Worldbuilding with Magic the Gathering

    It has been a little while since I've posted life has been catching up to me in a rough way and I've really fallen off on keeping up with two posts a week. A few people have checked in with me and I really gotta say, I appreciate you guys, it means a lot that some people in the community reached out to check in. Today I'm making this post in part to let people know I'm still kicking around and also to just get something out onto a page. We probably aren't back to our regularly scheduled program just yet but we're working on it!

 

Sometimes when I am in a creative rut and cant come up with something to make a post about or find the energy to make something for the campaign I head on over to Scryfall and hit random card. The goal is to take the card I'm shown and make something to use in the games. This usually falls into the category of a monster, NPC, location, magic item, or magic power that an NPC or PC might gain. The last one is a little stolen from 5E's boons and banes section where they talk about alternative rewards to treasure (it's a very good book and we might talk about it and the tools it presents as its own post some day).

    I give myself 30 seconds with the card shown to me. I read the card over and take into account it's name, cost, flavor text, rules text, power, toughness, and card type. I want to take into account all these things when I use it as a reference.  If after 30 seconds with the card I really can't come up with the faintest idea then I hit random again. I'll keep at this until I have something on my personal document for my setting or something setting neutral that I can slip in to later games. 

     In truth I really don't use these in the games that much, I keep them in my back pocket when I have nothing else in the moment and have used them maybe a few times. If you give this a shot, remember that the goal isn't to recreate the card exactly in your setting or rule set, it's to make something inspired by that card. I'll sign off with a few examples of cards I've used and the resulting writing.

 

Mazus La Croix (Fleshgrafter)

Mazus was an artificer in the old empire of man, how he has lived long enough to see the sun rise on the new world is a mystery but the steel grafts in his body certainly give hints. In his time in the empire he was considered extreme, even by the empire’s standards. He would get his hands on magical trinkets and artifacts, and graft them into the flesh of others, tying the powers of the magical items to the recipient’s soul. This drove nearly all of his victims insane but those who survived were exceptionally dangerous. In the empire’s twilight, lacking fresh sources to experiment on, he began to graft magic and steel into himself. What lives in that cavern, the ancient workshop, is no longer recognizably human. Perhaps you may find power in becoming one of his test subjects… or perhaps you will lose yourself to madness and become a danger until some group of adventures comes along and puts you down. 

Statistics:

Init +0; Atk graft drills +6 melee (2d5+1d3 bleed), darklight lance +7 ranged (4d4+weakness); AC 16 (grafted steel plates); HD 8d10(40); MV 60’; Act 1d20+1d16; SV Fort +10, Ref +10, Will +4; AL C; SP: Graft drills cause bleed on the target if hit, stops if spending 1 round bandaging or healed. Weakness: the darklight lance mounted on Mazus’ shoulder swivels and targets freely in any direction. Anyone struck by it must make a DC 15 fortitude save or suffer 1d4 strength, agility, or stamina damage.

Grafter: Mazus is able to form a permanent connection between an individual and any of their magic items or mundane gear. The process of this is extremely painful, anyone undergoing it must make a DC 20 will save or suffer madness so deep that they are unable to function without attacking everyone and everything around them, other than Mazus of course. Failing this check should result in the loss of a character and should not be undertaken lightly as this obviously evil madman makes no promises of it working. Anyone who makes the save will find that they are bonded to the item, armor replaces much of their skin, weapons replace limbs, trinkets are attached in useful places. Removing these magic items will kill the character, they may only be brought back by divine intervention or a subject of a quest.

 

Chant of order (Orim’s Chant):

This is a power usually associated with angels and other beings of order. It is rarely taught to mortals and for good reason, the chant was never meant to be uttered by mortals and causes them great pain and harm. Should a mortal prove themselves to be worthy, through deed or act a being from a higher plane might teach a mortal this chant.

A character possessing this ability may spend their round of combat cantering in the tongue of higher beings of order, this act causes one point of damage to the user’s personality and stamina. However, any spellcaster who’s magic comes from chaos, such as wizards and chaotic clerics, will find that their magic is blocked for the entire round until the chanters next turn. Additionally the chanter may burn 1 point of a physical ability score, should they do this enemies must make a DC 15 will save in order to attack them. Failing this save means the attacker wastes their attack this round struggling against the chanter.

 

Practiced Teamwork (coordinated assault):

This boon is often taught by seasoned militia captains, battle-hardened mercenaries, or warriors who understand the value of tight unit cohesion. Seeing the chaotic scrapping of most adventuring parties, they may offer this training to those they deem worthy, both as a reward and a correction.

Effect:

At the start of combat, the character may designate one ally as their fighting partner.

As long as the two fight adjacent to one another, each may use the higher of their two attack bonuses and initiative modifiers for the duration of the battle*.

*If separated, each reverts to their normal values until adjacency is regained.

 

Blackwater Anchorage (Restless Reef):

This cave was once a pirate hideout, the reef surrounding it made it impassable to the large warships of the empire but a safe place to hide for the lightweight pirate ships. Unfortunately this massive ocean cave eventually fell when the empire sent a necromancer named Vexilar Doomhand. He brought a single row boat and a re-animated prehistoric monster with him which he set to guard the sea cave and sink any ship that attempted to leave. The pirates in the cave lost their ships before they decided to hide out in the dwellings they had carved out and ramchackled together. Unfortunately for them, they couldn’t wait out the undead. Eventually they starved or died as they attempted to flee, leaving behind much of their treasure.

Now, with Vexilar’s death, the undead monster in the waters is dormant but not gone. The massive prehistoric shark in the waters of the cave will animate again if it senses enough life in the cave or a strong enough source of magic, such as a high level magic user, enters the reef.

Prehistoric Undead Shark

The Guardian of Restless Reef

Init +4; Atk bite +12 melee (2d20 damage, see below), tail sweep +8 melee (1d14, knockback 20’);  AC 20 (bone plating & undead resilience); HD 18d12 (108 hp); MV swim 100’; Act 2d20; SV Fort +12, Ref +6, Will +10; AL Chaotic

• Massive Bite: On a successful bite attack, the shark automatically grapples its target in its jaws. Grappled creatures take 2d12 automatic damage each round until freed (DC 20 Strength or Agility check). If reduced to 0 hp, the victim is instantly swallowed whole (see below).

