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?"   

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Magic sword: The Retort

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

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

 

The Retort

 +5 Elven Chitin Neutral Long sword

16 intelligence, communicates through telepathy and speech

 

4 Banes:

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

Special purposes: 

Forged to take no sides and seek the void.

 

Powers: 

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

Omen:  

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

 

Attunement:

Wielder must refrain from making any noise for 1d6 days

 

Beast Chitin:

Critical range increased by +1

 

Elven:

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

Monster: The Thought Collector

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

 

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

 The Thought Collector

Judge's Toolbox

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

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

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

 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

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

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

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

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

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

 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

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

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

 

 

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

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

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

Class: The Fury

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

 

The Fury 

Old School Treasure Troves: 1st edition DMG

 

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

Plants

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

Gems

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

Potions

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

NPCs

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

Alignment Tongue

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

Descriptions

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

Economics

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

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