertise, which a fighter could use at 1^st level in one of their Weapon Forms, allowing them to double their proficiency bonus with their favorite weapons. Yes, this will upset some balance (like CR was ever balanced to begin with), but it will also make that class shine again! A fighter will now hit far more often than any other class, just as they should, and it is only using existing mechanics from the skills section to do it!

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Showing the Player

I think I mentioned this elsewhere, but it is worth mentioning again. If I was just adding a few new skills and ‘medievaling’ the existing weapons and armour, I may have only needed a few pages in my supplements to do that. What I also wanted to do was fix what I think is a critical error in the layout of the 3 core rulebooks: all the cool stuff is in the GM’s guide.

As part of my supplements I went through all the SRD and pulled every magic item for both the armour and weapons to add them into the lists. One of the greatest sins is keeping all the cool magic items out of the eyes of the players. I am of the opinion that all the cool stuff should be front and center for the players, after all, it is with all the cool abilities they will get in the higher levels of their class, so why not their equipment too?

I included this in my Complete Character Sheet as well, putting a little bubble for Adamantine in the armor section so a player could see it, ask “what is adamantine?” and then when they found out they would ensure that their character was looking for it. A GM should know what the players want for their characters, so that they can give it to them! So I included all the cool goodies in my supplements so the players have something to aspire to obtaining.

Another Sneak Peak

Right now I am working on my basic equipment supplement, which includes all sorts of cool magic items, and maybe some new ones too. And I am getting closer and closer to Deconstructing the Magic of 5e in the hopes of providing a more creative system that allows for my Alchemy system to coexist and not feel crowded. Which also means I am working on the newest iteration of my Alchemy system, which will also be making a debut with the Heartbreaker system in its entirety.

As far as I know, the term heartbreaker, in the context of our hobby, has been a reference to games being designed by enthusiasts that are built on the chassis of the big popular thing that they love. I don’t think this is a bad thing, especially since I am one of those enthusiasts who just cannot get away from the brain-worm that constantly whispers in the back of my noodle “just a few tweaks here, and a little adjustment there, and we could have our own version that we like much better!”

Ever since I started playing I have been delving deep into the rules, the lore, and every facet of this hobby that I can get my hands on. At 19 I had stacks and stacks of paper with math and verbiage and fiction sprawled from edge to edge in the desperate attempt to understand how people took simulated reality and mapped it into understandable rules sets. I was hooked, and no matter what I have tried I cannot get away from it.

What is that “it?” It’s a Heartbreaker, and someday I am going to release it into public. Someday. Given that I have been at it for 20 years, you would think there would be something to show. But, as any creative knows, there is a constant back-and-forth with certain projects. As I have seen the rise and fall, and rise again, and recently, a fall again, of this game we all know and love (just admit it, we’re all friends here), I sway. Then I see that major professional designers took the chassis and put their own cars on it, and well, what could I possibly contribute?

I can contribute this.

Historicity

Yeah, I just went to the search bar to define that word, to make sure what I thought it meant it actually meant. And yeah, I was right!

One of those hard lessons we all have to learn as designers is that historicity, or realism, DOES NOT equal fun. I learned that years ago, and it was a gut-punch from a dwarven smith. I had built so many systems and rules and “fun” things that would make the game amazing (not to mention impossible to run) that I all the sudden had to throw out because: none of it was fun. You couldn’t navigate a single bit of it without getting a headache and wondering why you were doing any of it in the first place.

The other lesson I learned, a little later, but based on that first lesson, was that you could use authenticity to inform your design. When you use something that people already know, or are familiar with, the on-boarding is so much easier. There are so many elements of reality that we rely on to inform the unwritten parts of our games. Skill and profession systems are so commonly used because people understand them from our everyday lives. My dad was a carpenter and he learned it by training and practice. That is both a profession and a skill, and it takes time to learn it. Easy.

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Mapping Reality

Attempting to break down reality into easily understood rules is best left to physicists and their complex equations. As an example, I tried to break down, into a set of rules, how fire worked mechanically, so that characters could just start fires with oil or spells and then this other section in the book would take over with how it works. Bad idea.

So as I have been learning more and more about medieval history, society, laws and customs, technology, economics, and everyday life, the aspects of armour have always stuck with me. When I play this game I love I just don a leather suit, which was never a kind of armour on its own, and I am harder to hit. But it’s not so much that I am harder to hit, it’s that the armour keeps me, the person beneath the armour, from being hit by the deadly ends and the fiery magic. It’s almost as if the armour is helping me by deflecting the attack or absorbing some of the minimal harm.

That explanation makes sense, I can see that. Then, when you look into how the rules could be changed to add some authenticity, don’t worry, just a light sprinkling, it feels like the whole system falls apart. For several editions this game has relied on AC being a static score that sets the target number for the attacker. You have actions, spells, and special abilities all built on this understanding of armour. Plus, many of the other big games across the industry use very similar mechanics. Your defenses are static so that there aren’t too many dice being rolled and turns don’t take a long time. I get it.

Rules that are Applicable

I think this is an important point to stop and linger on; blah-blah-blah so that there aren’t too many dice being rolled and turns don’t take a long time. I have heard some discussion about this element before, but I don’t think I have ever heard so much as I have recently. With the advent of other games becoming very popular, and now that Daggerheart is in the mix, I feel like the discussion of complexity of turns and streamlining is out in the zeitgeist more than ever before.

The tenor of this discussion, as I have understood it, has always been a dichotomy. Either the players have too many things that they are doing individually, which makes all of their turns last too long and can make turn-based situations and scenes last way too long, or they have almost nothing to do and everyone feels like their character is more representative of themselves having just left the office to slay a hydra. Either too much or too little.

Time and again we have seen new books come out that offer more options, more abilities, and more power to players, often allowing them to rack up a pile of capabilities that make them feel like superheroes, or demigods, thus slowing the whole process to a sickly crawl. In order to compensate the GM has to bring out more and more guns, making their turns last longer, and everyone loses together because they were fantasizing about all the power they have when they were not in the moment when all those powers took 5 minutes per character to flop out onto the table.

The response is usually the same: nerfing. A new system comes out with the characters nerfed, which makes certain gamers happy and can make the game feel different or old school or gritty again. Then as this edition continues things slowly roll back, characters can be 8 different multiclasses because theory-crafters have content to make, new options are more powerful than old ones, and we are right back where we started.

I feel like this conversation has finally turned an important corner. And maybe it has always been there and I just missed it, that is a real (and highly likely) possibility. Now I hear people talking about what players can do on their turn, how it affects the overall group experience, and what GMs can do in response and how that affects the flow. This is all being wound up in a single conversation to figure out how best to proceed with moderate levels of complexity that can be front-loaded to character creation in a way that flows during turn-based scenes. Amazing!

To wrap up, as I have been looking over my ideas about redesigning D&D (and to be clear, not just 5e), since I learned this difficult lesson I am adding on the responsibility of making sure that any rules I bring aren’t going to make that moment-to-moment play any more difficult. And if I happen to do so anyways, it is something worth taking time or effort for.

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How Armour Works

In my medieval fantasy, I have always wanted a more medieval take on armour. Every time I see a movie where the knight has his attendants scurrying around him, tying knots, slipping piece after piece on and strapping it in, and then finally the big chest plate is fit into place, I think it’s cool. That whole process, not so much, leave it with the existing rules: it takes 1 minute to don or doff light armor, etc.

The idea I like so much is that the knight is wearing gambeson, then a layer of mail generally called a hauberk, and over the top they put on a breastplate, partial plate, of full plate harness. Obviously not everyone will be wearing full plate, but I’m sure some characters will want to go halfway and wear some gambeson and a hauberk (essentially a long chain shirt).

This is where we can really pull from some other games. In the Level Up Adventurers Guide for Advanced 5e, a helm offers benefits to saves against being stunned or rattled, and a visored helm reduces falling damage. We all know how important a helmet is when we fall, because as someone who bounced their head off concrete a lot as a kid (roller blades), I am pretty sure a helmet would have led to a much better disposition and cognitive capabilities as an adult!

Another aspect of armour that has always been itching the back of my brain is a classic argument: defense vs damage reduction. There are arguments on both sides that I think are valid, and going either way makes sense to me. I am on the side of damage reduction though, where the armour you wear reduces all incoming damage, but doesn’t make it harder to hit you. I get the point of making it harder for the danger-stick to hit the soft bits, but I think that just means that the armour itself is hit, and you don’t feel it (it doesn’t affect you) because it is reducing the damage.

The Spider’s Web

Any time you mess with a mechanic, at least for an existing chassis, you have to realize that there are little strands spreading out from that little point, that tiny intersection, that affect so many other things. The most obvious, if you change armour from defense to reduction, is how do you handle the target number for determining whether or not an attack was successful. The to-hit roll, how do you figure the AC?

In the 3e-3.5e d20 rules used for the Star Wars game, they had Defense. Armour still affected it, but because your swashbuckling Han Solo type obviously didn’t wear armour, it was mostly based on your class. Armour was for stromtroopers, and it didn’t protect them from anything, not even half open doors. Given that dexterity is the base attribute for determining AC, we can just move that over to Defense.

Rabbit Hole: Why is the starting value 8?

Something that really stood out to me as I began designing content for 5e was that a lot of the static scores began at 8, rather than 10. When you determine your score for anything, the most common being your spellcasting difficulty class, the calculation begins with “8 +…” and not “10 +…” Then, when you look at p14 of the PHB, second column, 5^th paragraph, it says “Without armor or shield, your character’s AC equals 10 + his or her Dexterity modifier.” Everything else is 8+, but your AC is 10+.

The answer is just as good as any conspiracy theory! It’s because the default assumption is that everyone is proficient in their own Defense. When you are calculating your spellcasting DC, you add your proficiency bonus, which means it will go up as you advance in level, and the same goes for any other score calculation. But your ability to defend yourself does not increase, because they detached it from your increasing power. At 1^st level, if you see this distinction (which I didn’t, it took years for me to put this together), then you would think you are getting a big boost. Everything else starts at 8 but your AC starts at 10, what a boon!

This is one of those mechanical decisions that seemed so arbitrary when I discovered it. I get it, they are professionals and they had good reasons to keep this system as they did. As a player it feels like they are separating this defensive stat from how the rest of the defensive stats work to keep your AC down and push you into other avenues of defense. Think about it, all of your saving throw proficiencies are also defensive stats, but those go up as you level. The only way your AC goes up is if you get better armour or increase your Dexterity score, or gain some other boon. The improvement lies outside of your character, while the rest (yes, if you are proficient) lie within your character.

An Underlying Avenue

This distinction hidden away in the early pages of the original printing gives us some room to work with in our new system. We simply make Defense work like several other elements, we attach it to proficiency so that everyone’s natural ability to defend themselves improves as they level up. So your Defense is equal to 8 + your proficiency bonus + your Dexterity modifier. Simple.

This leads to a few things (the ol’ spiderweb); characters will be hit more often, bonuses to AC will have more impact, and some characters will simply improve very little as they level. With the new system focusing on reduction, the increase in damage will likely be mitigated by being easier to hit. All those 1’s and 2’s on the damage dice by strengthless goblins and kobolds will be doing no damage now because the weakest armour reduces damage by 1 or 2. The barbarian and monk abilities that allow them to add other ability score modifiers to their AC will increase even more over time, but I think this will be minimal and offset by the fact that they don’t wear armour anyways, and they are frontline characters who are built to take hits, or avoid them. This leads to the last point that some characters simply won’t increase their AC that much, like wizards, but then again they never did, and that’s what shield spells are for.

Sidenote

Up until writing this article, and chasing this idea from the beginning and going over points and facts and ideas I have had sporadically over the years, I had not yet fully solved this system. I have had a set of layered armour ready for the equipment section, but I had not yet figured out how to fix the Defense issue. I guess it took this article in order for me to get there, and wow, it feels awesome.

Recap

AC now means damage reduction; whenever you take damage, reduce that damage by your AC. We could get into the nitty-gritty of damage types, and that argument is valid and can go on-and-on, but for now we will be keeping it simple. (I cannot wait to add a little more detail and distinction to this system though!)

Defense determines how difficult it is to hit you, and it is equal to 8 + your proficiency bonus + your Dexterity modifier. Any abilities you have that add to this remain the same.

And there it is. Enjoy.

