Blog d100: Recent Conflicts

     We are gonna cover another Blog d100 question, courtesy of d4 caltrops fun table which I really enjoy.

 

Rolled 92: What was one major conflict/war in recent memory?

 

    This is a pretty fun one! I'm actually going to use this to talk about a couple of different conflicts, one pretty fresh, the other not really in the living memory!

 

Drebas Civil War 

    The most recent one is the civil war happening in the city-state of Drebas. This is the direct result of player actions and it's still up for debate if the campaigns that are shaping Hodas will be part of the version of it that gets printed. On one hand it creates a rich world with a lot of loose ends created by players and myths left behind for anyone who gets the zines to interact with, on the other hand everyone could have a fresh Hodas to be the first legends in.

    So, this civil war! Tensions between Goblins and Kobolds in Drebas have always been a little tense but the Kobolds are happy to remain in the sewers and undercity while the Goblins are happy to let the Kobolds have the dark places. Unfortunately a certain crew of pirates may have started the city down the road to a civil war. From the Kobold's perspective, a prophet of their new god told them they had a right to the surface and led them on a holy pilgrimage to take what was theirs before disappearing. Now they believe she will return to lead them in their war against the goblins someday. From the goblin perspective these Kobolds were lead by a wanted criminal to the surface based on a lie. Then, in a later game which the diary hasn't been published yet, the party enlisted the aid of Kobolds to attack a fortified position in the city. Now the Kobolds have a fortified "embassy" on the surface from which they are causing problems. I fear what happens the third time a group of PCs enter this city.

 

Mutually assured destruction of the gods 

    Another, less recent conflict and one that I try to lore dump often because it explains the greatly diminished human presence in Hodas, is the war between the old human empire and the gods. Five hundred years ago Humans used to absolutely dominate the known world. They were masters of arcane magic and granted great divine gifts by dark, twisted, elder gods. The hubris of man grew too great and they decided they no longer wanted to offer prayers to the gods but to capture and bottle them for their power. Naturally elder gods took exception to this and wiped out all humans on Hodas, save for a single city to remain as their base of worshipers. Humans, ever spiteful, decided they needed to respond in true M.A.D. fashion. They cast a spell that removed the names of the gods, their depictions, memories, and knowledge of the gods from the memory, minds, writings, and art of the entire world. Because I like gods level of influence tied to the amount of worshipers and offerings, this meant those elder gods were bared from the world. It also meant that humans effectively lost much of their understanding of magic and now their final city, Last Bastion, is a crumbling city which loses critical infrastructure every year.

     

    This is the reason humans are so rare in Hodas and why every other race has been able to stretch their legs so much. The new gods of these races don't even come close to the power of these horrible evil gods that man used to worship and would be powerless to stop them if they existed together. Further, this allows new human gods of lesser power to slowly work their way into the setting. I've been using gods of the real world myth to slowly place their avatars and champions into the setting, using cults and divinities (while making big changes to the things I really don't like about their creative choices). Last bastion has something to say about this but that is a post for another time.   

 

 

As always with these I want to highlight other people doing this challenge or just making things from that same table!

This time we have:

Types of undead from Buster over on 19 Sided Die. This is one that I also answered and love to see another person answer the same question!

Also from Buster we have "It's okay to be under prepared" where he talks about a ruling he wishes he had handled differently. He also made a fun post talking about what games he would like to run eventually "I'll run it someday"

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Furies of Hodas, The abandoned children

     I've been having a really hard time just getting something onto the page this week. I wrote up another d100 blog post and started to roll up a sword but it just didn't feel good coming out. I decided to just type of a conversational post about the race of Hodas that I had the most input on. This isn't going to include their class write-up, That is for a later post as even recently I've been eyeing the class for a few edits for clarity and balance against it's fellow Hodas classes.

     Furies were chosen as one of the races of Hodas while I ran Wasteland Without Epithet. The player in question backed out of the process early, abandoning them. The other players didn't think much of it but I really liked the bones this player gave them to work with. He determined that the Furies liked coffee, practiced martial arts and divination, that they hated supernatural horror and evil. He determined that they were extremely Lawful, with no chaos in their hearts (naturally a PC could be the exception to this). He determined that the Furies are stubborn and beautiful, that they uphold a set of laws that only they know, they worshiped the scribes of creation (who I later decided were the actual participants in the game of Wasteland itself, the players), They lived in hidden communal citadels in the high places of the world. These felt like good bones. I couldn't just leave them on the cutting room floor. So despite being the person running Wasteland, I picked them up and made them my own. 

    They became a class that felt a little like a warrior monk. Mechanically they had a deed die in the form of a smite, only accessible when fighting the enemies of law. They were described as unnervingly beautiful and loving martial art so they were handled like a monk, their AC derived from their personality score, their beauty is hard to focus on in a fight, it's captivating, unsettling. They gained a lesser augury ability, a simple wheel and woe system. something that felt vestigial but gets a lot of use at the table, they may remove their feathers to make tools and weapons, the creative players have fun with this.

