Omino Spells

This one's about gamifying spell memorization.

I recently read The Dying Earth by Jack Vance for the first time. While it didn't change my opinions on Vancian magic in fantasy roleplaying games, I can appreciate why a bunch of people in the 70s and beyond were like, "yeah that book is cool, let's do it like that." In certain situations, I also want to do it like Jack did—just not every time I play a fantasy dungeon crawler. 

I hadn't given any of this much thought since finishing the book, until a question popped into my head today: how do they fit in there? The spells in Vance's world occupy wizards' minds until they are unleashed, taking up (meta)physical space. Marizian the Magician is so powerful he can memorize six normal spells, or four of the most powerful ones. What does it look like inside his head when he does that? 

Old school D&D cares a lot about replicating the feel of the spell-slingers that wander the Dying Earth. A level 1 Magic-User can memorize a single instance of a level 1 spell. It doesn't care much about how that arcane formula is stuffed into the aspiring wizard's mind, just that it is crammed in there. 

What if there was a game that did care? What would that look like? Well, maybe it'd look like Tetris. Or any video game with a grid-based inventory. Or Mausritter's inventory system. But this time, in your brain! Maybe a novice thaumaturgist starts with a mind hovel and grows in power until they have a mind palace to house their spells.

It just might look like this.

The Mind is a Fill-able Thing in Space

This is a proof of concept more than anything. I will reference various things from D&D, but this isn't a fleshed-out system designed to be used with a particular edition of any existing game.

Anyway, check this out: 

 

So you start with two boxes of space for spells. If you're playing a game with cantrips, maybe those would take up one box, allowing you to memorize two relatively weak, non-damage dealing spells. A level 1 spell like Sleep would take up two boxes. Maybe level 2 spells would take up 3 squares. From there, spells could start taking the shape of tetrominos, like the ones in Tetris.

By Anypodetos - Own work based on: Tetromino Tiling 5x8.svg by R. A. Nonenmacher., CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=8663361

Even more advanced spells could take the form of pentominos, like this:

By R. A. Nonenmacher - Created by me, CC BY-SA 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=4416149

The spell-caster finds or copies spells into their book, each spell has a shape, and every day the conjurer pours over their spellbook, rotating and arranging their spell choices to fit into the canvas of their mind. 

Is it practical? Hell no. Would it be fun? Highly subjective. Would the spells leave your brain once cast, like Vancian magic? Who knows! Has it been done before? Probably! But I'll be damned if I could find it.
 

 

Another Kind of Factions

This one's a draft of faction rules using Otherkind Dice. Which is to say, I haven't tried it. Yet.

I love factions. They're like the MSG of roleplaying games, their inclusion makes everything taste better. I also adore when a game has GM turns that happen in-between sessions. Especially when there's mechanics involved. For me, few things make prep more fun than getting to play a little mini-game during it. 

Recently I was looking at the faction rules in Mausritter. They're great! The goal progression results reminds me of an Otherkind result card, only there's just one question being answered. Which is elegant in its simplicity, but got me to thinking, "what would other result cards look like?"

Design Goals
"What am I trying to accomplish?" is a wonderful question to ask yourself repeatedly when you design something. It's can be easy to get the ball rolling, and even easier to continue chasing it to straight to catastrophic failure. I can't tell you how many times I began working on something, followed inspiration, incorporated it into a game night and went, "well, that sucked." So I started with that north star query.

"Make a faction system that tracks fallout and debt as factions make moves." There it is. I want something that determines how the public and other factions (enemies and allies) react to a faction moving toward their goal. I want factions to be able to interact with one another via debt. 

Faction Stats
As far as this system is concerned, factions have resources, goals, public reputation, faction reputation, and debt.

Resources are what factions use to accomplish their goals. They could be something concrete like a cavalry troop, or intangible like blackmail on members of the high council. Resources come into play in the form of dice, which is determined by the strength of the resource. They can either be standard (d6), diminished (d4), or enhanced (d8). Factions start with two or three resources, depending on their size.

Goals are, naturally, what the faction is trying to accomplish. I would use clocks, or progress marks as Mausritter calls them, ranging between two and five segments (or marks). If a goal seems too big to accomplish in five segments, then it should be broken up into a series of goals. "Usurping the king," for instance, probably has a few smaller goals before a faction could achieve the big one. 