• Swallow Whole: The undead shark no longer digests food and anyone swallowed can be cut out and rolled over, if the shark can be defeated

• Shipbreaker: Against watercraft, the bite deals quadruple damage. A small boat is destroyed in 1-2 bites; a large vessel in 3-4 

• Breaching Charge: The shark may leap from the water up to 30’ horizontally to attack creatures on docks, ledges, or the cave mouth. Targets must succeed on a DC 18 Ref save or be knocked prone and dragged into the water.

• Undead Resilience: Immune to poison, charm, disease, paralysis, and sleep. Takes half damage from non-magical weapons unless silvered or mithril

• Blood Frenzy: If any creature within 60’ takes damage, the shark gains +2 to attack rolls until the end of its next turn

• Lair Sense: Can detect any creature entering the reef, even if invisible or magically concealed

 

 

 

 

 

 

Class: Martial Artist

     The martial arts superhero is a staple of the genre, it feels criminal that neither of the DCC superhero hacks had a good way to emulate characters like Iron Fist or Bronze Tiger, especially when there is so much good groundwork laid out by the 5+ different monk classes out there! I wanted this class to fit in alongside the other superhero classes for this project and feel mystical, getting abilities that no one else really has.

    I've really been enjoying working on this project. I'm hoping to have this completed some time next year to make a proper rule book for what I think superheroes should look like in a DCC hack. But enough about that, here is the class' first draft, for your enjoyment:

 

The Martial Artist 

Champions of Tibault: Vol 9

 Something I adore is when a PC makes a connection or helps someone and it has a chance to come back around. I think it's good storytelling. This time, the people of Sweet Water got to deliver on the aid they had been given. The party ended up with some not quite magical but still unusual variations of the standard equipment. Leather armor that granted a claw attack, rawhide shields that granted more AC than a standard shield, a staff made from one of the massive bones, and other treasures from Sweet Water.

    Additionally, I LOVE patron stuff. I love to see it come back around. I love to see a player remember they have a patron. I love to see a player remember that the relationship with patrons is transactional. Talshu was always pretty good about that stuff. The player continues to be good about that kind of thing as they continue to play in other campaigns. 

 

Session 9:

The village of sweetwater delivered! They brought leather armors and a rawhide shield made of this “primal” leather, granting additional benefit. With their reward in hand the party decided to mess with wounded animal further, hoping to find something condemning on the featherfolk slaver and arena master. While Talshu broke into his home she released a demon from an iron cage who offered her a wish. She suspected that he would twist the wish and the demon shrugged and more or less confirmed that he was a bastard. She wished for a book detailing all the accounts and information of the old empire, everything possible, no matter how frivolous. The demon gave her a book which she quickly got out from under before it smashed through the floor of the wagon that wounded animal called home. Unable to move the book Talshu called out to her patron, the architect, offering him the book as part of her continued service and possible future reward. He immediately rewarded her with a patron spell, dimensional sundering while he took her to his pocket dimension, The House of Legacy, where she met a strange group of adventurers, Spingsinger, Brother Gavin, Saldru, and Squire, all of them seeming like larger than life heroic figures, he said they were visitors to the house of legacy from “another system” some distant place he called “five-e”. He briefly explains something called an Eternal Champion and says that sometimes he’s not addressing her but the eternal champion before returning Talshu home to scramble away from the wreckage of wounded animal’s wagon.

Talshu unfortunately didn’t get away with no witnesses and as a result Wounded animal demanded justice, Talshu had been summoned to the Arena to fight and prove her innocence. Witherbone and Egrat battle in her stead, against a 4 armed gorilla monster who almost kills Egrat. Fortunately Witherbone is able to put the beast down and a Mountainborn in the crowd with a talent for healing is able to bring Egrat back from the brink.

 

Magic Items: 5 potions

     You know what I love about DCC? Magic items. The rules give scarcely little information about them in the games. They encourage you to give them a story, to make each one unique in it's own way. No sword is "a +1 sword". You know the rest. I talked a little bit about Scrolls not too long ago and how those should also be unique, which the book gives us a great start for. The other "common" disposable magic item is a potion. I think those should be just as unique and storied! Maybe not as much as say, a sword or a wizard's staff, but certainly some kind of history. So in the spirit of that, I've been playing with potion tables and rolled up 5 potions with little stories, descriptions, and in some cases, side effects, to make them feel a little more special when someone finds them.

 

5 Potions 

Blog d100: Player Suprise

 Continuing the Blog d100 series using the d4 Caltrops table! The gauntlet was laid down by Buster over on 19 Sided Die and I will continue to go through it when I need a filler post!

Rolled 60: A time the players surprised you or ruined your plans.

 

This is a fun one for me, it means another story time post!

 

I played for years with a dude who was constantly throwing me off or catching me off guard. He did this thing where he could almost see the connection to the most distant pieces of the puzzle in his plans. The catch was that he could only do this with his own plans. He couldn't see through the plot or plans of the foes. 

 

Guy was usually playing an evil character but was somehow lovable about it. He would tell everyone long before the first session, "I'm going to betray all of you at some point". Then when it happened everyone always just kinda shrugged and laughed like "oh man, you really got us! we even knew it was coming! haha!". It was interesting, he had a unique ability to turn on the whole party and not even a single person would flinch when it happened. He telegraphed it, telling people not to trust his character and doing shady things in the open where other characters could see him and catch wind of his inevitable betrayal.

 

I ran a game using a combination of Heroes Unlimited and Ninjas and Super Spies. The goal of this game was to break into this facility extract important information for a group of people who hired them. The party was playing a group of basically bottom of the barrel contractors for this kind of job. Two people played something called "dedicated martial artists" These are characters who are extremely skilled fighters with borderline mystic martial arts abilities but fresh off the boat and no ideas of the modern world. One person played a Hardware character who was both a weapons expert and an electrical genius. This guy... He played something called a worldly martial artist.  He was meant to be the guide to the dedicated martial artists in the world... he roped them into this contract and was paying them pennies on the dollar for the job. It was discussed and everyone found it to be funny and fine. 

