Monster: Bones of Balance

 This week we come back with another monster! It feels like it's been too long since I made one and the recent talk of undead and spirits got me in the mood to work on an undead.

    The below monster is a result of mechanics based on Monster Extractor II. I cannot overstate how much I love these tables to get the creative juices flowing. It gives such a good guideline to start with. 

    When using the monster extractors I strongly reccomend that you tweak your results as you go and pick and choose things you think work better than what you might have rolled. Let the monster come to you and stick with your gut as you roll out options.

 The Bones of Balance 

Blog d100: Snacks at the table

          Another post this week inspired by d4 Caltrops: d100 subject list. This week we're talking about eating during the game.

 Rolled 73: What are the best snacks you've found that work during a game?

    This is one that when I saw it I hoped I would roll. The act of sharing a meal with friends is very important to me. I use the phrase breaking bread a lot when I talk about this subject, because to me that is what it is. We gather for a communal meal to sit and enjoy each other's company. The act of cooking for my friends and sharing a meal means something to me. So we're gonna get a little (lot) off topic and hijack this topic to answer the question and talk about what those snacks really meant. 

    Getting the now out of the way: I play online now because I moved to a country where my ability to speak the language is similar to that of a pre-schooler. My snacks now are usually just chips, a local candy brand that I've come to love, and popcorn. My wife got me into the habit of eating my snacks with chopsticks to avoid a mess and it makes me wonder why I wasn't always doing that. 

     Some of my fondest memories of the table come from this sharing a meal. I come from a group that used to block off an entire Saturday once or twice a month and play for the entire day. We would rally at someone's house before the sun had risen. We would quietly set things up at the table and share coffee while someone made sausage biscuits and gravy. One of us would throw some eggs in a muffin tin and toss it in the oven, someone else brought this unhinged device to microwave bacon and turned the microwave into a fire hazard but made the crispiest bacon I've ever had. This sounds messy, like a great way to get grease on your character sheets, and it is! some of us would keep our sheet in a plastic sleeve from a binder page, some of us wouldn't. Rich's sheets were always the greasiest things. But we shared breakfast and discussed the weeks or month prior while the DM did his last minute prep and reviewed things. The shared meal at breakfast was important to us for a lot of reasons.

    Around lunch time we wouldn't take a break, usually we would break out chips, pretzels, canned soda, and the fixings for sandwiches. Lunch was not one of the important meals and we might take a short one while the DM made a sandwich or take fifteen while the smokers took a break (often to buy us time to think about our next move). Occasionally we might order a couple of pizzas or pile into a car for a trip to Macca's or Arby's. A light lunch and snacking through the session got us to dinner. Snacks for me personally always included almonds, corn nuts, dry jerky, or something else small and crunchy that I could shovel into my mouth by the handful like I was feeding a furnace. I would always bring 4-5 of those tall cans of Arizona iced tea, drinking something like 6 times my daily value of sugar but always willing to share these.

    Dinner was also important. This one also meant that we took a break. In the summer some of the guys would go out and load up the grill with burgers, dogs, and chicken breasts. No vegetables by the way. I don't know why but other than french fries we didn't eat vegetables during this. I remember a visiting player asking about this and someone asking if he wanted to make them, then it was never brought up again. In the fall and winter we would throw a stew in the slow cooker or a instant pot. I loved making Tex-Mex stew over rice for these games. We often took a break for dinner and would sit and discuss things we had been watching or reading. Sometimes we would break out magic cards and play magic over dinner. We always made way more than we needed for dinner so people would be comfortable going back for seconds or thirds over the course of the rest of the night. We would pick back up after dinner and play late into the night, picking at the leftovers and cleaning out the snacks we brought. Sessions would end around 2-4 in the morning and after we would spend at least an hour just talking before everyone scattered and headed home. 