P.S. Weight & Mobility

Listening to armour experts, and those who have worn plate armour and jousted or fought in a full set of plate, I have come to the conclusion that those who wear full plate are much less limited than the game system would have us believe. I also wouldn’t be surprised if the creators knew this, it isn’t a secret.

So why does heavier armour slow people down, give them penalties to things like stealth or movement or dexterity checks or what-have-you? In this instance, I would say game balance. When creating a character in a system that allows so many different kinds, there needs to be trade-offs. If you want to throw big spells that deal a lot of damage to a bunch of enemies at once, it isn’t fair that you can also wear the best armour and become a medieval fantasy tank, like literal abrams tank.

For those that want to stand toe-to-toe with a dragon and take as much damage as they deal, they don’t get the spells but they can wear the big suit of metal and swing a whole bunch of times with their sword. All of this is about trade-offs, making decisions to specialize in one area while sacrificing others. This makes complete sense.

I disagree. Something you will notice on my armour chart is that there is no property for bulky, loud, or some penalties to movement or stealth or anything of the kind. Yes armour weighs a lot, but the reason people could wear it is because the way it is attached to the person distributes that weight over the whole body. A suit of plate harness is not the equivalent of a backpack full of 50 pounds of gear. Therefore, if you want to use this system and would like to put those elements back, you go right ahead, but I will see how it goes without them.

Sneak Peak

So, when you look at our new Defense, what do you see? 8 + prof + Dex modifier, looks an awful lot like how you would calculate a static skill score, doesn’t it? And if it were a skill, which would allow you to determine who is and isn’t trained in defending themselves, because that is not a skill everyone has, even adventurers, what else could be done with it, and what other skills could we make that could further add fun and interesting bits?

In our games, most of them, magic is broken into spells, predefined recipes that state explicitly how they work and what will come from their use. The fact that these are formulaic gives the game away, magic has become science. When you learn new spells, they work exactly as intended, safe and predictable.

A Mage’s Magic

As I said before, not all games work this way. One of my favorite games is Mage: The Awakening. Magic is handled in a very thematic fashion, with lots of prose and beautiful writing describing where the different elements of magic come from, how they interact with the world, and the likely uses. In the description of each branch of magic they even include a few well studied and practiced spells to give new players something to work with, called rotes. But overall, the system is freeform, allowing players and the arbiter to create new magical effects on the fly.

The mechanical balance for this is my favorite ever, as it is taken directly from the fiction rather than any structural argument for how the characters should be matched evenly to the world; paradox. The world the characters live in, our world, is fallen from the time of magic and everyone save for them is certain that magic doesn’t exist. These sleepers prevent magic from taking hold of the world again, and when they witness magic their disbelief functions as the backlash.

This is not exactly the way it works, there is a lot more to it, but I am trying to make it succinct for my point. Reality, as defined by the overwhelming majority, is not magical. So when a PC casts a spell, they risk that reality snapping back against them like a rubber band, and the farther that band is pulled, the worse the paradox.

This is one of my favorite systems despite it being very light in rules, but without those rules there is room for far more world building, which I adore. The primary issue I have is that there is only one factor to this system, which type of magic you are using. Given that Mage is a World of Darkness game, a dice-pool system, what you can accomplish with a given type of magic is determined by one statistic. This leaves very little room for anything other than a simple linear increase, even if it represents an exponential increase in power.

The Most Popular Spells

The most popular system is one I have had an eye on remaking or tinkering with or modifying for years. In 3e there was a supplemental book that introduced the idea of points rather than slots, and I ran with that as often as I could. I even had one of my old GMs allow me to use it with a sorcerer instead of the normal slots in his game, and it turned into me modifying my spells using variable amounts of points, which we both loved. It gave me a sense of control to customize my spells while it gave him the ability to make it risky, as a modification could come with dire consequences. We even turned my sorcerer into a roll-to-cast class in 3e, which was something we had not seen anywhere.

Side note: my greatest achievement with that character was following one of the higher level PCs into their temple, mostly out of curiosity, and talking with one of their priests who offered me access to unlimited power. I was playing a very pyromancy focused halfling sorcerer, and the priest took me with him to the hells in which his deity resided to show me the “hell-fire” that I could wield if I made a deal. It was Asmodeus. I said I would consider his offer if he would grant me that hell-fire, and he let me loose to go speak with Asmodeus (I know, character ending bad idea). The GM rolled box-cars (double 6’s) on the demon lords attitude, and I walked out with the symbol of Asmodeus on my chest for a pool of hell-fire spell points equal to my existing pool! Great game.

Over the years I have tinkered with the D&D system of spellcasting, trying to recapture some of that mystique and openness to interpretation, resulting in a massive list of tiered spells (something like firebolt to burning hands to fireball as part of one “spell”) and a whole shift to a Force skill like system from the Star Wars versions of 3.5e and 4e. Having all of the spells “spelled out” (giggle) just takes the magic from the magic system. I have seen this in myself and others where we don’t look to the spells with wonder and awe, we see new and differing types of swords, bows, and thieves tools. (What are thieves tools anyway, just tools, right?)

Vancian Magic

Yes, I know. This topic has been discussed to death, but I haven’t had my 2 cents yet, so here it is.

Vancian magic is cool. The concept is really interesting and thematic, but I think where D&D misses the mark is fully explaining it to the audience. Vancian magic is predicated on the idea that in the old world, before the fall that led to the current medieval world, there was a utopian society that had spent eons working out all of these different ways to manipulate magic. Powerful magic-users had spent generations developing all of these recipes that any mage could use to perform these fantastic arts that bend reality to their will. Once a user memorizes this formula, they finish it in the moment they need it, and the spell is gone from their mind.

As much as it builds a certain theme, despite that theme being absent from the gaming books we know, it leaves magic in a very scientific place. At one point there were books and rules for players to create their own spells, but there was never any room for new spells. The vast catalog of spells present throughout the editions, especially 3e and 3.5e, left very little space for any creative players to come up with something that felt necessary and relevant. I tried for years to come up with something new for my own world and the best I had was a Scribe spell, where the caster could hold their hand over a paper or parchment and will the ink to write their words onto the page en masse, saving them massive amounts of time writing scrolls, memoirs, or missives.

When it comes to the playing mechanics, players simply pick from the list and apply them as needed. Not so bad, until the major theme of the game is revealed, combat. The biggest problem I have had with magic in D&D for all of these years is the idea that mages are better at war than fighters. It doesn’t matter what kind of solution is attempted, the spellcasters are always going to do better at the jobs everyone else is supposed to excel at. Need to get through a door? Why use lockpicks when I can melt it, teleport past it, or command it to open. Need to slay a dragon? Why use dragon-slaying arrows when I can disintegrate it. Need to get the king to hand over his kingdom? Why try to persuade him when I can inhabit his mind.

Magic in D&D presents solutions to the problems that everyone else is supposed to fix, and it is easier and cheaper, since most people ignore components, than those people engaging those problems. The primary challenge of D&D is this: keep the spellcaster alive long enough for them to cast the right spell.

The Modern Classical Weaving

Dungeon Crawl Classics (DCC) is a D&D game with a very old-school bent, both in themes and physical design, that tries to take this system and add some of that variability. Where Mage added openness by describing what each type of magic could do and provide a handful of rote examples, DCC runs in the opposite direction, describing any spell even further. DCC has spell descriptions that cover whole pages, with variations in effect based upon the outcome of the spellcasting roll the player makes.

To me, this seemed to be a better answer, until I grappled with the amount of text and reading and reference that would be necessary to pull off a single spell in any given situation. I love the idea of a spell working in a different way depending on the die result, but oh man does it become unwieldy very quickly. I could not imagine ever handing a player that book and saying “when you cast a spell make sure to have this open and be reading the paragraphs of information after you roll a die.” I did type paragraphs, plural, and I absolutely meant it.

Casting Like a Knave

A game that I have yet to run but definitely am interested in, is Knave. Knave is one of the standout works that is taking a hands-off, rules-light approach to old school dungeon crawling goodness. Just to be clear, a game all about dungeon crawling is not my style, but it is still goodness, as much of this hobby is exactly about that.

Ben Milton’s approach to the issue of codified spells is as simple as it can be: each spell has a name and a sentence or two of description. The rest is, intentionally so, up to interpretation by the GM and the players. This opens the door wide, I would say taking it off the hinges, for players and GMs to create their own spells, quickly and efficiently, to make their magic systems at least somewhat variable and mysterious again. Knave 2e even has a list of 100 spells included, which only takes up less than 4 pages of space. Beautiful.

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Arcana as a Class

When I started working on this issue, I realized the class distinction was possibly the biggest piece. A fighter is supposed to be the frontline, the best in class at taking a hit and dealing one out. Then, the spellcaster comes into the mix and takes that spot away from them.

One of the approaches I have been trying to tease out is the fighter being the best, no matter what tool they are using. If a fighter chooses a sword, they will be the best at using that sword in battle. If they choose magic, they will be the best at battle magic, and so on. This would require a complete restructuring of the class system we know and love, from top to bottom. The fighter would have access to battle magic, and excel in it should they choose it, and that would leave the wizard, where exactly? Exactly! A wizard, even though they could choose battle magic, would not be as good, because they are not a fighter.

In the modern versions of class based systems of fantasy medieval superhero monster slaying depth spelunking adventure, a wizard would be someone coming out of their tower to continue their studies on the road and lend their vast knowledge to companions, rather than beating them all at their own focus. The wizard would have magic, and excel at it, but only in the avenues of complexity, history, esoteric lore, and reality bending spells, but none that are outwardly combative.

A sage who spends most of their time in study and experimentation would not have the experience of the hardened battle caster that a fighter would be, trained in a military fashion as a support for mundane troops during large scale warfare.

Magic as a Tool

This concept would disconnect magic from its own class, opening it up as more of a tool, as it has been subtly ideated, for many years. We see this influence in many of the non-wizard classes and subclasses, many of them depending on magic, but in smaller and more defined ways. Paladins are essentially clerics mixed with fighters, rangers are druids and fighters, rogues but with spells, warlocks are something new and interesting (why I love them), and monks are fighters but with magical powers, maybe some spells.

But magic has to be more than that. When a fighter picks up a sword, that sword is reliable and predictable. A bow requires the bow and the arrow to put harm down range, losing one or the other leaves the fighter in a pickle. So when a fighter chooses to use a spell, which requires neither bow nor arrow, there needs to be an offset, they need to engage in a trade-off.

The trade-off is important in game design. When you are presenting players with a myriad of options on how to design their character, they need to know why their choices matter, otherwise those choices are meaningless, and meaningless choices should not be presented. Another issue I have had is why fighters don’t have firebolt, because it is cheaper and more reliable than ranged weapons. If the spell needs a focus, it only requires a wand, whereas normal ranged attacks need both a bow and an arrow. Any fighter worth their salt would choose a wand, and an economy based on surviving in a monster filled world would provide ample supplies of firebolt wands for cheap purchase.

Magic as a Danger

This trade-off, in my opinion, should be danger. When someone chooses to tap into a well of power from a bygone era that is unpredictable and unfathomable, they should be taking their life into their own hands, as well as the lives of those around them. A sword is not a gamble, a spell should be. At the same time, that spell should have the possibility of being more than a sword, or a bow and arrow. This potential is what makes the trade-off considerable, maybe even worthwhile. A firebolt can potentially require only the concentration or focus of the battlemage, so it should be more than a bow and arrow, and come with more risk to those who use it.

Where does this leave wizards, the people that spend their time not in military camps learning how to explode their enemies with shouts and gestures? Well, they spend their time studying, experimenting, and learning about magic. Battlemages only seek what they need to become proficient with the magic and spells that aid them in battle, and wizards are trying to unravel the mysteries of that magic. Wizards should stand apart in that they are safer with magic.

If magic is dangerous, than those who study it intimately should be more aware of those dangers and how to mitigate them. This could be born out in the complexity of the spells, with battle magic being simple and low risk, while wizard spells are more complex, take more time to cast, but have farther reaching consequences and dangers, mitigated by the expertise of the wizard. Yes a wizard could use battle magic, and be much safer from its potential backlash, but their focus allows them to cast more complex spells that have refined effects. Battle magic is a machete, wizard magic is a scalpel.

Shifting magic and the classes in this way would make wizards more focused on mitigating magical danger, understanding new formulae, working with artifacts and relics, and deciphering ancient knowledge regarding the arcane. Battle mages would simply know some spells and be able to use them fairly reliably.