Public reputation is the general attitude of different populations toward a faction. I imagine this to be regional. A thieves guild might start off with a favorable attitude with farmers in the countryside ("stick it to those richie-riches in the city!") but disfavored by the citizens in the city they operate ("that's my purse! I don't know you!"). It could also be done on a smaller scale, like a church that the lower class of a city adore for their charity but the upper class resent for their tithes. 

Faction reputation is how factions feel about one another. I can think of two ways to implement this. The first is simple: two factions always feel the same about one another. So if one faction views another as the enemy, the opposing faction does as well. The other is more complex, and a faction's attitude toward others is independent of their attitude toward them. This would require more bookkeeping, but would result in things like Faction A viewing Faction B as an ally, while Faction B sees them as an enemy and works surreptitiously to undermine them. That sounds cool as hell to me! 

Either way, both public and faction reputation would be tracked numerically. 0 being neutral, with -6 and +6 representing hated and loved respectively. For public reputation, the score would help me roleplay NPCs the players encounter. For faction reputation, it would both help me roleplay faction NPCs and also make decisions during the faction turn. If Faction A has a -3 reputation with Faction B, Faction B is going to interfere with Faction A's plans when convenient. If it's -6 instead of -3, Faction B is going to interfere at every possible opportunity. If it's a +6, Faction B might abandon goals that run counter to Faction A (especially if B is the smaller faction). 

Debt is what it sounds like. One faction can ask another to lend resources. They then take on a debt, which is repaid by lending their resources to the faction that helped them. It's a way to incorporate and track the political machinations of these organizations in their quests for power. More on how debt actually works below.

Does that all make sense? I hope so. Anyway, how do we actually play the mini-game? We grab some index cards, some dice, and prepare for...

The Faction Turn
Factions act in-between sessions, lowest number of resources to highest. Smaller organizations are able to mobilize and act more quickly, but larger factions are able to interfere more easily because of this. 

At the start of a faction's turn, they pick a goal to make progress toward. Then, they select any number of their resources they could reasonably use to accomplish that goal, and grab the appropriate dice. Don't roll yet!

If they do not have enough resources to answer every index card, or they want a better chance of success, they may enter into debt or call in what is owed with another faction to add more dice. They may enter minor debt (d4, owe them 1 time) or major debt (d6, owe them 2 times). If they have negative reputation with the faction they ask for help, double what is owed in return, but once the debt is repaid their faction reputation increases by 1 for a minor debt, or 2 for a major debt. Calling in a debt gives the lender equivalent sized dice to what the debtor received.

Lastly, factions can interfere before the roll is made. For every resource die an interfering faction decrements in size, they can likewise decrease a resource the acting faction is using this turn. 

Now, on to the result cards. Roll the dice and place as you wish. 

Notes: Unless otherwise stated, a new resource acquired from accomplishing a goal starts as diminished (d4) for two turns. Likewise, any enhanced resource (d8) automatically decrements to standard (d6) once it it used.

Does the faction make progress towards their goal?
7+: Yes, major progress (2 segments), and if this results in acquiring a new resource it begins at standard (d6).
6: Yes, major progress (2 segments).
3-5: Yes, minor progress (1 segment).
0-2: No, they suffer a setback (-1 segment).

Does the faction exhaust resources working toward their goal?
7+: No, they don't, and if an enhanced resource (d8) was used, it does not decrement.
5-6: No, they don't.
3-4: Yes, one is diminished next turn.
0-2: Majorly. Two are diminished, or one is diminished for two turns.
If the resource chosen to be diminished is already a d4, that resource is lost instead.

How does it affect their reputation with the public?
7+: Public opinion in the area skyrockets (+2 rep), and word of this is received well elsewhere (+1 rep with another population).
5-6: Public consensus in the area is positive (+1 rep).
3-5: It's split. Some see it as good and others use it as further fuel for their mistrust or animosity (no change).
0-2: The public consensus is negative (-1 rep). 

How does it affect their reputation with other factions?
7+: As 6, but +2 rep with one ally and +1 rep with one enemy.
6: Allies react positively (+1 rep), enemies are neutral (no change).
3-5: If a debt with them was entered, they react positively (+1 rep). Otherwise, allies are neutral and one enemy is upset (-1 rep).
0-2: One ally reacts negatively (-1 rep), and one enemy is incensed (-2 rep). 