     I look back on these times so fondly. I deeply miss these extremely long game days. I miss sitting at a table with friends and sharing meals while catching up on everything we missed. This group is one I played with for a decade, we had people come in and out but that vibe never changed. We had younger players some high school guys, all the way up to a guy in his 70's who liked to tell me "my youngest grandchild is older than you" for some reason when I was in my mid 20's. In this age of digital games where everyone is playing online I really feel like something important about games is lost. I am not breaking bread with friends for an entire day, I'm hopping on Discord and playing for a paltry 4 hours and feel that I barely had enough time to run the game before it ended. There is a social element that is lost online. I live in a tiny studio apartment now and lack the space to host like I used to but I long to play with a group of people at the table, people I am friends with, people who's lives I want to hear about and share their burdens and joys with them before we all get into our game of pretend with math rocks. Games were once a full day, shared human experience, and food was how we made space for each other inside that time.

 

This post is the result of Buster over on 19 Sided Die laying out a challenge to me to cover the whole d100 list of topics. Since my last post he has had three, including one that covered this same topic! check out "Are Holy Symbols Required" "Where does lantern oil come from" and "Gaming Snacks". Additionally Bombgoblin has answered the question of "What drugs are in your setting?" with a... unique answer and I strongly suggest checking it out.

Monster, Lairs, and Battles

Lair Actions
    Something I really love that 5th edition D&D did was lair actions and legendary actions. For those of you unfamiliar with them lair actions are special actions the monsters can take within their own lair, such as making part of a cape collapse. Legendary actions are given to those monsters and foes who are a cut above, used to signify bosses of adventures, these are actions that allow them to act slightly out of initiative order to do a short list of things. I always thought these rules were fun and really lined up with the DCC philosophy of "monsters don't follow the rules", stated in the monster section of the rule book. Giving them these options contributes to making them mysterious and frightening. 

    In general my players have been smart and careful enough to avoid fights with monsters in their own lairs, luring them out, baiting them to another location, or simply destroying the lair before starting a fight. So I've never been able to really use lair actions in DCC until very recently. I gotta say it was a great time. The players fought an evil magician with his scarecrow minions. They went in supremely confident that they could trash this guy... and then he activated every scarecrow in the room for a free extra round of actions from them and the players immediately realized the danger they were in. It totally changed how the battle felt. It went from confident magician stomping to panic and filling the room with smoke and fire in a single round. Had they baited this magician out of his keep he wouldn't have been able to do this. 

    This really felt like it added something, everyone remarked that the fight was a lot of fun and despite things going sideways quickly they were having a good time. This is something that I really think fits into the philosophy of DCC and to make it lean further into DCC we could go as far as making it's lair action into something it rolls on a table to determine it's random lair action. Even a short d6 table could really make the  concept of a lair action lean into the identity of DCC more than it already does.

 

Legendary actions

    In truth, I've not had the chance to use this. If I'm being totally honest, I keep forgetting. The way I run is a lot of improv and off the cuff, so as a general rule, I don't have set stat blocks ready to go. I borrow from things I've read, I improvise in the moment, I copy something close enough. For something like these Legendary Actions, my style of running is really bad at having those. So I cant speak to this as anything resembling an authority. However, this feels like the philosophy of DCC. Giving a big powerful threat these special things that allow it to break the rules just a little lines up with that "monsters don't follow the rules" line. It also does something to make the monster or foe more dangerous while giving them complexity instead of just bumping up the numbers. In theory, if you were to lift it 1:1 from 5e you could make a whole lot of panic happen at your table when a character spell burns like crazy to do something devastating and the foe uses one of these legendary actions to resist it. I think there is a discussion to be had here over this one and I am open to that discussion.

 

 Windup Attacks

    A D&D youtuber who has been playing since the old days did a video about this, Telegraphed Attacks and that is where the idea came from for me. I've used it once or twice and always to great effect. The idea is simple, we've all played a game where the bad guy winds up for an easily avoided attack, you dodge and come back swinging. At the table this creates an environment of risk and weighing options. Maybe you know your friend already spent their round in the attack range and you need to decide if you're going to get yourself or them out of the way. Maybe you think you can bring down the foe before he brings down his huge sword? Failure to get out of the way of such a big and telegraphed attack should be punished. It should be crippling, an automatic critical, or some other effect applied to the characters who didn't escape the incoming attack. I've used this to have the battlefield suddenly altered, characters sent flying, and weapons and armor broken. It changes the flow of combat, no one wants to find out what happens when the ogre swinging a battering ram like a club connects that windup hit. It doesn't need a map either. If you're like me and handle your fights in a theater of the mind, its easy enough to explain that the foe is winding up an attack and you are in the range of people to be hit. 

