Modern / Progressive takes on Genre Fiction

Originally posted on the OSR Pit.

I recently watched both Doom Patrol and Harley Quinn on HBO Max, and both shows are excellent and brilliant and really spoke to me both in unique ways.

One thing that really struck me, and this is something I’ve been feeling for some time, but hadn’t seen it done as explicitly as in these two shows, is how these shows recontextualize the tropes of science fiction, fantasy, superheroes, Weird, etc., which were historically portrayed as horrific and rooted in xenophobia, in a way that is consistent with the original concepts, but is now empowering and inclusive. It all feels much more relatable, even as a straight white cis-gender male, and just as if not more so creatively and intellectually engaging.

I had read Grant Morrison’s run of Doom Patrol years ago and I was generally aware of how much Grant Morrison has inspired me over the years, but the show felt like it was reading my mind in terms of exactly what I’m trying to do with Maximum Recursion Depth. Likewise, I haven’t fully processed it all yet, but the Harley Quinn show has me excited about and interested in superheroes in a way I have not felt for several years now. I think Marvel and DC would do well to incorporate these ideas into the comics if they hope to remain relevant.

I realize that there have been many other works along these lines, like The Ballad of Black Tom or Lovecraft Country for HP Lovecraft (the latter I still have not read nor seen the show), Imaro or possibly also Elric for Conan (neither of which I have read, unfortunately), and of course many more. But I do think there’s something about these two shows, in particular, their specific sensibilities, that to me seems really telling about what the future of genre fiction and probably also RPGs entails.

This feels very in-line with a lot of the indie TTRPG / SWORDDREAM-space, the sort of post-OSR-exclusivity BS that always drove me crazy, where we can talk about and acknowledge these more complex social issues, and also Weird high concept fantasy, and we can do both in a way that is organic and functions on multiple levels of subtext.

So when I say modern / progressive genre fiction, I don’t just mean in the social equality sense per se, but in a very literal sense, I think these kinds of works are telling about the future of genre fiction.

I’m not entirely sure what the point of this post is. I’d assumed, at the beginning of the Trump era, let alone whatever happens from covid, that this was all going to have a profound effect on culture and zeitgeist, but I wasn’t sure exactly what shape that would take, but now I think I’m beginning to see it, and it has me very excited. So I guess this is just me putting those thoughts out there, and asking if other people feel the same way, or have other thoughts about the future of genre fiction.

The key components I see, and this is absolutely a non-exhaustive, stream of consciousness list, but roughly:

• Characters who are deeply flawed, but conscious of this fact and, importantly, are striving to improve.
• While interpersonal conflict exists, real communication is important.
• Weirdness happens and to a certain extent, you just have to be willing to go along for the ride.
• Weird can be dangerous, but it is not to be feared.
• Normal can be just as weird as Weird.
• Weird can be just as normal as Normal.
• Not just intellectual white men can be quirky, brilliant, angsty assholes.
• It is not unreasonable to look at the universe, at the macrocosmic / cosmic scale or the microcosmic / societal scale, and feel existential dread or nihilism, but it is generally better to try to relish in the absurdity of it all.

Retrospective: Pixels & Platforms

I enjoyed writing the Mythic Beings Retrospective, a re-examination of my very first post, so I decided to do another retrospective. I recently published my second game, Maximum Recursion Depth, for the Eclectic Bastionjam, so I thought I might do a retrospective on my first game, Pixels & Platforms for the SWORDDREAM DREAMJAM (I also wrote an article about P&P for the high level games blog).

Overview

P&P is intended to simulate the experience of old-school 2D platformer videogames in a tabletop RPG, using a resolution mechanic building off of Lasers & Feelings. It is loosely framed within my setting The Quantumverse, although the way I present it in P&P is more so like an off-brand NES crossover (although I do have bigger ideas for that setting which I haven't written about).

There are three attributes; JUMP, SPECIAL, and FIGHT, and each attribute has a Light and Heavy input. For each attribute, you choose a NICE! number between 2-5. For Light actions, you want to roll over the NICE! number (lower is better), and the reverse for Heavy. The particulars of what these attributes are used for, and the differences between Light and Heavy Inputs for each attribute, are described in further detail in the Select Screen and Control sections of the game, but this is the core of the game mechanics.

The CPU (the term for the GM in this system), designs a Platform Crawl, a series of Screens (or Stages, or Worlds, depending on the scope of the game), consisting of traversable platforms and various enemies and obstacles. Unlike a real 2D Platformer videogame, there is obviously no real-time input for platforming, and very early on I decided that the challenge should not come from success or failure on JUMP rolls per se; that would basically just be chance and not very much fun. Instead, the platform crawls should be designed such that there are many ways to go about getting from one end of a stage to another, and it's a matter of the party figuring out how to leverage their attributes and special abilities to collectively get across. In some ways, it's almost more like a boardgame than a TTRPG per se, for better or worse. I have some additional thoughts on this which I discuss in the conclusion.

There were a lot of ideas for this game that I think worked, and some that didn't. It's biggest flaws, I think, are that it lacks polish and that it needed more supplementary content. In particular, it very clearly needed to have a platform crawl module included. Despite being a small game, I think it was actually fairly ambitious in what it tried to do, but as a result, I needed to do more within the text to demonstrate to readers how it should work. I also think I needed to have a deeper understanding of it myself. In retrospect, I wish I had designed the resolution mechanics and the platform crawl concept independently and tested them at least to some extent independently, to better understand how to polish the mechanics and articulate them. In general, I needed more playtesting.