 

During their raid of this building they fought against some cyborgs and some strangely skilled martial artists for being on corporate payroll. Along the way they defeated a man with a sword that contained a demon. This guy took the sword and made minor deals along the way to the goal in order to gain some power. 

 

After a battle with an honest to god supervillain who was way above the pay grade of the party, and somehow coming up with a way to defeat him but not put him down, This guy has his character die. The sword offered him a second chance, a new life, at a cost. Dude didn't even hear it's deal and said, "nah, death is fine" before throwing the sword away and letting go of life. It really shocked me, I thought for sure he would take the deal and become a new villain in the setting. He was always playing such evil characters who were so quick to turn against the party.

 

Goes to show, you can play with someone for decades and they will still surprise you on occasion. 

 

 

As always with the blog d100 series, if you follow along and make your own entries please comment below and I'll link you at the end of the article. It seems this time there are no new places to send you but I'll keep an eye out! 

Super Vehicle Rules

 Mentioned briefly in the Vigilante Class for Comic Crawl Classics or Evolved I now present the super vehicle rules. I didn't really care for the rules presented in Evolved and wanted them to be a little more granular and potentially tied to progression and player choices. I wanted something that felt a little bit like it could allow choices for unique vehicles as players built them differently. I also wanted to tie it to the prosperity die, which this project will be using, when getting points for upgrading because we always see the most wealthy of heroes with these insane vehicles and super suits. I wanted something that gave players options and wasn't just loaded with bonuses to X or Y all over the place. I wanted it to feel like comic book craziness where a vehicle could be built quickly and we could lean into the "rulings not rules" style that DCC lives and breathes.

    The rules I present below assume using the same vehicle rules as Evolved which originally got them from The Umerican Survival Guide. 

     As with the other posts in this series, this is just the draft of these and a fully corrected, edited, formatted, and fleshed out set of rules will be presented when the book comes out.

 

Super Vehicles

Blog Graveyard Vol 3: Balthazar's Bloviations

     Balthazar's Bloviations, last seen February of 2020, was a more general RPG blog that covered content across multiple games, 5E, DCC, FASERIP, and a few others. He covered something near and dear to my heart, Superhero RPGs. Recent posts should tell you that I love superhero games. You don't see a lot of overlap in this sphere with superhero games. He also talks a bit about "cloud campaigns" which I'll share below and might be good for you. Overall I have gone back to this blog many times over the years for inspiration and just fun things to read. He loved tinkering with tables and many other things that feel near and dear to my heart. So here are some treasures from Balthazar's Bloviations to get you started!

 

Alignment Based Disapproval Tables: I really love these. Prior to stumbling on his post for this, I found myself thinking that this would be a good thing to have, splitting out disapproval based on alignment, if not the gods. If you don't want to write out a custom disapproval table but want it to feel more tailored to alignment, Balthazar has what you need.

Cloud Games: I think this is such a good take on the west marches style of game which I'm sure more than a few of you are familiar with. At its heart it is just a west marches style but it's meant to be episodic and have an indeterminate group of players. He has 4 posts about this and I suggest reading them. It feels a little like how I've treated every campaign as the same setting for years and years. I think I'm going to make the superhero game I end up running soon with each session being episodic.

Carousing Tables: I try to collect these left and right. I love a good carousing table. It is such a good little generator for interesting little moments, developments, and sinking money. There are quite a few over on Balthazar's Bloviations, including one if you are boring and want to lay low. Take a look, filter for carousing tables and have a good time looking at tables for the core classes. Keep in mind these are made for Skull Mountain but there is no reason you cant change things just a little and use these tables anyways. I know I have.

Shrunken PCs: This entry includes a table, a scenario, and tips for running that scenario. It is part of his "Steal This" series and honestly every entry in this series has something interesting to inspire or one to one rip and run at your own table. Give this series a look. Personally, I fantasize about running a game about a group of Tiny PCs once a month. Fighting insects, navigating the forest of someone's front garden, scaling massive structures of furniture, going on dungeon crawls in the walls of a house. 

 

    This one was fun to run back through. Balthazar's Bloviations ran for about 5ish years, give or take. I'll consider myself lucky if i can run that long. He hosts a second blog for a game called "The Dragonreach Campaign" which is mostly a chronicle of the game. By my best estimates it seems like it went on as recently as 2023, the only evidence I have for that is the house rule packet being updated in 2023. This isn't strictly a DCC blog but you can feel the years of experience coming through the posts with this one. I encourage you to go check him out, there is always something to take away from any source.

Class: Vigilante

     Another class made for compatibility with Evolved and Comic Crawl Classics. This time I wanted to emulate a street level Batman. Batman the animated series was the guiding light of writing this one. I wanted the character to feel like a detective and a bit of a scrappy fighter. The Utility belt also felt important to the identity of the class. I really started to lean into the comic terminology here, calling sessions "issues" or things that happen off screen "between the panels". I think as I write these and my own superhero rules I'm going to lean into this more.

    You might notice that The Vigilante starts with a super vehicle but there are no rules presented for them. I promise those are forthcoming, I'm still tweaking them and will probably release them some time before I release the rules for the Armored Hero class. 

 

The Vigilante 

Champions of Tibault: Vol 8

     This session brought the most wealth I think the party has ever held at a single time. The players sold a tube fed shotgun to the Gunsmith's guild who were all too eager to pay for this strange new design that didn't at all follow the rules of firearms in the setting. Eskel has yet to see any royalties from this yet, behind the scenes the Gunsmith's Guild is suppressing the technology, worried that it might change the balance of power if guns are no longer difficult to produce works of art. As time passes in the setting a new type of firearm will be released eventually but for now, the tube fed system remains a secret.

    This was also the first time someone use the DCC multiclassing rules. I gotta say it was pretty cool. This person saw a chance to make their character a better fighter and took it, letting her support herself in the arena, in a pinch.