Divine Magic

For most of this article I have yet to mention the magic of the divine, most commonly known through clerics, paladins, and to some, druids. In the olden days druids were seen as divine casters as well, with the delineation of magic being arcane and divine, with magic-users being the arcane. Arcane was scholarly while divine was belief and altruism.

When it comes to the difference, it seems rather arbitrary, especially when the original principles of GMs being able to take away clerics spells based on their actions fell out of practice in the modern hobby space. GMs were intended to be acting as the deity of the cleric, watching their moves and intentions to ensure they kept in line, and when they stepped out of line, they would lose their spells. The modern gamers do not like this.

Handing over control of their characters to the GM is, understandably, not popular. When people think of the typical party, they always think that a cleric is necessary, given that no one else can really heal when the pack is knee deep in kobolds. As with the wizard though, and how they deal with magic, we have to consider the divine casters and how they are related to magic and what it means for the game.

Divine casters gain their spells through their adherence to the principles of their deity. In this fantasy world, the gods are real and having faith in them and offering devotion can come with a reward, a direct reciprocal power, magic. In the fiction we read, we have seen instances of the uniquely faithful being rewarded with immeasurable power in the form of the “chosen one,” which often leads to a floundering or corrupt institution of faith crumbling before a true believer with the full weight of their god behind them.

One of the distinctions made was whether a cleric was following a good or evil deity, which determined if they got healing or harming spells, and if they could banish or control undead. Over time this has been watered down to where the cleric is just another form of spellcaster, with little happening between them, their deity, and any institutions revolving around their deity. The cleric simply has a holy symbol instead of a wand or a staff.

Danger in Divinity

In order to introduce danger into divine magic, there has to be another shift, one that may not be comfortable for players (which could be easily resolved at the table by all those involved). There needs to be an established trade-off for the powers that come to the divine spellcasters. Keeping in the theme of their class, this should be directly related to their deity or faith, how well they are representing their interests, and whether or not they are forwarding their goals.

To the surprise of everyone that is a regular reader, I have not yet brought Shadowdark into the discussion. Shadowdark addresses some of the issues I have in interesting ways. Spellcasters roll to cast their spells, and failure leads to losing their spell. For arcane casters, if they roll a 1, they suffer some magical malady that may hinder them permanently, but many can be remedied once they return to civilization. For divine casters, rolling a 1 means they have to atone, performing some penance in order to regain the use of that spell.

When I was initially reading Shadowdark, the idea was closer to what I wanted, and seemed like it would be great fun at the table. In the gritty hex- and dungeon-crawling nature of that game, everyone is a fighter with some other abilities, and if their spells fail they can resort to brute force to survive ling enough to regain their magic, hopefully. But in practice, my players and I had a different experience. A player losing their spells made them feel useless. I get why this mechanic was introduced, magic is fickle, difficult to understand, and mysterious. But I would say this execution was more in line with the concept that adventurers are normal people trying to survive their horrible greed in a deadly reality.

Getting back to the divine topic, having the character perform some penance in order to regain the favor of their deity and the powers that comes with makes a lot more sense. A cleric is supposed to be representing a power outside of themselves, that lends them that power to enact their will and further their goals. It takes the focus of the character away from them as an individual, and ties them to the entities of the fiction, to the factions and the larger scope of the world as a whole. This is different from most other characters, namely the arcane spellcasters, who answer only to themselves when it comes to what they can and cannot do, or better yet, should and should not do.

This distinction, like that of the origin and purpose of Vancian magic, is once again lost in the modern iterations of these games. I think the history of the game, and the distance of it from the original influences, is only helping to make this problem worse. In its inception, the people that were playing these games were likely exposed to the influences, and so coming to this game they better understood the purpose of these systems. In the modern day, some 50 years and a generation or two beyond, those influences have been lost as the media and tastes have changed. What didn’t change though, were the games, the executions of those influences.

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Magical Solutions

There have been several iterations over the years, a few I mentioned above. The unfortunate part of this whole investigation is that I have only ever been able to test one of these options, the spell points, with my own character in another person’s game.

Solution 1: Spell Points

Changing the system of using slots was a first step, an attempt to bring more versatility to the system by allowing the player to vary the amount of power they are attempting to channel. If a 1^st-level spell cost 5 points, they could attempt to empower it with more points, or spend less with a reduced effect.

Having a pool like Hit Points also allowed for the magic-user to “overcast,” an option where HP translates 1-to-1 in times of dire need, so the mage could drain their own health in order to continue casting spells. This is one of those trade-offs, a dangerous choice to continue using a powerful implement. But, it only ever comes up when the caster has already spent all of their spell points, so it’s more of a last ditch effort than a risky standard practice.

Solution 2: Force Skills

One of my favorite campaigns I have ever mastered for was Star Wars d20. This game was released back in the day by WoTC using the 3e base model, and later I switched to the equivalent of 4e. I have made the argument before that I think 4e was a better system for Star Wars, and I loved using it at the table. I have my gripes, but I think overall it was a good match.

So, in my free time, I pored through all of the supplemental books that I had to try and figure out a way to translate the D&D magic system into a new type of spell-skill system, based on the Force skills. In Star Wars, the Force skills worked like other skills; the user had to be trained in them, and certain feats or class options unlocked more uses of each skill, turning each of them into a skill tree, the likes of which we usually see in video games these days.

The unfortunate part was that they never presented them in a skill tree, so it could be difficult to navigate the whole system and figure out what all of your possible options were. I can see where this would be a design choice, leaving the force knowledge scattered to give it the feeling of an esoteric power, but it would have been helpful all the same.

Basically, the skills were the different schools of magic: abjuration, conjuration, divination, enchantment, evocation, illusion, necromancy, and transmutation. Magic-users would choose their skills to be trained in, and take feats or class options to unlock more powerful abilities. Spells were also changed, similar to the DCC version of spells (long before I ever knew DCC existed), where different effects were spread out among the standard array of Difficulty Classes (DCs).

A low DC fire spell, using the Evocation skill, would get your a firebolt, whereas a high DC would get your a fireball. I had the different spells laid out for lightning bolts, cones of cold, phantasms, teleporation, and a whole host. Classifying and sorting all of the different existing spells into their new spell groupings was a hefty challenge, and I only ever made it through the planning stage and into a few completed spells.

But this was no different than the solution presented by DCC. Magic was still scientific, and I was only going further into defining the effects and presenting a more detailed box, but it was still a box. You could look at the label and know exactly what you were getting each time.

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The Intended Solution

I want the player to assess the current situation and come up with an effect. I want them to describe that effect to the arbiter, and then the arbiter tells them what characteristics are relevant, and then the player rolls to see what happens. If the mage is trying to create a wall of fire in the heart of a volcano, I want there to be a risk of rolling too well and creating a spell that they cannot control. If they roll poorly they may end up burning themselves after having drawn waves of pyromantic energy towards themselves.

The player character should be adapting their magic to the moment, drawing lightning down from a thunderstorm or unleashing bolts through the rain, using the conductivity of water to heighten the distance and power against their enemies. Disappearing into the darkness should be relatively easy for shadowmancers, cloaking themselves in the already present night.

The But…

But, there needs to be rules, guidance, some sort of rails that the arbiter and the player can lean on to make their creations quickly and the arbitration of those creations equally quickly. With Mage, the storyteller needs to have a solid grasp on what is possible and what is not to quickly adjudicate if and when paradox arrives during the casting of a spell. This is easier because the setting is the modern day, as we know it. If the setting was a medieval fantasy world, judging backlash would be nearly impossible because of the nature of that alien environment. I think that lends to the simplistic dice pool system where a mages power with any type of magic is determined by a point total between 1 and 5.

So what I want is the freeform nature and creativity offered by a system like Mage, but the structure and guidance offered by systems like DCC and D&D, with the danger of Shadowdark, and minimal rules for reference. To me this looks like a skill system. Skill systems in modern games offer a baseline capability for the player that can be easily extrapolated and expanded upon by both the player and the arbiter. The Athletics skill is vague so that all players can understand how it would apply, and the numerical value attached offers the arbiter quick and easy interpretation.

End of Part 1

I got to the ninth page on my libre office doc and started hearing my stomach grumble and thought, “well, looks like this is going to be my first series.” Well, I hope to see you next week as we dive into the systems and fiction that are influencing my journey, and how I hope to wrap all of this up with a new system for finding mysterious magic in a fantasy world.

Why Did I Do This?

For a while now I have been hearing and seeing the various jams that go on in both our community and the related video games community. A few months back I almost joined an adventure jam, but I got absorbed elsewhere, plus cold feet, and I just let the excitement die out. Ever since I have been contemplating making my game as a one-page, so I finally did.

Last week after I wrote my article this idea came up again, so I challenged myself. I said “self, over the next week we are going to ‘finish’ my game, by making it into a one-page RPG.” There is no jam currently, that I know of, but it would make a great first step, maybe only step.

A First Step

We all know the struggle. We play these games, we get excited, and then we start thinking about how we want our names on one of those pretty books. We have ideas, we know how to do things, we can write, and before we know it, we have a few notebooks full of scribbling regarding our own “totally unique and absolutely amazing” game. Also known as a Heartbreaker.

By dedicating myself to making this first step, I get my idea completed and out into the universe. Maybe people love it, maybe they don’t. Maybe people see it, test it, play with it, maybe not. That doesn’t matter. What matters is that I finished it. Having it done means I can return to it and polish it, expand it, add art and a whole bunch of things the community expects, or I can leave it.

Why It May Be the Only Step

Exploring the vastness of the hobby has allowed me to find solutions to problems I have had with the limited games I played for years. I have seen so many different ideas and ways to execute on our hobby, and there are some games that almost completely fill what I think are my needs for a great game. Honestly, after playing and reading several, I have started to rethink whether or not there is actually a hole to fill with my own ideas.

If I actually do find a game that fulfills my needs as a gamer, then I don’t have to any creating. I can leave all of my notes and ideas and scratchings in their books, and on my computer, and never have to worry about treading ground that is well-worn by another. I may have found what I have been looking for after all these years. And maybe I haven’t.

Iterations

The biggest advantage on having this “done,” other than the feeling of relief that I finally did it, is that it gives me a foundation. The process of turning my piles of notes into a compact and concise product forced me to really think about what I want my game to be about. Having only so much space made me reconsider all of the “essential elements” that a game needs, that my game needs.

Is it perfect? No. Does it fulfill what I consider to be the core premise of my game? Yes. The likelihood that I will return and use this as my foundation for further iterations is high. For years I have wanted to create my own game, and as much as I thought I would need a few hundred pages, masses of character options and arbiter guidance, looking through the hobby has lately has really started to change my thinking. Despite all my aspirations, I had not yet produced anything, until now.

Conclusion

I know what you’re thinking: “the guy who rambled about the importance of character sheets, to the point of designing and selling his proper version for 5e, released a game without a character sheet!” It’s crazy, it’s reprehensible, I know. I wanted to, really I did, but I didn’t have time. Another part of this challenge was sticking to my time constraints, just like professionals do. So maybe, in the near future, I will come up with one that fits perfectly onto an index card, since this one-page RPG is so small.

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I don’t mind the cold, not really. It helps me to sleep. What I do mind, however, is the arcing pressure and pinching that stretches up my spine and behind my ribs. The fingers of agony reaching through my back make it nearly impossible to stand, and some mornings I have to give in and let Rung help me up.

Opening my eyes, Rung was nowhere to be seen. I wiped the dew from my face, the morning kiss of the elements. Rolling on to my side I fought back verbal acknowledgment of my discomfort, pushing myself into a sitting position. Before I could think about it, my hands were reaching for the two plates of leather-bound wood, unclasping and positioning the tome in my crossed legs.

My other hand instinctively poked and prodded my pack for the ink well, to no avail. Surely it is in here, I hadn’t needed it since last morn. Ah, there it is. Setting the well beside me, uncorked, I began my ritual. As the words slowly left my lips, the visions of the night drawn back to my waking mind, I hovered my hand above the page.

Slowly my eyes drifted into the back of my head as a handful of parchment lifted into the air. Rivers of ink lofted from the well and began setting down onto the pages, letters and images beginning to form. The spell nearly ended when a new smell joined the campfire, fresh meat. Rung was returned with a bounty.

After some time the spell ended and I looked down at the work I had done, the words and images familiar as a distant memory. This trip had been a busy one for my sleep, my visitations to the Dreaming frequent and filled with the whisperings of The Joining. Perhaps one day one of my dreams will be important.