That being said, I still think it is an interesting game, with ideas worth consideration and worth exploring further, and I hope this retrospective maybe convinces people to give it a look, or think about these ideas, and maybe I will be able to one day come back to this game and turn it into what it really should be.

Things that worked

The layout could use some work, it's definitely pretty dense, but otherwise, I think looks pretty good. HarveydentMD's cover art is great, and the itch page looks good, and I'm happy with the font I used for the game text itself. It's like a poor man's Super Blood Harvest. In retrospect, if he were even open to doing it, I wish I had commissioned HarveydentMD to do the layout as well and make the whole game look like the cover art and itch page, then it would compare more closely with SBH.

I have mixed feelings about some of the terminology, but overall, I really wanted the game mechanics, down to even the terminology, to be evocative of old-school videogames, and I think I succeeded in that regard. Whether that ultimately makes for a better TTRPG experience is a separate question which I'll discuss later.

The setting. Despite the fact that I include very little explicitly about The Quantumverse within P&P itself, and most of what is included is like an off-brand Nintendo crossover, I still like the way the character classes, enemies, items, etc., generally present. I had some more ambitious ideas for the setting which I never ended up writing about, unfortunately, but I assure you there was more to this setting, in a classic Weird & Wonderful way, if you've been following this blog long enough to have any sense of what that means. Unfortunately, it is unlikely that I'll ever come back to this setting unless out of nowhere there is suddenly an outcry for more on this game or setting, which is a shame, but my main focus right now is MRD.

The classes. With the caveat that they needed more playtesting and balancing, and I don't necessarily think it makes sense for only two classes to have a variety of options given the Spellbook. In retrospect, there should have been some caveat, like maybe the spell they can cast at any one time is selected randomly, so at least there's a tradeoff to their versatility, or something like that. In any case, I tried to give the different classes special abilities which actually made them interesting and change how a player could interact with the world, and I think within the context of the platform crawl design, it makes sense. It's more prescriptive than I generally prefer in TTRPGs, but within the context of what P&P is supposed to be, I think it makes sense.

The core resolution mechanic. The idea of treating an attribute as two-dimensional; as an axis, where the number on that axis doesn't necessarily mean good or bad, but good at one category of thing and proportionally worse at an opposing category of thing, is really clever and in my opinion underutilized in TTRPGs. I don't understand why this mechanic exists only in L&F or L&F hacks. P&P is to the best of my knowledge the first and only game to actively try to build on this mechanic, as opposed to being just a straightforward hack, and also to leverage it in a totally different way, that way being as a "simulationist"-style mechanic.

Along those lines, putting aside the toxic and, I'll say frankly, stupid debates people used to have on "GNS", since as far as I'm concerned it's a decent heuristic regardless of whether it is a fundamental truth of the universe, it is the only game I can think of that is "simulationist", while also being rules light. "Simulationist" games are generally very crunchy, whereas I tried to use the simplicity of the two-dimensional attributes along with the terminology and platform crawl design pattern to simulate the experience of an old-school 2D platformer videogame in the absence of "high-fidelity" crunch. Regardless of whether or to what extent it succeeded, I still think this is conceptually really cool and with some polish could potentially work quite well.

Things that did not work

Due to time constraints, I only had one playtest, and that one playtest went poorly, which was part of why I did not follow up with as much additional content for the game as I had originally intended. I do genuinely think the poor playtest was in part due to extenuating circumstances and a couple real rooky mistakes in how I ran it, but it was still discouraging. I made a lot of changes after that playtest which I do think were for the best, but those changes were not playtested, so I am not as confident as I would like to be that those changes succeeded. There are also some things when I look back at the game, even without further playtesting, that I know are rough around the edges and need more work.

I said this in the overview, but this game absolutely needed a platform crawl module included. At the core of P&P is a very goal-oriented, puzzle-like design pattern that I think could really appeal both to OSR gamers and the kinds of people who like the tactical combat of D&D 3.+, but without a demonstration, I think it was hard to explain this concept to anyone. Also, frankly, I am not a very visuospatially capable person in the first place, so in retrospect, I wish I had collaborated with someone with those kinds of sensibilities, or even attempted some kind of random auto-generation approach. While this game is not crunchy, it does require a playmat or some other visual or tactile representation, and my reticence to acknowledge that hurt my playtest and the lack of that kind of support really hurt the game as a whole. I do not own Mario Maker, but my players had rightfully suggested that something like Mario Maker could have been a useful tool for roughly designing platform crawls. I still think that, or just taking asset rips of the stages from old-school 2D platformer videogames, could work really well for P&P, at least as proofs of concept.

My hope was that the terminology would be flavorful, and also intuitive. However, at least in the playtest, everyone had a very difficult time keeping track of the terminology, myself included, mainly from being flustered because I definitely understood it all beforehand, but if I failed to keep track of it while running the game, that means it failed. After the fact, I completely reworked the terminology. Rather than having separate terms for each end of the axis for the three attributes, and using the terms Left and Right "Inputs" for the axes of the attributes which obviously got conflated with left and right movement across the Stages, I replaced Left and Right with Light and Heavy, and just referred to them as e.g. Light Jump and Heavy Jump rather than unique terms for each. I also think maybe some kind of visual aid even within the game text itself, like a graphic showing what a rollover vs. a roll-under success would look like next to the description of Light and Heavy Inputs, could have been very helpful. Given how the first playtest went, I am somewhat skeptical whether these new terms work and would ideally like to playtest them as well, although I do hope they're at least an improvement.

