Black Hack Class Hack: Sorcery!

I reviewed The Black Hack in my last post. I mentioned that I felt like I had a few Hacks of my own to add to the growing number of genre specific clones of David Black's Modern OSR fantasy RPG.

I think an Early Modern Era, historical, weird-fantasy hack would be a lot of fun to play. For such a game I like my magic dangerous and unpredictable. It's something I've talked about before. Mike Evans came up with a good system to make sorcerers' casting flexible with an element of unpredictability with the usage die mechanic, but it lacks the danger I think is needed in RPG magic.

The usage die mechanic (from page 8 of the Black Hack) assigns a usage die to any resource ranging from 1d4 to 1d20 to roll when it is used. A roll of 1 or 2 brings the die to the next lowest value for subsequent rolls. Rolling 1 or 2 on the 1d4 means the resource (in this case magic) is exhausted until that resource can be replenished. The sorcerer can gain back one die for six hours of uninterrupted rest.

For my take on magic cast with the usage die I took a lot more inspiration from Barbarians of Lemuria, then mixed in a little Dungeon Crawl Classics and the spirit of weird fantasy.

Any time a sorcerer casts a spell the player rolls a number of usage dice matching the magic level of the spell. The spells are divided into three levels of sorcery: 1 - the Forbidden, 2 - the Infernal, and 3 - the Inscrutable (I'm still not entirely happy with the name of level 3).

The first level of sorcery consists of forbidden formulae and ancient rituals that allow the caster to bend reality enough to do anything a fully trained and equipped person could do, only with more ease. For example: a warrior with a sword can do 1d8 damage to a foe by attacking them. A sorcerer would utter a spell of forbidden magic and merely point at the foe to tear away their flesh for 1d6 + caster level in damage. A sorcerer can use this magic to create a light source, open a lock or climb a wall in a moment because a person could do so with a few minutes and the right equipment. It matches up in power roughly to the first and second levels of spells found in the Black Hack.

The second level of sorcery is more dangerous because it exposes the caster and everyone around them to infernal corruption. The player rolls two usage dice and takes the lower result because these spells are more taxing for the sorcerer to cast. The danger comes into play if the player rolls doubles on the usage dice. Doubles result in a casting mishap. Since it is more likely to roll doubles on D4s than D6s or D8s, it is more dangerous for low-level casters or exhausted high-level casters to use this level of magic.

Infernal magic calls upon the dread powers of chaos to reshape reality in larger ways for the caster's benefit. These spells allow the sorcerer to do things normally impossible for one person. A sorcerer can use this level of magic to fly, to transform something or knock a hole in a stone wall. Infernal magic could be used to create a poisonous fog that does 1d6 + caster level in damage to all nearby foes, or allow a sorcerer to vomit a swarm of demonic insects onto an opponent to eat their flesh for 1d6 damage per caster level. With so much possible in a moment with a whisper and a series of gestures this corrupt magic is tempting to use. It matches up in power level to many of the third, fourth and some fifth level spells in the Black Hack.

The Inscrutable level of magic comes from the recorded whispers of malignant intelligences in alien dimensions. Their motivations are as unknowable as their form.

This third level of magic is difficult, requiring special components such as time, place, specific alignment of astronomical bodies, assistants to help perform the ritual, and a specific tome or artifact. The more powerful the spell the more conditions the GM should apply to its casting.

These are spells of tremendous power that come at a terrible risk to the caster and their world. With this magic the sorcerer could create an earthquake that could level a city or create a magic plague that could bring an empire to its knees.

It can also be used to undo lower magical effects such as restoring a character turned to stone. It could be used to create a magical item. It could create a passage through chaos itself to allow a caster and their level in companions to travel anywhere in the world in an instant. It matches up in power to some of the higher level spells available in The Black Hack.

When a sorcerer casts an inscrutable spell they are flirting with disaster and draining their power. The player rolls three usage dice and reduces their magical power by one usage die for every 1 or 2 rolled. Doubles result in a casting mishap. Triples result in a casting catastrophe. There is no table for this result, match the effect to the scale of the spell, but tearing holes in time and space that allow extra-dimensional invaders to pour through is one way to go. Accidentally transporting the whole party to Geoffrey McKinney's Carcosa is another.

