10 Magical Weapons

 Just dump 'em in your setting. Careful: A magical weapon is both a curse and a boon. And a pretty great one of each.

1. The Original Weapon

What it looks like:

A rock, flint, a bit larger than a fist. One side is rounded. The other side has been chipped into a basic sharp edge. There is blood on it that never seems to wash off or dry out.

How it was made:

It was the first weapon crafted with the intent to murder another human being. Kain slew Abel with it. Romulus his brother Remus. It is murder incarnate.

What it wants:

It wants to murder. Not kill, it is not a weapon for combat. It is a tool for murdering. Those who trust you. Those who won't fight back.

What it does:

Any attack on a trusting target will always hit and will always kill. If you were to wield it in battle, you could only use it to hit your friends in the back of the head, not the enemy. For such purposes, it is absolutely deadly though. The only way to make sure this weapon cannot kill you is to never really trust anyone.

2. The Great Khan's Blood Blade

What it looks like:

A sabre of the type that the nomad warriors of the steppe wield as side weapons when riding into battle. The grip is made from human bone, wrapped in human leather. The blade is dark steel.

How it was made:

The Great Khan wanted to make a weapon from the pain of all who opposed him. It took the blood of nearly a quarter million people to extract enough iron for the weapon. In the end, it killed him.

What it wants:

Vengeance and pain are what it revels in. The anguish off all those who died in the process of making it will never rest and the blade wants to spread their misery.

What it does:

Hit a living thing and it will utterly desintegrate. Any small cut will suffice to turn an enemy into red mist. The weapon is also as sharp as a blade made from steel can get and remains indestructible to a degree that also prevents it from ever blunting.

3. The Chaos Flayer

What it looks like:

A Macuahuitl but grotesquely alive: There is an eye on the side near the tip, the whole thing is made from bone and the grip has living skin. Along the edges, human-looking teeth are gnashing.

How it was made:

The famous chaos wizard Tristram prayed to the Beings Beyond for his son to be the deadliest warrior to have ever lived. When the child was born, it looked normal but upon puberty, the boy developed a hunchback. In the end, a teratome or devoured twin grew out of his back, separating, killing the boy. This was the Chaos Flayer, a living weapon.

What it wants:

It wants to kill more people than anyone ever did. That's a lot (see the Great Khan's Blood Blade) but the weapon is alive and immortal and has all the time in the world. Also, as it needs human blood for nourishment, it needs to kill at least one person per day.

What it does:

It quadruples the strength of its wearer and will easily rip through anything that isn't harder than human teeth. Also, the effect of its cutting is identical to that of a chainsaw, ripping, rending, being generally very messy.

4. Natnarin's Boomerang

What it looks like:

A boomerang, carved from a material that is light as wood but harder than most ceramics while being slightly flexible. There is text etched into its surface besinging the Great Huntress of the North.

How it was made:

A craftsman who was in love with the legendary huntress got a hold of the tooth of a wyrm she had slain. For twenty years he toiled, grinding the material into the perfect throwing weapon. When he presented it to her, both of them old and worn by years, she granted him a kiss on the cheek as a token of gratitude. He commited suicide immedeatly afterwards as he didn't want to lose the feeling of her lips on his skin.

What it wants:

It wants to hunt, preferably rare monsters that are difficult to kill and are a threat not only to the hunter but to people in general.

What it does:

When thrown by a skilled hunter, this weapon will always return to them, even after hitting. It is effectively indestructable and the sharpened edge can slice through anything softer than wyrm enamel, which includes steel. It doesn't miss unless there is a good reason for it to want to miss.

5. Saint Helena's Hammer

What it looks like:

A full steel warhammer that culminates in a hand that holds a stake, all made from steel. It contains the actual bones of the right forearm and hand of Saint Helena, the patron saint of those who hunt witches, undead, demons and unholy monsters.

How it was made:

After Saint Helena died, the weapon was forged by the church as both a relinquiary and a weapon. While the rest of her body was interred in a cathedral in the Holy Capital, this weapon was made to continue her mission to cleanse the world from supernatural evil.

What it wants:

To cleanse the world from supernatural evil. In fact, the wielder won't be able to do anything else with it and it would probably punish them for attempting to do so.