 

I know this was a bit of a short one, I just really wanted to share this. This is one of those things that I found and liked while playing another system. Yes, DCC is my home system and the game I use to run almost everything these days. But experiencing playing other systems, even for a short time, is important. Even when I hate a system, there is still something somewhere in there, a small treasure to plunder and take back to my home system, something to enshrine on the shelf and make my home system just a little more personal. 

Class: The Spirit

Death is not the end 

 In a recent post I talked about the undead in Hodas and where they come from. One of the things I mentioned was that, should a character die and failed to be rolled over, they have a second chance to become a spirit, mentioning a class coming soon. Well here is that class, The Spirit.

    When we played our first game of Wasteland one of the facts a player decided about the world was that Spirits are somewhat common, common enough that the living don't see issue with their family having several spirits living with them. In past games that hasn't come up as much as I would have liked it to, In one game we had a player lose their character and become a guardian spirit to a minotaur clan but we didn't really interact with the idea much. I was originally going to use a class that I swear is real and I looked very hard to find in place of writing my own spirit class but I couldn't find it, even with a lot of help from the nice people on the DCC Subreddit (they did show me a lot of cool classes I didn't know about thought!). So now we have The Spirit, a class for Hodas that gives a player a second chance after death and allows them to continue their story in some fashion, maybe even find a way to claw their way back to the living.

    I will admit, the spirit class can get powerful at the higher end, rolling a d30 for it's actions and using 2d7 or 1d16 for it's damage can get pretty deadly. But that works for them! Remember that the spirit should be temporary, if it doesn't find a way back to life they will eventually fade away or worse, turn their awesome power against their friends when they lose their mind from holding on for too long! The spirit may get powerful but it will be something to be concerned about too, maybe even creating the villain for the next campaign. 

The Spirit

Champions of Tibault: session 2

     Been a while since I posted on this story! I've been trying to stick to one of these every 2 weeks but it's not been working out that way, too many things I want to talk about on the blog. So here is our next part, session 2!

    Just like with the previous entries on this one, I'm gonna talk about them a bit before. The minotaur clan hero here is a piece of that world building I've talked about where spirits are somewhat common. in a minotaur clan, the spirit of a hero is actually an important thing. The minotaur have gods, but they don't pray directly to their gods or make direct offerings. The clan's hero acts as their voice to the gods, petitioning the gods on behalf of their clan. The hero can be given rest when another member of the clan who has performed heroic deeds passes on and replaces them. As long as there is a single living member of the clan, the hero will persist. When we publish the Minotaur of Hodas Zine this will be covered in more detail. 

    Magic items we see today included the dagger with a soul trapped in it that takes over the bearer under the right conditions. This is something that I remember from playing with my dad when I was little and first getting into RPGs and it's just a small way that his games have influenced mine. The player naturally got a save and several red flags but pushed forward, no risk no reward. The other magic item is the crown of the mog king and gosh did witherbone's player hate it. Moglins will not recognise witherbone as the moglin king and their strange and illogical inventions will work for him. Additionally each day, 1d4 mogs per HD of the wearer, will find their way to the wearer. The moglin king is determined by the death of the last king and whoever wears the crown, making this a dangerous position to be in.

     

Session 2:

The party is faced by a surge of moglins rushing up the stairs at them and a terrifying moglin champion. The moglin champion is massive in size and strong enough to break the stairs with his fists. Eskel fights valiantly against it alongside Witherbone and Deranged while Talshu takes up position to bring her daggers down onto the creatures back, ending it’s life. With their champion defeated the surviving moglinss flea down the stairs. The party seizes the momentum and rushes after them hoping to catch them during the route. When they reach the bottom they find many dead moglins, all headless. A faint blue glow from one of the passages into the tombs gains their attention and they encounter an apparition, the spirit of the minotaur clan’s hero, Seoras Macphaidein. They explain that they are not here to loot the place but instead kill the mogs. He charges them with killing the moglin king and the party agrees. Upstairs they find hundreds of mogs in the great hall. Through his familiar Witherbone generates an acidic fog cloud that snuffs out hundreds of lives in only a few minutes. The party considers the morality of their position for a moment before laughing about the funny screams the horrible little mogs make as they die. With the great hall cleared the party rushes the mog king who flees and is stabbed in the back by another mog who steals the crown. Four more mogs repeat this before one escapes with the “elite” guard. The mogs are chased to a treasury and swiftly slain. Witherbone looks at the twisted and ugly crown of the mog king and places it on his head. Deranged finds a strange dagger with a light in the gem that adorns it. They look closer and in a flash of lightning Deranged is no more, an ancient cleric known as Balthazar now inhabit’s their body. They return to Seoras and are rewarded with The Lilly of The Hero. upon returning to Tibault the party lies to Orkov about their findings and fold a feast for their friends and allies with Orkov weaseling his way into the feast.