One thing I like from both BoL and 5e D&D is the cantrip magic. Cantrips as minor feats of magic that can be cast with little danger of exhausting a sorcerer's magic sounds like a fun addition to the game. Little things like moving small objects, changing the apparent value of a coin for a few moments, creating a brief wind to blow a door shut, removing a stain, lighting a torch, creating small sounds as a distraction, detecting magic, etc. For these simple spells the sorcerer could test Int for success. A natural 20 would reduce their usage die for magic.

The usage die available to sorcerers would depend on their level:

• Level 1-2 would have a D4 usage die
• Level 3-4 would have a D6 usage die
• Level 5-7 would have a D8 usage die
• Level 8-11 would have a D10 usage die
• Level 12+ would have a D12 usage die

Image by Doug Kovacs for Dungeon Crawl Classics

I also roughed out a 3D6 table for casting mishaps:

3. 1d6 random people/creatures present become hybrids with another random creature

4. Earthquake for 1d6 moments

5. Random extra-dimensional invader/demon summoned (usage die in HD) and attacks caster

6. The minds of all nearby people randomly switch bodies

7. Random caster's relative teleported to close range with caster

8. All nearby gold turns to lead

9. Random caster's possession disappears

10. Roll on corruption table for sorcerer *

11. Roll on corruption table for sorcerer *

12. All nearby wood turns to glass

13. All nearby drawn weapons turn into something random (flowers, butterflies, etc)

14. All nearby metal super-heats for 1d6 moments (1 damage for small items, 1d6 + caster level for metal armour)

15. 3D6 HD of creatures put to sleep, centred on but not including caster

16. Random extra-dimensional invader/demon summoned (usage die in HD) - roll on reaction table from (page 8 of the Black Hack)

17. gravity reversed for 1d6 moments

18. Roll on corruption table for 1d6 of sorcerer's random allies

*There are plenty of these all over the blogosphere, I'll simply pick one while I playtest. This result is by far the most likely, so the greatest risk is always to the sorcerers themselves.

The Sorcerer as a character class is basically the same as the Conjurer outside of casting. I'll be trying this one out as soon as I get a group together to play The Black Hack. I think any player of a sorcerer that pushes their luck too far or over-reaches their level will likely end up in deep trouble.

Review: The Black Hack

To say that I'm late to the party with this review is a bit of an understatement. When The Black Hack Kickstarter funded back in February is was a mere blip on my social-media radar. I looked at it briefly, thought, "Ugh, a roll-under mechanic," and "Do I really need another retro clone?" then moved on. What I can say now with no reservation is it deserved a closer look.

As the year progressed multiple genre-Hacks using David Black's "The Black Hack" as a base cropped up. It wasn't until I saw what Mike Evans over at DIY RPG Productions was doing with his own sword, sorcery and super-science genre hack called Barbarians of the Ruined Earth that I decided I had to pay the Two US Dollars to get the PDF and find out what all the fuss was about.

I get it now! I understand not only why people love this version of tabletop fantasy role-playing, but also why it has spawned so many of its own hacks!

It is described as: "The most straightforward modern OSR compatible clone available."

It's a bold claim, but it has merit. The game fits comfortably into twenty A5 (half-letter-sized) pages, including the cover, acknowledgements page, Open Game Licence and character sheet. That means the game only uses sixteen pages to explain how to play.

With a core mechanic based on rolling under character statistics, the rules are clear and for the most part easy to understand. The writing is straightforward and economical. As a former journalist and a parent with little time to read rulebooks, I appreciate David Black's tight writing.

There is no art beyond the cover, but the layout and design is clean, with good use of white space and easy-to-use tables. It has two columns per page for most of the book. The typeface used for the body text is a standard serif font, offering no distractions or obstructions to reading. The headings and titles all use the distressed sans serif typeface you see on the cover. I like this particular choice as it embraces the "quick and dirty" nature of the rule system. The effective headings, bolded text and good use of white space makes it easy to reference the book for specific information despite the lack of page numbers.

The best use of white space is on the four pages of character class descriptions where each class gets its own page with a single column running down the middle of the page. This gives a special emphasis to these pages and leaves room to make notes around the text in the huge margins. It also allowed me to print out a few character sheets with the rules for each class on the back.

