Blog d100: Stories From Games

 Another post in the blog d100 series, the challenge came from Buster over on 19 Sided Die and the table comes from d4 Caltrops. As always, if you make a blog post based on this challenge or even just that table, please let me know in the comments! I would love to link other blogs in the OSR sphere.

 

Rolled 16: Do you have any stories from games that players cannot stop talking about? 

      In short, yes, plenty of them. I've played with mostly the same group of people for decades now. There are stories they remember vividly. All the ones they talk about the most come from having someone join our group and totally miss the memo on the tone. I'll give you one of my favorites below, it's a long one, fair warning.

The Fall of Steve Galaxy

    This was a superhero game. I told everyone involved that this was supposed to be a superhero game. This was repeated often as we rolled out our characters using palladium's Heroes Unlimited. So a player rolls up a guy with some space and gravity themed powers, he could make holographic projections of his memory, he could turn into a void of stars, tractor beams, a couple other small things. His character is named Steve Galaxy, I didn't know at the time it was a lazy mimic of Steven Universe. His character showed up in a space suit with helmet and everything. He did a hero machine portrait with a bunch of buckles hanging off the suit and a helmet full of stars. It looked pretty good.

     

    Other important characters are Grimsby, a rat man made using the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles rules who was super fast and had super hearing. Also, Hex, a witch who was the mystic study hero category, basically a wizard similar to Dr Strange or Dr Fate. Hex was a returning character and had some history in the setting.

    The setting of this game was a city that had been bottled, like Kandor. The villains in the city greatly outnumbered the heroes and quickly cut up the city into territories. The police and heroes maintained control of only a single sector of the city, unable to push too much further.

    

     The session when Galaxy first started to show signs of madness began with the PCs having just defeated a villain, his slice of the city unprotected. This villain was also the wizard category, he had been drawing power from his entire territory by skimming a little bit of mana off the top of every person in it every day. With so many people he was really powerful, The previous session faced the players with no choice but to kill him, knowing that he had a backup body somewhere else and killing him would only remove him for now.

    The Heroes decided that the people in this part of the city needed to be moved to a safer part. They made a deal with a villain named Glimmer, who owned another part. He would take in these people... but Galaxy realized that he wasn't getting a reward for this. He demanded Glimmer give him something in exchange for all these people. Grimsby protested briefly but was pinned to the wall with a tractor beam, Hex was not present, she was looking for other heroes in the city to help with the move. So Glimmer offered Galaxy a house, a really nice one with all the bells and whistles. This seemed to make the hero happy and he accepted.

     

    The plan was for Galaxy to use his powers to make the people think he was the messiah figure in their worship of the villain that used to protect them, and lead them on a pilgrimage to safer lands, the promised lands. This was accomplished easily when he used his powers to mimic the wizard they defeated.

    Hex, out in the city was able to find a crime fighter she knew well, a vigilante named Slayer, and his team of crime fighters. He was horrified that the Heroes were handing over all these people to Glimmer and said he would protect that section of the city with his team, not to hand over the people to a villain.

    Hex agreed and called Galaxy and Grimsby on the radio, she explained that Slayer was a hero, that he would protect the people, that she had known him for years, that he could be trusted, and that the people shouldn't be placed in a villain's hands. 

 

    Galaxy's player looked across the table to Grimsby's player. What passed between them in their minds in this moment I'll never know. Galaxy's player simply said "do you wanna trail of tears this shit?" and Grimsby's player agreed. While the rest of us were reeling from the horrific choice of description from their plan they started to lay out how they told everyone that "Slayer is coming to kill you, leave your stuff and run!" working everyone into a mass panic and starting their panicked rush into Glimmer's slice of the city.

    We rolled some dice and a few people were trampled in the panic. I described this to them and they shrugged, "the price of protecting my subjects" Galaxy's player said.

 

    Slayer himself went to the hospital first, to ensure that anyone who couldn't be transported was safe and not left behind. He took his team with him to deal with looters and sent his right hand man, Copperhead, to go talk to Galaxy who he assumed didn't get the message.

    Copperhead catches up on his motorcycle and flags down Galaxy who is flying overhead. Copperhead explains that there are people to protect this area now, no one needs to be sold to a villain. Galaxy explains that he is not going to do that, he has a house waiting for him. Copperhead takes out his gun, a small automatic, and aims it up in the air at Galaxy.

    Out of game, Galaxy's player knows that automatics in this system are dangerous, even to superheroes. He knows that if Copperhead empties the magazine he has a real chance of losing half his hit points.