Conclusion

Talking about this game really makes me want to playtest it again, and design a proper platform crawl module to go along with it. This concept I genuinely think has so much potential, but it's very experimental and just needed more time and playtesting. I almost would want to make it a sub-game, like run a campaign in The Quantumverse using something more like an Into the Odd / Super Blood Harvest hack, and then make platform crawls an occasional thing like one might do with hex crawls, dungeon crawls, point crawls, etc. That would also put a lot of burden off of this system to accommodate more heavy lifting in RP or non-platform crawl activities, which is decidedly not the case.

If this at all seems appealing to you, please let me know. My main focus right now is on developing and expanding Maximum Recursion Depth, so it would be hard to justify putting more work into this unless there was any interest whatsoever in it, but clearly I'm trying to talk myself into it...

It's Okay To Be A Monster: RPG Rough Concept

Sadly I have not had much time to do or think about RPG stuff lately, but I had kind of a rough week and so naturally I am now feeling creative. This is an idea I've been sitting on in various forms for a while, but it recently mutated (pun intended even though it's not obvious why it's a pun yet) and I like where the idea is heading so I'm just going to write this poorly conceived stream of consciousness version of it now and we'll see what happens.

In some ways on-face it seems maybe more like a PbtA or storygame in that it has a very central theme. That being said, I'm conceiving of it with OSR or that style in mind and I think for reasons I can't totally articulate that it's better that way but there's no reason why someone else couldn't do it a different way.

The core idea is that characters do not die per se; everything is fail forward, for better or worse. Everything is mutilation and mutation and metamorphosis and mind-shattering (maybe Mutations & Mutilations is a better name for the RPG? I'm open to suggestions). There would be lot's of random roll tables for all of these. If you would die, you are reincarnated, or become a ghost, or transcend to some other plane of existence that is perpendicular to the rest of the party. If you would go insane, you enter an alternate state of consciousness, or are consumed by an eldritch being and become the eldritch being, or something like that.

The idea is for the game to be recursive. If you would be critically mutilated, mutated, mind-altered, metamorphosed, etc., you can still be part of the party and progress, just differently. If one player dies or goes insane, they may gain awareness of or access to other realms and dimensions that they can share with the rest of the party that they wouldn't have been able to get to otherwise. It's not just that these things are fail-forward as a fail-safe, but they're the primary means of progression and digression (again, recursive; it is the gameplay loop, not just a way to keep the loop going).

The storygame "theme" of it is that rather than being about body horror or psychological horror or existential cosmic horror, it's about acknowledging these disturbing and sometimes awful changes and accepting them. You could go Adventure Time with it or Always Sunny (the latter being more so why I think it would work better for OSR-style play, if you're following me), or somewhere in the middle.

It's about making mistakes and doing things you regret and accepting them and growing from them and moving forward and then probably doing it again even after you thought you learned better, but in a goofy, ridiculous, tabletop RPG sort of way.

I don't really have the juice right now to write up or consolidate pre-existing tables, but I think the core aspects would be to have these tables, and to have the connective tissue, probably another set of tables, so that once a mutation, mutilation, massacre, etc. occurs, it generates some sort of plot event as well (access to / awareness of a new dimension, a new NPC, a new mcguffin, etc.).

Meandering Thoughts About Combat

I mentioned recently how I was feeling creatively empty, which gave me a bit of a creative burst, but I appear to have run out of steam and can't seem to finish my Martians setting even though I have a bestiary post already 75% drafted and would like to make some Martian Mechs for TNT by way of Mechs & Monstrosities and Gamma Knights. But that probably won't happen unless I will it to happen by mentioning it here.

On a theory level, I've been thinking about combat in tabletop RPGs, and how to handle it. While I actually do find character builds and tactical combat in games like D&D 3.+ compelling when I've done a sufficient amount of research into them, I prefer that style of play in videogames, not tabletop. I've come to respect that style of game design a bit more again. By integrating all of the mechanics together, a relatively crunchy game can be made much more streamlined (as opposed to many of the overly complex bolt-on mechanics of D&D 2e and other games from that era, see Star Frontiers Advanced which I should but probably won't write a review of bc tbh I was a little disappointed that my Gamma Knights review didn't make it on the thought eater humpday blogarama). However, it also becomes much less modular, so unless you want to redesign the whole game any time you want to hack something, you're pretty much stuck with what you've got. Which is great if you lack the time, creativity, or general inclination to make stuff yourself. But at that point, I'd rather just play a videogame.

Anyway, that was an unintended tangent, this is a bit stream of consciousness. I've been thinking about this stuff because of games like TNT and Gamma Knights. I don't necessarily prefer opposed rolls to hit vs. armor type combat systems, but I do find them interesting, and I wish more OSR people would look to TNT for inspiration even if they aren't interested in switching systems. I like how in TNT ranged weapons have fewer damage dice but can bypass the opposed roll, or how rolling a six on any damage die gives 1 spite damage that also bypasses opposed rolls, such that a sufficient number of weak monsters can still make a mark on player characters, without necessarily being an hyper-deadly game. Likewise, while I generally don't like character builds and tactical crunch in tabletop, I do like the idea of that being a differentiation between regular PCs and mechs or power armored PCs. If I were playing a whole mech game I wouldn't bother, I'd just reskin any other game, but there is something kind of appealing to me that I can't fully articulate about the different sensors and power management and force fields and computerized systems in Gamma Knights (or maybe it's more generally related to the point I will be making below, which is supposed to be the main point of this meandering post).