    Away from the mechanics over the years of playing the furies have gotten more and more fleshed out. People would play them and make up new things or give inspiration that fleshed them out as a people. We established that Furies leave their communities to become worthy, fighting the enemies of law and eventually returning to the sky citadel. Over time that slowly changed. Furies are essentially immortal as long as they are not slain. That time frame changes so much about them. When you encounter a Fury in Hodas it's possible they have been there for hundreds of years. These fast living races around them leaves their mark. We slowly decided that the Furies who return to the sky citadels might actually be bad influences on the young who leave for the world below. To walk with the men who live in the mud, the mud men. The average Fury has a sense of superiority to these short lived fools... at least at first. The truth is that most Furies never return to the sky citadels. They realize the importance of remaining on the ground to protect and guide these mud men, to pull them up from the mud. Some Furies will never learn this lesson, they will return to the citadel after slaying an enemy of law or leading a crusade and they will perpetuate the cycle that the mud men are inferior. Most Furies find that love and compassion override their sense of superiority and they remain among the mortals. 

     Originally Furies in Hodas had wings. As many experienced Judges know, flying at low levels can be difficult to work with. So it was decided that Furies bind their wings in wrappings of law, swearing not to unbind them until they are worthy of returning to the sky citadels. Then we started to question how that might get in the way. I cited things like Hawkgirl, Hawkman, and Angel who all bound their wings neatly in their back. Then questions of "how do they wear backpacks?" started to pop up in games. Recently we've settled on the bindings being more symbolic. They have no wings, they wear a sort of harness or string, rope, chain, or similar item which acts as the binding that rids them of their wings until the binding is removed. So that is how it is now, their feathers simply appear in their hands as long as they can make the plucking motion.  

    The gods of the furies were described by the player as "the scribes of creation". given how religion changes over time due to the countless reasons that it does, it was decided after he left the game that they worship these scribes as the creators of the perfect world and law itself. The scribes created a perfect world and moved on to create another perfect world. Only after wasteland was done did I, with my love of the meta possibilities, decide that the scribes were the players themselves. Those who gathered to create the world of Hodas. The 8 scribes of creation, my friends. Six of the scribes had very active roles in weaving the tapestry of creation, one only named her chosen people and then left, leaving them to be twisted by random happenstance and chaos. The scribe who made the Furies, their personal scribe, gave details about them but walked away. The Furies interpret this as they were simply perfect with less need than the others. 

    Later, a Patron I wrote called The Architect became a part of their story. This patron was a character from my old superhero games, the product of a game called "True Self" in which the players were put into the world of superheroes I ran as themselves. The Architect has a long, boring, complex story but for the purposes of being a patron, he claims to be a "bored super wizard" and claims that he didn't create the world, but he did plan it out and lay down the foundation, after that the world created itself. This architect became the patron of a player's Fury character. She immediately integrated the architect into the faith, declaring that he was a subordinate to the scribes, their words weaved creation onto the tapestry but the architect laid down the blank tapestry for them to begin their work. This player was one of the people who was there for Wasteland and knew exactly what she was doing.

     Coffee was mentioned about the Furies. It was decided that Furies make the absolute best cup of coffee in all of Hodas, which meant that the setting had coffee and we could expand that to others. Goblins make it stronger, strong enough to cause stamina damage, but Furies do it best. This extended to other things. We decided that there was a special type of weapon, but not armor, in the setting, called Fury forged steel. These weapons are only ever made in things Furies are proficient in, darts, javelins, spears, short swords and other similar weapons. Fury forged steel grants a non-magical +1 to hit and damage, demonstrating their superior craftsmanship.

     We decided that furies were heavily influenced by Greek origins. Their names are all Greek in origin with only players being the exception. They dress in a manner similar to the ancient greeks, though more revealing to take advantage of their striking beauty. Their art, weapon designs, and sensibilities lean towards a generic, homogenized ancient Greek feeling, not leaning too hard into any one of the many cultures that made up ancient Greece. 

     As far as classes go there are currently three versions of the fury. Our standard one, as described above a sort of warrior monk who fights with fury forged steel or nothing at all. There is a largely untested Qill of the scribes version who is more like a cleric. They see themselves as a more direct instrument of the scribes than others, gaining spellcasting and lay on hands but losing out on their smite deed, instead adding their attack bonus to both attack and damage. The Quill of the Scribes loses all weapon training in order to come closer to their beloved scribes. The third option is called the Fury Speaker. The speaker is a bit of an edge case to the furies. They learn the words of creation itself to string them together for magical effects. Right now the Speaker uses a sort of free form magic system using the tables from Knave 2e to get their words that the player directly sits with me and determines at least a few options while leaving others open to on the fly spell creation. This class required a lot of trust between Judge and player and out of everything I've ever written it is one of two (the other being the Ooze) classes I would caution that the player should be the right fit for it lest they spend an inordinate amount of time on their turn hemming and hawing over the words they wanna use. In both cases, the Pen and the Speaker, the Fury becomes something with access to some kind of magic and in both cases they are seen as an outlier in Fury society. The Quill is seen as an extremist who had come closer to the scribes than other furies to gain miracles from the Scribes. The speaker however, is picking up the words of creation that the scribes left on the floor of their workshop and learning them by inscribing them on their body through ink or scars, they are seen as almost heretical to the rest of the their people, pushing the limits of exactly what is acceptable.