What it does:

It starts to shiver whenever supernatural evil is around. It gives off a faint, silvery glow in the darkness - enough to use as a low-end light source. It will destroy any evil it hits, whether that be corporeal or incorporeal. If the metal stake is slammed through something and into a surface, it can be used to hold to question even incorporeal demons. You can perform an exorcism with it, by staking the victim through the hand, driving the demon from the body whilst trapping it.

6. Shiftblade

What it looks like:

It comes in a variety of shapes and forms but all in all it is always fully made out of silver- or mercury-looking metal. It has a total Mass of three pounds, which doesn't change. Other than that in between a rapier, a spear, a thin but strong metal shield, a flail or whatever you can think of, the weapon can be whatever the wearer wants it to be.

How it was made:

The soul of an innocent child that was murdered by his own mother was captured and bound into a vial of mercury by an evil alchaemist. This is how a shiftblade is created – after the first wielder forces their will unto that poor, tortured soul.

What it wants:

Actually it wants its suffering to end. If the wielder ever slips in their dominance of the blade, the Shiftblade will betray them, hoping for a release when their tormentor dies. It is, after all, an innocent soul held hostage by a violent individual.

What it does:

When someone picks up the Shiftblade, they must assert mental dominance over it in order to use it. Once that is done, it can be used in battle - taking any shape that the wielder wants in a flow that takes less time than the blink of an eye. Of course, blocking a blow with a shield that then becomes a spear to stab with and then a blade to deflect a counter attack is extremely effective - if you know what you're doing. Thus this weapon multiplies the base fighting ability of its wielder, making a skilled warrior profit far more than a clumsy beginner.

7. Twin Succubus Daggers

What it looks like:

Two curved daggers, the handles, made out of a light and smooth stone, carved into naked women. Surprisingly ergonomic though. The two weapons are connected by their pommels with a length of indestructible chain about one meter long so they must always be wielded together.

How it was made:

Someone sacrificed their soul to bind two succubi into an ordinary pair of weapons, which could have started out as something as mundane as butter knives. Then a blacksmith forged them into these weapons while the succubi were still bound, which must have taken some more sacrifices of human souls to accomplish.

What it wants:

Sex and murder, preferrably a combination of both. This is a weapon to bind and rape and kill someone with. Yet all parties involved will feel pleasure from whatever combination of sexual debauchery, sex crime and violence/combat is had with the weapon. Do involve the chain for some breath-play.

What it does:

It makes the wielder into a sexual combatant with lightning-quick reflexes and an appetite for both slaughter and sex. Effectively tripling the speed at which you can act. In anything like sex or combat it makes you a terrible monster to encounter. You will only remember things as a haze of red but at that point your soul is probably already on its way to hell.

8. Meteoric Khriss

What it looks like:

A snaking blade made from a dark steel. The grip is wooden and has a finely decorated pommel. It comes with a wooden sheath that has a protective metal bar by its opening and doubles as a smallish war hammer if you need a secondary weapon. The blade is about a foot long. It is of the hardest conceivable steel.

How it was made:

A prince of the island kingdoms long a go witnessed the fall of a meteor. As it was in an age before the advent of steel, the gift from the gods was forged into this very weapon with the express purpose of being able to combat not only human enemies but also supernatural beings.

What it wants:

It wants to help bring balance to the universe. Whenever evil is in the advantage, it will want to slice that to bits. But once the tide of a battle is turning, so will its loyalties.

What it does:

Cuts anything - even souls. If two people are bound by a link of souls it can slice through that if you can guesstimate where their connection runs through the aether. Cuts made by the curved blade will also heal very slowly.

9. Leech Dagger

What it looks like:

A roundish, hollow tube with a sharp point like a very large but a bit stubby hypodermic needle. It appears to be made from silvery copper. From the base of the blade, there are six curved metal pipes about the thickness of straws that wind around and end in sharpened points where the wielder will have their hand and wrist. The grip is spiralled with orichalcum, mythril and amber.

How it was made:

The Master Alchaemist's second apprentice, the one who turned evil, forged this weapon in order to give it to his lover, Shireigh the Assassin. He had hoped that the infused essences would keep her as beautiful and deadly as in her prime. In the end, it would be the blade that killed him and, much later, her as well.

What it wants:

Drink blood and infuse its wearer with it.