That being said, in practice, I almost always prefer to minimize combat, or add saving rolls or other non-combat mechanics into combat scenarios. I don't find GMing combat fun, I only kind of find being a PC in combat fun, if the GM did a good job setting up the encounter, and anecdotally, I find that a lot of the fun leaves the table when things get too solely combat-driven. It could just be that I'm not a good combat GM. Or it could be that good combat encounters should include non-combat actions, and I'm doing it correctly after all.

While I haven't played it, I find the Pyrrhic Weaselry, Or At What Cost? system so intriguing because it's willing to defy the norm of combat systems in an otherwise D&D-style game space, and is really conscientious of fictional positioning and how to leverage that to create interesting encounters. I think the term fictional positioning gets thrown around a lot by storygame people, but frankly I've found that many of the people who sling that term around don't really understand what it means, or haven't thought it through all the way, just making common sense needlessly pretentious (this statement is not intended as an attack on all storygamers or all storygames! I'm not one of those obnoxious anti-storygame people! In fact there are many things I like about FATE and PbtA!). Anyway, If you really want to understand what fictional positioning means, read Pyrrhic Weaselry (we've had some good conversations about it on the underutilized SWORDDREAM_unofficial subreddit). I do genuinely think FATE and PbtA do good fictional positioning as well, and also deserve credit for abstracting away combat as not fundamentally different from other mechanics; it's more that I think other people sometimes reduce it to something less meaningful.

Despite all of what I just said, the idea of a combat-less system just seems... wrong. I want a combat system! I don't care that I generally don't like it, or that my players generally don't like it, or that I usually try to minimize its use as much as possible, I still want it there! In small doses it's nice. Just knowing it's there adds to the experience. Maybe that's crazy, but such is life.

That got me thinking though, while there are certain things I don't like about FATE, one thing I really do like about FATE is how it re-constructs tactical combat in a way that doesn't remove combat mechanics altogether, but abstracts them into different kinds of actions that play into the fictional positioning system (aspects). Skills can be designed flexibly for any setting, and can be used as either an attack, defense, to overcome an obstacle, or one other thing that I'm forgetting off-hand because I haven't played it in a while and also I may be getting some of this terminology wrong. That in tandem with the two kinds of stress tracks (one more physical, one more mental, I think called Will) and the ease with which one could hack in more stress tracks, allows you to have your cake and eat it to when it comes to tactical combat vs. fictional positioning. I actually think it's a shame how FATE has to some extent become a victim of its own success, because personally I think FATE is much more interesting, flexible, and DIY than PbtA, which I think has become (or by its nature is) really just the D&D of storygames (for better and worse), but that's also post for another day (I should really be keeping track of these tangents...).

So I don't have a concrete idea at the moment, but I'd like to think about how to, rather than remove combat altogether in games like TNT and OSR, abstract it across other mechanics or situations in ways that are both tactically and fictionally interesting. How could one bend combat to social conflict, or fire fighting, or ghost hunting with a proton pack, or to cooking a dish / line cooking as a team during the dinner rush? I suspect creating a FATE bolt-on to TNT or OSR, or a TNT or OSR-inspired hack of FATE, will play a part in this, but I don't want to commit to anything yet.

I've created TNT character types such as the War Dogs or Warlord that add more fictional-positioning Saving Rolls to combat, but I'd like to maybe try coming up with some character types or general mechanics that go the other way, adding combat-like mechanics to scenarios that are not combat per se. The idea isn't so much to increase the overall amount of combat, but to smooth out the delineation between combat encounters and everything else.

Fitting for this post, I'm going to end on yet another tangent that is dubiously related to the intended point of this post. I've also been thinking about a Poker combat-type mechanic for TNT, inspired partially by the poker mechanics in Deadlands. Because of how TNT uses D6s, I think TNT lends itself better to this kind of mechanic than OSR, but there's no reason why it couldn't also be bolted on to OSR. But again, that's a post for another day...

High Level Games: 3 Unique Variations on "The Crawl"

I forgot to post about this sooner, but I wrote another article for HLG! This one is about rethinking "The Crawl" in tabletop RPGs, and how that design goal in the abstract can be applied to different kinds of games. It was inspired by my recent game Pixels & Platforms: The Platform Crawl RPG, my submission for DREAMJAM on itch.io. With that game, I took the base mechanics of Lasers & Feelings, generally considered a "storygame", but applied a design philosophy of retro-2D platformer videogame Stage-as-Dungeon to create an experience intended to be more like OSR. While it has undergone revisions, it is still definitely a work in progress, but I hope that people will check it out, play it, and provide feedback, or also use it as a springboard for their own Crawl ideas.

Pixels & Platforms: The Platform Crawl RPG

Pixels & Platforms is live! It's my tabletop RPG that I submitted for DREAMJAM, and I think it's really cool. It's PWYW and all eyeballs appreciated.

From the game description:

A micro-Tabletop RPG primarily for one-shot adventures inspired by retro 2D platformer video games.

The rules of Pixels & Platforms are inspired by the tabletop RPG Lasers & Feelings by John Harper, but build upon that framework for a somewhat more complex game. 

Pixels & Platforms uses three attributes, and is designed to emulate the feel of retro 2D platformer videogames in tabletop form. This is a game of Platform Crawling; where a Stage is like a dungeon and each Screen is a puzzle platforming challenge!

