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.

DCC Martial art: Drunken Monkey

     Those of you familiar with Secret Santicore might remember this post. The Five-Fold art of war is a martial arts system that builds on the back of an already existing system for patrons to give more martial inclined characters something similar. Yes, warriors and thieves can have patrons, in fact Lankhmar had excellent rules to make characters into patrons which warriors and thieves might get a little more mileage out of. My issue was always that while anyone can have a patron it's pretty obvious that a spellcaster is likely to get the most mileage out of one by nature of them usually granting spells.

    Personally I love some martial arts madness in my RPG. for decades now my favorite class has always been the monk in any game that will allow me to play one. I have maybe 4 versions of the monk class in my folder, This one is my favorite because it feels like the early editions of D&D monk by having thief skills and random mystical abilities and limited advancement.  There are other ways to do high flying kung fu rules in DCC, like the fantastic Kung Fu classics, which is more for emulating the kung fu movies I know more than a few of us grew up watching. 

    All that to say: I like martial arts and the rules from Secret Santicore are my favorite way of including them in DCC. This is one of my own martial arts made under those rules. I added some things, like an ability score adding to unarmored combat, affiliated deeds, and special rules. I'll admit I had a hard time getting this one finished, it basically is writing 4 spells and a bunch of other things. I ended up binging some of my favorite kung fu movies in the process for inspiration which certainly didn't help speed up the process. So here it is, for your enjoyment:

 

Drunken Monkey 

Champions of Tibault vol 5

    This game saw a lot of action from Talshu's player. I really enjoyed this character. She collected titles as we kept playing. Each time I looked at her sheet she had added a new title to the titles section and I kind of loved it. This person was one of the only people in the games who used the multiclassing rules which I really loved.

    This session saw a lot of down time so we really see the party scatter and get up to their own little issues. I use a combination of down time rules from a few places but usually it is just a matter of asking what the party wants to do and playing some of that out.

 

Session 5:

The party encountered Electra and Honest, the only survivors of the party who went into Evernight, learning that the others were dead and they captured some kind of massive bipedal rat in the forest. They sold this creature to Wounded Animal and intend never to try adventure again, Electra considering taking up a role as a tavern girl somewhere and Honest thinking of leaving the city entirely.

Egrat retrieved a diamond of some value from his share of the treasure from their recent adventures and offered it to Obedient in exchange for the newly born crown jewel’s assistance studying a pearl carved with a spell. Obedient agrees and a new Crown Jewel ooze is born Tunic. Tunic uses it’s body to enlarge the carvings on the tiny pearl, allowing Egrat to study it and copy the notes.
Halcyon starts to work with her contacts in the city, friends, fans, and allies in order to start to piece together an information network. Many of them don't have the skills for it but agree to keep an ear to the ground.

Talshu Is hired through the Torchlighters to investigate and obtain a sketch of the beast Wounded Animal recently purchased. She sneaks an artist into the barn and finds the creature, as well as a group of children who seem to be in cages. Her morals get in the way of the job and she releases the children to find that they are strangely grown up for the age they appear to be, they claim to be from a village nearby but it is not a place Talshu is familiar with. She completes the job and gains information on Wounded Animal that she brings back to the party.

Later, Talshu decided to acquire some alchemist’s glue from a stall in the market. The first alchemists she stopped by, a pair of married old goblins named Overconfident and Square, gave her a price she didn’t like and would not budge when she insulted them and implied she could take it. Talshu decided not to shop around and snuck into their stall at night and took the solvent and left a snide note. Naturally she was accused of the theft and demanded trial by combat. The old couple hired a well known featherfolk gunner which prompted Talshu to look for her own champion. Aerin refused her and recommended a goblin he knew called Loose. Loose was hired and the arena fight was short and brutal. Loose ignored the spirit of the fight to disable his opponents ability to surrender and then smother him slowly. Talshu is cleared of any wrongdoing but her stomach turns a little as she watches the Featherfolk’s struggles and attempts to plead for it’s life.

 

Class: The adventurer

    I read a post a while back about the book The Class Alphabet that talked about how disappointed they were in the book. In that thread, there is a link to a really good breakdown of its classes from none other than Daniel J Bishop himself and I strongly recommend reading his review of it before buying. I mention this because, if I'm being honest, I was also a little disappointed in this book. I echo the sentiment that some of the classes feel half baked and others spent too long in the oven. I agree that some of them are functionally identical to each other.