There it is! As you can see, there are four index cards to answer. Factions start with a maximum of three resources, which means they will either be incurring debt immediately or facing the harshest consequences for their moves. Likewise, each card has a 7+ result that can only be gotten by placing an enhanced resource (d8) there. 

Like I said up top, I haven't tested this yet. It existed as a couple of paragraphs on a notes app in my phone before I typed it all out into this post. Now that I don't have to ask myself, "what did I mean by that?" I can give it a go. There are some questions I don't have an answer to yet, like, "does lending a resource take it out of play for the turn?" I hope to get my answer by trying it both ways and seeing for myself how it feels. I'm excited to take it for a spin in solo play before bringing it to one of my tables. Hopefully it inspired you to think about different ways you can run factions. And if you happen to try this way out yourself, let me know how it goes!

 

Life is Likely Hurt & Pain

Here in
DUKK BÖRG.

This one's a review. Of DUKK BÖRG by Gem Room Games and Nerdy Paper Games. It's a DuckTales-themed hack of MÖRK BORG.

Let's get the disclaimer out of the way first. This is about as biased as as a review as you're likely to find. One, Dan Phipps of Gem Room Games and I have been mutuals on social media for a few years at this point, I don't remember how many. Talking about games with Dan is a blast. I'm probably going to go into any of his work expecting to enjoy it, even if it's not particularly my jam.

This, however, is extremely my jam. I grew up on a steady diet of DuckTales, Darkwing Duck, Chip & Dale's Rescue Rangers, and Sonic the Hedgehog. You give me a game where I get to play around in those worlds, I am all-in. Hell, just let me be a duck or a mouse, even! I spent an embarrassing number of hours in 2020 playing Animal Crossing New Horizons looking like this:

 

 

 

 

Like, hundreds of hours.

Speaking of which, I should probably pick up Dragonbane at some point. 

Anyway, I bought DUKK BÖRG. Then I read it. Then I played it. Let's get into it.

Part 1: The Book

I backed the physical copy of the book when it went to crowdfunding. It's pretty, in the creepy way that many BORG games are. They nailed that MÖRK BORG-style layout, and between that and the art, it is very fun to look at. It is also less-practical to use at the table because of this. The book has a handy index on the inside back cover, and I saw they have a plain-layout pdf as well. I have ran plenty of MÖRK BORG only using the physical book, so this wasn't a hurdle for me. I could see it being a barrier to entry for others, though. 

 

This thing is fun to read. It is as stone-faced as it is silly. It dares you to take it as seriously as it takes itself (more on that later). The classes, locations—even the magic items—are rife with adventure hooks. The classes themselves nail the cartoon's archetypes, as does the equipment. Those world-ending psalms that are a hallmark of BORG games are just the DuckTales theme song. And like the theme song, they are repetitive. That might wear on anyone brave enough to live in this cartoonish hellscape for long-term play, but the text is challenging you to look at your players with a straight face and tell them what new thing is heralding the apocalypse with an oo-woo-ooo. 

 

Included is an adventure, The Aeonian Citadel. I ran it for the Tuesday crew, so without further ado...

 

Part 2: The Play

There are going to be some spoilers for the adventure. You have been warned!

 

My Tuesday table currently consists of three of my friends I have been playing games with for 8 to 20-ish years. One has played MÖRK BORG with me, the others have not.

 

They ended up making a Treasure Hunter, a Gizmo-Speaker, and a Devotee. Each of them had at least two classes they were interested in playing, deciding on one might have been the hardest part for them. One ended up rolling for it. The clan creation was a highlight for me, and a great way to tie the player characters together. I let them spend their starting silver on gear because the adventure plops you right in front of the dungeon and doesn't really let you leave. 

The dungeon itself is SKRUJ's tower, and it extends up into the sky and down into the earth. The length of it is indeterminable, because travel between each keyed floor includes a random number of unimportant floors. Unimportant, that is, unless there's a random encounter on them. My players got really lucky on those rolls, but luck has a funny way of running out.

 

See, the thing about the tower is that it's a race against time, but time only passes when the characters smell money. There are set, keyed money encounters, but they can also happen during a random encounter. If you smell money too much, game over. Once my players figured that out, the sense of foreboding only increased. 