Pixels & Platforms uses the Quantumverse as its default setting, but the rules are light enough to support other settings, such as adapting your favorite retro 2D platformer videogame!

r/d100 Let's Build Appreciation, Prompts, and Compilations

r/d100 is consistently one of my favorite reddit communities; I believe it's where I met semiurge, and where I've received probably the largest and most reliable positive feedback and readership. I would love it if the SWORDDREAM unofficial subreddit could become a community like r/d100. I've shared my Weird & Wonderful Tables on r/d100 plenty of times, in fact I was posting there before I even started this blog, but up until recently I only rarely contributed to the various [Let's Build] community posts. I've been finding that they're a fun way to get the creative juices flowing when I don't want to commit to a larger idea, not unlike what I did with the 5 minute challenges. Below is an up to date as of posting compilation of my contributions, with links to the r/d100 [Let's Build] tables they were written for.

Before that, I've posted two let's builds of my own, neither of which has gotten any contributions other than from myself yet, which is really disappointing :(, so please give them a look and share your ideas!!!!

One is loosely inspired by Skerples (Coins & Scrolls) recent post Sci-Fi: Space 1977. It's a micro-settings prompt for settings that diverge from big franchises, like an alternate Star Wars that branches off from Empire Strikes Back, or a Marvel comics that branches off from the Bronze Age.

[Let's Build] d100 Parallel Micro-Settings based on big franchises

An alternate Star Wars universe, if Episode IV hadn't made enough money to do Empire.

The second I unfortunately titled Monster Hunter Special Forces, implying a connection to the Monster Hunter videogame series, but that was not intentional. This list is just a prompt for characters, classes, species, or equipment suited for hunting specific kinds of monsters common in fantasy and tabletop. If anything, it was more so inspired by the Vampire Hunter D novels which I've been working my way through (I'm roughly halfway through the ~30 book series). I'm pretty happy with how my ideas on that table are shaking out so far, but I'd love to see what other people think!

[Let's Build] d100 Monster Hunter Special Forces

Vampire Hunter D!

And here are my contributions to other people's Let's Builds

d100 D&D encounters inspired by art

• I cheated on this one a bit, just linking to my Aquarian Dawn: Whitemare post based on the awesome Vanillamare: YoYo by Mark Akopov.

I would put this vanillamare in every post if I could justify it.

d100 Gribble-worthy fantasy conspiracy theories
While these were supposed to be wacky Dale Gribble (King of the Hill)-style conspiracy theories, I think mine were a little too straight; some of them I think would be cool as actual world concepts and not just conspiracy theories haha.

• The Castle is an illusion created by the Mage Guild. The real "castle" is a subterranean base at a hidden location.
• The Dark Lord is a puppet for the emperor. They pit humans and [orcs / demons / undead / etc.] against each other to keep the peasants from recognizing how they're being exploited by the nobles.
• Zombies are still alive, they've just been fed drugs by a witch doctor that makes them obedient and uncommunicative.
• Demons are hyper-advanced humans from the far future; their infernal plane is just the universe in a highly entropic state, the final flicker before heat-death. For humanity to transcend the universe, they must allow themselves to be consumed by the future. The church is covering it up because they would rather die than admit they were wrong (or maybe they have another plan...).
• Dwarves aren't actually all that good at engineering. They've just gotten good at finding ancient ruins and salvaging them for parts. In fact, probably they're destroying valuable relics that could provide much greater utility, or at least knowledge of the past, if they were maintained and studied carefully.
• Elves claim to be the first race, but this is false. They've been hiding records indicating that elves were actually an offshoot of humanity as a result of an arcane accident long ago.
• Halflings aren't as defenseless and ignorant of the world as they appear. It's all for show. In fact, each halfling is trained from birth to be an elite warrior, spy, and assassin. They're basically an entire race of super-ninja, so competent that they've managed to keep it a secret for all of history.

Dale Gribble of King of the Hill infamy

d100 demons, imps, and demon lords

• Lamentok, Demon Lord of Regret and Recursion. He can only be seen in hindsight, or in daydreams of what could have been. He feeds on parallel timelines, consuming them at the moment of divergence, traced backwards through memories and forwards through daydreams. He encourages poor decision-making, whispering in the ear of the gambler to place a larger bet to recoup his losses, or for the investor to buy into a scheme too good to be true. By consuming the parallel timeline, the memory of regret and the daydream of what could have been, he brings temporary ease of mind, but without the memory, one is prone to making the same mistakes. He'll nest in ones hindsight for their entire life, letting them make the same mistake over and over, never the wiser, until they've run themselves into an early grave, and then he follows the paths of those affected by his host, repeating the cycle.

The anime Kakegurui, about gambling. Haven't seen season 2 yet but I enjoyed season 1 a fair bit. It's about gambling, partially inspired Lamentok.

d100 forms of tavern entertainment

• Bag of Booze: A drinking competition. The competitors each drink from a bag of holding containing a seemingly infinite quantity of booze. Whoever stops drinking, chokes, or passes out first loses. Loser has to take a swig from the mystery bag...
• Floating Beer Pong: Like regular beer pong, except as a floating 3-dimensional pyramid of cups held in place with magic.
• Karaoke+: It's karaoke, but the bard uses bardic magic to change your voice randomly. You won't know how you sound until you start singing, so you'll need to figure out quickly how to make your new voice work for the song.
• Monster Meal: It's an eating competition where the food bites back! Race to see how many black puddings (or other monsters) you can eat within the time limit, but you've got to defeat them yourself if you want to eat them.
• Prestidigitation Games: Tavern games of skill such as darts or pool, with a twist. Each "athlete" is paired with a "mage", who can use prestidigitation or some other cantrip to assist their athlete or distract / impair the opposing athlete. Each round (one turn for each athlete), the mage can only intervene once, either on their athlete's turn, or the opposing athlete's turn. They can't do anything that damages or physically targets an athlete, nor anything that would make it impossible for the opposing athlete to succeed or that makes it impossible for the mage's athlete to fail. If a mage has not acted yet, they can attempt to counter the actions of the other mage.