 

Session 8:

Eskel courted with featherfolk gunsmiths about selling his newly acquired weapon. They asked him to come back when they could have more experienced look at the strange new weapon. He hired Quill, a featherfolk lawyer to represent him to this gunsmith and the gunsmiths guild. Wanting to help her friend, Talshu hired the Black Eye kobold gang to watch the featherfolk overnight. The expert gunsmith who came to represent the guild was an emperor penguin who seemed very eager to get his hands on this weapon. Ultimately the deal was that Eskel would receive 1000gp in advance, a favor worth 400gp, and a 5% royalty on any weapons made based on this design. Interested in becoming a better hand to hand combatant, Talshu started to study under the gladiator Arin. 

The party then decided they needed closure on Eskel’s death and returned to the Macphadin clanhold, finding his spirit residing there in the hero’s tomb. In his final moment he was elevated to the clan’s new Hero spirit. Here, in this place of heroes, The Architect arrived to make a formal patron bond with the party, making them truly bonded as patron and petitioner. To celebrate, on the way home they killed the petulant tree on the road, damaging it until it could no longer talk or move.

 

Class: Manhunter

    Lately I've been thinking about Evolved RPG. I'll be honest, I have a lot of gripes with it. It fascinated me when I first heard about it, grafting super heroic rules onto the DCC ruleset? Sounded wonderful. In some ways it nails it, in others it feels like it is fighting tooth and nail against the genre it wants to emulate.

    I grew up on Heroes Unlimited, I want danger. Some punk with a gun should still be a threat to someone who has no defensive powers. But Evolved pushes past this into actively unreliable. Powers are completely unpredictable and unreliable and Heroic characters die easily. The tone pushes far away from heroic. 

    On top of that, the original release went out... rough. The table of contents was missing, it was riddled with errors, wrong page numbers, missing rules, and more. It came out feeling like a game that was just shy of being finished.  

    Then I found the "Justice Edition". It cleaned up these errors, made navigation possible, filled in missing rules, but most importantly it stripped away the Evolved default setting which was mechanically tied to the entire book.

    Justice Edition has its own problems, chiefly its total lack of support for entire archetypes of heroes, Especially those who don't have powers.  

    This is the first of my series of posts to correct the lack of almost any other archetype of hero in the rules. Today I give you the Manhunter! Inspired by heroes such as the Punisher, Vigilante, or Red Hood. This is a person armed with guns, guts, and tactics they use to throw themselves into fights way above their weight class. They run on nothing but determination to finish their never ending mission.

 

The Manhunter 

Blog d100: Superstitions

 Continuing the Blog d100 series laid down by Buster!

 

Rolled 54: Common Superstitions in your setting

 So with Hodas I've been letting the players coming up with the superstitions in the regions they play in. They continue to build the world around themselves even after the game of wasteland has been completed years ago. So I'm gonna offer you one from each group of the races decided as the major people in Hodas.

 

Goblins: When someone dies, you open all the doors and windows to allow the spirit to escape the building. This has resulted in significantly less spirits among goblins in a setting where spirits are relatively common. 

Featherfolk: It is bad luck to directly hand someone a weapon. This means that featherfolk, who make most of the guns, set them on the counter before selling. They toss them short distances in combat. Some wealthy merchants will have a statue that is meant to be a middle person between the buyer and seller.

Kobolds: Lava is evil and seeks to consume kobolds, wearing it's colors is unlucky. They live mostly underground and lava is dangerous, it seems simple on the surface. The person who put them into the setting eventually said that the lava is a metaphor from ages ago, kobolds wearing red started a rebellion that surged up through "the high kobold city", turning them into the slum dwelling nomads they are now. They are a people with no written history, passing on their history through oral tradition, so naturally the story has degraded over time to be lava.

Ooze: It is bad luck to clean another living being. Ooze believe that this could kill the person being cleaned. This hasn't stopped one industrious player from creating an "ooze bathhouse" where ooze are used to clean people in places where water is scarce. The oozes who participate in this are probably frowned at by their kin but they are exceptionally rare so they might not know how their kin feel.

Minotaur: The minotaur believe they must offer hospitality to anyone visiting their home and requesting it. This means providing safe place to rest and food. Minotaur believe that guests are offered 3 days of hospitality at minimum and to fail to honor this hospitality invites ruin onto your clan. Every minotaur clan knows the story of a clan that refused hospitality and was wiped out only days later.

Mountainborn: The Mountainborn believe that the mountains are always pulling towards the moon, so digging through them is to invite their anger. They live in harmony with the mountain, living in natural caves at the peaks or asking the mountain permission before shaping passages. To dig in the mountain invites it to crush you. This hasn't played out much, most of our adventures haven't spent much time in mountains.

Furies: Furies believe they can detect each other's lies and to lie to another fury will other you. Furies in the setting have been brutally honest in the form of both PCs and NPCs. Even when it isn't another fury they are addressing. It seems that Furies just have an aversion to lying in general so lying to someone they consider an equal must have special weight to them

 

This was a bit of a short one but I will admit I am having a hard time keeping up with 2 posts a week, I might cut it down to 1 a week for my own sanity.

As always, if you make a post in this series or even in the original post from d4 caltrops let me know in the comments and I'll make sure to link you in the next one!

Magic Scrolls

     The DCCRPG presents a list of unique scroll traits (p. 374). The prior page gives us some things that I really like too, the contents of a scroll table and the casting mechanism. These are important to the game for sure but I think how the scroll looks and the form it takes is also important. Flavor is free and can be added to tell a story about the creator of the scroll or the item's history. I think the Unique traits is an excellent start and would really like to see more to it. So here we are, I have made a short table to roll on and add more detail to a magical item which, by the game's own admission, is a little hard to come by. 

 

Scroll Appearance 

Blog Graveyard vol 2: DIY RPG Productions

     We are gonna continue this series with a blog that eventually gave way to a book that I love dearly, Hubris from Mike Evans. Over on DIY Productions you can see the prototypes and bones that grew into Hubris. You can find things that were left on the cutting room floor and didn't make it into the book. This blog really is a great way to feel out if you're going to like Hubris or not. It is worth noting that this blog has been somewhat active, there hasn't been any RPG related material for a few years now, but there are regular posts presenting a punk song of the day. Not technically dead in the way you might expect as Mike went on to release his book. You'll have to head back to around January of 2025 to see any directly RPG related content but I cannot recommend digging through this one enough. You will find art, monsters, classes, patrons, and more if you dig through their archives!