 

Therein lies the beauty of DUKK BÖRG. The game, and by extension the starting adventure, is so full of Saturday morning zaniness that we ended up laughing and joking around. But it all rests on the bones of the incredibly dangerous MÖRK BORG skeleton. So it might be a funny mental image when a troupe of primary-color wearing ducks with slingshots pop out of a vent, but when it hits you that this is a life-or-death situation the game asks, "who's laughing now?" Like I said before, it dares you to take it seriously. There are consequences for not. 

My players decided to descend the tower, and I encountered my only hiccup in running it. See, I had read the entire dungeon when I first received my physical copy last November, but I only skimmed it before playing it last Tuesday. One subterranean floor has a freezer. 

 

The book tells you what temperature the freezer is at, and another section has a consequence for unplugging it. There's a cryptic label with letters missing on the freezer. Neither myself nor my players could figure out what was in the freezer. I'm not sure if the incomplete label refers to something in the real world, something from the DuckTales cartoon, or something I was supposed to come up with. It put me on the back foot, which was frustrating in the moment. In hindsight, I wish I had read through the adventure again in full and expanded on that dang freezer. 

But that was just a road bump during an otherwise action-packed, laugh-filled evening with my friends. Each keyed dungeon floor they explored was interesting, the multiple encounter tables kept things fresh, they even ended up finding some cool magic items. One of the players forgot he had a pet lemming for half the session, but I've never played a game where a player's pet isn't forgotten about. 

 

They made it to the very bottom vault of the tower, but didn't make it back to the ground floor before becoming indoctrinated cogs in the corporate machine. We faded on them shuffling off, holding orientation papers in their feathered hands. I couldn't think of a better end to our brief time in this fowl world. 

I asked my players if they'd like to take another run at the adventure sometime in the future, when we want a break from whatever else we're playing. After all, they only explored half of the tower. They immediately started hatching their next plan.

I'm excited to return to the Accursed City, because DUKK BÖRG isn't just a pun, it's a pun that's playable. I don't think I can give any higher praise. 

Solokind Negotiation

This one's about using Otherkind Dice in old-school solo play.

My love for Meguey & Vincent Baker's index card dice system is no secret. Recently, I've been gearing up to do some solo dungeon/hex crawling. It seems like a fun way to pass an hour or two, and if it ends up resonating with me I'd like to join the ranks of people running sandbox campaigns for their friends that they also play solo in between sessions. 

As I prepare for my descent into The Incandescent Grottoes, I took stock of what I need. There are many fine products for one-player games—GM oracles, spark decks, etc. I'm using a procedure-heavy game and published material, so I don't really need help with content generation. The one thing that puzzled me was how I was going to treat with the dungeon denizens I encounter. 

I looked around for ways other people have handled this situation. Maybe I didn't look hard enough, but I didn't find much of anything. I'm sure there are brilliant solutions out there, just out of reach of my search-engine skills. So I had to think of how I'd do it. And naturally, I thought of Otherkind Dice. 

Negotiation
When you negotiate with an NPC, use the following three index cards. Roll 3d6 and assign one die to each card. Add your reaction roll modifier (Charisma) to one of the results. If a negative reaction roll modifier would give you a result of zero, treat it as a 1.

What do they want?
6: Help achieving a small goal.
4-5: Something material and common.
3: Help achieving a large goal.
1-2: Something material and rare.

What will they give in return?
6: More than you're asking for.
3-5: Exactly what you're asking for.
1-2: Less than you're asking for.

How will this affect your reputation with them?
6: A great increase in reputation.
3-5: A modest increase in reputation.
1-2: No increase in reputation.

I think Otherkind Dice are a powerful tool for the solo roleplayer. I imagine a solo game only using them could work quite well. I can't wait to continue my solo journey and find other hurdles to overcome with a few index cards and some six-sided dice. 

Wrestling with a White Whale

This one's about grappling.

Has any ttrpg done grappling well? I'm sure some have, just as I'm sure every edition of the world's most popular roleplaying game that includes grappling rules is not among them. Rise Up Comus said as much yesterday on Bluesky, and it got me thinking... how would I do it?

That question opened up a majestic can of worms (sorry, I'm so sorry). What do I want from grappling rules? Well, I want them to be fast. But not too fast, one-and-done is anticlimactic. Dice rolls should be involved, however. In contested rolls! That way my players and I can narrate the back-and-forth as each side struggles for the upper hand. And it should be simple, something I could explain in about 30 seconds. 

Here it is in much more, "these are game mechanics" language. 

A Grappling Contest

These rules use a dice chain (d4>d6>d8>d10>d12>d20). 