The rest of the day went as usual, the party enjoying breakfast before setting off on the road again. As we made our way through the gates I immediately split off, the temple would want to add my Annals to the rest. Through the familiar streets and portals I traveled, past the floating spires and enchanted cobbles. The city never changes while we are away, a comforting reality.

Rounding the corner I slowed my pace. I do this every time I return home, walking slow to take in the sight of the temple. In the Ensorceled City faith is of little consequence, which is easily depicted by the state of our church. Nestled between two homes is a ramshackle of a building.

The wood is cracking with patches of mold, the uneven doorway crowned with the symbol of Mytharel Kaetiloy, The Joining. The plaster is weak and flaking, and in some spots it appears to be barely hanging on, threatening to depart the structure and throw itself upon the cobbles to be swept away by the janitorial enchantments. The windows are dusty and the paint nonexistent. The whole building seems to sag with age, but we like the authenticity of it.

Lift and push. Once again, and with a groaning scrape the door opens. The familiar scents of creaking beams, musty parchment, and the twinge of arcane greets my nose as I step into the entry. Dutifully I make my way behind the counter, stepping down into the storage room below, heading directly to the Annals.

Every building in this city has some sort of hidden underground, well, at least the ones that aren’t peoples homes. This old shoppe had quite the tunnel system, and we have long speculated about their ties to the Last Privilege, using these tunnels for stolen goods and nefarious plans.

I barely whisper the incantation before the power passes through me and a little ball of light appears above my upraised palm. Pointing my palm away from me I continue until the tunnel opens before me, and I can see the makeshift counter separating the rest of the complex from the Annals.

Reaching down the chain I grasp my tome, setting it onto the counter. The separation of the covers activates the enchantment, and as they open a book appears between them. The polite conversation halts for a moment while the book is removed and a new one emplaced. Then the tome is marked, its origin detailed into a reference, and then handed off to one of the many workers that organize and maintain the Annals of Dreams.

Most of the temples have Annals, recording the dreams of their clergy in the off chance that one or more of them are receiving visions or divinations of some sort, though I don’t think anyone else would think to use a gateway into The Lost for storing them. I have never understood it myself, but the chronicler, like most of the rest of the Ensorceled City, is a practitioner of the arcane, following in the steps of our Paragon, Mytharel Kaetiloy. What a strange city this is, my home, that I love.

Morning Rituals

As part of their morning rituals, clerics record their dreams into magical tomes they carry with them at all times. These tomes are carried on the ends of chains in magical covers that summon the book upon opening. Some clerics use quill and ink while others cast incantations that translate their memories into words and images directly using magic.

Only those who can channel the divine energies of their paragon must record their dreams, as those without the power do not seem to have any visions or dreams of meaning or import.

Dreaming Tome

Each tome is magical in nature and has an indefinite amount of pages. Knowing when one is full and ready to be returned is a matter of instinct, and can be different from cleric to cleric. Once it is full, they return to a temple and extract the pages, giving them to the chronicler in their temples’ Annals of Dreams.

Annals of Dreams

These vast libraries hold the dreams and visions of all of the clergy of a given temple. The staff that maintain these repositories are rarely clergy themselves, as other skills and powers become very useful to organize and sift through all of the present knowledge. The staff are often arcane devotees of the temple.

The classic flow of influence starts with tabletop or board or card or children’s games and moves into video games. CRPGs are a prime example, but not the only ones. Lately I have been thinking about the idea that modern video games may have some thing to offer those we play on the table.

Attempting Innovation

Maybe I am the only one, but one of the predominant ideas I have had is that I need to do something different, maybe even new (if possible) to really stand out in this community. How many fantasy games are there? Scifi? Apocalypse? Investigation? A lot, of each, and many more covering a broad swath of other genres and playstyles.

A while back this formed into “VideoGame the Tabletop Game.” Catchy title, I thought. The concept was to take elements from modern video games and translate them in some fashion to create the foundation of a new tabletop RPG. At the time I didn’t know exactly how it would work, what rules system it would use, or whether anyone would even take it seriously. The truth is, a lot of people play video games these days, and there are some fundamental concepts that most people understand because of this.

So here are a few of my starting points.

Player XP

It is long established that players learn and grow in their ability to play games. There are whole genres predicated on players knowing how those games work, using that knowledge to influence the development and pacing of the game. The argument could be made that by simply having genres we speak to each group of people that enjoy and readily support the type of game being produced. You could say that this, in essence, is player experience.

There are some new games entering the space that speak directly to players, rather than just their characters. There are sections discussing rewards for showing up, bringing the snacks, helping other players, and a myriad of other positive reinforcement techniques that can be applied to the people that are outside the normal reward of character progression. If this is something that people appreciate, why not include PXP?

A quick argument here, things like Inspiration, Luck tokens, and similar mechanisms are often explained as rewards for good play and given directly to players, so this may just be renaming.

Information Transfer

In most video games, the player is given hordes of data. Each time they discover a new location, there is a new entry in the pause or character information screen. Whenever a new monster or adversary shows up there is a profile, sometimes with weaknesses or preferences entailed. Weapons or implements have art or models that can be examined as well as full statistics sheets to scrutinize when you find something to compare it to. Quest logs, plot discussions, world-building notes and images, there is a whole host of information given to the player.

Once again, this is done in tabletop games, but in very different ways. A lot of this information is reliant on player experience, where a group of veterans has instinctual knowledge about the owlbear before their character does. One of the lessons I have learned lately, and that I am trying diligently to take to heart, is that players never have enough information. I came across this idea first from Sly Flourish on youtube. Then I read about it in Mothership, and then Shadowdark. Kelsey Dionne talked about it as well.

The best argument I heard for giving players all of the information was put something like this, “people know about the world because all of our senses are telling us about it. The PCs don’t have that luxury, so the GM needs to be filling in all of those senses for each of the characters, letting them and players, especially the players, know as much as possible, so that the players can then filter that knowledge to their character and make meaningful choices.”

So why don’t we join the ranks of the video game industry? Now, an arbiter doing this on their own would be doing a lot of work, but I think it would be insanely fun. I would love making little flash cards for a town or a region that I can hand to my players so that they can look it over and reference it each time they need to.

As an aside, I think by now we all know that I sit down and write these on the spot, with little preparation other than thinking about a potential topic throughout the week. This info card idea came to me as I was writing this, and I am already in love with it, as someone who loves sitting down to create a world. I may incorporate this into my running game, I’ll keep you informed.

These cards could contain information that is delivered to them as a standard in the video game industry. As much as I was disappointed in Destiny for their Grimoire system, approaching storytelling as lightly as possible in the game itself, I did love going into them and reading a whole bunch at once. That game was so good. This would basically be a grimoire system for tabletop RPGs.

Pause

I know what you are thinking, just hear me out.

With a tabletop game there is already a built-in pause mechanism, people just standing up to grab a drink or use the restroom. All we have to do is stop playing and the game is essentially paused. But what if we instantiated the mechanism of pausing into the game.

The first idea I have here is in reference to timers. If you are unaware of timers, a lot of games and influencers and creators have been talking about using timers, that are visible to the players, to instigate faster paced play. Whether the timer is a die, an actual countdown on a clock, or a circle with different segments being filled in as parameters are met, the use of timers as an actual mechanism to aid play has been discussed a lot lately and implemented in a lot of smaller titles.

There have been many times when the action of the game is moving quickly and I want my players to move quickly as well. When a high stakes decision comes up they don’t act quickly, they stop and start debating or discussing, trying to find the correct answer when the situation is about just having an answer at all, and immediately. I don’t really care for this because it can bring the mood and the gathered stakes down to the floor. This is one of the issues that timers is supposed to fix.

So, if we are using mechanisms like timers, in whatever iteration we choose, to keep play moving at a pace, then we can also instantiate a pause mechanism, potentially only allowing so many in a session. If the players are out of pauses and they can’t make a decision, then play continues and they suffer a consequence. The consequence should not be outlandish, but that person that freezes up when a situation turns dire often does not have a good outlook.

Saves and/or Respawns

A major topic of discussion in this hobby is character death. I started in this hobby in a highly lethal game. I lost many characters before they ever made it out into the world to adventure because the GM was portraying a world full of evil and prejudice and uncertainty, a deeply medieval world with the extremes more pronounced by the presence of magic. I have always appreciated a game where I can feel the mortality of my character, and I become bored or uninterested in games where that threat is not present.

For the longest time, I thought that I needed a more lethal game in order for the players I was finding to have the kind of motivation and incentive to engage like those original games I was raised in. All of the players in those games pushed each of their own narratives forward, they had goals and ideas and things they wanted. The world was bared to us as we crested the hill in search of our objectives, it was not a curtain being pulled back to reveal the place we were supposed to go or the thing we should be after. Then I started trying different games.

A save mechanism could hold a character at a certain point, allowing the player to retrieve them should the worst come to pass. My immediate argument to this was the spoiling of whatever the player learned in the time before their character died, but as a lifelong player of video games, this knowledge has rarely turned me off of the game. One of my favorite genres is crafting survival games, and my characters die so regularly that I am accustomed to it and the progress made is never spoiled simply because I have to go back and do it again or try something else so as to not die.

Now, this mechanism could really make the arbiter’s life difficult, but that could be mitigated with a little bit of guidance and direction. Imagine that the party goes off to a dungeon and dies. However it happened doesn’t matter, but the fact that it did, does. So, the players say that in the next game they are going to load their save and either try the dungeon again or do something else.

If they returned to the same dungeon, they would have knowledge about it that their characters didn’t (unless a new type of character has some abilities to retain memories from their previous lives, exciting!). If this is a problem, which depends on the arbiter, then changing up some elements could solve that quickly. Grab a new map, grab a whole new dungeon, change out some of the monsters, alter rewards or traps, just change some of the elements around.

Now, if you do change some things around, what does that remind you of? Rogue-lights, yes! Or is it rogue-likes? Oh well, you get the point. There is a whole genre of games built around this concept, where the death of the player character is expected and prepared for, it is an integral part of the game! I am currently playing through Returnal, in my opinion the ultimate version of this concept, and I highly recommend it, amazing game.

Characters could respawn in the nearest settlement. The cleric in the party could unlock an ability where they can respawn in a temple that is closer or a wizard could set a spot in the wilderness, a camp perhaps, there could be any number of iterations exploring this concept. Imagine a teleportation focused spellcaster that can set their respawn points anywhere in the world they have been. I am just spitballing here, but this idea could be a solution to another problem that I have yet to see a comfortable solution emerge for.

Death of a Character

That last point ran right into something I have been pondering for a while. When I was running 5e and similarly heroic games, the lack of understood mortality gave the game a relaxed tone. Some people like this, I do not. When I come to game I want the story to be serious, the stakes to be high, and the motivations to be questionable. I want a drama, as well as a fantasy adventure, as well as a good-cop/bad-cop dichotomy, with fleshed out villains facing a group of bitter and hardened antiheroes. I do not like “beer-and-pretzels” tabletop RPGs, not one bit.

So I thought I needed to up the ante, to remind the players that their characters are indeed mortal in an uncaring and dangerous world. Even when they understood this, the sting of death persists. We moved to games like Mothership and Shadowdark, and we recently lost our tenth character to the Shadowdark in only five sessions, and the player took it a bit hard. He had lost a few characters already, but this one seemed to be different. I thought playing a more lethal game would encourage them to play more diligently, to take the game more seriously, as well as the work I put into it, and I think I may have been wrong.

But how do we solve this problem? It is a regular point of discussion that arbiters want a more lethal game and players want their characters to last longer and become vessels for development and growth. Maybe respawns, a given in video games, is the solution. There would have to be a penalty, such as experience and the gained treasure, kind of obvious, but the character they have invested in would continue.

A respawn system answers both the arbiters and the players problems with death. The world can be more lethal, for some arbiters it would have more verisimilitude, and the players can retain the investment in their character even though they had a run of bad luck. Characters only die in video games if they are not the player, why should these games be any different?

Character Complexity

One of the other regular discussions around tabletop games and their design is the complexity of the characters. For a game like Shadowdark, where the characters are expected to die pretty regularly, the creation process needs to be quick and simple. For a game like 5e, where there is no expectation of death, the characters can be more complex. If each respawn is indeed a death, and we are treating it like a save file, the characters and the world dial back the time before they left on the adventure, then this could be brought into the mechanics of the characters in multiple ways. Diviners and oracles could glean information about their potential future deaths by retaining something each time they respawn.