 

    This is the part where I share some of my favorites, hoping to wet your appetite and send you off to go dig through the content over on DIY Productions, so let us dive right in!

 The Blood Witch: This is one that made it into the final cut of Hubris and is slightly different here from the rule book. This class is a little bit of a magic user but with some unique options that really lean into the visceral world of Hubris. As the name suggests they play with blood a little. Their spellcasting is stunted but they gain things like healing in the form of their Blood Potion. Personally, my favorite item in their toolkit is Blood Walk which was always my favorite feature of the old 3.5 prestige class, the Blood Magus, but updated to feel like it belongs in DCC.

 

The Blood Acolyte: Continuing the trend of blood, this class also gets to play with blood in a different way than the Blood Witch. This class feels a little like a mystic monk but flavored appropriately for Hubris. They can fight unarmed and like to wear light to no armor. Their mystic abilities are fueled by the blood of their foes. Their abilities are diverse and depend on how much blood they want to invest into their abilities. They feel like a good visceral monk and it really is a shame this was released after the Hubris book was released. The only drawback here is that it lacks an attack bonus but that is easily remedied by just giving them a flat 1:1 progression with their level.

 

Orcs: The orcs of Hubris are near and dear to my heart. They are a heavy inspiration for my own orcs in Hodas. The orcs described here bring prisoners back and create abominations with them through dark alchemy practices. They very much are a bad guy species and I really like it that way. The post includes not only a table on how some of the orcs are mutated but also a quick set of rules on creating abominations for the orcs.

 

The Klind: This is another thing I love about Mike Evans' monsters, he doesn't just present a stat block, he pumps out an entire lore and several versions. He talks a little bit about the why and the what. The Klind are another example of the absolute fire writing of Hubris. Its viceral and just a little bit horny. I mean, look around at sword and sorcery art and writing as far back as you like, so much of it was armored bikinis and ripped shirtless men. Why shouldn't Hubris be a little horny?

 

Wizard's Spellbook: Another Entry that is near and dear to my heart, Spellbooks! Mike proposes that a wizard's spellbook should be strange and even have it's own personality. If you've seen my post about spellbooks then you know I think a spellbook can come in a lot of different forms but if one wants to stick to the general book premise then this is a great article. Personally I have integrated this into Hodas in the form of mages before the fall of man were "Magicians" like the class from dying earth and each had a book that was rolled on this table. The modern era of magic is now unstable and full of half remembered learnings that reflect the Core Rules wizard. This is a great entry to generate a villain's spellbook or even a piece of treasure.

 

Ioun Stones: A classic magic item turned into a DCC style. I'm sure Mike isn't the only one to cover these but I've always really liked his handling of them. I've used them a few times in my own games, usually rolling randomly on the table with 40 entries when tossing one into a loot pile or tacking one onto an evil wizard. You can feel the early influences of 3.5 and PF in this one and I think it's perfectly fine to have those influences. A while back I made a class specifically because someone coming from 5e really wanted classes in DCC that felt like some 5e options, so we got the spell drinker.

 

Going back through this blog was such a good time. The early bones of Hubris and other works from Mike Evans really just rocks! I shared two classes but he has a lot of write ups for classes over there and I think you should check them out! His blog and by extension setting are apologetically visceral and horny. The logo he uses is a hand giving the middle finger. Nothing is sanitized. It is a treasure and honestly I feel like more people making content for OSR games should lean into this energy. Mike Evans brought us a blog, then an entire book that doesn't flinch at these things. I cannot say this enough, go read his blog. GO!

Bonus: Buster from 19 Sided Die has also done an entry in this series covering Appendix M! Check out his post!

Champions of Tibault Vol 7

     I always like when character's patrons get involved in their lives. Patrons are a great tool to generate quests and challenges for the party. Their patron can send them to go get something, help someone, or do anything and due to the transactional nature of a patron the party is obligated to do something about it. I often like to use it when the party is at a bit of a loss for what to do or need a longer term goal.

    In this episode we saw use of the extended mercurial chart from hobonomicon. I really like that table as the results of the core book's table where nothing special happens is not all that interesting to me. I like magic to be weird and unusual. At times, I sub out the mercurial magic table for the Nehwon table. I particularly like that one for Goblins in Hodas as a way of sort of setting them aside from true wizards, it makes their magic feel more formulaic and rote while still keeping it kind of unusual. 

 

Session 7:

The party rest and is given a vision from their patron, The Architect, of a piece of a broken mirror locked in the elven vaults. As the party gathered to discuss this vision they were summoned by the elves to stand trial. During their trial they learned that the elves treat justice strangely. They sentenced the party to create a work of art that had a form and function that improved the emerald dream. To get an idea of what this could mean the party sought out the royal artist. They found her in the palace, depicting a sleeping elf in various mediums and forms. Based on the amount of work here she seems to have been doing this for centuries. Unsure what to do next the party decides to rush for the vault, risking it all. They found the vault and engaged with the elven guard and their perfect mithril blades. After some struggle Egrat took a gamble and cast a spell from a scroll he had been saving. The resulting mercurial effect whisked them to another world, a strange one with men fighting with guns that were far more advanced and less artful than those of Hodas, massive constructs of steel in the streets. They landed in WW2 without knowing it. Meanwhile back in the vault, four WW2 german soldiers had replaced our heroes. When faced with myth these germans chose to simply start firing. Their modern weapons made quick work of the surprised elves and their magic. When the effect ended the party traded back with the germans and found that the shard was in their grasp. They snagged one of the weapons from a fallen german and their patron stepped in. Taking the shard in exchange for protecting them and getting them out of the emerald dream. They were given one week to recover in the Architect’s pocket dimension before he returned them safely to their tent in Tibault.

 

Blog D100: Spellcasters

     This week we have another post courtesy of the Blog d100 challenge laid down by buster over on 19 Sided Die. The source of these prompts is found over on d4 Caltrops.

 

Rolled 3: Are spellcasters rare and how do people feel about them?