     If you're still here, thank you for reading my talk about the Furies who have kind of become my favorite race in Hodas. The players in the games have had such a big influence on them after they were initially put into the game. I didn't intend to write an essay about Furies today but it's what came to me when I decided to write about something I like. The base class for them is probably coming soon, still being balanced. If you have ideas, questions, or thoughts I would love to hear them! Maybe I'll put out similar posts about the other races of Hodas, the Goblins, Minotaur, Mountainborn, Ooze, Kobolds, and Featherfolk all of which are shaped by the players in the same ways. So thanks for coming out and reading this! 

Champions of Tibault: session 3

 This week, I introduced a foe to the party who was obviously evil and a political opponent in a good position to keep the party from just killing him. Wounded Animal, the featherfolk. In Hodas Featherfolk names are sounds, when introducing themselves or talking about other featherfolk they use those sounds. translating those sounds into words is done for the benefit of people outside of featherfolk culture who cannot mimic sounds. Featherfolk often choose their favorite sound as their name, which paints a hell of a picture for this fella named Wounded Animal who runs an arena where men face off against beasts. Everyone immediately hated him and you'll see in later episodes how deep that hate runs.

    The beast in this case was actually an allosaurus the setting's first introduction to the fact that there are dinosaurs running around in the setting. I love dinosaurs. I think I never grew out of that phase of being a little boy. When this setting was being cooked up in wasteland I was constantly thinking about how to integrate dinosaurs into the setting. This armored human and his unknown heraldry introduced mystery and danger that the party just ignored and went on to proudly proclaim that they had killed a dragon, sometimes changing the story to "we have slain a satan" as a joke. The setting took them at their word though, they are called dragon slayers, this allosaurus is the first "dragon" that has been seen in more than 1000 years and it is already creating a mess of rumors through the setting. 

 

 

Session 3:

The session began with an invite to meet with the featherfolk businessman, Wounded Animal, at his home. The party debated this, discussing his obvious cruel nature with a name like Wounded Animal. Ultimately they met with a goblin in the city named Obedient who tasked them with locating a single large gemstone, any kind, worth at least 100gp.

Deranged met with some dwarf smiths in an attempt to sell an artifact and finds that the dwarven concept of ownership is different from everyone else. This lead to a disagreement between the dwarven smiths and Deranged who got frustrated and challenged them to an arena battle. Ultimately Aerin agreed to represent Deranged and defeated the dwarven champions.

Feeling charged from their winnings the party met with Wounded Animal. The beastmaster charged them with capturing a beast in the nearby village of Sweetwater and bringing it to him for payment.
Arrival in Sweetwater was met with joy, someone was here to defeat the great feathered monster that had been eating its people daily. The party rushed to the lair of the creature and set an ambush. At great risk they ambushed the beast and decided they would not be bringing the creature back to Wounded Animal, he would be too dangerous with such a creature. With the death of the beast the party found the corpse of an armored human in the cave it was making it’s home, not decayed enough to be from the old empire but wearing heraldry none of them recognized. Bringing the beast back to the village the party is heralded as heroes and treated as such. The villagers agreed to make what leather they could from the creature but made no promises and sent the party on their way home with as much of their sweet whisky as they could spare. 

On the return trip the party encountered the furies Electra & Max, and the goblins Open, Honest, & Clear. They explained that they were trying to look for a way into the forest of Evernight and invited the party to make camp with them and share stories. In the morning they parted ways, having made friends.

When the party finally returned to Tibault they quickly settled their contract with Wounded Animal, glad to be done working with the twisted little bird. They were also approached by Phedrus who they offered to share their reward from sweet water with, making nice with the minotaur who runs the largest arena in the city.

Spell: Horn of Enigmatic Acceleration

     This spell was inspired by Nick Baran over at Breaker Press Games. He did a video a while back where he randomly generated a spell name using the charts in Knave 2e. I really liked this and took it as a challenge to myself, who struggles to write spells. 

    This originally started as a lesser and confusing haste but after looking through other spells and remembering that spells like Ekim's mask and force manipulation exist I decided this spell didn't need a strict linear progression like most others, that sometimes it's okay to make a spell have different effects at different levels because magic is unpredictable in DCC. So here it is:
 

Horn of Enigmatic Acceleration 

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 cave 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.