    Yes, this book is gonzo as heck. It set out to make absolutely gonzo classes and I think it really succeeded there. Unfortunately for someone like me, most of those classes are... not really usable at my table because they are TOO gonzo. There is nothing wrong with this, not everything is for everyone and to treat anything like that would be dishonest to the work. You know what this book REALLY did for me? It made me wanna write my own classes. I don't intend to collect my own works together and create my own publication for DCC called "MY class alphabet" or something, but I do think it is a fun writing exercise to pick letters and write classes and other content based on that letter. 

 

So with all that in mind, I would like to share the first class I've written for this project: The Adventurer

You’re no reaver, no cut-purse, nor heathen slayer or tight lipped warlock guarding long dead secrets… but you did work for those people for a long time and somehow survived, picking up some of the tricks of their trades. 

 A is for Adventurer 

Thieves Symbols: A tool for exploration

 It is only natural that the thief, or it's equivalent, should be scouting ahead. In a perfect world the party will wait patiently for the scout to come back but that is not always exciting and what if the worst should happen to the scout while they are exploring and they don't come back before the candle burns down? They need to know about the things the scout encountered along the way but how could they do that without meta-gaming?

    In the past, I've played games where I played my favorite class, the thief/rogue and taken on the role of scouting. I would take chalk or charcoal with my into any exploration and leave marks at a specific designated height, that they could look for and would explain the nature of anything I encountered. I got really granular about this. I would buy the party daggers, each of them identical in height, and tell them "If it is my mark, it will be found at the height of the cross guard when you place the tip of the blade on the floor. If it's not there, then it's not mine." additionally I would give the players out of game a collection of my symbols and what they meant, printing out the page and handing them a physical copy of the list for reference. They were supposed to know that there was no distinction of chalk vs charcoal and a few other rules about deliberate changes to things to warn of a danger that was able to track the symbols.

    If you adopt this, I don't think anyone needs to get as granular as I did back in the day. Just having a system of symbols and telling your fellow players before hand that you do this, this is what they mean, here is the symbol key, is more than enough. when following your scouting, look for the symbols. I did all that stuff because I played with a lot of GMs growing up where had a very deep seated GM vs player mentality in how they ran. This made me a Paranoid little Toast. I would do things like leave candles with my group and say "when the candle burns down to this point and this nail falls out, if I haven't returned assume I'm dead and act accordingly." I was really big on dungeon exploration and keeping track of a lot of things. There might be future posts about that if there is interest.

The symbols I used when I played

    

    This whole symbol idea is not entirely my own. I saw this infographic on symbols that the homeless use to designate safe and dangerous places around a city. I cannot speak to the validity of this at all. I questioned who was out here studying the symbols and how they could be universal. It seemed a little dubious but it did give me a good idea for navigating a dungeon and make mapping just a little easier. 

    There was a long running game where this DM had us exploring a mega dungeon and realistically we would never see all 3500 rooms of this place. I decided that my character wasn't particularly interested in the treasure of the dungeon. He traveled in with this Paladin and his squire who he kept sending into death traps and a few other people. The guy playing the paladin straight up told the rest of the table it was his game and his story. He refused to elaborate on this and got very angry when we tried to help with anything plot related. So I mapped this dungeon as I explored, left my symbols behind, and eventually published an almanac of the first few floors with their dangers and my symbols marked on the map. This did not sit well with the guy who claimed this was his story as the dungeon was supposed to be a secret, which he never told us. It was a good time. I remember that game fondly. 

 This one got away from me a little and turned into a bit of a storytime! Thanks for coming out and reading! This might turn into a bit of a series about things I used to do to help with dungeon exploration. 

Judge Toast House Rules Vol3

     Welcome to another post where I share a bunch of house rules that I use at my table. As always with these I'll Share the rule and talk a bit about why I use it and how it has worked out for us. Here is a link to Vol 2 if you're just joining us and wanna see more!

 

I know a guy: once per session a player may declare that they "know a guy". They are allowed to detail who this guy is, why it's relevant to what is happening right now, and what their connection to the person it. I will then roll 1d10. This is to determine the person's attitude towards the PC who knows them. a 1 is enemies, on sight conflict, and a 10 is good friends, lifelong allies. 

This is a good tool for allowing the players to have just a little more influence on the setting. I feel strongly about the games being a group storytelling activity and your character should know people outside of the party. This is how you show what kind of friends your character had or has. In play I've only ever see one person try to abuse it but naturally the Judge holds veto power over any NPC proposed, so it is an easy thing to keep from being abused.