Not familiar with the Magic Tavern podcast but I like this image. The Alexandrian has a good Tavern post for things like this as well.

d100 paired weapons

As part of this Let's Build I used my Weapon Hack.

Beauty and the Beast 

Beauty

Heavy: 1d8, Two-handed Plastic: Made of hard plastic. Concealable: Can be hidden from view.

Beast

Heavy: 1d8, Two-handed Anthropomorphic: Has features vaguely reminiscent of a humanoid face or humanoid body part. Bonded: Weapon only usable by owner, cannot be removed from person without consent.

Beauty is a sleek, modern staff made from a hard and surprisingly light plastic that can be compacted and stored on a utility belt. It is ornately painted, as much a work of art as a deadly weapon. The Beast is a grotesque organism like a massive human finger, which sprouts from the side of the torso opposite the non-dominant hand. It is bonded to Beauty, and whoever wields Beauty develops a tumor in their side, usually within their kidney, that opens an extra-dimensional portal, sprouting Beast. Because Beauty and Beast are magically connected and Beast extends from the torso, medium sized creatures who would normally not be able to wield two heavy weapons may wield both Beauty and Beast simultaneously. So long as neither Beauty nor Beast are disarmed or disabled, both weapons gain +1. If either weapon is disarmed or disabled, both become inoperable.

Min and Max 

Min

Light: 1d4, +1 AB, One-handed, Concealable as free quality Fungal: Made of or contains elements of fungal life or is a living fungus. Elemental (Fire): Has properties related to fire (e.g. produces heat/light, can cause burning).

Max

Medium: 1d6, One-handed Laser: Made of hard light or projects beams of light. Large: Designed for large-sized creatures. Medium-sized creatures take -1 AB, small- creatures cannot use this weapon.

Min is a spade-shaped fungus that oozes a noxious fat that combusts in the air, setting it alight. Max was a spore of Min, which through mysterious circumstances mutated or evolved into a higher life-form of pure energy, and now takes the form of an over-sized lasersword. They are beyond mortal comprehension, but one gets the sense when wielding Min and Max that the pair are having fun and making inside jokes at the wielder's expense.

I used this image in my old Weapon Hack post.

d100 Unique Mimic Ideas

• The mimic isn't just the treasure chest, the entire dungeon is the mimic, and we're inside it...
• Your warforged companion is actually a mimic (or was replaced by a mimic)
• The "wizard" is a huckster with a mimic wand- the mimic itself is the actual wizard.
• Sometimes the oasis is a mirage, and sometimes it's a mimic...
• The Dark Lord, fully concealed in his full-body black armor, is just a calcified corpse wrapped in a mimic (or maybe the mimic is just his body double...)

There's just something about mimics that I love.

d100 things you encounter in the feywild

• The party are surrounded; on one side, Tweedle Dee, the unstoppable force, on the other side, Tweedle Dum, the immovable object.
• The party reach a fork in the path, with no obvious indicator of which way leads where. A magical talking cat taunts them, telling them that there's nothing to find and that they should turn back. Whichever path they choose, they reach another fork. At each fork, they hit a monster encounter, and the further they go, the monsters become slightly more powerful, more numerous, and more cunning. After each encounter, the magical cat returns, teasing them and telling them to turn back. In fact, the only way to proceed forward is to turn back (turning back at any stage of the path will take them forward to the next area).
• A massive sleeping ogre blocks the party's path. A man-sized talking caterpillar smoking a magic looking-glass hookah tells the party that the ogre will never move, that it suffered some trauma in childhood and has been completely unmotivated ever since. By smoking the looking-glass hookah, they may enter the ogre's dreams and change his memories. If they can resolve his emotional trauma, he will move. External forces like the ogre right where he is, and will attempt to stop the party both in the real world, and within the dreamworld. Within the dreamworld, the party may encounter additional looking-glass hookahs, and may need to enter other dream-creatures dreams. Within each dreamworld, time moves an order of magnitude slower than in the preceding world, such that a moment of real-time can be like an eternity in a deep enough dreamworld.
• A magical draconic creature, an immortal, unstoppable, nonsensical force of super-nature, the Jabberwocky, has gone on a rampage. The Jabberwocky's wife claims that a woman has stolen her baby and refuses to give it back. The Jabberwocky will go on a rampage until the baby is returned. The woman's husband is a fey protector, magically shielding the baby from any thieves. The only thing that can pierce the shield is the Vorpal Sword, and only by slicing through the baby. If the party threaten to use the Vorpal Sword to fairly split the baby between the Jabberwocky family and the fey family, the true parents will acquiesce to the false parents, whereas the false parents will accept the split (GM can decide who is telling the truth).
• The party find themselves at the table of the Mad Hatter at Tea Time, whom they must appease in order to proceed in their task or get some critical piece of information. The Mad Hatter insists they drink his tea, a necessary component to receive that which they need. The magic mushroom tea warps spacetime, and they "change places" with another character or NPC. No pair can swap bodies more than once, so as per the Futurama Theorem, they must find two more participants who were not present at Tea Time in order to return to their original bodies. These two individuals will inadvertently provide what the party was looking for in the first place.

I took a very Alice in Wonderland approach to my Feywild entries in this Let's Build.

d100 dimensions and their properties

This dimension was generated using the Hubris plane generator. I rolled once on all tables except the type of plane table, which I rolled on twice. I think this plane could use some cleaning up, it's mostly taken as-is from the generator, but I think with a little tweaking it could be really interesting.