What it does:

Equipping it will immedeatly hurt you. Stab someone with it and it sucks out far more of their blood than they would normally lose and infuses it into you, whilst magically cleansing it and making it compatible with your body. It steals life force but that also contains parts of your victim's soul. Do it often and you will lose yourself in a sea of inner voices.

10. Rock Bian of Heavenly Justice

What it looks like:

A ridged, straight rod with a grip, all carved from a bone-coloured stone. It is ridged to look a bit like a human spine. Between the lowest ridge and the grip there is a ring of symbols that can be rotated around the shaft, although it was made from the same rock. Spinning it emits a very high pitched whine as long as it keeps turning, which can be up to half a minute.

How it was made:

It was carved out of bedrock from mount meru by a demon tasked to do so by a long forgotten emperor. Said emperor wanted a weapon that could smash but not cut as he had been prophesied to die by beheading with his own blade. The legend has it that it is one of the very rare intances where fate was actually averted: The emperor died of a stroke in his bath.

What it wants:

Smash the forces of chaos and disorder in the world. It does not care if you are good or bad, only if you obey a very hierarchical world view and know your place in it.

What it does:

While the lowest ring segment is spinning, hitting hard things with this will break and shatter them: The bone in your arm will break much easier than normally, it rips open armour and splits rocks. Swords connecting with it will splinter into pieces.

Free Release: The Discarded Giant's Boot

 I made another one-page-dungeon: The Discarded Giant's Boot.

It's a the adventure I played on a long car ride with my son, as written down in this post. It was meant to be played with Arnold K.'s Copper GLOG but can probably be easily adapted an dumped into any sufficiently weird/magical play world. Wherever a twenty-kilometer-tall giant may have existed somewhere in the very distant past.

Have fun!

Play report: Copper GLOG Session 1

On a longish car ride (your definition of what constitutes a long car ride may greatly vary), my older son and I played a session of Copper GLOG, as invented by my favourite ttrpg-blogger of all times, Arnold K. For our randomizer we used even/uneven licence plate end numbers (foreign ones didn't count even if they did end in a number) of cars we passed or that passed us, depending on what came first.

My son chose a ratling warrior as his character class – Fighter level 1, good skill sneaking, special equipment: Bow and arrow. He was sent by his clan to rescue the princess of his clan, the forest ratlings. She had been kidnapped by goblins, presumably for some higher-up ruler, and dragged to the Discarded Giant's Boot, a one-index-card-dungeon I had made up sometime last year. The nameless ratling hero started before the gaping maw of the enormous boot (the entrance into it is about half a kilometer wide), a mountain cave made out of leather of an ancient beast of titanic proportions.

The ratling managed to sneak into the boot's shaft, which contained the hovels of a goblin village. Listening to two of the greenskins converse in one of the huts he found out that the princess had been brought into the boot's tip. He left the goblin village, going deeper into the boot. There was little light coming from holes rotted into the thick leather roof, otherwise it was a detritus-strewn dark cave. A random encounter got our hero his first fight: A giant flea (Level 1) attacked. The ratling managed to fend it off but got hurt in the fight, losing one of his two HP.

He decided to take lunch and move on, triggering another random encounter, this time with a herd of fleas herded by goblin herdsmen, who were driving their disgusting flock towards the village. A successful stealth check meant that the ratling was undiscovered but listening to the goblins only revealed dirty songs the goblin herdsmen were singing.

Delving deeper into the boot, the hero found himself with the choice of going left towards the boot's tip or into a hole gnawed into the heel, where the goblins presumably were mining leather. He decided to explore the leather mine first, went inside and found himself in a hollowed-out area with a big mushroom surrounded by slime on the floor, out of which half-finished goblins were growing. This was their mothershroom, the place where the goblins of the village spawned. On the far end, he could make out cages.

He decided to investigate, sneaking around the half-grown goblins and reaching the caves. One contained five of the fleas, one contained a desiccated skeleton, one a live ratling who begged to be released. The hero freed the prisoner and gave him his bow and arrow, making a Friend for the rest of the adventure. The two of them, however, failed to sneak out – and had to fight their way through four half-grown goblins (Level 0). They succeeded after a long and somewhat tedious battle, losing no HP in the process.