    Galaxy lowers himself into the crowd, using them as shields, "I'm their god now Copperhead, They will follow me." Is all he says. 

    Copperhead understands this and knows he can't handle this alone, he gets on his motorcycle and leaves. Galaxy's player declares that he waits until copperhead gets up to speed and tries to tractor beam the motorcycle out from under him, openly declaring he wants to kill Copperhead. Fortunately he misses and Copperhead gets away to report to Slayer.

 

    For a brief moment Galaxy has clarity, he actually stops the crowd and the player is thinking about what he's doing. Then Grimsby empties the magazine of his weapon into the ground and starts the stampede again.

 

    Not long later Slayer makes his appearance, in his own way. Somewhere in the distance the pair hear a gunshot and a bullet ricochets off Galaxy into Grimsby's leg. They ask where the shot came from, the players angrily demand to know exactly where the sound came from... in an open field with an echo. Grimsby's player reminds me that he has super hearing. I tell him that is important as the second shot rings out and hits his leg after bouncing off Galaxy, now that he knows to listen for it he is able to tell the direction. I tell him it is coming from behind them, near a bridge they just passed over. This doesn't quite track because Galaxy is being hit in the front. The players never communicate with each other about this. Galaxy simply flies in the direction of the sound while bullets continue to bounce off him and into Grimsby. 

 

    Eventually Grimsby's resolve breaks, he picks a random direction and runs. We roll it, I laugh and show my notes to another player. He randomly chose the direction Slayer was in. So Grimsby comes face to face with the vigilante. The rat has super speed but Slayer is significantly higher level and has quickdraw. Slayer wins initiative and quick draws a tranqu gun, pumping Grimsby full of enough sedatives to knock out a horse. Grimsby's world goes dark.

    Meanwhile Galaxy has found the source of the gunfire, or at least the decoy Slayer placed. He finds a 9mm glock that has a device attached to it and is loaded with blanks. He quickly gathers that every time Slayer pulls the trigger on his presumably silent weapon, this thing fires a blank to direct attention away from him. He decides he is going to fly in the opposite direction of the remote gun, guessing (correctly) that Slayer is in that direction.

     

    Grimsby comes to and his legs are bandaged. Slayer explains that he's not a medic and Grimsby shouldn't move too much or his bandages might come undone. Shortly after this, Hex arrives with the rest of Slayer's team of crime fighters. Grimsby figures he's beat for now and waits, quietly getting his rat hands out of the zip cuffs that aren't meant to contain someone like him.

    Then Galaxy arrives. He assesses the situation and immediately declares that he is going to try to kill everyone.  He says he is going to create a vacuum bubble around them and declares that everyone dies instantly in a vacuum. The more experienced players at the table remind him that this is a game with rules, his power actually takes 1 minute to knock someone out, 5 minutes to kill, as the rules say. The people below, a mixture of PCs and heroic NPCs start to react and Galaxy flies away at his best speed.

    This is Grimsby's moment. He snags a flashbang grenade from one of the PC's a military style hero, and pulls the pin, dropping it at his own feet. This buys Galaxy enough time to get a lead. Grimsby recovers slowly, his super hearing causing his ears to suffer incredible damage, but he breaks his bandages and crawls into a sewer. Slayer sends most of his team after Grimsby. Hex grabs Slayer, puts him on the back of her broom, and flies after Galaxy. Galaxy has a lead and they have the same flight speed but Slayer has a gun.

    Shots ring out and Galaxy is injured, losing control of his Void form and falling from the sky. Specifically, Slayer targeted Galaxy's arms, not wanting to kill the lunatic. Galaxy plummets and says he's going to tractor beam the ground. With both his arms being shattered and flapping like wet noodles. He somehow manages to land the attack roll, landing safely on the ground and running into the woods, bleeding profusely.

 

    Hex and Slayer land. The pair puts together all of their shared skills as hunters, detectives, and crime fighters to track down this man who is bleeding profusely as he runs through the woods, while the player is loudly saying he shouldn't be able to be tracked. They follow the blood trail and find that it leads directly to a prostitute... alone in the woods. It's obvious to Hex and Slayer that this is Galaxy using his holographic projection power to change his appearance. 

    Slayer growls, "you could have been anything." and it feels like this old vigilante might not be talking about just what Galaxy could have turned into.

 

As Slayer takes out the tranquilizer gun Galaxy nods his surrender, unable to raise his arms, "gotta know when you're beat." he says slowly.