The Plane of Chaos and Death

• You emerge from the portal dry, sunburned, dehydrated, and exhausted.
• However, the plane appears to be in Winter.
• Any liquids you are carrying turn to ice (potions receive a save).
• You arrived in an electrical storm that has ravaged a small town.
• The local denizens are creepy living dolls.
• Time functions faster, one hour in this plane is like a minute on your home plane.
• On this plane, the young are revered, and the elders become servants and slaves.
• The entire planet is in a solar eclipse-like state. Creatures that fear and hate the sun now move unimpeded.
• This was the result of the last cataclysm, the plane saved only by the unique planar religion (which is also the basis for the reverence of the young and enslavement of the elderly).
• Because of the solar eclipse, the Six Nightmares have risen to power, bringing death and chaos to the plane. They are opposed by Lucifer, a 20ft glowing orb, a mysterious eldritch being which has become the sole source of divine light remaining on the plane.
• To travel to and from the plane, you must seek forgiveness from someone you've wronged.

Hubris is an excellent world and worldbuilding tool!

Aquarian Dawn: The Whitemare

The Whitemare is kinda-sorta the equivalent of Mordor for Aquarian Dawn, the realm of the Dark Lord, by way of Beetlejuice, Vampire Hunter D, and the Cancerverse. It also incorporates several of my ideas from the micro-setting Record of Machine Goddess, one of my four 10 monster settings, into Aquarian Dawn. I think that's a cool micro-setting in its own right, but thematically it seemed similar to what I'm already doing with Aquarian Dawn. Last but certainly not least, the concept of the Whitemare was heavily inspired by this artist, and specifically this piece:

Vanillamare by Mark Akopov

It's rare that a single piece of art influences me so directly, but this piece is so unique and evocative that I just couldn't help but incorporate it into Aquarian Dawn! It reminds me of one of my favorite artists, Zdzislaw Beksinski.

Michael K could tell you I've probably spent way too much time thinking about all of the particulars of this idea, and I've also discussed it a bit already on reddit such as on the SWORDDREAM_unofficial subreddit, so I hope it's actually coherent and interesting, and not just an overwrought mess 0.o.

It also draws some parallels to some of the ideas I had for the anti-mutants in Phantasmos, but I don't quite think they're compatible. I had always wanted to come back to the anti-mutants, I thought and still think there was a kernel of a cool idea there but I never got to explore it as far as I'd like. Depending on how I feel about the Whitemare / Cancerverse down the line, I may come back to the anti-mutants eventually as well.

If you are a player in my current Aquarian Dawn Campaign, this contains SPOILERS! PLEASE DO NOT READ!!!

So with that:

The Whitemare

Beware the Whitemare.

Our legends are endless dead dreams. I awaken, and rest.

To die is to dream. May your dreams be ever pleasant. Sleep well.

What do undead dream?

The Machine Goddess Athena, The Dark Lord

Her skin is twilight like the cosmos, dotted like a ginger with the violet-hot light of stars and nebulae. Lines like shooting stars course over her skin, thinning and branching into symmetric fractal patterns, vein-like, violet-whiteness fading into her forearms and hands, and ankles and feet. She has three pairs of arms that move in tessellation. She is covered in metallic armor, smooth and seamless, with lines that reflect and refract in a geometric manner; chitinous. A series of violet-white tubes arch along her back, always bending in uncanny ways, appearing the same when viewed from any angle, appearing detached from space-time when she moves or when one moves around her, or like a dimension unto herself. Her hair is violet-white and composed of straight strands that split into branches, each splitting into self-same branches; frizzy, but in an unnaturally symmetric, perfect way. The upper half of her face is kaleidoscopic, like many shifting spidery eyes, each a reflection of her whole face in miniature, with kaleidoscopic eyes reflecting the whole again, ad infinitum.

Machines, undead dreams, fractals, cancer metastasization; infinite, recursive, unchanging life. Athena had intended to create paradise, designing crafts to better society, and brought knowledge to the peoples. Somewhere along the way she grew angry, resentful; disgusted with mortals, with what she was creating, and with herself, creating only in defiance. Or perhaps she had been sabotaged, her works twisted in unexpected ways by petty and short-sighted mortals, or other dark gods.

Whatever the case, the fomoire, the remains of her Unseelie Court, grow increasingly mad and wish to die, as do all in the whitemare. The beings of the cancerverse themselves, the mutates, pteraghuls, and so on, are like idiot godlings, even in their brilliance, overwhelmed by the genuine euphoria, beauty, and symmetry of infinite recursive existence. One could argue that with the cancerverse Athena succeeded in her goal, and really did make a better existence, and it's only the whitemare itself, her twisted nightmare dream of endless self-loathing, that needs to end. The cancerverse has a will to life above and beyond anything else, even the mortal world. Perhaps the cancerverse and the mortal world are compatible, different but containing a piece of each other.

Servants of the Dark Lord

Fomoire

Whereas the Fey represent the beauty, majesty, and wonder in things, an abstract "magical" force in the universe, the fomoire are like bestial proto-fey or anti-fey; representing that which is ugly, disturbing, painful; or mundane, defeating, or hopeless. They are fewer in number than the fey, but generally more powerful. Each is unique, as if to embody the torment of one person, except there are so few of them; a reminder that You are not special and neither are Your problems. There was once an Unseelie Court that served the Machine Goddess at the highest levels, but they were defeated or displaced in the last war against the Empire of the High Age of humanity. 