Despite the freed prisoner's fear of the deeper areas of the boot, they pressed onwards towards the tip. They managed to sneak past a giant earwig (Level 2) and saw the lit entrance of a wooden house at the end of the cavernous boot-cave. The house was larger than human-sized (enormous for two ratlings, who stand about a meter tall in our world) and guarded by two goblins. One of them was asleep, the other was picking his nose – the Friend killed both with well-placed arrows.

The two ratlings had to stand on top of each other in order to reach the doorknob. They did and went into the house. On the ground floor, the first door lead into a room full of cages. Six of them contained princesses: The ratling princess, an orc princess, a human princess, an aelph princess, a beetle princess and a kobold princess. The princesses told the two ratlings that the keys to their prison were in the posession of the Orgre (Level 3, two attacks) whose house this was. He was planning to make a Princess Stew, the recipe of which demanded for eight different types of princess.

The two ratlings snuk up the stairs to confront the monster. The orgre had been lying on his bed but smelled the two newcomers enter his bedroom. Grabbing two huge butcher-knives from the nightstand, he got up and a healthbar grew on the bottom of the screen and boss-music started. The two Level-1-ratlings had a difficult time with this boss monster but in the end were successful. The nameless hero slew the ogre with one HP left and the resusciated his Friend who was at 0 HP. He'd have to stay in the back, shooting arrows, from now on.

The two heroes freed all six princesses from their cages – and then armed them with oversized kitchen utensils. They princesses counted as a Swarm of Princesses (Level 6, fights as level 0 single creature but has Lvl HP). The group left the house and went back towards the heel of the boot.

On the way a random encounter delivered an agressive giant earwig their way. The ratling hero attacked in close combat, the princesses did too and the Friend fired arrows. In the end, the hero had to be patched up after the battle (0 HP) but the group succeeded. This marked the occasion of the hero leveling up (10x current level in XP; Defeating monsters results in Monster-Lvl XP). Now level 2 he'd be a better fighter still but do not gain an additional HP yet.

At the leather mine into the heel, the ratlings decided that a large-scale distraction was needed if the group was to get through the goblin village and leave the boot. They snuk past the mothershroom and freed the captive giant fleas which fled into the larger cave, spooking the herds of fleas the goblins were keeping and causing widespread chaos, pandemonium and destruction.

A failed stealth-roll led to the princesses each having to do a roll on their survival. Luckily, only two of them didn't make it out: The human princess and the beetle princess died upon trying to get through the chaos of the goblin village. Five rescued prisoners brought our hero another five XP. He had also accomplished the mission (rescue the ratling princess) and made some valuable new allies. With the ogre dead, the goblins would soon be subject to a new ruler and we decided it would make sense for the orc princess to return with a retinue of her warriors to now become ruling queen of the discarded giant's boot.

The whole thing took about three hours of play time, which we spent with some interruptions, whenever I had to concentrate on more complicated parts of the road. The simple resolution system makes for an easy way of playing hands-free and the minimal bookkeeping helps as well. You can only use a simple dungeon if you want to keep it all in your head – I did cheat in that by placing one dungeon (the ogre's house) inside another dungeon (the giant's boot). But keep it simple and this works just fine. Thanks,Arnold!

Re-Release: Midnight at Halcyon's Coven

 I'm re-releasing my one-page-dungeon Midnight at Halcyon's Coven again, this time in order for it to be on my itch-site. It's part of my pledge to release something on there every month of 2023 – but I'll only make it something new every other month because let's face it: I'm not that productive. Anyhow, if you like paranormal investigation, go and check it out!

Evangelion as gaming inspiration

A few weeks ago I re-watched Neon Genesis Evangelion. It came to me that this would be awesome material for a deep roleplaying game: Every player being a board-member of a society tasked with defending mankind against an unknowable and almost godlike foe. Everyone having their own secret agenda. Dealing with the stupid shenanigans of your immature pilots who keep fucking up and making things worse whenever not in the cockpit.

So I started making that game for myself. It's going to be a journalling experience for solo players when it's done – I simply do not have the free time or mental capacity left to make a campaign like that as a pen&paper-RPG for my friends. Thus far I've been testing the combat system and the balancing of the Evas Titans that NERV the Kaijuu Boueigun (Kaiju Defense Force – KDF) fields. Kaiju and Titans alike have an ATP PMS-Field, the Projection Manifestation Simulacrum, which makes things of that size work by de facto magic. The Titans may not be fuelled by anyone's mother's souls (a concept that even my seven-year-old derided as stupid when I explainde Evangelion to him), but they are actually the twin of the pilot (but changed). This is a handy concept because it also explains why the Kaijuu Boueigun sends 14-year-olds to war – that's how long the technology has been around and that's how long it takes for a Titan to reach maturity.