    When the trigger is pulled he rolls a d20 and declares dodge, shouting, "but that shouldn't stop you from trying!"

    He fails to dodge and his world goes dark and the tranquilizers put him under.

 

There is a part two in this story where Galaxy makes some... Interesting choices in custody but this is already feeling a little too long. If this gets some interest I'll follow up with the other half, maybe tales from past games will become a regular thing here.

 

 

As always, here are the links to others who have been running the Blog d100 or replying to the original post:

 

Buster on 19 Sided Die gave us "I'll run it one day"

 

Over on Mythscribe we got "What are four legendary treasures one might search for in your game?"   

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Magic sword: The Retort

 
The Retort was forged with clear intended purpose. The Elven weapon master who built it poured his people's disdain for self important eternal creatures who think they are clever. Other immortals who play at being clever by playing games of riddles with many answers, ego stroking mind games and gotcha contracts. Elves believe that these things do not make an immortal clever but make all immortals look petty and foolish. So in an act of extreme pettiness The Retort was made as an answer to all these other immortals, an answer to all their games, riddles, and contracts. It served well in the hands of the elven people for millennia, where it was drawn, games ended, and contracts burned. Eventually the sword was lost when a mortal with their own agenda attacked the elven people.

    The Sword then became the subject of many elven campaigns against the human kingdoms. As these wars went on, the world changed around the elves, Dragons went into hiding, Demons stopped bothering with the mortals, Sphinxes dwindled into numbers they couldn't recover from, and wizardry became fringe hobby and seen as madness. When The Retort finally found its way back into elven hands they deemed they no longer needed it and laid it to rest in a place of honor, a grave similar to that of an elven hero, where it remained until it was stolen, its status only discovered when the seals on the tomb were broken to answer a resurgence in self important immortals. 

 

The Retort

 +5 Elven Chitin Neutral Long sword

16 intelligence, communicates through telepathy and speech

 

4 Banes:

• Demons: +1 damage
• Dragons: Beacon of Hope, Berserker fury 
• Sphinxes: Banishment
• Wizards: Death Dealer
• Elves: Berserker fury 

Special purposes: 

Forged to take no sides and seek the void.

 

Powers: 

• Type I: Detect traps 40'
• Type II: Flame tongue 
• Type II: Whirlwind attack
• Type III: Spell Healer 

Omen:  

Weapon sometimes appears as a non-magical short sword or dagger, when attuned can be changed at will 

 

Attunement:

Wielder must refrain from making any noise for 1d6 days

 

Beast Chitin:

Critical range increased by +1

 

Elven:

Wielder may use strength or agility for to-hit and damage rolls 

Monster: The Thought Collector

     It sure feels like it's been a while since I've done a monster post! A lot of long winded discussion style posts but not a lot of the usual immediately usable monsters, magic items, and classes I really enjoy putting out. So this week we are going to get back into monsters a little with the Thought collector!

 

    The thought collector can be a good hazard on a recent battlefield, or even a threat that shows up in the middle of a fight and potentially wants to claim the memories of a fallen party member before the body can be rolled over. If using this to make the idea of leaving a body behind to come back and roll over later less appealing I would suggest that there are signs of it's presence in the area before it shows up. Corpses who clearly died from one wound but then later got a fresher wound in the head should be plenty. Used in this way it can put pressure on recovering a body right away. If showing up in the middle of a fight it becomes an element that might not immediately be known and could put a little more fear into PCs, pushing them to really consider how much they want to risk.

 The Thought Collector

Judge's Toolbox

 I saw a video a while back of this person's GM's toolkit. It was a super lightweight kit they brought with them when running games to make their life easier. Most of my stuff is still in storage so I had to find pictures of them from a while back but I figured I could post the pictures of what I use, talk about it, share links to what I can, and hopefully give you some ideas for your own table.

    I wanna start this off by saying that my setup is super low budget. I don't like to use a lot of minis or map pieces. I find that, with the way I run, mostly improv and in the moment decisions, the use of a lot of map pieces and stuff doesn't really work for me. I come from an era of using rocks and pennies and whatever we could find as minis so keeping things low budget has always felt good and a little nostalgic. The idea behind this is that I could carry this with me easily and run a game almost anywhere with my backpack of books I used. 

With as many of these entries as possible I'm including links to show their price. I strongly encourage you to check your local equivalent of  a hobby or craft store before purchasing from amazon or any online retailer. If you go to a local craft store you're going to be able to hold it and look at it and really decide if this is what you want. They also sell them in much more manageable amounts, you don't need one pound of glass beads when a small bag is more than you'll ever need. 