 

    I love this question for a lot of reasons. I get to talk a little bit about some table philosophy that I keep and the setting of Hodas! Let us dive in!

 

    I'll talk about table philosophy first because it's going to be important to the second half of this. At my table, the PCs are the only people in the entire setting I run who have class levels. The only wizards with levels in wizard in the entire world are the three who were played by players  in prior campaigns. An NPC might have a few features of a class, like a skilled pit fighter might have a deed die that adds to attack and damage but doesn't allow deeds. A magician might have a couple of spell like abilities but they won't have full spellcasting range like a wizard. A burglar might have the ability to pick locks and sneak silently but they won't be spending luck or using the full range of thief abilities. A high priest of a temple will be able to perform minor healing with a ritual of prayers and incense but never as easily call on divine power as a cleric. This allows me to tell stories where the PCs are this unique and possibly legendary or disruptive force who move through the world doing things that others could only dream of. I like to run a low magic game where the PCs are not outshined when they meet an NPC who is just them but better.

 

    So in Hodas, the average NPC will never see magic, real magic, in their lifetime. They might see a magician who knows a few parlor tricks, or a priest who has some small healing ability, but they will never see the kind of magic that a PC is slinging around. Those evil sources of magic, foes, aren't the type to openly practice in a world that would fear and hunt them if they just whipped out their magic tricks. Its a low magic setting, one magic user who decides to announce themselves publicly had better prepared for the mobs that will come for them. As it stands, no foe of the PCs has gotten to the point of being a wizard in his tower with an army of minions. Not for lack of trying. There is at least once case of a former PC who's going to become a problem in 10ish years, but that is a story for another time.

 

 

If you decide to join the d100 challenge or even just make a post related to the d4 Caltrops list, comment below and I'll include a link to your blog under this section! 

Dungeon Exploration and Combat

 I recently stumbled on the YouTube channel of a gentleman named Galen Wood, a real OG of war gaming and tabletop RPGs going back to the 1960's. He has such a great conversational tone on his channel, it feels like I'm sitting down with a friend who's been in the hobby longer than I've been alive and listening to him talk about something that he is passionate about. I watched his video on Dungeon Combat Through Time and it really spoke to me. If you've been here for a while you know I talk about dungeon exploration from time to time and sometimes it bleeds into topics that aren't related. Sometimes the article is about exactly that.

    His video really got me thinking about how I run combat in the dungeons of the games I run. In recent years I've run entirely online. When I first started running games online I used to make maps in Gimp and upload them to a VTT like roll20. Over time I did less and less of this. Eventually I started to run entirely theater of the mind for fantasy, which I was already doing for Heroes Unlimited and other Palladium games. I found that it dramatically improved the games. I really used to love maps and visuals and all that jazz. I bought a 3D printer at some point to make my own minis and environment pieces, I got these papercraft map pieces, I started to get into 3d modeling... But honestly it didn't improve the experience. After Covid I barely played in person anymore and my Judge's Toolbox was collecting dust. It was all online play with zero visuals. I enjoyed it a lot more and people who had been playing with me for years told it that those were some of my best games. In some ways it felt like getting back to my roots. My first experiences with D&D were playing with my dad running a game for me and my friends. He didn't use maps, he didn't use minis, just occasionally asked for a marching order.

Combat as a more nebulous series of descriptions really made things fun. In a game with less rules like DCC it really shines. Heck it even says in the book itself that everything is written the the assumption that they will not be needed. It allows for more dynamic combat, telling the players how many feet away something is, letting the thief try to describe how he's going to slip around instead of looking at a map and counting squares and assessing if he has to pass foes, these things really make the combat feel more dynamic and enjoyable, it keeps the attention on each other and the Judge, not watching a map and having perfect battlefield clarity. The theater of the mind acts as it's own fog of war. Character should not have a perfect mental map of the battle in the dark places under the world that they have just set foot in, they have to focus on the ogre trying to kill them right now. 

 This is all to endorse how much I think theater of the mind improves the games. I want to thank Mr Wood for running his channel and I really think you should check him out, here is a link again. If you're someone who uses a lot of maps and visuals and has never tried theater of the mind, I strongly recommend you give it a shot, even if you don't end up liking it, I'm confident you'll have walked away learning something.

Magic Weapon: The Executioner's Sidearm

 

+1 Lawful Silver Wheelock Pistol

7 intelligence, communicates by urges

Made to Punish Murderers

Bane of Demons: on hit, fortitude save, DC 15 or die permanently

 

Omen: gun is inexplicably heavy, when dropped everything within 30' shakes harmlessly

 

Attunement: Slay a proven and wanted criminal

 

Silver: -1d damage, +2d damage against creatures vulnerable to silver and it's bane, even as a ranged attack.

 

The executioner's sidearm didn't start as a magical weapon. It was a ceremonial piece commissioned as a means of execution. Placed to the back of a murderer's head and the trigger pulled. Over the decades one of the executioners who carried it noted that it seemed to be growing heavier, perhaps the weight of the countless souls it had taken from the world. Even so, it spent more than a hundred years in service as an executioner's tool.

    The sidearm gained its infamy when a summoning in a now long gone human city went wrong and demons poured through the streets of the city. The executioner stood alone against several of the creatures with only his ax and this ceremonial weapon. Even after his ax broke against their hides he continued to fight. The exact moment the weapon gained it's otherworldly power is unknown, all that is recounted from it's origin is that none of the demons killed in front of the executioner's home found their way back to the abyss. From there, the pistol continued to be used as a ceremonial tool of execution until the fall of the human empire, where it disappeared into a private collection, then moved hands as the world picked itself back up with much of the human presence gone.

Years Gone By

     I recently passed my 100th post on this blog and it got me wondering, how long ago did I start? I checked out the Blog's original home over on Tumblr and found this post, dating my online presence as Judge Toast to September of 2023. More than two and a half years ago. I made the move over to Blogger eventually and made a small effort to keep the Tumblr up to date with this blog, but just never really kept up with it. 