Unlike in Evangelion, conventional weapons can be of some help in my game. Thus, whenever the Titans are damaged or insufficiently armed, the JSDF can be asked to provide support in the form of tanks, air strikes, attack helicopters or tactical nuclear weaponry. These use favour-points though and should thus be fielded very sparingly. Also: These things are weak. A group of 12 tanks has 1 HP, some minor chance of surviving a hit and deal 1 damage. Most Angels Kaiju will soak like 5 damage per round of combat or be completely immune to conventional weaponry.

I've so far played through six encounters with angels Kaiju. Combat seems to work (but I will keep going with that campaign in order to test more Kaiju as I make them up). I'm also working on the social system that is going to be much of the game: The pilots causing trouble, having difficult relationships with one another and then traitorous adults in your ranks like military liaisons pushing for more conventional warfare, industrialists wanting robots instead of Titans and of course the crazy dude who just wants to liquefy all of mankind.

It's actually great fun to journal this sort of thing. Might acutally finish this one and put it up on Itch. Definetly doing to do some play-reports here.

The Epic Adventures of Paul the Nice Thief, part 1

 During our quarantine, I started a role playing campaign with my older son, who turned six this summer. I hesitate to call it “pen and paper” because as my player can’t read yet, there is hardly any pen&papering involved. After the first session I did write down the basic facts for his character though, so I guess it qualifies. The system is almost purely narrative-based. As we started playing while walking in circles in our backyard, pushing the stroller with our sleeping toddler, there are not dice involved.

The character is just a scant few points of data: Name, class, health points, experience points, skills (three to begin with) and equipment. I guided my son through the character creation process by asking him if he wanted to be a warrior, a thief, an archer or a wizard. Of course, he chose to be a thief (his favorite in Heroica as well as Pixel Dungeon). I gave him 4 HP for that, as well as the starting skills sneaking, climbing and reading tracks. Then he got to choose a weapon and a starting item of power. He chose a set of three throwing knives and a disguising cape that could render you invisible while immobile and holding your breath.

I decided to start my son’s adventuring career with a classic premise: The dungeon run. A wizard named Xerax has a tomb that is rumored to be guarded by traps and foul creatures. It is located a day’s march from a nearby village and Paul, our thief, has heard of it. Next up: Paul’s first adventure. I will write it up straight-faced – my son playing a grown-up (as he thinks what that would be like) leads to some Vincent-Adultman-situations which are great fun for me. And perhaps for you as well, my fives of readers.

Book Idea: Cogite Ergo Sum

 I've been thinking: What if you made a book that pretends to be a chatbot that pretends to be sentient? Could one do that? I mean, you can have computation of sorts by making a choose-your-own-adventure and have the reader do some of the lifting by following instructions to find certain pages. Then you can add a couple of bits of RAM/Memory like I did with Der Dornengarten. Can you make a book that pretends to have a conversation with the reader, arguing for its own sentience, perhaps even be convincing in it? I'll have to ask a friend who studied philosophy what the killer arguments would be and then make up ways to have them flow into a conversation where one side can only pick out of multiple-choice answers like they're playing a video game. It's just an idea but what if...

Three Horror Game Scenarios

Pen and paper horror is ideally made in one-shots. Two of these I have GMd before, using my crad-drafting little pnp-system. It's possible I'll make some of these into one page dungeons or something similar at some point. For now:

The Drillhole Trilogy

1. Oilfield

• You are the survivors of a plane crash. The engine of the passenger jet just cut out.
• Clinging to floating seat cushions the high waves carry you towards a darkened oil rigg.
• Inside, everyone is dead. There are weird symbols scratched into the walls.
• There is a shoggoth in the main tank. It's angry.
  
• Twist ending: The world has ended. You are among the few survivors.
• You must stop a second event. The source of the mass death is on this oil rigg.
  