 

Lets start off with the top of the toolbox, meeples. You can get these on amazon pretty cheap on amazon in a huge number. You can get them in wood, or plastic or even transparent plastics now it seems. I liked wood, just felt better in my fingers. coming in so many colors makes it easy to distinguish what they are supposed to be. It's easy to take a note card and place it on the table with meeples on it with "= orc" to make a key if players are having a hard time tracking it. This is such a low budget way to have a lot of minis out on the field for normal sized or smaller foes.

The first tray on the top. I went ahead a numbered this one to help with explaining everything. Tray 1 is easy, its just a few dice. I count at least 3 d20 in there which makes me think I probably put at least 3 sets of the standard dice in there in case anyone forgot theirs, or someone drops one off the table into the shadow realm

Tray 2: Glass beads that are flat on one side. They are really helpful for a lot of things. marking spots on a map, sometimes I use them to track enemies, sometimes they are just used to mark light sources or things that I'm encouraging the players to interact with that aren't monsters or NPCs. They are also super cheap. I think mine came from some random planter I walked past in the trash but they can be purchased in absurd amounts cheaply too.

Tray 3: Super simple, wooden disks from the craft store with a number on one side and a skull on the other. you could use them for death saving throws or something else but I used them as enemy tokens. It helps for people to be able to say "oh I'm gonna go to attack number 1" and track them, then flip them over when the players kill them to track the bodies. I remember looking online and finding they were much cheaper to purchase in a hobby store, almost half the price I found online. Here are some of them for you to look at online and get an idea of how much they are.

Tray 4a: A two parter because I couldn't comfortably keep the other part of them in that tray. These are just little card holders that have a cardboard piece that slots in. for a while there I used them for the PCs. the players could draw their character, write their name, doodle a little symbol for their character, anything really on the card part and then it was easy to tell who was who and who was were. I offered to print off art and glue them to the cards for players but that never really happened. 

Tray 5: A collection of pawns in different colors. sometimes they were used for PCs sometimes they were for hirelings or NPCs who came along with the party. These came before the cards in tray 4 and were mostly phased out aside from NPCs after a while. I originally got them for a board game I was making but ultimately never used them for that because I found out I could build my prototype in tabletop simulator.

Tray 6: Similar to tray 3. I had larger ones for larger foes. The neat part is these are usually measure in the half inch so they always lined up with the grid. I had some long ones for mounts along with the ones shown there.

Tray 7: The all important spare pens and pencils. I always assumed everyone would show up with none and expected them to go missing so for pens I raided a supply closet for these stylus pens from work and got mechanical pencils. Buried under there are long erasers in those plastic sleeves that you click out like a pen, I love them and it saved a lot of mechanical pencils from never being able to refill.

 

Tray 4B: Talked about above as the other half of the top tray.

Tray 8: There are more wooden disks that fill out the slot of "large" size monsters and enemies, along with some peel and stick glass tiles that have numbers on them. I never really used those for much. One time in 5e I used them to track exhaustion, another time I used them to track traps on the floor the players had found, once I used them as a stand in for monsters. I'm not sure I would seek these out when I rebuild this box.

Tray 9: A bunch of dry erase markers in different colors. I don't typically use minis or scenery pieces and I draw out my maps so having a bunch of colors was usually pretty helpful to get hazards and details across. not the same tray but next to 9 is wet erase that filled out the same function. It was usually an either/or situation but there was one single time that I pre-drew the tiles and had some of them in the wet erase so I could wipe away the dry erase parts and make the map "crumble" away. This tray also includes a sand timer of 1 minute which is often used to put the pressure on players in tense moments. When I take it out, it usually doesn't even mean anything, it's just there to cause panic.

Tray 10: Those wooden pieces I mentioned earlier that are used for mounts. they are a little long and take up just over two 1' squares. 

Tray 11: Even more little wooden disks with numbers on one side and "X" on the other to signal a body. these tiny ones are used for swarms, like my favorite little monsters, vegepygmy.

 

On the bottom of the box I really managed to cram a lot of stuff in there and this one has some things that are not pictured or are in later pictures. For example, not pictured is a standard deck of playing cards. I have never really had a use for them but I always imagined it could be useful some day or in the event most people don't show up at the last minute we could still play cards.

Number 1: This is a wooden salt cellar I found in a thrift store, I keep one complete set of DCC dice in it. It probably takes up too much space but I really like it.