When one character attempts to grapple another, a contest is started between them. Each contestant starts with a grappling die, which is a d8 by default. The die is incremented one step for each advantage a contestant has, such as a difference in size, abundance of limbs, etc.

The contest is a series of rolls using the grapple dice. Any to-hit melee bonus or penalty from a contestant's Strength score is applied to the roll. Each time one side loses, their grapple die decrements one step. When a contestant no longer has a die to roll, they have lost and are grappled. 

Well, there you have it. I haven't tested this, besides grabbing some dice at my kitchen table. It seemed fun to me, I could imagine the back-and-forth action that I want out grappling mechanics. Will it be fun for my players? Only time will tell. 

Smoke & Mirrors

This one's about suspension of disbelief, or rather when I fail at it.

Torches in old-school roleplaying games are magic items masquerading as mundane ones. With some exceptions, every torch lasts a set amount of time—usually an hour. Dungeons are often pitch-black and filled with beings adapted to seeing in such places. Yet the light of a torch doesn't attract the subterranean denizens as the delvers explore, illuminating halls and rooms as they go*. Neither does the smell of smoke, apparently.

The smoke! Don't get me started on the smoke. You're telling me dungeon crawlers light a fuel-soaked cloth attached to a stick to explore confined underground spaces? While moving maybe 120' every ten minutes? At worst, it sounds like a great way to speedrun suffocation. At best, it's going to be very difficult to see your surroundings. Because of all the freaking smoke. 

As I mentioned and you likely already know, torches are made from wood. Preferably resinous so the handle of your fire-stick doesn't burn as well. Then you need a cloth—burlap or something similar—soaked in a fuel (e.g. pitch, lard, oil), and fastened to the stick with something that doesn't easily burn, like wire. Maybe the fuel is a pitch or animal byproduct that doesn't produce smoke. Maybe it's common in the fantasy world the game takes place in. But from where I'm sitting it sounds supernatural.

So torches are magical. Or some parts of them are, because what other explanation is there? 

What does the availability of torches imply about the game world? About the labor of said world? How many people are involved in the production of the material components of a torch? And who puts them all together? Is there an infinite supply of them at every town and village? I suppose they may be a popular method of indoor lighting if they're the smokeless variety we see in tv and movies. Or do they only work that way out in the dangerous depths few dare to tread? Are adventurers really few and far between, or does the existence of an ample supply of torches imply a bustling industry of ne'er-do-wells? 

Look, I get it. Everything about torches are an abstraction, one of many found in these games. We could use candles or rushlights, but they're variants with the same problems on a smaller scale. Besides, we're not playing medieval life simulators. Torches exist for resource management, in the light they provide and the inventory space they take up.  But unlike nearly every other abstraction common throughout old school games, this one leaves me with more questions than answers.

So I can't think about torches. But I also can't stop thinking about torches. They aren't really a problem that needs to be solved, yet I still want to solve it. Thankfully, Dan Phipps and I did so a few months ago on Bluesky. You're welcome.

*The referee could, of course, have torch-use be the reason behind random encounters when they happen. But that isn't explicit in most games' procedures. And in a game like Shadowdark, it's actually less likely you'll encounter a wandering monster if you have a light source.

x-in-6 Roll to Retain Spells for OSE, et al.

This one is an untested idea.

What if the spell slot tables for casters in OSE and other such games was instead their x-in-6 chance of retaining spells of that level after casting it? 

Okay, surely this has been done before, right? But if anyone's talked about it online, I could not find it. If you know of anywhere this already exists, feel free to let me know in the comments. If you've tried it yourself, by all means share your experiences!

Anyway, I will likely give this a go the next time I run a game in the B/X family. Vancian magic is probably my players' least favorite part of games that use it, and I'd like to see the fun they'll have casting every spell they know at least once, maybe more, a day. Would this get messy in high-level play? Probably, but we've never reached high level before wandering over to another game. I'll cross that bridge if we come to it.  

Also, I much prefer roll to retain vs roll to cast. My tables have played roll to cast games a bunch over the years, and none of us particularly enjoy that aspect. I've taken to houseruling roll to retain into any such game we play. Null results won't stop me from playing something, but the less there are the better if you ask me.

P.S. Yes I know in Old School Essentials that would mean a 14th level Cleric would be able to cast infinite level 1 spells. That sounds really cool to me.