2. Abyssal Entrance

• You are a group of urban explorers somewhere in the Russian hinterland.
• An old research installation is legendary among your ilk. It is completely abandoned.
• Radio picks up scratched transmitions. They turn out to be coded christian prayers.
• The bore hole that was used to explore the depths is at the bottom of a strip mine.
• Down there there is a record of a prayer powered by a radionuclear battery.
• In the 60s, the Soviets accidentally drilled a hole into hell.
  
• The record needs to be replaced. If it isn't or if it is turned off, hell will invade earth.

3. Icy Prison

• You are political prisoners in a penal outpost all the way out on Pluto.
• Every day you get to suit up and do geological exploratory digs.
• One of your fellow inmates catches something from the hole and goes insane.
• He infects some staff. They start killing people.
• You team up and try to survive.
• Can you fix up a space craft? Wait for help in several months time?
• Or do you stop the transmission of this mimetic disease before it spreads to other worlds?

Technology and Magic

I like my fantasy more medieval than the mainstream these days does it. Outside having an aristocracy, most fantasy authors basically seem to transfer ideas of old-west frontiersmanship into a medieval setting. Lone farmsteads, guarded by farmers with shotguns crossbows. While this does make a murderhobo-fantasy more plausible, it really irks me. So do ginormous fortresses a la World of Warcraft or Lord of the Rings. Like - who would have built this? With what manpower? Why?

I really dislike false modernisms in my fantasy. If you want street lamps and cell phones, please, by all means, use a modern setting. Urban fantasy is great in allowing you to do magic and swords while having all conveniances of modern civilization. If you can't think without smartphones, then don't. Fuck speaking stones. Fuck eternal lights. Let me state it here:

ANY SUFFICIENTLY MUNDANE MAGIC IS INDISTINGUISHABLE FROM TECHNOLOGY.

There, I said it. If every other dude can cast light/bread/whatever, there is no medieval society. Nope.

So magic better be rare, hard, opaque, weird, dangerous. Have the supernatural as a hint, not an everyday thing. And don't forget: If you can actually feel your god's power via visible and undeniable miracles they work through your or someone else's hands – please don't call it fucking faith.

Free Release: Midnight at Halcyon's Coven 2016

After the One Page Dungeon Contest 2016 is over it's time to revisit my first foray into that competition: Midnight at Halcyon's Coven was a mess so I decided to re-make it. Using all I have learned about making One Page Dungeons, I cleaned it up. Let me elaborate.

The original had three specific problems: Problem 1 was way too much work I put into the 3D-rendering of the bunker and its furniture. Hours upon hours went into coffee-mugs and desk lamps that would be invisible in the finished product. That work however, has been done and this is not a problem for the reader - so nothing's to be done about that.

Problem 2 is that ugly frame. It was supposed to make the whole page look more professionally lay-outed but it makes large swaths of text harder to read. While the new version looks a bit less stylish without it as I have not found a good replacement, having no frame is better than that one.

Problem 3 is the most glaring one: Way, way too much text. I left nothing to the imagination of whoever is running this adventure and that was very foolish. The large amount of text gives unnecessary details and forces the font to a tiny size that's a terrible chore to read. I cut it back to the bare necessity. So, I hereby proudly present to you:

Midnight at Halcyon's Coven 2016

Results!

So, after the release of The Lair of the Voidbeast comes the results of the One Page Dungeon Contest. I made it into the Penultimate Winners Circle, which I am somewhat proud of. You should all definetly check out the contest entries, as they are all diverse and interesting.

In other news, a YouTuber named Jupiter Hadley (if that's her real name, her parents are incredibly cool!) has tasked herself with playing ALL the entries of the Low Res Jam 2016. In episode 22 she gets around playing a minute of our offering, Low Res Dungeoneer.


I might enter a nice press snippet with

"I wish I knew what I was doing" - Jupiter Hadley

on the itch.io-page. Cheers!

Free Release: One Page Dungeon Contest 2016

Three years after my first entry into that prestigious contest on pen & paper adventure design, this is my second attempt to leave my mark:

The Lair of the Voidbeast - a Non-Euklidean Dungeon

It's inspired by this and the follow up. Folded into a cube that you might wanna hide behind a screen it could potentially flabbergast and bamboozle players who like to draw maps while exploring. Next up: A remake of my first One Page Dungeon, after having learned a bit more on design and legibility...