Number 2: Note cards. Any table needs these. one side is blank, the other side had lines. Great for making quick notes for players to hang onto, place something down on a map. I'm confident no one reading this blog needs me to talk more about what I do with these, I'm not breaking any new ground.

Number 3: A dry eraser and yet more pens. Its been so long since I used these that I don't even remember what was special about these pens. the eraser was super helpful to have on hand because of how I did maps, which you'll see later.

Number 4: Sticky notes. Yet another staple at any table. as with note cards above, I'm not breaking any new ground here.

Number 5: These are stolen from Cranium. That is the player pawns and the die from cranium. not pictured, I 3d printed 3 more, one in silver, one in white, and one in black. These became my default PC pieces for a while. Someone drew little faces on them to show the direction they were facing. The die was just thrown in there, because why not? On occasion I would have a player who called bullshit on the dice that were rolled out in the open and be salty their character died. I would offer a chance to change their fate if they could call what color the die would land on before it was rolled. I encourage people to plunder old board games from thrift stores and the trash for pieces of their games. I'm still kicking myself for not taking the pieces of mysterium and throwing them in with this stuff.

Number 6: Have I mentioned that I used to run 5e? These decks are from a company called Nord Games. I got into 5e because friends wanted to get into the hobby and had discovered D&D, so I ran the system they had already read and asked about instead of DCC which I had been running for years at that point. The decks I owned were a happy middle ground between DCC and 5e for how criticals are handled. I wanted tables with fun options, The players wanted big numbers and were deeply opposed to critical tables because a certain famous GM didn't use them on his show. As for the treasure decks, I like treasure to be randomly generated unless you specifically are hunting down a named item and have gone on a quest for it. The last one there, the luck deck, if I still had this I would be using it in DCC. The luck deck was used to add something meaningful to rolling a 20 or a 1 outside of combat. On a 20 you would get a card you could play at any time that could alter your own die rolls or add some beneficial effect to the game. On a 1, I got a card that I could hang onto and hit you with later to penalize a roll or cause some doom. I will never forget a player evaluating how hard his save would be, realizing he had a slim margin of success and then shouting "you're going to the shadow realm!" when I slapped that card down in front of him. Bastard still made his save.

Not Pictured: Plastic poker chips. These got a lot of mileage as fleeting luck tokens, fellowship tokens, markers for resources players might forget to track, number of days traveling vs number of rations. Just a whole lot of use.

Not Pictured: Plastic bottle rings. When you drink a soda you get a ring of different colors depending on the brand and flavor. The colors could mean anything and I used them to indicate status, bleeding, on fire, stunned, paralyzed, poisoned, you name it. I kept them in so many colors, I had a little tray I kept in that bottom box.

Other things I liked to bring with me in my bag with my book and dice include the dry erase dungeon tiles and a binder that was my Judge's screen. Pictured below, on the left is the boxes of the dry erase tiles and on the right is the binder I used for my screen. I really liked that binder because it bent at that crease along it and could be used as it's own stand.

 

 The dungeon tiles were really nice because you could do chases, extend rooms as needed, spin them around while making rooms to mess with people's orientation as they tried to map. They were a lot more to carry than the classic roll up map, for sure, but I preferred these because it presented more chances to mess with players in a way that is less antagonistic and more funny. They can be found at Roll 4 Initiative where you can get them in hexes and even different patterns if you don't want white tiles.

The binder opened and folded in the back with a piece along the bottom to make it sit open. I had quick reference tables for both 5e and DCC in mine because I was switching off between running both of those at the time. It takes up more space than a normal judges screen but I could get so much more information this way, including full critical tables and fumble tables. Its hard to tell in this picture but it's standing on it's own there super nice to have on hand. 

 

 

 I hope this maybe gave you some ideas for stuff to use at your own table for low budget fun.
 

 If you're thinking of building your own Judge's toolbox like this I cannot stress enough that no single tray should ever cost you more than $5, these things can be done super cheap and still be super effective.

 If nothing else this is something I've wanted to talk about for a while now but was pretty sure I would never find these pictures again. If you made it this far, thanks for reading!

Class: The Fury

 A short while ago I wrote about The Furies of Hodas. I talked a lot about them and gave a lot of context for their development and how they got fleshed out into the class they are now. In that post I mentioned that the Fury class was coming soon but needed to have a few things edited for clarity. So here we are. This still isn't the final version, none of the classes presented on this blog are, consider them the rough draft for the Zines we hope to put out eventually. until then, enjoy!