With the solution presented, character creation can become more complex. A lot of people are put off of this because of the amount of rules it takes for players to put a book down, but if your investment only takes a minor penalty when the character dies, there is so much room for additional growth. 5e characters can take on a whole new level of customization and personalization. I am not advocating for complexity just because, but there may be some new ideas on how to further tailor characters to the players wants that would make more sense in a game where the characters only truly die when the players and the arbiter decide to end their campaign or the final boss fight can only end one of two ways.

Hexploration & Map Markers

Shadowdark has pushed me deep into the hexcrawl side of the hobby, far deeper than I have ever been before. I have long been investigating hexcrawl influences and rules and iterations because I want the exploration part of the games I run to be as interesting and engaging as anything else. Hexcrawl seems to fit perfectly with both the video games influence and the instantiation of respawns. Each time the characters meet someone new or gather some bit of information, it puts a new marker on the map and gives them another choice for how they want their game to progress.

This is yet another heavily debated topic in our hobby, whether or not exploration or wilderness travel is worth more than just “hand-waving” between the important bits of combat slog here and combat slog there. When I make a ranger or similar character, I do it because I want them to excel at the outdoors and getting the party from one place to another using my skillset. That’s the character feel that I desire, and it is so hard to find that when everyone has been told that skipping travel is the best option, for whatever reason.

Just because the players have a map, and the characters have a marker, doesn’t mean they cannot get lost, experience hardship and difficult choices, or face some adversaries on the way to that marker. I debated whether or not I was going to put the map in front of my players during our hexcrawl in the first pamphlet of the diminished lighting. Then I looked at it, as an appreciator of maps, and thought that this beautiful little world representation needs to be seen, to be appreciated. During their last trek they asked if they knew where they were going, understanding the difference between player knowledge and character knowledge and respecting it.

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Some New Books

Recently I have purchased two new games, both of which I have been curious about for multiple reasons. Both of these tabletop games are based on video games, and I have had this VideoGame the Tabletop Game idea for a while now. The first was Dark Souls, and the second Fallout.

Dark Souls the Tabletop RPG

This is a genre of games I have only tried once. As a previous Star Wars fan, I decided to try Jedi Survivor. I know that I am a person with a relatively low tolerance for mechanics designed to be frustrating, but I wanted to branch out in my video game exposure as well as my tabletop game exposure. I broke a controller for the first time in my life, and I have never looked back at this genre.

Other than that, I was extremely curious about what kind of experience this would be at the table. I have not played in a game or run one, but I cannot imagine the kind of the session that would happen, at least not until I thought about my average game of 5e in the wild. I am currently a player in an Adventurer’s League game run at a local hobby store. As part of the league, the game is published adventures, and we are currently at the tail end of Phandelver and the Depths Below.

Needless to say, every session is a combat. We do a few minutes of moving through an alien space, some short conversations with NPCs, maybe we find something interesting, and then we are back into a fight again. All I can imagine is that Dark Souls is that but without the pretense of anything else going on in the game. Although, it seems like it would be the perfect fit for a respawn system.

Fallout the Tabletop RPG

I love the Fallout games, namely the recent 3d action adventure ones. I tried to go back and play the originals, but as I covered above, I have no tolerance for a game that ruthlessly traps me in a corner until I learn the exacting esoteric pattern that will get me out. As for Fallouts 3, New Vegas, and 4, I love them.

Something else I love, is the post-apocalypse genre. Just the other day I got a notification from one of my latest Kickstarter projects that my the end of May I will be receiving my copy of Ashes Without Number, and I am so excited! Now, this book purchase, the Fallout one, was prompted by both my curiosity and the fact that our Adventurers League was suspended the last two weeks while the shop employees prepared for a local con. So, one of our players that occasionally fills in decided to run a trial of his Fallout adventure that he would run at the con, for us.

Given my love for Fallout I was so excited to play, and I had a great time. We planned to run the adventure for the two sessions our normal GM would be absent, so when I got to the store for our second session, I bought the book. During the whole session I let the younger more excited players take the lead and just perused the rules for ideas on how to run survival, and I got a few. Most of my book purchases are to do research, the good ol’ R&D, to find ideas and methods that I can steal, like most great arbiters do.

I haven’t fully read both of these books yet, but I plan on it. The last book I read cover to cover was BREAK!! RPG, and it is still worth recommending to anyone.

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What Video Games Cannot Do

I started reading Storm Front recently, the first book in the Dresden Chronicles, as they have been highly recommended since I was young. Alongside that I have been rereading Mage: The Awakening, one of my favorite Pen-and-Paper RPGs in existence. The World of Darkness books are a whole other level of aesthetic and theme development that I think every designer could use some influence from. I love them.

Video games cannot do magic. I am not saying it is not possible, but they cannot reproduce magic in the fashion that I want magic to exist in my games. For years I have been trying to figure out how to incorporate Mage rules and Wheel of Time aesthetics into my fantasy games. Maybe it was just the group I was playing with, maybe it is the intentional design of the game, but the way we as players approached, and the arbiter reacted to, magic in the Mage games we played, was so empowering and thrilling that I want that in my other games.

For those who don’t know, the World of Darkness games use a dice-pool system, d10s, with a very light mechanical structure. The players explain their goal and the arbiter determines which combination of attributes and skills and magic powers are incorporated to determine your pool, and you try to get a number of successes. The primary focus of the rule books is the setting and the atmosphere. The pages are filled with art and fiction that engrosses the players in the world that is being built, offering questions and curiosities as opposed to answers and truths.

Their approach to mages living in the modern world is so richly developed, as well as their approach to the mechanics of casting spells, that it evokes a sense of empowerment and mystery, with a little trepidation and anxiety when it comes to using your power.

As I have been thinking about how I want to design magic for my game, I have taken to exploring the primary balancing mechanism, paradox, and its potential application to a fantasy setting. In Mage, the vast majority of people are “sleepers,” unaware of the magical world and powers that exist right beside them. They do not believe, and this collective disbelief empowers reality to push back against any changes that a mage would make with their spells. Thus, casting when in the presence of sleepers is extremely dangerous unless the spell is properly crafted.

Spell Duel in the Market

As an example, two opposing mages discover one another in a street market and a fight ensues. The first mage wants to use fire, so the player explains, “the food cart next them suddenly begins to hiss, a visible gas leak coming from the back of the cart right before it catches from the flames in the stove on top and explodes into a fireball!” This whole situation is plausible, even if it was the direct result of magic, so all the sleeper witnesses surrounding the mages think nothing is out of the ordinary, save for the sudden failure of the streetmeat wagon.

In response, the second mage has a large potted plant “slip” from their place on the second story balcony and drop into a kiddie pool behind them, splashing water up and into the path of the oncoming fireball, mitigating some of the burn, all the while using water magic to protect themselves. Both of these uses of magic do not appear to be magical to all those nearby, which mitigates the potential of paradox to correct their use of magic.

Frustrated, the first mage decides to take the risk of a direct assault. As the fire dwindles and the water drips down their foe, they call lightning down from the clear skies overhead in an attempt to end this fight. There are no clouds, definitely no storms, and there is little to explain the sudden thunderous roar as a flash of electricity strikes the seemingly lucky person who survived a freak food cart explosion. To the sleepers, this appears more like magic, and their collective disbelief in magic brings paradox to bear on the offending mage.

In this last case, the mage would roll essentially a save against paradox, the level determined by the arbiter depending on how offensive to reality and the nonbeliever this particular spell was. Electrical poles and lines are known to fail, so sleepers will leave the scene without any understanding of the reality, but it is still offensive. If they fail horribly, a mage can suffer debilitating conditions, or even be sucked out of reality into the abyss. Success means that paradox corrected their mistake, the nearby electrical pole suffering a failure as well and causing the arc that killed that random person.

Mechanizing the Unknown

The ultimate goal of my magic system is that the outcomes, as well as the consequences, are unknowns. More experienced spellcasters will have a good idea on what to expect, but the mercurial nature of an unpredictable and unknowable force remains dangerous to tamper with even into mastery.

There has been some movement in this direction from modern gaming, other than Mage having this in spades from decades ago. DCC and Shadowdark use roll-to-cast systems, adding some of the randomness and consequences into magic. Other systems retain the Vancian system of memorizing set spells, and some allow the players to create their own, but they are still defined within an almost scientific rules set, which diminishes the mystery. DCC has whole tables to determine the effects based on the result of the die roll, which is interesting, and I thought about incorporating this system, but tables are just as unpopular as rules that explain the nitty gritty of grappling, rather than leaving room for the imagination and interpretation based on the current circumstances.

The danger is leaving the system completely open, which puts a massive workload on the arbiter. Rules light systems and their proponents never seem to address just how much more work the arbiter has to do to fill in all the gaps that can be reasonably accomplished by just a few more rules. Why make an Athletics check, or maybe Acrobatics, (does your background come into this?), when your Strength score defines how far you can jump in one small paragraph. Yes, the paragraph is in the wrong place in the book, so everyone misses it, but that is one little thing that the GM doesn’t have to worry about while trying to maintain the tension at the table.

Finding the Middle Ground

In a fantasy world, there is the expectation that even the lay people that live in the villages and towns throughout the monster infested world know about magic, even though they rarely encounter it. Normal people live with the hope and expectation that when they wake up tomorrow, the world as they know it will not be dramatically altered, and this may form some sort of disbelief. Street magicians would be performers more than arcane aficionados, using sleight of hand rather than ancient language to ensorcel their victims.

Out in the wilderness though, where there is little sapient thought and the stranglehold of normalcy, magic could flourish. Maybe this is one of the many reasons mages put their towers outside of town, to avoid not only endangering the common folk, but also to keep their disbelief from hampering their experiments. In the halls of the king, someone who deals with mages and magical entities, most of the people would not have such a mental block, and although casting in front of the king is a bad idea, he does have court wizards to ensure his safety as well as validating the claims of those who engage him in council.

From the rules side, each type of spell or school of magic would need some brief, though clear, guidelines on what is and is not possible. Is this type of magic capable of harm or healing? Can it alter the world or does it just appear to those with senses that it is altered? How much of an area does it affect? How far away can the effects be experienced? Does it drain the caster or the victim, or does it use some limited resource that exists in the world in a realm “beside” it?

Needless to say this avenue of research has been going on for years. I have pages and pages of notes and organizational structures and influences and experimental executions. I tried the Force skill system from various Star Wars RPGs, I looked at the Wheel of Time RPG, Ars Magica, The Burning Wheel, Mage: the Awakening, Vampire: the Masquerade, and a whole host of other influences.

Conclusion

It’s strange that a few rather large topics seemed to all collide into my thoughts on learning from video games. Hopefully some of these ideas give you some inspiration, or at least remind you of a game you love and want to boot up again.

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Then a week went by. Then I heard other people discussing this idea. I read a few articles, listened to a podcast, and got some perspective from creators who are professionally in this ecosystem. You know, the people I should be listening to because I want to be a professional in this space too.

So I listened, and started wondering what my setting was. Of course I had a vague idea, I wanted a post apocalypse just like any other magical fantasy game, but I also loved the idea of far-future tech, I was so greatly inspired by the likes of Worlds Without Number, and hell, all of Kevin Crawford’s work. I am slowly inching my players towards running a game in all of his books; Worlds Without Number, Stars Without Number, Cities Without Number, and the upcoming Ashes Without Number. So excited.

Discovery In a Known World

One of the largest elements I want to be present in my game is discovery, characters going beyond the known and finding things both terrifying and awesome that none have ever seen before, not even the arbiter. I want the players to have a hand in the world building, a stake in its creation and evolution. I want each new game, campaign start, to be in a fresh world full of adventure and intrigue.

The question then follows, how does a group explore a completely new world if I am going to create one? Should I even create one? If I release a setting guide and build a world for them to explore, how will it be new? The answer is simple: don’t.

Rather than build a setting, I will build a tool-set designed to be used in play, or during prep, that will allow the players and arbiter to shape the world and create something wholly unique to their table as they venture out from the relative safety of the origin city. This was a big step for me, given that I wanted to create a cool world with a beautiful map and a bunch of adventure seeds and interesting potential for the arbiter to just pick up and run with. I wanted the players to slot into the system and set off into a new style of game. So now I have to give that up, and that’s okay.

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Setting From System

In order to accomplish this I will have to lean on all the great minds that came before me. I have already been exploring the introduction to the game, without making any mechanics really, where the players all will create the Origin City where the remnants of past civilizations survived the latest cataclysm. Using a die drop method they will use a hex map to put together a massive place full of intrigue and politics.