One Page Dungeon Contest 2016 - Sneak Peek

So, the One Page Dungeon Contest 2016 is around the corner. Deadline is May 1st, so there is some time left. This year I'm working on something quite special. Here's a little sneak peek of my work in progress:

It's been three years since my last entry in that competition. Back then I made several rather big mistakes I'd like to address here.

Pen & Paper: Action Set Pieces

I somewhere read that an action sequence needs more than just a static battleground. This is as true for an RPG as it is for any movie - you better have something going on around you, surroundings influencing things, hazards, all that jazz. So this week, I had my players fight - in a pit.

Good action movies know that the set is as important as the action that takes place in it. Take anything Jackie Chan does, for example. The sets and props really take center stage. If he could get a hovercraft for a day, you better believe that there will be a way to integrate it into the plot. The best action scenes are running gun-battles or fighting on a moving train or scenery falling down around the characters, threatening to crush either combatant at any moment. This is something where computer RPGs often fail - and so does traditional gridmap DnD.

You CAN put rules into the game that make things more interesting. Say, this and that hex/square/area spout hot steam every X turns, doing damage. Often this just creates no-go zones for PCs and enemies. If you present an enemy stupid enough to run into danger face-first, the battle threatens to become a riddle. Where do you need to place yourself in order to lure the monster into X? That's why I prefer freeform storytelling in battles, sprinkled with some dice-rolls to keep things unpredictable to both the players and myself as the game master.

The two surviving PCs of a small foray into ancient underground ruins were fleeing. Their friend lay dead, killed by their own bullets, in a crypt behind them. The monsters were chasing. The underground complex terminated in a huge drill-shaft. To get back topside, they would have to climb - there were rusted metal bars forming a ladder, alongside which a steel cable was hanging. The group had used the cable to secure themselves when they were climbing down. So one of them took to the ladder, the other tried climbing the cable, when the praying mantis-like aliens emerged from the tunnel right beneath their feet.

The battle was a vertical chase between the PCs, armed with firearms with little or no ammo, and the aliens that were limited to their raptorial legs. It was tossing down empty guns onto the following monsters, rolling for stamina to stay ahead, rolling acrobatics to swing over to the ladder etc. In a desperate last-ditch, one of the two, the teams socialistic terrorist bomb builder, hung herself upside down by her injured legs to fight one of the monster hand-to-hand - and won. The interesting part was the verticality: You could lose your grip and fall, and there was no regular trading of blows with something that is hacking at your legs.

Thanks to some astronomic luck in dice-rolls, both PCs got out of the hole alive, although said revolutionary almost bled to death on the way up. I really liked the vertical battle and will implement such features more often n the future. Tactical inequality is always nice. The only thing the whole thing was missing was moving parts, like enormous drill looming above coming to life or something but the industrial plant on that planet had been left alone for eight decades. I couldn't imagine it still working, as scavengers had picked over it and ripped out all useful parts. Well - next time.

Pen & Paper: I died last night

So, last night in one of my pen & paper campaigns, my character died. Now I've had characters die before, usually towards the end of a campaign, as was the case here, but this death was somewhat unspectacular and anticlimactic. It also totally blindsided me and came right after a first for me in an RPG. Let me tell you about Dr. Hong-Owen and his not-so gallant death.

Dr. Tyson Hong-Owen (extra-points for anyone who gets the reference to my favorite body of sci-fi works) was a space-archaeologist. Space Indiana-Jonesing was the pitch that our GM had baited me in with so that was the profession I chose for my character. A young, vigorous man in the process of discovering Space-Mayan artifacts and working with passion on discovering their secrets. So when, during the course of the campaign living Space-Mayas showed up, he was on the forefront of first contact with them. And it cost him his life.

Pen & Paper: Sandbox or Railroad Campaign?

So, I've been GMing an RPG set in space recently. The group took the first part of the campaign to escape from an interstellar prison-planet (yes, it's Butcher Bay. I know). Some characters died during a prison-riot that the group had started in order to form a distraction, but most of the group succeeded in escaping, forming bonds in the process, being cool and all.