  

Magical Feedback:  Wizard and similar casters start combat with a d4 in front of them, the "1" face indicated. Each round the wizard successfully casts a spell they increase this die by 1. This number is added to checks made by the wizard to cast spells. When this reaches a 4 the wizard suffers from magical feedback. They must make a roll-under check on their casting ability score or lose the ability to cast spells for 1d4 rounds. a pause of a single round resets this counter to 1. When this is at 4 and the wizard has successfully saved, it remains at 4 and a new check must be made each round they cast a spell.

This is another that comes directly from the Index Card RPG. I really love that book and feel that even if you don't play it, you will find something to take back to your table. Strongly recommend reading it. I really like this as just one extra little way a wizard can get spells off but also maybe dig too deep into the power they utilize and be left with nothing for a short time. This one I've really only used at a physical table but I really liked it when it was at our table.

 

Signature Spell: After a wizard determines their spell list, they then select one spell from that list to be their signature spell. Each time they cast this spell they add double their level to the check. Each level after 1st, they may add another spell to their signature spell list but may never select a spell that they have only just gained, it has to be a spell they have had before gaining the level. they cannot double select a signature spell.

This has always mostly served as a way to give the wizard just a little more juice, a way to tilt things in their favor on at least one spell early on. It also sort of lines up with a lot of appendix N, you see a lot of magic users in that who have spells they use over and over in favor of others. I don't find that it really changes much other than to add just a little more flavor to the character.

 

Research Spells: a wizard may have at any time 2 randomly determined "research spells". These spells are cast using a d14 instead of the usual d20. They also have 2 randomly determined mercurial effects. When a wizard gains a level they may automatically take one of their research spells as one of their new spells, selecting one of the mercurial effects and removing it and now casting it with the usual d20. A wizard may also gain access to these spells early through questing, repeated attempts to cast, or long research periods in down time. Finally, with one week of down time, doing no adventuring or exploring, a wizard may discard one of their research spells and randomly roll a new one.

This is a pretty recent addition to the rules and it hasn't seen a ton of play. When it did we had one guy who didn't cast one of his research spells ever but constantly failed to cast the second one and when he succeeded it usually came in clutch as he spell burned like crazy and borrowed some luck from a funny little kobold to get the spell off. It broadens the wizard's spells selections but doesn't make it easy on them. I like it a lot for this reason. It also means that there is a reason that the wizard somehow gains a new spell fully at each level. I know I took this from somewhere but I don't remember where I found it. If you know who did this first, please leave a comment below so I can credit them.

 

 Second Wind: Any warrior or warrior adjacent class may begin combat with a d4 in front of them with the one showing. Each round they remain fighting they increase the facing on this die by one. when they die reaches 4, at the end of that round they may roll it and recover that many hit points, then reset it to one.

This is such a small amount of healing that it doesn't feel like it changes much but does allow a warrior to feel like a bad ass who is doing things like ripping off their shirt to bandage on the fly. It feels cinematic. This is yet another lifted right from the Index Card RPG (really, check it out!) and I've found that when I play in person it really encourages the warrior to play a little recklessly to try and get that extra little healing.

 

Change to mighty deeds: A warrior (and at my table only the human warrior) may choose three of the following things to apply their deed die roll to:

• Attack Damage
• Attack Roll
• AC
• Saves
• Damage ignored this round
• additional attacks: one additional attack for each time the number on the deed die is divisible by 3, rounded down, minimum 0.

These must be selected before the die is rolled and failure to indicate means the deed die only applies to attack and damage, as the rule book dictates. 

This one I'm pretty sure came from Knights in the North, like a lot of the house rules I use today. So I said this one was only for the warrior at my table because humans in my setting are sort of rare. There are a few race-as-class options that gain a deed die and are their own version of warriors. So this is only for the human warrior to make them stand out just a little more but in the past I have allowed it for the non-human deed having classes and it works out just fine.

 

 

 

 

 

    Well, That is another pack of my house rules. I think there might be one more volume of this where maybe I include a PDF with all of them together, kinda like how Judge AMP did over on Knights in the North. I Find that most of my house rules have integrated pretty seamlessly into the games I run and aren't often missed or forgotten. I generally approach with a philosophy of "does this make someone have more fun?" rather than "does this balance the game?" or "does this solve an existing problem?". I find that a rulings, not rules, approach deals with those other two questions a lot better than making a house rule for every little thing that comes up.