In order to further invest the players, I want each of them to create a Family (lineage maybe?), Guild, or District, somewhere their character is tied to. This tie needs to be loose, this is also going to be a perilous game, but still present. This idea alone led me down the path of what each character could actually be, and how the player may retain their ties when they lose a character. That nugget will have to wait for later.

Together they will draw out the map and take notes to add details, and by the end of the first session they should have a rough outline of what their world looks like. The arbiter will then take that map, do some polishing and refining, and by the next game they should be ready to begin. It is important that PCs are not active members of any guilds or organizations, membership should be earned through play, though they may be associated with them at the start.

Guidance Challenge

I am not sure as of yet, but I think providing guidance will make the task of providing sufficient aesthetic more difficult. Rather than fleshing out a whole campaign setting that will translate the feel and theme of the game to the players and arbiter, I will have to fulfill this task using only guided world-building, which is already difficult when so many great resources for world-building already exist.

Character(s)

Given that this cooperatively built city is the focal point of the setting, it is important that the players remain tied to it, meaning that their characters remain tied to the city as well as the story as it has unfolded. When the game itself is fashioned after older games where characters die easily, this becomes a challenge, but I think I may have a solution. A budding aristocrat does not travel alone, but with servants or guardians paid for by inheritance or wealth of some other source. Knights may have squires. Priests may have acolytes. Many of the traditional characters would not travel alone, even when they are traveling with a party.

The dynamics of the game will heavily involve politics and social intrigue. Nearly every noble would have at least a small retinue, and to appear in Court without them would seem strange if not outright provoking suspicion. Hirelings and retainers are nothing new to these games, and due to my limited number of players I have to use them in my current Shadowdark game to give the crawlers a fighting chance. For my game though, I may be building them directly into character creation, giving the players an option to keep them tied in should their primary character meet an untimely death.

Conclusion

A bit of a shorter article today. I have been stewing on this concept all week and trying to open my mind to the wisdom of others, letting this new perspective shift how I think about and approach my design. So far these are my ideas, and I am not sure if I am moving the needle t all in the conversation, but maybe this will be the first in a series of “how this concept changed my process.”

Thanks for reading.

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Music choice: Secession Studios (songs with Greg Dombrowski are some of my favorites).

This article was different for me. My goal this year is a simple one: write a substack article about the hobby I love and the creative space I want to be a part of every Thursday (or just every week). Don’t do a lot of prep, don’t turn it into a part-time job, just prove to yourself that you can steadily produce the results of your workings and observations. Next year, I can worry about expanding, spending more time researching and planning, engaging more thoroughly with other members of the community.

But this article, this was different. I have read a few other articles that are somehow related to this topic, and I knew that this was going to be my topic only yesterday. This facet of my game is hugely important to me, and it is one of the darlings I really don’t want to have to kill (precious idea that needs to be let go of for the development project to meaningfully move forward). Because of that, I didn’t want to discuss it in too much detail, but today was the day.

So, I handled this one a little differently. I wrote for a bit to get the rough outline, then I took a break and really sorted out my thoughts. I have no idea if the increased effort will come across, I hope it does, but it did change the timeline and flow of these ideas from my head, as well as their organization and the ultimate message I was trying to put forward. Anyway, please enjoy.

Failing Forward

A topic I have taken interest in seems to have become more prominent over the last few years, the idea of “failing forward.” From my understanding, the concept is that when a players fails on a roll, rather than allowing that failure to halt any progress, acting as a gate, their failure should instead bring more challenge or a sacrifice into the narrative of the event.

Upon first encountering this idea, I didn’t see the importance of discussing this in the hobby. It always made sense to me that some failures would halt the progress of the narrative, driving the play into a new direction, a perfectly natural conclusion to a series of events altered by chance.

As I encountered this discussion more and more, I began to see the nuances and perspectives, and after a while I finally understood the value of just having this idea in mind. Applying this concept is not only about the players, it is also about the arbiter, the group as a whole.

Player-Side

For the players, failing forward means that chance has a much smaller impact when it comes to punishment, or negative outcomes. Failing to leap across the chasm does not have only one outcome, and only applying one outcome to that failure is as boring as playing superman on earth. Telling the player that they sink below the edge, stretching their hands out as far as possible only to barely catch the rough and broken stone, and then immediately leaning back and asking the rest of the players what they do as their companion’s fingers slip over the side, that is dramatic and exciting.

If the character simply descended into the void, the players, whether consciously or unconsciously, would see that outcome as an unfair conclusion to the challenge. Pass or fail never feels good to anyone, and when our academic grading system has instilled the idea of gradients, we feel especially cheated.

If the character catches the ledge long enough for a few fumbling companions to slip and slide, trying everything they can in a panicked rush only to just miss their friend, the loss feels terrible and gut wrenching, unfair only in the sense that the dangerous depths just took their ally away from them. The added drama shifts the blame from the arbiter, and from the dice, to the monstrous world that is nipping at their every step, waiting for them to falter just once and pounce.

Arbiter-Side

Imagine for a moment that you are the arbiter. You have spent the last week preparing the adventure based on the aspirations of the characters. There is a trek through the wilderness, random encounter tables, preparations to be made, and then the arrival at the adventure site where exploration and danger await. Even if you purchased this material, like I did, you still need to spend some time familiarizing yourself with it so that it runs smoothly at the table.

Now, the party has made it to the dungeon and they are carefully making their way from room to room searching out treasure and avoiding or defeating monsters. In my own recent game, playing the Cursed Scroll #1 for Shadowdark, the party made it to a hidden room where some treasure lay in wait. In six coffins there were preserved corpses, each with a 1:6 chance to awaken as a wight when they broke them open for the loot. They made it to the last coffin before I rolled a 1, and if you know anything about Shadowdark, my crawlers did not have any magical offense besides the mage’s magic missile spell (wights are immune to nonmagical damage).

The players rallied. The warriors took to the front and began slashing and stabbing and swinging in a fury. The ranger fell back and loosed arrow after arrow. The wizard went to the far corner and unleashed his magic missiles. Weapon after weapon bounced off the undead horror as his glowing eyes set themselves on the only true threat in the room, the mage. When I locked eyes with my player the terror on his face was matched only by his excitement at the challenge.

Then that player failed in casting the spell, losing it entirely. The monster only had a few hit points remaining, and one of the warriors was a Knight of St. Ydris, with only 1 usage of his demonic possession left. As the wight reached my now truly terrified mage, the priest jumped in at the last minute and cast turn undead. The spell went off, and the horror began to recede. Immediately the party discussed trying to run from it, but it was fleeing from them through the only exit in the room, and after 5 rounds, it would be back, and they had only 1 remaining weapon against it.

In this moment, they decided to tackle the monster as it tried to flee, all 6 characters spread throughout the room, before it had made it out. Their only chance to survive would be to pin it down and beat it to death with the knights class trait. During this scenario, I could have let their failure simply end the party. He failed to cast his spell, it was pretty much the only source of damage, and that monster would return to finish them off.

Instead, I gave them a desperate option: you get a single Strength check with advantage to dog-pile it, and then the knight has to hit it, with advantage, at least twice of his 3 available magical damaging attacks in order to kill it. He could still miss, but there was a chance. If he did miss, the wight would turn over and start life-stealing everyone touching him, and would probably kill most of the party. They took it.

The knight rolled well, and for the first time since we started playing Shadowdark a month ago, they defeated a monster that they didn’t have a choice in facing. Keep in mind, none of the other corpses rose into a wight, so they only knew they were getting treasure. The party had lost 10 characters in 4 games, and though they were up for the challenge, they were feeling a little defeated until this moment.

In short, I used this concept to turn their utter failure into a dangerous gamble that was dramatic, reminiscent of the movies and the fiction we take in as story-seeking humans. This is important for the arbiter as well, because if I had killed the party entirely, would we have even continued in this adventure? After losing every character, would they want to continue playing the content of this zine, let alone Shadowdark altogether? Implementing the concept of failing forward saved all the money I have spent and the preparation I have done while giving my players one of the best games we have had to date.

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From Dice Rolls to Character Advancement

I don’t know if this was just a personal shift or a legitimate evolution of the larger conversation, but at some point the idea of failure applying to instances became failure applying to how characters increase their power. Normally I would make the argument that dice rolls and advancement have little to do with one another in the larger scheme of a game’s design, but in this instance they seemed connected.

How to Become a Master

Throughout my journey in developing my own game system, I have done research across a vast swath of different topics. The topic that is relevant to this discussion is mastery, or how humans learn things and how they progress to become highly skilled, or masters.

From what I have learned, humans primarily master a skill or a subject by practice, doing the thing over and over and failing a lot. I have heard it summed up in this way: a person masters a skill by learning every way to do it wrong, and then just never doing any of those again. What I took from this is that humans learn by failing.

In essence, humans fail forward. We learn by doing something wrong over and over until we do it right, and then we keep doing it right, or we just keep doing it, right or not. This sounds an awful lot like failing forward, but it applies to experience and character advancement rather then checks and variable outcomes for attempted actions. It wasn’t until I was learning about another method for game mastering that I put together how this would apply in a p&p rpg (pen & paper role-playing game…).

Consequences & Constraints

In a previous article I discussed this topic, so I will only cover it briefly here. In order for a roll to matter, for it to feel meaningful, it has to have consequences and constraints. When you tell a player to roll the die, to let chance determine the outcome of their attempt, their action must have a consequence for both success and failure, and it must be constrained.

The consequence could be falling off the ledge and into the infinite darkness. The constraint could be that goblins are right on their heels and will start filling them with arrows and spears if they don’t leap over the chasm right now. If the player has all the time in the world, no constraint, and can perform the action over and over without loss or injury, no consequences, then there is no need for chance to determine the outcome.

Together, consequences and constraints ensure that any time a player is rolling a die, it is necessary, and the impact will effect the narrative, for good or ill.

Consequences, Constraints, & Mastery

If the players are limited to rolling dice only when it is absolutely necessary, and failure is the way the humans learn and become better, then we can combine these ideas to create our character advancement system.

The Zero System

In the Zero System, the rules set I am developing, characters are defined by skills. Each skill is measured by the size of the die, and more dice are used than come in the standard set, including d3, d4, d5, d6, d7, d8, d9, d10, d12, d14, d16, d18, d20, d24, and the d30. The larger the die, the weaker the skill. This means that masters of a certain skill roll a d4, or a d3 for grandmasters.

Whenever a character fails, they put a mark by that skill. After a certain number of marks, determined by how far along in that skill they are, they can go to a trainer and be taught, advancing that skill to the next rank. I have also written at length about many of the parameters of my system, so I won’t go into too much more here. Let’s discuss this in a little more detail, especially what it means for the players and the arbiter.

Encouraging Play

In another article I talked about how the rules of a game influence, or outright determine, how the players interact with that game. This is especially true of the rewards system. How a game sets out the rewards for the players, which is nearly always how their characters progress or advance, has a strong influence on how the players design, play, and think about both their characters and the fictional world.

D&D – Advancement Through Triumph

In the worlds most renowned rpg, players are rewarded for defeating monsters, and as the rules are written, this means slaying them. Experience points, which determine the progression of the character, are only given out for the death of a monster. There are some obscure rules hidden on some page in one of the books about how the GM can hand out XP for challenges, but these rules are optional, obscure, and not nearly as fleshed out as the standard rules. The GM need only flip open to the latest monster to see the XP the players would get for killing it.

This is known to the players as well. At some point they will flip to the back of the PHB and look at the creatures that are there, mostly for convenience (and to aid in the staggered release of the books), and they can see that this is where they get their XP from. Modern video games and a whole host of similar games have instilled this mindset into us as players; slay the monster and become more powerful.

Skyrim – Advancement Through Effort

Another well-known model is the one present in the Bethesda games revolving around the Elder Scrolls franchise, notably Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim. In these games your character advances in their skills by performing the skills. Failure or not doesn’t matter, it’s a single player game, and dying simply sends you back to the last checkpoint or save, so instead they reward the player using the skills that they want their character to have.

Even though this is a video game, and we usually discuss tabletop games, the similarities in how a game encourages play can be understood. The player is rewarded with an increase in power by doing the things they want to be good at. This model is very easy for us to understand, not just as gamers, but as people, because this is how our lives work. If we want to be good at something, we do it over and over again, like writing articles on substack, in the effort to get better. And some of you are making real progress, keep it up!