Playing a campaign in prison had some advantages for me as a game master. The environment was limited, so were the NPCs to interact with - I made an exhaustive list of them and how they were grouped and what they were like. I had no plan how the group would escape the prison. They would have to figure one out themselves. It was a small-scale sandbox for my group to play in. Now, for what we call our second season, we have some new characters, some old ones, and the whole thing is set on a small ship escaping from the law. We basically went from Butcher Bay to Firefly. Which is nice. But entirely different in structure.

Thoughts on Pen & Paper: Player Interactions

One of my players in our sci-fi pen & paper campaign complained that there wasn't enough player-interaction going on in the game. Being as he was the pilot, that was true. Being a fair GM, I thought I needed to change that. Being also a somewhat rough GM that I am, things went bad quickly. Well, the goal is for everyone at the table to have fun. Most things did work out. Read on to find out how things went!

Some people say that the pilot of a sci-fi campaign should better be an NPC, as all they have to do is fly everyone else from A to B and whenever they get action, everyone else is just strapped into their seats anyways. I usually try to levie that by having the others busy with quick-repairs and fending off boarders forming from the very walls of their own ship. Yeah, it's a rather high-tech setting. Now over the past few sessions, there really wasn't much dangerous piloting or space-combat to be done, just exploring an ancient tunnel system in a planet/optical computer/religious site. And they always left the pilot behind so yes, he got bored.

So I started with, when the rest of the crew returned to the ship and they started loading up loot into their cargo-bay, having the pilot see different stuff than everyone else. The implications were clear, as the pilot spent most of his time linked to the ships computer he would be the first target to any sort of cyber-attack. As the crew spend most of their free time in a VR simulation of whatever they like, the rest would fall too but they hadn't had a break for a while. So the pilot is going crazy, seeing an intruder who, after some testing by the chief of security, isn't there although she ship does react as if they were. The result is that the pilot gets knocked out with a phaser and restrained in the med-bay, where he spends the rest of the session, while the rest of the crew shuts down the computer core and fights the two escaped prisoners whom they had brought from another system.

I do agree that I kind of pushed my pilot into open rebellion against his comrades. He got phasered and forced to inactivity for most of the session, which was a bummer for him as a player but at least everyone else got to interact a lot with all the suspicion, threats, pulling of rank and discussion appropriate for the tense situation of being in a ship with a computer compromised by a vastly superior enemy.

I will have to find ways of doing this without the group restraining each other or going all-out PvP in the future. After all, we're all at the table to enjoy ourselves.

Free Release! One Page Dungeon! 100th Post! 1 Year Blogiversary!

Well well well, it's been one year with this blog now, coinciding with my 100th post. Putting out something that's been in the works for quite a while this is a good point to get back a bit to role-playing, which has come a little short during the current Kerbal-streak I'm on.

So here (a bit more info after the jump) it is, intended to be entered into this years One Page Dungeon Contest: Midnight at Halcyons Coven:

One Page Dungeon Project 1 - a sneak peak

I have decided to participate in the next One Page Dungeon Contest, which is still a few months away but who knows how long I'll take to actually get this thing done? Might as well use that creative energy of mine now.

So here's what I intend to do: I've made this vertical dungeon (in a broad sense), a bunker situated in an abandoned missile silo from the cold war era. I made the graphics with Google SketchUp and then edited them with Gimp because I couldn't draw if my life depended on it. Now the idea is that, while my One Page Dungeon will have an urban fantasy theme with a satanic cult and vampires and all that, the graphics can be used to interpret them as pretty much any scenario that sensibly could take place in a private or governmental bunker. I mean, people can actually buy these things today...

So here I present a small glimpse at my current state of graphical representation, the dungeon-map so to speak, although the full version is, of course, much larger and more detailed:

As you can see here, there is a house topside and the missile silo itself has been fitted with floors, making it a vertical dungeon with quite a few floors to cover. I'll post more whenever this thing grows beyond the preliminary state - I'm currently writing descriptions on everything, giving the whole thing story, theme and antagonists.

Character Progress in Games - some thoughts

Whilst playing Kerbal Space Program recently, I've been thinking about the different types of progress characters in games, in both video- and pen & paper RPG, make towards overcoming challenges set by the game or a game master better. Here's what I've come up with regarding character growth in games.

Three types of character growth, actually, if you completely disregard story, lore, context and all these things that get in the way of talking about pure game-mechanics. Of these three types of growth, only one is immanent in the game itself, which is the first I'll talk about here: Character growth.