 

Judge Toast House Rules Vol2

     If you've been reading my blog for a while you know I love house rules. I love that every table has their own rules they run by. It creates such a diverse ecosystem in DCC. No two tables seem to be the same and I think that is something really special about this game.

    So this week I'm gonna offer up a few more of the house rules at my table. For those interested, here is the first part of the post: House Rules Vol 1. Keep in mind that these are general rules, I have others specifically for classes and those will definitely be in future installments of this series.

 

Fellowship:

This is talked about in This post. Keeping it short, at the end of each session I have the players award each other a few experience points. They have to say why they are giving these points out, even if it's as simple as "I'm glad you made it today". This is a small amount, usually each player has a number of points equal to the number of players and cannot award themselves any.

 

This has a whole story behind it that is told in the original post, so I'll keep this one brief. This came about as a way to get the players to really pay attention to each other's actions in the game. It gets them invested, they are looking for those moments where they can award other players. 

 

Permanent Injuries:

Pulled from the pages of D.A.M.N. (at this time I am unable to find a link directly to the zine so here is a review), I like to use the permanent injury table presented there. When a body is rolled over successfully, a point is not deducted from an ability score but instead they roll on the table and take the permanent injury.

I love this one because a point of ability score damage isn't all that interesting to me. Yes, you lost a point and something happened... but what happened? Do you have a limp? Are you an inch shorter? Is a nerve pinched in your shoulder? This tells a bit more of a story and has the added bonus of getting my players to actively seek out means to fix these issues. They hate to find out that they won't be able to sit comfortably in the tavern anymore, or that riding a horse will cause them painful discomfort and will seek out means to correct this. So it's not just an injury table, it's a push to adventure.

 

Infravision:

Infravision is explicitly the ability to see heat signatures in the dark. Just like with thermal vision, details are limited but fresh footprints do leave lingering heat for a few moments.

This is not explicitly a house rule, as the book explains it but not clearly. In the Elf, Dwarf, and Halfling section it mentions that these races have Infravision but only says they can see in the dark out to their given distances. Later, in the corruption section we see a clarification that this allows the sight of heat signatures. I always made this assumption because I'm a bit of an old school guy, I handled it the same way older editions of D&D did. This is more of a clarification than a real house rule but it is still on my list because it's often forgotten.

 

Martial Arts:

Similar to how anyone can (in theory) benefit from a patron bond but wizards and clerics get the most mileage out of it, we have martial arts. This means that anyone with access to a teacher, time, and money, can learn a new way to fight and push them to new heights. Each martial art has a base option and "spells" similar to a patron bond that you do not get right away.

This one is mostly because I just really liked it. The idea of warriors having their own sort of patron bond just really hit with me. This can have as much or as little of an influence at your table as you want it to. The school of martial arts could have needs, it could issue quests for more training, just as a patron would. It has seen a little play at my table and when it comes up it performs exactly like you would expect calling on a patron would, it's big, it's flashy, and you take great risk showing off your school's secrets so brazenly.

 

  

Helmet Law & All Shields Must be Splintered:

Exactly as presented in the pages of Crawl #2, these allow players to take a critical to the helmet or shatter their shield to eat a hit.

These are at my table because they are fun and cinematic. Every now and then a player remembers they have the option and it turns the tide. Someone shatters their shield and it always seems to change the momentum of the battle. At my table at least, it feels like the tide turns when someone makes this desperate move, everyone locks in and it becomes a battle for desperate survival that causes the players and their characters to look just a little harder at the fight and find a way out. 