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Shadowdark – Advancement Through Acquirement

Although fairly new to the scene, the model that Shadowdark uses is not new. In games that are understood to be “old school,” the characters advance by bringing their ill-gotten booty back from the dangerous holes in the ground to civilization. It does not matter how or where they got the goods, so long as the goods are valuable, like treasure, and they bring them back to some sort of safe location, preferably somewhere they can spend or trade their treasure, the player is rewarded with character advancement.

When it comes to how rules encourage play, I have seen a massive difference in my players. Our first campaign together was playing 5e, and the tropes were all present (not a bad thing, just an observation). The solution to every problem was primarily kill it, and anything that stood in the way was a problem. We only began to play Shadowdark after a brief detour through Mothership (another amazing game), but I think the mindset was still shifting as we got back into the comfort zone of medieval fantasy.

The players are no longer thinking about how to defeat the monster, or the enemy. Instead, they are considering whether they can make a new ally, navigate around the nest, or trick the simpler beasts into getting what they want. Rather than looking at every obstacle as a stack of hit points to throw all their combat-focused abilities at, they are considering how they can best achieve obtaining the loot with the least amount of resistance or danger. This approach is encouraged by the rules and the design of the game, and it makes my task as the arbiter truly gratifying.

My Model

I know that my model is not unique, hell I essentially stole the core from Skyrim after doing a massive trek around everything I knew and understood before coming back to it and recognizing that I knew about it all along. What is important is how my game encourages the players to play, how they think about their characters and the fictional world, and how they engage with the challenges set before them.

The Zero System advances character skill through failure, and with rolls being limited to times when there are real consequences for rolling the dice, this pushes the characters to go out and do dangerous things. Shadowdark says that characters can only level up when they have enough loot, so they go out to take it. My system tells the players that they need to practice what they want their characters to be good at, in a risky situation, in order to put those marks on their sheet. Then, once they have those marks, they need to engage in socializing with the world and its characters to find someone that will train them so that they can improve.

These risky situations can be anywhere and at any time. Characters that want to excel in Council, the social and political mode of play, can get involved in the intrigue and politics of settlements, regions, or nations, risking their freedom, and their life, to maneuver into power, and then to keep it.

For the classic feeling medieval fantasy, a character that wants to be a slayer of dragons has to go out into the wilderness, hunt and observe their prey, research for all the existing knowledge, and then ultimately face one in battle. Every step has risk, and danger, and can lead to the downfall of an aspiring hunter.

If someone creates an alchemist that wants to unlock the secrets of natural magic, they will need to venture out into the wilderness for rare and exotic ingredients. Only the remnants of the past utopia will hold the recipes and ancient secrets of the alchemical arts, requiring the aid of daring adventurers to go down into the ruins of a fallen world.

Sorcerers that wish to bend reality to their will have to face a whole host of challenges from rival mages to powerful magical entities. Rulers and political types won’t trust anyone that can turn them into ash with a thought, and navigating a society that sees you as no different from a rampaging dragon will be as difficult as traversing the many dimensions in search of forgotten spells.

Not only do I want my system to allow players to create a variety of characters, I also want the rules to encourage them to play those characters as they were intended. No matter how many sneaky rogues I make for any 5e game, I never get the experience of navigating the back alley politics of thieves’ guilds, hiding from the law, and stealing from mages towers and corrupt oligarchs alike because the system encourages all of us, even the arbiter, to ensure that our challenges are bags of hit points, and that my only role is to come up behind them and stab them for a handful of d6.

Foreseeable Problems

Another trend I have been noticing in the hobby lately is the downplay of “paperwork.” Over the last several years I have run into a great many players that don’t like having to keep track of supplies, rations, carry weights, and ammunition. The players in my own game have left many a thing off their character sheet and expected that they would have it despite it not being written down. They almost roll their eyes when I ask if they have something on their equipment list (they aren’t being rude, they just don’t understand why they should write it down).

When it comes to marks, the players will have to keep track of those as they fail their rolls. I don’t know where this attitude comes from, and frankly as a GM I find it nearly insulting, but my game will require the “paperwork” so many seem to despise.

Other Effects

As I was thinking about this the other day, I made a note in my phone after reading an article related to this discussion. It reads as follows:

Zero/Mastery System

Success = progress in situation.

Failure = progress in the long term (marks).

Extreme failure = potential end.

Extreme success = progress in situation and in the long term (marks).

Something that seems to be staying at the surface of our hobby’s discussions is the idea of variable outcomes. Many people call this degrees of success/failure, so I will call it variable outcomes. Something I have been considering for a while is not exactly combining the attack and damage rolls, but ensuring that a good hit improves the damage. And not only with combat, but any roll can have an additional boost from an exceptional result on the die. But this can be a topic for a later article.

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Conclusion

Until I really started reckoning with these concepts, I just took those moments in a game where I feel disheartened or bored as something that comes with any hobby or anything we can engage with. Whatever it is, it is not always going to be rewarding or gratifying or fulfilling, there are bad days, and that is okay. I can still remember some recent games where my rolls were bad and I became frustrated because I couldn’t do anything, and that wasn’t fun, and my failure didn’t lead to anything except me being excluded from the proceedings.

This topic bouncing around the hobby space is a really good sign to me. Developers and designers trying to figure out how to maximize our enjoyment of our hobby, while trying to make games more intuitive and accessible, is a great sign of the vibrancy and level of engagement. I only wish that some of the bigger players were taking these notes to heart and a least trying to lead the way into whatever future this space has, instead of doubling down on their safe practices to hit mass audience.

In a previous post I was discussing the inspiration given me by this new game I am playing with my Thor’s Day group, Shadowdark. I continued on to explain that I am so inspired that I want to shift my alchemy system, or at the least a version of it, to work with it. I am planning on not only making a version for Shadowdark, but to make my own zine.

Dark Alchemy

Shadow Alchemy. Alchemy Light. Dark Practices. Shadows of Alchemy. Practicing in the Dark. I haven’t nailed down the name yet, which is really important to me (I have a thing about names), but it will arrive when it does. The zine will be an absolute ripoff of the Cursed Scrolls, which I am playing through number 1 with my group and absolutely loving, and I am not ashamed. Included will be a hex region, random encounter tables, a few new classes, some new monsters, a stripped-down alchemy system, and concoctions to boot.

The System So Far

For the last few weeks, this week especially, I have been ramping up my work to convert the alchemy system. I have been doing an overall redesign, aimed at the original target of 5e, but given the streamlined nature of this latest version, I have also been aiming at Shadowdark.

I have returned to the crafting rules given in the 5e books, including the SRD, and done away with a complex measurement and tedious inventory tracking system. The crafting rules involved adding up the total allotment of used ingredients and multiplying them by 5 minutes to determine the crafting time; making a check at the halfway point to determine whether you are proceeding as planned or the whole thing explodes; and then you finish out your time and have a concoction of some sort.

I was leaning on the properties given by the ingredients to allow for an open-ended crafting system, pushing players to focus on the properties they have rather than the recipes they want, and that lead to a whole list of ingredients, a whole list of properties, and a whole list of recipes. Cumbersome, no? So I did away with the properties, and instead I went with a bold word reference.

The new system is recipe focused. It will still have room for creative players, always my primary focus, but this new system is easier to deal with. There will be a list of included recipes, and in those recipes some words will appear in bold. Those words can be matched to the properties of ingredients to determine which ingredients can be used to craft that potion. An ingredient has keywords, and the recipe needs to match them, easy.

The recipes are based on the SRD, as well as some original ideas, and I am sure more will come as I put this whole thing together. But my first major push needed to bring the ingredient descriptions in line with the new format. The old format had each ingredient source, such as a yew tree, with a list of properties available. The new format has each source broken down: the yew tree has bits that can each have one or more properties: ash, bark, fruit, leaf, needle, nut, root, sap, skin, and wood. Not all of these will be used, and some may even have more than one property.

The properties are going to be the words I found that inspired my original property creations. Instead of changing these terms to suit a system, I am going to leave them intact and allow players and arbiters to interpret them as they wish when they create concoctions. I like this idea a lot more than prescribing them as I did before, and it will allow me creative freedom in the recipes I choose to include with the rules.

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The Challenge

My greatest challenge with this whole project is the editing. Shadowdark is concise, inspiring while not being overly verbose, and hugely imaginative in its execution. I have been raised in the 3e, 3.5e, and 5e era of gaming books that go out of their way to include as many words as possible in an attempt to cover every possible variable and outcome. This exercise is going to help me develop the muscles to constrain my writing and reach the point in a way that both delivers the relevant information and leaves just enough interpretation that the players and arbiters will be inspired. Big shoes to fill for my amateur feet.

In the initial stages of design, I wanted the system to be open, so I created the properties, and detailed their workings. The healing property required so many ingredients with the Healing property, as well as 4x that amount of the base ingredient (water, oil, etc.), and then so many hours to create one or more potions. I thought by including detailed rules, as well as supplemental rules for mixing different properties, concentrating more powerful properties into smaller forms, and a host of other rules would allow the players and arbiters to create vast arrays of recipes.

What they would actually be doing is math. A lot of math. They would need to be spending hours either adding, subtracting, and multiplying, which is good practice, or devising a program to do all of that for them. Everyone else would just ignore the whole thing, maybe taking a potion or two and just adding them to the shops.

Shadowdark has a lot of delineation of progress and power established in tiers. This makes it easy to determine which recipes fall into which tier, and then have time and cost variables based on those tiers. One little table for each and every recipe of any tier. The only reason I am including ingredient and source descriptions is because I find them interesting, and as I reach further and further into the magical and strange to create new fantastic ingredients, I think there may be some want of appearance and details of the new fauna.

Aesthetics

The look and feel of a product, of a piece of art, is important to me. Not just me, many of the creators I have paid attention to have talked about this quite a lot. Gamers in this hobby lean toward books, articles, zines, anything with good aesthetics. Good aesthetics isn’t always flashy, expensive-looking colorful art. Shadowdark is one of the most focused games I have seen in a while, right next to BREAK! It is only black and white, and yet it still shines every time I open it. The artwork speaks to the atmosphere of the game, and I want my work to do the same.

As I have been moving forward with this project, reading more articles and watching more videos, I have been thinking about what I want my products to look like. For pieces I release for Shadowdark, I want them to capture that feel, but I want my own spin on it. I don’t want to exactly replicate the unique feel that Shadowdark has, but I do want people to look at my work and think “yes, this definitely goes with the Shadowdark game.” When I was designing for 5e I wanted the same, a similar look with unique twists that stood out as my own.

Black and white is easy, all of the old artwork I want to bring out of the past is black and white. Kelsey Dionne’s devotion to legibility and accessibility is amazing. Simple layouts and sleek rules sets made to fit on a single spread is so approachable, even for an old gamer like me that is used to flipping back and forth in an attempt to understand the 33 pages of rules on grappling. I want to follow in those foot steps, but I like a little more flair.

A lot of the inspiration for my layout design comes from the art in old books, especially medieval manuscripts. I love drop caps. I think it is so awesome to have the first letter of a paragraph be larger, fancier, and to just leap off the page. In keeping with the strictures though, it can’t be too fancy. I still want the reader to be able to understand that first word when they need the information, but when they look at the page I want it to feel old.

The ornamentation of medieval manuscripts is also something I really like. The only problem is that it is so easy for me to go overboard, so I am challenged once again. I figure that the first page of any chapter could afford to have a big fancy piece with ornaments and full page art, but the rest would need little pieces to tie the aesthetic into place. Fortunately they are easy to come by, as so many old books have been scanned and these designs are available. And I love that these were made by people long gone, who never would imagine that their work would end up in a gaming book people could print at home.

The Rough Draft

Below are a series of images I exported from my current rough draft. I am just getting the layout, as well as my new licensed fonts (big step from all the fonts I would just take from wherever), and some of the decorative elements in place. I still have editing to do, but part of the writing process for me is also seeing the final piece with art, probably because my largest mental reference is a bunch of finished game books.

Anyways, I hope you enjoy seeing what I have so far. If you have any comments or questions, feel free to let me know with a comment, and I always appreciate constructive criticism.

For this week, I have been focusing more on what I am going to write next, and then today came and my mind decided to scramble. I read through one of my older posts that had the potential for an expansion, and I was about to start writing a follow-up, and I realized that I had a perfectly good inspiration from today’s game.