    When I started this blog Hodas was still mostly scattered notes and a handful of class documents and a single rough draft of a zine. I remember waking up one night and telling my wife "I gotta write" and hammered out the entire rough draft for the first Dueling Guardens of Hodas Zine, Goblins. That is coming, I promise. We're in a rough spot right now working out art, editing, layout, and kind of living in survival mode but it, along with two others, it is coming. 

    This blog has been something I've kept consistent for a long time. I've missed a few posts but I've been pretty good about getting out my Tuesday and Thursday posts each week. It's given my life a sense of structure and consistency. Even when it's just one of the session write ups or a magic sword that I generated on the spot the day before. It has gotten me in touch with more than a few people in the community who I have really appreciated their feedback and experience, people like Nick Baran from breaker press games, Daniel J. Bishop from many beloved books and articles and his Crowking Press, and many others. I would like to shout out to Buster from 19 Sided Die who I've gone to for feedback and given feedback to, talked to a lot and really feel like I've made a friend with. His blog is something I check every Wednesday. It might be a bit presumptuous of me but I really feel like our two blogs are growing together. I would also like to shout out Tyler Broor who has been running his blog since August of last year and has, in my opinion, become a bright spot in the blog sphere.

Seeing my weekly readers jump from 2-4 to around 1000 has really kept me going! I appreciate every single person reading this blog, Thank you all for coming by and reading! I would love to hear more from you guys, what you're interested in, how you feel about stuff I write! 

 I wanna sign this one off by saying thank you again to everyone who has been stopping by to read my blog. I will remain committed to making my regular two posts a week with intermittent self promotion when I am able to count past the number 1. I promise I am not a gully dwarf. I've been teasing it for a long time but there will be Hodas Zines in time, the first three issues are going to be the Goblins, the Minotaur, and the Ooze. We don't know if there will be a kickstarter yet but if there is expect more than those three.

Monster: Steam-Blood of the Sandbars

     Haven't done one of these in a while, despite how much I love making monsters. This time we got away from the usual method of tinkering with something that comes from the Monster extractors. (Not that they aren't great sources! Seriously, check them out, they are PWYW). Instead we got our hands on a bit of an old book that we only recently stumbled on: The Random Esoteric Creature Generator! This book goes all the way back to 2008 which feels so far away now.

    So this time we moved through the tables in this book and got our flavors and abilities of the monster, then put it all together. It has a lot of the bones of DCC, use monsters once, don't give them proper names for your PCs to call them. call them things like "achie's folly" or "the beast in the dunes", and other great advice. You can really feel the philosophy of the future of DCC in this book and it's a great time. 

But this isn't a review, the title of the post says there is a monster here! Here it is for you:

Steam-Blood of the Sandbars

Champions of Tibault Session 6

 Elves of Hodas are something I spent a long time thinking about. They were mentioned in the original game of wasteland that created the setting but they weren't a focus, just an offhanded comment. So I had some freedom. Elves in Hodas fall into two categories: The ones who stayed behind and the ones who left the plane. Most elves in the world simply left as the empire of humanity rose and enslaves all in its path. The ones who stayed behind secluded themselves in extremely hostile or magical locations that the empire simply couldn't gain access to. This created a culture of elves who are something of a cross between Tolkien and Llanowar from MTG. They are hostile to outsiders and powerful, immortal beings. 

    On the other hand, the elves that left all changed. The elves and land are one, a friend decided that in another game a long time ago and I've always loved it. So what happens when the elves find a new land? In Hodas, they take on properties of the land they move into. Almost all of the ancient elven cities shifted themselves onto another plane and took on the properties of those planes. Some elves now reside on the elemental plane of fire, their weaknesses and patron have changed. Others settled on the mechanical plane of law, their bodies taking on an almost clockwork appearance.

    This session was the first time I really got to break out the elves who stayed behind and show what they were really like. I like elves as an antagonist that believes it is in the right. 

Session 6:

Orkov came to the party and revealed that the party, through Deranged, was indebted to him. When the party asked for proof he had a featherfolk step forward and relay the entire conversation between Orkov and Deranged to them. Deranged began to make outlandish claims about Orkov and claimed that anyone could say anything and that it wouldn’t always be true. After some confusion it was explained to Deranged that featherfolk can replicate any noise or voice they hear with absolute accuracy as long as they only repeat the thing that they heard, exactly as they heard it. This prompted Deranged to insult him. Naturally he demanded full repayment immediately. Deranged challenged Orkov to a battle in the arena and Orkov accepted, believing his champion would crush anyone Deranged could hire. 

Deranged, unable to find a champion stepped into the arena to battle against Black Stone, Orkov’s champion. Deranged put up the best fight they could but ultimately was defeated by Black Stone. In a desperate attempt to survive Deranged switches minds with the original Deranged in the dagger. Shockingly Black Stone heals Deranged, stating that if they couldn’t pay the debt then Orkov would gain a new slave.

The party collected their friend and wiped out quite of bit of their funds paying off the debt owed to Orkov and departs for Evernight in order to find some treasure and wealth to make up for their losses.

The party hacks it’s way into evernight and finds that the foliage is growing back behind them. Eventually they get into the forest itself, they find it is dark but lit by a strange silvery light that permeates the forest in the form of moon beams coming though the trees above. The party scouts the area and spots a strange group of rat creatures scavenging something nearby until a horn is blown in the distance which startles the creatures and sends them running. The party soon finds out exactly what startled the creatures when they are ambushed by elves and surrounded. They are told, through Witherbone’s translation, that the only reason they are alive is because they travel with this disgrace for an elf.

Blog d100: A book or movie

 Been a bit since we did one of these! This Post is part of a challenge from the Blog d100 challenge made by Buster over on 19 Sided Die.  Check him out!

 

Rolled: 58 - Talk about a movie or book that influenced your setting!

 

This is a good one but a bit of a tough one! The setting of Hodas is inspired by SO many sources. I've already gone on about how Micheal Moorcock has influenced the games at length. So what Source could I talk about next? So instead I'm gonna share a few and give a short talk about why they inspired me!

 

Heavy Metal:

Heavy Metal is a bit of an old one, an animated film from the 1980's. This movie just refuses to explain anything and just tells its stories. It opens with a car dropping onto a planet from space and the driver just driving home and getting annihilated by an evil green orb. It talks about how powerful it is and then tells stories where it is defeated like... 3 of 5 times or something. The music of it, the storytelling, it really left a mark on me when I was young.