 

Battle Fury:

    The first time a character misses an attack each combat they are to take a d6 and place it down in front of them with the 1 facing up. This face on the die is added to their attack and damage rolls. Each time they miss they increase the number on the die to a maximum of 6. When they hit, this die is removed from in front of them until they miss again, beginning the process over again.

 This one is lifted directly from the Index Card RPG. I use it because while failure and difficulty is part of the fun of telling a story and the dice represent the uncertainty, no one likes it when you spend the whole session not getting to contribute in any way because you fail every attack, save, spell check, and check above a DC of 5. Yes, the dice tell the story and sometimes the story is that you had a lot of bad luck that session... but I personally don't enjoy sitting at a table, rolling my math rock, checking my numbers, find out I failed, and then continue to do this for 4-12 hours while everyone else gets to contribute directly to success in combat, skill checks, and spells. This from a Judge who thinks that failure can be interesting and fun, often more than success.

 

 Sleep Rating: 

Beginning at 1st level, characters roll a d10 and indicate the result on their sheet as their sleep rating. This represents how heavy of a sleeper they are. A 1 represents a character who is a heavy sleeper and a 10 is someone who sleeps so light it may cause complications. This is rolled when a noise that might disturb a character's sleep is made, rolling under your sleep rating means your character wakes up to the sound. The character is still woken normally by being actively woken up by another character or taking damage. Someone sneaking simply uses their roll as normal and sleep rating is not rolled against a sneak attempt, nor is it rolled when someone is sneaking unless they roll a 1.

This one is almost as old as my history with tabletop. It came from playing a game that didn't really have rules baked in for passively waking up from hearing something, much like DCC doesn't. I like to have a way to decide if the characters heard that unusual sound in the hallway and if it woke them up or not. 

 

 

 

That's it for round 2 of my house rules. A lot of these come from experiencing other systems and taking little pieces I found worked for me along the way. I really think it's always a good idea to read through other systems, maybe even take a short break from your usual game and try them out. You never know what gem you'll find in a rule book you wouldn't normally pick up. As always, this isn't me telling you how to run your own games or saying that my way it better or definitive, this is just what I do at my table and wanted to share.

Spell: Animate Lump

Art by Lex Cazimi

     Recently I have found myself feeling the need to try my hand at writing spells, something that I find a little intimidating because it can get rather long and coming up with an escalation at each jump always feels a little overwhelming to me. Recently Nick, from Breaker Press Games made a video where he made a spell for DCC using Knave 2E's system of naming a spell and then worked from there. This video really got me in the mood to give making spells a shot. Doing what he did in that video is definitely in the cards for us but today we have a spell that I've been thinking about for a while.

    So this is how we get Animate Lump, the 1st level wizard spell. This was made after I read over the spell Breathe Life in the core rulebook. I like the idea of a wizard animating things. What I didn't care for with that spell was that it was both not swingy enough and didn't offer enough control. That seems like it might contradictory and it is! What I mean is that when this spell is cast, the most pathetic of your options are temporary. As it is written, this is fine, because the spell doesn't have a cost component unless you get to the really high end. On it's higher end this spell allows the creation of golems and other animated guardians at a steep price with a great amount of control over what comes out the other side. 

I think there is room for two options to expand the ability to create constructs.

The first is linked below, Animate Lump. This allows a wizard to create a permanent servant that, for the most part, isn't better than having a hireling but does allow a creative mage with gold to burn to create a useful and potentially interesting tool for dungeon exploration or small conveniences such as a torch bearer that can and will advance down a trapped hallway without a second though. The trade off is that it's costly. the circle costs 100gp in materials, the golem costs another 50gp. It takes one day and one point of spell burn. this is a steep cost at lower levels and allows the wizard to experiment during down time at higher levels when money is a little more available. 

 The second... I think the creation of golems under Breathe Life offers too much control. Magic is supposed to be unpredictable and dangerous. I think that the creation of a golem should work similar to sword magic. There should be dice rolls, there should be powers that you never expected to be added to the golem. There should be strange things that you couldn't foresee that are a part of the golem's creation. I think, when I am more familiar with writing spells, I'll write myself a higher level spell that emulates the nature of sword magic in the creation of a golem or animated construct. 

 

Here is Animate Lump, I hope you get some mileage out of it!
Animate Lump