Firbolg

The marauding armies of the Machine Goddess, once organized under the Unseelie Court. While Athena rebuilds her forces in the Whitemare, remainders of her forces, who went into hiding during the peak of the High Age of humanity, have since resurfaced. The firbolg consist of fomoire warlords, drow, trolls, hobbs, machines, and denizens of the cancerverse. Firbolg are often mutated with cancerous growths and teratoma eyes, literally embodying the all-seeing panopticon of the Machine Goddess. They wear armor and weapons of blacklight stone, with linear and fractal patterns carved into their armor or on their skin; a Mandlebrot "eye" equivalent to a teratoma. Those firbolg hordes under the direct influence of the Machine Goddess carry her emblem; an aegis shield, within which is an interwoven multitude of ouroboros with repeating patterns on their scales replicating the pattern of the interwoven ouroboros.

Drow

The exact origins of the drow are uncertain, but it is believed that they are either an offshoot of elves who chose not to leave for the higher realm and instead joined Athena, or they are the natives of what became the Cancerverse, or a hybrid species. They have grayish-purple skin, black, white, gray, or purple hair, large eyes, long pointed ears, thick humanoid body hair, and prehensile tails. They mostly worship the Machine Goddess, representing her machines, lines, and fractals with spider symbology. The tsuchigumo are their divine-military mystic corps, who wear blacklight stone or psionic masks like a spider-face. Their scout corps are driders, who ride mutated or biomechanical spiders. Some have even been fused into their spiders. Oni are drow with a teratoma horn, like a psionic third eye. They contain massive raw psionic power, but over time their psyches unravel, and they split into two monsters known as Yoma and Ashura, usually ogre-like creatures, one red-skinned and the other blue-skinned.

Cyclops (Starborn Golem)

Massive giants of blacklight stone, with linear patterns and fractals carved into their stone skin. They are powered by a large blacklight stone eye in the center of their face, capable of projecting beams of blacklight energy that split in fractal patterns. It is unclear if they were created by or discovered by the drow, or the Machine Goddess, or were creations of the elves that later became the drow. They are revered as demigod constructs by the elves, who believe they were created during the High Age of the elves. The name "starborn" is a misnomer; although the elves believe they were created in the celestial bodies, they were actually created or summoned by the science-witches who found the astrological equations hidden in the stars, inadvertently divining the Whitemare.

Whitemare

Massive, spindly humanoid creatures that can move bipedally but often choose to move like a spastic quadruped. They move freely between the Whitemare fractal dimension and the cancerverse. It is not clear if the dimension was named for them, or they for the dimension; if they were created by the Machine Goddess, and if so, if she created them intentionally, or how much control she has over them. They have extra-dimensional properties; crawling, compressing, and gyrating through spaces they should not possibly fit. They generally serve the Machine Goddess, but don't seem to be innately malicious or have any discernible intelligence or motivation.

Vanillamare by Mark Akopov

The Twilight Treasurer Black Tom, and the Twisting Terminus

Twisting Terminus 

The mind-castle of the Machine Goddess within the Whitemare. A gothic, psychedelic, symmetric, kaleidoscopic spacetime of lines and fractals. It is full of Athena's machines and firbolg, but also independently operating fomoire, denizens of the cancerverse, and numerous other beings of independent allegiance and unknown origins, lost as in limbo. One is always being watched in the twilight terminus; most at first modifying their behavior as in the panopticon, until they reach a point of madness in which they care not at all for their privacy, or for any allusions of decency or proper behavior. Even if one could escape the Twisting Terminus, they would find themselves lost in the dreary Whitemare, or the vast flesh-desert of the Cancerverse.

Djinn (Daemon)

The djinn are something "else", metaphysical forces like the Fey or Fomoire, but lacking an intrinsic "moral nature", or a material form. They are more like robots, things that can be programmed or manipulated. Servant djinn are sometimes referred to as daemon in ancient texts. The Machine Goddess has built biomechanical cancer machines powered by djinn energy. These daemons maintain her castle, the Twisting Terminus, and serve as its panopticon-wardens.

Black Tom

An extraordinarily powerful, mischievous, and arguably malicious or at least narcissistic leprechaun trapped in Twisting Terminus. He has been trapped for so long that none know his origins, not even the Machine Goddess, or Black Tom himself. Although powerful, he is quite mad, aimless, and has a tendency to get in his own way, and is seen by Athena as more of an annoyance than a true threat.

Those who meddle with Dark Lords in extra-dimensions may find a twilight token, a black coin with a four leaf clover on one side, and the face of a leprechaun on another. By rubbing together three twilight tokens in one's hand, a mortal may summon Black Tom to serve them. However, one often gets more than what they bargained for when dealing with Black Tom.

High Level Games: 4 Reasons Why Your Game And Mine Are Less Different Than You Think

I wrote another HLG article! In line why my recent interest in SWORDDREAM (check out the subreddit!), this article is about defying our preconceived notions of what differentiates different kinds of games, and to what extent it's authorial intent, culture, dice probabilities, etc., and also how to go about leveraging that knowledge. Even if you disagree with the particulars, the point of this article is more about just encouraging people to think about their games more critically, or at least differently.

SWORDDREAM

So my friend Saker Tarsos from tarsos theorem made me aware of this interesting new RPG movement on twitter called #SWORDDREAM. You can learn more about it on the graverobbers guide blog.

Nobody had done it, so I took the reins and made a subreddit. In keeping in the spirit of SWORDDREAM, it's "unofficial by design". If you want a convenient, centralized place to discuss SWORDDREAM-related stuff, it's there, and if you don't want to, then you don't have to!