 

Silver age comics: 

I've been reading comics for ages, almost entirely my dad's inherited collection. I ran superhero games for decades and you could really feel the influence of these comics. Heroes were heroes, villains were villains, the systems worked as intended but villains were getting out of prison once a week. It used to be a really black and white superhero setting where there was a lot of multiversal and villain of the week stuff. This setting grew up as people who read different comics came to play and changed the setting with their influence. 

Michael Moorcock:

I know I did a post about him but I just wanna highlight that the Corum books were a huge influence on me. They were the first time in a book I had seen someone borrow from Celtic myth. These are another world of sword and sorcery that refuses to explain anything. There is a giant in the water and he drags a net behind him, why? Don't worry about it! I very much felt that was a good way to handle things like that. The players don't need to know why and how everything everywhere works all the time, their characters certainly wouldn't know these things. 

 

The Etched City:

This book is about two people who leave behind questionable lives and arrive in a city that has many low magic elements. It very much is a story that feels very low magic until suddenly it isn't. This really made me lean into the low magic part of DCC. When I run, the world doesn't feel like it has a lot of magic in it until you find yourself in a remote island not on any map and the people here all descended from elementals.

 

Fantasy Metal Music:

This is a more recent influence but fantasy metal music feels like a love letter to the old school world of tabletop. Some of the songs are about the same novels I'm talking about. Blind Guardian does music about Elric, The Wheel of Time, and Arthurian legend. Glory Hammer has this whole world of insane high magic fantasy with tech elements thrown in, there is a whole song about a magic dragon (machine) and the magic scroll to control it (instruction manual). Recently I've picked up Eternal Champion, I think based on the name you can guess the influence on that one. 

Blog d100 sharing this week

Since the last time I posted one of these and there are a couple out there I have been keeping an eye on. If you are doing this and want to see your posts here, please comment and I'll make sure I'm linking you!

 

From Mythscribe we have: Who Digs those Dungeons?, be sure to check them out, a lot of good content over on Mythscribe!

Blog Graveyard vol 1: Knights in the North

     If you're here then you probably know about at least 3-5 other blogs out there in the DCC sphere. You might also be aware of the number of interesting blogs out there that have fallen silent. I still use a lot of those for reference material and sources of rules, classes, monsters, and really anything related to DCC. So I got a suggestion from a friend of mine to talk about some of the older blogs out there. He's new to DCC and already has the attitude and energy for this game. He's bridging between his home system and DCC so smoothly and with such good energy, he's even contributed an interesting entry to a secret project I'm working on. He was reading something I wrote for another post I am writing where I reference The Secret Santicore and asked if there is any sort of resource list or archive of these blogs that are now silent. The unfortunate answer is that there really isn't. I fear the task to archive and source all of them is beyond me but I can at least talk about some of my favorites and maybe help people who are just getting into DCC find other sources that they might not normally locate. This series will only be covering blogs that have been silent for 3 or more years, and despite the cheeky title I'm not saying these blogs are truly dead and will never come back, I'm not the blog graveyard keeper or blog undertaker.

     So to kick this off we are starting with one of my favorites, Knights in the North! This blog's last post is 12/08/2019, it was to announce their Patreon which also seems to have fallen silent. KitN had a team of writers & artists who really made the blog come to life. Most posts come with some art and something that fits not just DCC but can easily slot into the OSR sphere. They had it all, Classes, Spells, Patrons, Gods, house rules, cool tables, new races, magic items, and ready made encounters. If you're here, you probably have heard of KitN but if you haven't, buckle up!

    I want to share some of the highlights some of my favorites to get you started reading their work and give you enough to decide if you wanna dig deeper (you should).

    The Knight class: This class could be covered under warrior, flavor is free after all. That said, it offers someone a way to play a little more energy leaning into the legends and myths. It included a great piece of art and excellent rules. It hit all the notes I personally would want in this class, it has deeds, fighting style based on alignment, divine leanings, a code of conduct, and can even incur their own version of disaproval. 

Animal companion rules: Animal companions are all over Appendix N, if you've read any of those books you can probably think of one or two off the top of your head. This added a much needed rule for covering animal companions. I know a lot of people will say "quest for it" which I think really is only complimented by this. The PCs can quest for animal companions and the judge has rules already made for this. This offered a simple set of rules to give any character an animal companion, a stat line, and advancement without building out a whole new class for it like a certain blogger who's post you're reading right now.

 Equipment Qualities and Materials: This is a great one that I use all the time. It offers some ways of spicing up weapons and armor without just making them magical. I use it in almost every single magic sword post you might find on my own blog. A weapon that does +1d damage without being magical but looks like a sawtooth sword, something made by elves to be lighter and faster, something forged on another plane that detects as lawful or chaotic, all of these things and more add some real flavor to the weapons and armor you might generate randomly. 

 Down time rules: There are probably tons of these out there by now, I know of at least two others, but these were some of the first ones I ever saw and I loved them. I got a lot of mileage out of them and still come back to them for some games. Excellent for when your players decide they wanna hang out and recover without carousing or creating more problems for themselves.

Random Encounters: This is such a good weird random encounters table. It has a wizard traveling on a scorpion, Fae trickery, roadside monoliths, and candy you find on the ground. I like to break this one out on occasion to keep the world feeling weird.

 House rules: No conversation about KitN would be complete without a mention of these house rules. If you've been reading my blog for a while you'll know how much my own house rules list references these often. There is more than one post on their blog that falls into this category but the two big ones are linked here. I strongly recommend reading through their work. 

 

Knights in the North has been a massive influence on my own blog, in the content I cover, the diversity of topics I want to cover, and the format of adding a PDF to the end of most posts so people can download and have the content in their own folder, even if my blog goes belly up. I strongly recommend digging through their content if you've never been there before. This is the one that inspired me to start to blog, to share the things I made for my own games in a public space for others to enjoy and comment on. I hope my love letter to their blog made you wanna check them out. Writing this was really wonderful, picking through their blog is such a trip down memory lane for me.