My Semi-Regular Sessions

For at least a year now I have had the pleasure of gaming twice a week. Of course, this isn’t always the case, life comes for all of us, but three out of the four weeks each month I have managed to keep the schedule.

The latest game in which I am the GM is Shadowdark. For my players, of which there are only three when everyone is present, I ran the first game as a Gauntlet and ushered them directly into The Gloaming. The Gauntlet was Trial of the Slime Lord, which was a perfect lead-in to the Cursed Scroll 1 material, as the adventure pertains to oozes and slimes.

So Many Deaths

Despite having come into this game directly from Mothership, the lethality is both refreshing, and somewhat disheartening. Losing a few characters is acceptable, so long as the players can learn the curve, adjust, and begin to make progress. To date, we have had three sessions and lost seven characters. Seven. These are not inexperienced players. They are somewhat new, and definitely new to the styles we have been exploring as we cross into and out of different games of late, but they are not carefree and reckless.

In today’s session we lost four characters alone. As they were camping in the wilderness outside a bandit camp, they were set upon by a random encounter. This is not unusual, they have become somewhat accustomed to the random encounters, but this one was big. I followed the randomizing guidelines in the big book, and it turns out that the Willowman, a famed and feared monster that wanders The Gloaming, was right on their camp, and unhappy with their presence.

Given how many PCs had already died, partially because there have only been two players since the beginning of this particular game, they had acquired some hirelings. One of them was immediately murdered in their sleep by the monstrosity, and the other was paralyzed. The one PC that was in camp decided to fight in the hopes that one of the hirelings would get away, which worked.

The hireling made it to the other PC as they were returning from scouting the bandit encampment, but the Willowman was right behind. The hireling was once again paralyzed, and this time quickly slain, while the PC made a run for the bandit camp, hoping to lure the monster inside and have it get caught up with the bandits. Brilliant idea, I thought. It seemed only fair that running through the forest at night would be a difficult endeavor, especially since the PC was trying to stay ahead of the Willowman and its abilities. There was a roll, which was failed, and then a Charisma check, which was failed, and the TPK was complete.

The Discussion

We had 10 minutes left before we normally ended our sessions, so I asked the players, “what do you think of the game right now?” I needed feedback, this game was really brutal. The lethality is a plus, as it puts combat into the unusual context of not being the only solution. When the PCs are heroic legends with long deaths, dying is not going to be a disincentive, merely an inconvenience. They appreciate the survival nature, but the level of brutality and how many characters have been lost so far is making them feel like they aren’t going to get anywhere. And this is the ultimate crux, they are starting to not see a point where they will make progress.

The hexploration (as I call it) is also something they are enjoying. They see the markers on the map, but they don’t really know what they are or what they mean, and several times they have gotten to a location with a mystery. A stone in the middle of a clearing with a carved swirling pattern, four rough insets, and four barrows surrounding. They dug one up looking for treasure only to lose one of their characters to a wight. They didn’t know it was a wight, but they learned something all the same, and then ran for their lives. They are very much enjoying the discovery elements of this game, which I am also, even though as the GM, I know quite a bit about everywhere they could go.

Solutions

We already knew, and I had already mentioned, the option of having regular access to hirelings. Hirelings are ready replacements if a PC dies, they can boost the combat prowess, and they can aid in carrying loot. It would be better if we could find more players, and I have been trying, but they need something to bring them up to the designed standard of the game. This game is designed with parties of 4-5 player characters in mind, meaning that half of that is going to be half as effective.

I recently read a post, I’m sorry I don’t remember which one, where someone discussed the rule in Shadowdark where failing to cast a spell means you lose access to it for the rest of the day. I have known about this rule, but this person said they only resort to that when they critically fail. So if you fail to cast, you basically lose your turn, which is rough, but not nearly so much as losing access to a spell. In my opinion, that would be akin to a fighter losing their sword if they missed. So I have been ignoring it, for now, with a consideration of making the failure window larger. But with only two PCs of late, I have to give them a little more power to help them survive, or they won’t have fun, and then we won’t have a game.

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That Bit About Discovery

When I asked them for feedback, I was expecting it to be about the immediate situation, where we lost three PCs in a matter of 10 minutes playing. But that second bit, the one about really enjoying the discovery, caught me off guard. I knew what they were saying, I had recognized it when they came across some of these mysterious locations, but when they said it it really clicked.

One of the thoughts I have been having lately has been about what the PCs know. A player knows what the GM tells them, and not much more. As time goes on and players exist through their characters in a given world, they will come to know more and understand the world better, but especially in a new game or new world, they know very little. This is because the players know very little. When it comes to games like Mothership and Shadowdark, the guidance for the GM is to give the players as much information as possible.

When I first started hearing this, I was confused, but the more I thought about it, the more it made sense. Give the players as much information as possible. There are things a player needs to know, even if the character doesn’t know it, that allows them to understand the context of where their character is or what they are doing. And the more information they have, the better the decisions they will make, which is the point.

When it comes to discovery, something that is amazing or weird or wonderful but not dangerous or threatening, this really comes to light. I described the swirly stone, the four graves, and the four little indents in the stone, but that’s it. That was all the information that I had, save for the things in the graves and what they had that would do something with the swirly stone, but those details were for me.

Out of fear they left this place, fearing the undead and the horrors that may come down upon them for messing with graves. Which makes sense. But when they returned, they decided that they wanted to know what it was all about, so they started digging. It was a little difficult but eventually they popped open a stone casket to reveal the undead horror they so feared, and they were not really surprised, but they were also rewarded with understanding the world. They knew there was going to be undead, but they didn’t know they were right until they dug it up. And being right is rewarding.

The Feeling

Even though they didn’t fully figure out what was there, and thus gain any rewards or treasure yet, they know that something is there. They know that there is a mystery behind that deadly battle, and that when they return, ready, they will unravel it and be rewarded. This is something I have witnessed very little in my time playing these games; the mystery. It can be very difficult for players to feel that sense of mystery and excitement, to get the players to buy into the situation and leave their general knowledge about these games at the door.

The second little area they found with a mystery in it was another clearing with a ring of mossy stones, and given the time (which is relevant for this mystery) they found only a handful of tiny dandelion petals, the ones you blow off, that seemed to be made of silver. One of the characters has a background as a ranger so I made it fairly easy for him to search the area for clues or something to indicate what this circle was for, and I decided this would pique their interest and leave them wanting to learn more later.

I am intentionally being a bit vague about these mysteries in case anyone reading this wants to play through this amazing zine. When I first read through this zine, I saw lots of places where I would need to fill in the details, given the spartan descriptions and the vague connections between characters and the region as a whole. But I didn’t.

Inspiring By Design

By leaving the details in short form and all the explanations vague, this little zine has built a wonderful little world in my mind. It has given me enough to tell my brain what the parameters are before my fantasy addled imagination fills in the rest of the details or starts making connections of its own. Also, all those details normally included with settings and adventures leaves little room for those connections to be made. Because we are told every little thing, understanding them is akin to memorizing a whole book, which we don’t even do when we are in school. We memorize notes and concepts and inspirational ideas the lead our brains to understand the content in a way that works for us.

Spoilers Ahead

One of the first true monstrous characters the party encountered was Drusilla, the medicine woman of the smallest village. They were immediately suspicious and decided to stake out her little hut overnight (it wasn’t supposed to be overnight, they just wanted to catch her doing something and follow her, but she ended up staying). What they did end up seeing was the werewolf she had been working with, who left the hut late at night, and the ranger followed her.

Drusilla is a hag and she is working with the werewolf to poison the townsfolk so that the werewolf can take their children as cubs, as hers were killed by the local dragon. So, when Victoria, the werewolf, left the hut, I had her go by the village to just peer in through the palisade. I figured a creature, evil or not, that was yearning for children after losing hers, would be hard pressed to not constantly be looking into the town, impatiently awaiting the day she can take her new cubs from the dead villagers.

Once she caught on to the ranger it was a tense situation. She moves incredibly fast and rather than fight in the shadows of the village he opted to flee for the gates. I made all my rolls honestly, and he made it to the gate with only a few hit points left, and as soon as she saw the gates open she fled into the night. It was a tense situation brought on by me having only the most spare of details in which to adapt and create a situation where the PCs would encounter the interesting mysteries going on around them.

Because of those sparse details and vague descriptions, I was able to adapt the situation to the players. I didn’t feel hemmed in, in fact I felt empowered, to put Victoria at Drusilla’s hut so that the players would be rewarded for their ideas, and rewarded in a way that furthers the adventures and events going on in the local area.

Spoilers Over

The design gives me the necessary information so that I can cater the experience to my players and allow them to approach situations however they wish. If they do it smart, they may make it through with less struggle. If they don’t, it may lead to the death of everyone in the party. That dynamic only exists because the game is so brutal, which seems to be perfectly paired with the design of the adventure “zone.”

Empowering the Arbiter

As we are making our way through this, my first real hex-crawl, I am beginning to understand what I have been reading and hearing for years. Maybe it is because I didn’t understand what people were saying, maybe it is because I am stubborn and have to learn lessons the hard way, but I am starting to get why the rules light approach is so appealing. I feel empowered. The creature wasn’t on the random encounter list, I decided that it would be there so the players could learn about it.

Another example is the list of rumors. I have used rumors before, but it has been a long time. When I was preparing for this game, I wrote them all down in my notebook and gave them numbers. I decided that each time they went into an establishment at the settlements they would hear another rumor, essentially giving them a quest without having to go to a quest-giver or look at a job board. I also spent time detailing the settlements, because I like maps, and I like making them. So I just checked the boxes and marked off the rumors they heard. It was obvious, I saw it on their face when I rolled out the first one, but I think they also understood what I was trying to do. To give them the necessary information, remember, give them all of the information, in a way that felt more authentic.

Nothing in the game indicated how or where I should hand out rumors. So I did it where it made sense. In previous games I waited for my rogue players to go into taverns or to walk through markets and tell me, player to arbiter, “I listen to what people are talking about, I listen for rumors.” These players haven’t done that, so I improvised in a way that made sense to me.

Ultimately, this approach allows me to prepare what I need and leave the rest. When I know that they are going into town, I prepare the town, the NPCs, and the rumors they will hear. When they are going to the medicine woman’s hut, I prepare the medicine woman and everything connected to her. When they are going to be exploring the wilderness I prepare the encounters and get familiar with the guidance on determining distance, attitude, and the potential animals that may wander across their path.

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The Intentions of Design

I feel like I have been spinning circles around the same idea, and for that I am sorry. The piece that I want to make really clear here is that I feel intent in the design of this product. I feel that this little piece of a world is a rough layout, a series of ideas, laid out on a little map and ready for the arbiter to make their own. The designer has planted seeds that can spring into something more, all over, and is intentionally waiting for the players, more so than the arbiter, to water these seeds and grow them into something that not everyone will experience the same way.

Only in the last few years have I had any experience with premade adventures. When I was trying to run a 5e RAW game, I opened an adventure book for the first time with the plan to run it. During all those years before, my original group looked down on premades. We always ran our games off-the-cuff, which made us better. As I grew older I realized that we were wrong, and that premades are great for players with less time or who don’t have the trained skills at improv we were given by those who taught us how to play. Even then, not all of our games were great, some were awful.

The difference, the thing that is really blowing my mind, is that the premades I ran before were stifling. There was so much text and guidance, page references and instructions, that I felt that no matter what, I was doing it wrong. With these zines I feel, so far, that I am being given hints and told to flesh them out, if I even need to. The players may never go to the other side of the map, so I may never need to touch those areas and do any further prep.

I feel that this design empowers the improv skills I have had for many years, and maybe it will even nurture those skills in newer and less experienced players. I think that is the future of this hobby, or at least it should be. Mothership reminded me that I need to be able to create and improvise on the spot, that the world that I represent is not static and unchanging, and that the mere presence of other people makes the variability even more volatile.

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Lessons Learned

Right now I am digging heavily into the fourth version of my alchemy system, which will have a bend for 5e and a bend for Shadowdark. I intend on making my own zine, with a few classes and ancestries and a light version of the alchemy system for crafting during downtime. It will also include a hexploration map and an adventure, and the light touch I have been experiencing of late is the perfect lesson to learn right now. I really want to produce a fun and interesting little region, and I think (hope?) that I am actually starting to understand the route I should travel to make that happen. Include the necessary information, as concise as possible, and leave the details for the people playing it. Inspire the arbiter, don’t direct the players.