 

The Fury 

Old School Treasure Troves: 1st edition DMG

 

If you’re here you’re probably at least passively aware of the 1st edition AD&D Dungeon Master’s Guide. It’s an old book that is kind of hard to get your hands on these days. There are some archived digital versions out there with the images and formatting removed to preserve them, and there was a reprint a while back. To me, this book has always been an important reference tool, even when playing other games. There is a lot here that can be useful. So I would like to talk less about this book as a whole, there are plenty of people who cover it in detail, and more just the parts that I find myself referencing often.

Plants

First up on this list is the herbs, spices and medicinal vegetables table. Found on page 220 we have a sizable list of plants and their uses or “powers”. This list is very hit or miss for accuracy, plenty of things listed here are correct and more than a few kill you if you consume them but are listed to have healing properties. Even with that, this is a good table to have on hand and reference in the moment. Yes, you could take a more comprehensive work and use that as a reference but why would you need to? At the table, in the moment of the game, not everything needs to be 100% accurate to real world equivalents and this table gives you something fast and easy to reference for this purpose. 

Gems

The next table I reference constantly, given the slightly magical nature of all gems in Hodas, Reputed Magical Properties of Gems. This one starts on page 26. It gives us a list of gemstones and minor magical properties affiliated with them. For example it claims agate grants restful and safe sleep, it claims a ruby brings good luck, and jade imparts skill with musical instruments. This table is a good leaping off point to decide the powers of a magical gem. In Hodas this table contributed heavily to a similar one that is used to reference the very real minor magical properties of the gems in the setting.

Potions

Another table I reference often is Potion Miscibility. This is a short section on page 119 that covers two scenarios: when two potions mingle, and when you drink a potion while under the effects of another potion. Especially for DCC this feels so right. A world where magic is chaotic and unpredictable and you just mingled two pieces of that unpredictable mess of magic? Be worried. This could result in an explosion that deals 6d10 damage, it could poison you, or it could make the effects of one of them permanent. There are some more robust versions of this table out there but this is the one I like, it’s short and it’s fast to move through.

NPCs

This next section is a whole lot of tables that start on page 237 and give you a whole lot of tables to generate an NPC. I typically use this one to make a character’s mentor or important NPC they might have picked up through the Tome of Levelup or declared they have from their time between levels 0 to 1. I have my own version of this on this very blog but I’m not entirely satisfied with it and have been working on a re-write. Until then, this section is a good reference point to give a whole lot of information about someone and it’s seen a lot of usage at my table over the years.

Alignment Tongue

Alignment Tongue is something that it’s possible for a character to roll as a language in the DCC rules. It would be a fair assumption to say that it is simply the secret language spoken by agents of that alignment and then move on. What is presented in this book is a pretty detailed description of what this actually is and at my table we go by this description. The short version of it is that it’s basically a sort of thieves cant for an alignment. And just like thieves cant, it is limited in it’s applications. You will not be having long, fully detailed conversations about anything and everything in your alignment tongue. You will be able to establish things like intent, ask about hunger, and health but not much more. Speaking this to someone who you are not sure of their alignment can be messy. 

Descriptions

Something that is common in this book are tables of descriptive words. Things you can read once or twice but every time you do read it you’ll come away with another word to help bring your games to life. I am not ashamed to admit these tables expanded my vocabulary. There are sections of descriptive words for, gemstones, potions, dragons, dungeon dressings, hirelings, castles, and many more. This isn’t found on any one page. Most of these are scattered through the book in somewhat random places and others are near similar information. 

Economics

This last one might sound boring but hear me out! On Page 90 there is a discussion about economics framed around the context of PCs. It touches down on the fact that PCs bringing an influx of gold will flood the economy. It speaks to things that don’t get talked about often, taxes and trade. Why wouldn’t the local lord demand a cut of the money you pull from the dungeon that is in his lands? Why wouldn’t the PCs be charged a toll to cross a bridge along the way? It talks about a silver and copper based economy. These are all things that can matter as much or as little as you want them to and if you do want them to, this gives you a good starting point.

I could go on about this book for a long time and talk about tons of sections, but I wanted to keep this post connected to the tables and parts I use the most. There are so many other helpful pieces in it that can really bring some new ideas, or old ones, into your games. It’s one of my most used reference tools over the years. Are there parts that I don’t bother with? Yes! Tons of them! Even so, this is a great piece of reference material for any table and I strongly recommend looking at one of those archive preservation versions of this book. 

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"