    As always, Thanks for reading and I hope I gave you something to think about or take back to your table, if nothing else I hope you enjoyed reading! 

B-Team Adventures

     One of the things I like to do when I run a game is have the players play only a single character at a time with a few backup characters as the "B-team". In order to allow the B-team to sort of keep up with the party they gain an amount of experience based on the session number rounded down. This cannot exceed the experience gained by the main party that week. The question has often come up, "What was the b-team doing this week?" and I haven't really had a good answer. Until now. Now I have a table to roll on when asked what they were doing that lends itself to making up threads for the party to pull on if they want to or simple storytelling if they don't. Check it out!

 

B-Team Adventures! 

Spell: Honey Cage

Another spell that comes from generating names straight out of Knave 2e. I really struggle to write spells, easily the place where I have the hardest time. So no better way to get practice with it than actually do it. I wanna thank Nick over at Breaker Press Games for this idea. It really has gotten me to leap into the creation of my own spells for DCC and maybe they aren't all going to be the most original or best but it's still getting me to sit down and make something and learn things along the way.

Honey Cage is mostly a crowd control/de-buff spell but there is no reason the players couldn't use it to preserve foods or as a source of nutrition. 

 

Honey Cage 

Champions of Tibault: Session 4

 This is probably one of the first times I really got to use Orcs in Hodas. Our orcs are very much the standard pigmen who are more or less just evil creatures who survive through the suffering of others. I wanted a bag guy race who are consistently evil and won't be talked down from their position or redeemed (unless it's a specific quest for it moment) through a simple talking to. 

    So what makes Orcs in Hodas so evil? Orcs are created, they are not born. Every orc carries within themselves an ancestral memory, how to make more orcs. when a tribe is reduced in numbers enough to risk being wiped out or grows large enough to splinter, an orc's generic memory activates. They dig a pit, they fill it with water, orc blood, and perform rites of sorcery over it. from this spawning pit is where new orcs come from. Living creatures are thrown into these bubbling pits and painfully they are turned into orcs, loyal to the tribe, with no memory of themselves before. Each orc tribe has their own secret they add to the spawning pits, creating unique traits within the tribe. The twisted spine clan, talked about in today's post, add in a grass local to their region, known as coil grass. This gives them the ability to "launch" their upper body up to 30 feet away to make melee attacks before springing back into place. they use this to slingshot ranged weapons and harass on the run.

    This process isn't perfect, 1-in-10 orcs are born with a mutation. They are simply accepted into the tribe as another orc. sometimes it's a conjoined twin, sometimes it's one massive strong arm and one vestigial arm. some tribes even place their dead back into these pits to bring them back, making mutants 1-in-5. 

    This is how I got my bad guy race. They need to kidnap people and put them in these pits to propagate their species. Because they were made to be a weapon of genocide they do not know any different and cannot escape their cycle (unless someone quests for it). In setting almost no one actually knows any of this. they assume people are taken back to orc camps to be eaten or worse and orc women and children simply are not kept among raiders or war camps. The benefit of a small world is that such things aren't widely known. 

 

Session 4:

Party Geared up and rode out to battle against the twisted spine orc clan, meeting them in an open field. They clashed in a bloody conflict slaying more than 20 orcs, including a pair of chiefs, a shaman, and a mutant. Unfortunately the party underestimated the low cunning of the orc tribe and had their retreat cut off by burning grasslands behind them as more orcs raced into battle. Deranged and Halcyon fled through the flames, suffering painful burns and smoke inhalation as they rushed through the fire. Talshu chose to flee along the path of the fire, hoping that her steed would carry her to safety. Unfortunately for her the orc’s alatlatl claimed the life of her horse. Her escape seemed hopeless until Eskel decided to bring honor to himself through deed and steel. He charged the orcs and felt a strong spirit guiding his blade as it found orc flesh. His charge gave everyone enough time to flee to the safety of Tibault. 

Upon regrouping and finding that they were missing their friend the party mourned him while the city celebrated. It seems word had gotten around that he was a hero who single handedly repelled the orc tribe, taking hundreds of them with himself. The tale grew each time a balladeer spoke it and women (were paid) to weep in the streets for him. It seems Eskel had many secret lovers in the city.

During the private funeral Orkov showed his face, and offered to cover the loss of his equipment, no strings attached, as a thank you for the work Eskel did to rid the city of the orc problem. The party refused and chased him out of the funeral but later Deranged accepted the deal with the understanding that he could recall the debt at any time, adding strings now that he had been insulted.

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?"