The rules themselves surprised me in their simplicity and flexibility. The core mechanic involves rolling under the relevant stat for any given action on a twenty-sided die (D20). Since stats are rolled on three, six-sided dice (3D6) player characters all start with a good level of competency. The balance of power from the difference between the levels of the player characters and the Hit Dice of their opponents (monsters) creates bonuses and penalties to combat rolls. The advantage/disadvantage mechanic that is a big part of the success of 5th edition D&D is also used to maintain the power balance and protect the specialisation of the different classes.

The rules are a solid blend of old school simplicity with modern improvements. The system simplifies resource tracking with the usage dice that also creates an unpredictable element to resource management. There is a six-item death-and-dismemberment style table for characters who are knocked "Out of Action." The sundered shield option to sacrifice a shield to escape damage is included as well. Encumbrance is streamlined with obvious penalties.

One interesting mechanic is how the players do almost all of the rolling, similar to Monte Cook's Cypher System. The player rolls under their relevant stat to attack and again to avoid attack. Because of this change, armour provides extra hit points instead of making it more difficult to be hit.

I didn't like it the first time I came across the idea of class-based weapon damage, but here it serves to eliminate the pages of weapon lists that you see in other clones while still having some variability in damage. I like how it assumes that fighters are more dangerous with weapons than other classes. It certainly makes sense when you look at fantasy fiction. Conan is just a deadly with whatever weapon he picks up and Fahfrd names all his swords "Greywand" because they do the same thing. The addition of the unarmed/improvised damage by class is smart. It means a balanced weapon of war like a spear or sword is going to be more effective than a chair leg or shield bash.

Spells are handled in a way I think will see more use of utility spells at lower levels. The player starts with the spell slots you see in most OSR clones, but the slot only expires during casting if the player fails an Intelligence roll. The total of spells memorised is restricted by level so players need to decide what they want to have prepared for fast casting and what they'll be pulling out their spellbooks for. It feels like the ritual casting option in 5e D&D without being so finicky. Also, this design choice creates uncertainty in the resource management of spells. If anything should be uncertain, it's magic!

The spell lists themselves are short, with single line descriptions filling one page each for divine and arcane spells. This is another good choice. Reading the spells I find the shorter descriptions far harder to misinterpret and stretch to irrelevant purposes than the longer ones of other clones and editions of D&D.

The monster entries are also almost always one-line per creature. Since they only roll damage, that, their hit dice and any special attack or defence is all you need. The list is two pages long and has creatures from one hit die up to twelve. With these examples, conversion of any other monsters should be no problem.

Player character progression by level is a nice innovation that works with the core mechanic. The player rolls a D20 for each stat and raises any stat they roll over by one. Each class has at least one stat which they roll twice for. Besides that each class also has a hit die that they roll for more hit points.

The game only has four classes including Warrior, Thief, Cleric and Conjurer. These four cover the basics and leave plenty of room for meaningful differences between party members. There are no rules for different fantasy races, but if you need them in your game it's not difficult to add them. With such a simple system, bolting on extras will be half of the fun!

That is why we see so many genre-based hacks of this system out there. The system is so straightforward and simple it would take some serious effort to break it. While reading the rules I came up with three genre hacks I'd like to do with it myself!

The example of play is one of the better ones I've seen. A player could read that one page and grasp almost the entire system.

I'm not surprised the game is picking up momentum. The Kickstarter had 604 backers. I don't know how many PDFs have sold since then, but The Black Hack community on Google Plus has 810 members as I write this review, implying it is only gathering more fans.

Still, the game is not quite perfect. I would change a few things that I don't like.

The cleric has a spellbook. This choice is not terrible mechanically, but for the sake of flavour I would call it a prayer book and refer to casting divine spells as performing miracles. It would create better separation between the cleric and conjurer.

The conjurer spells have "read languages/magic" as a third level spell. I'd put that back into the first level list and add "fly" to the third level list. Before I run this system I might come up with a streamlined version of the "summon" spell from Lamentations of the Flame Princess as well. If I can get it down to two A5 pages I think I'll slip it into my copy.

Armour points are used up during combat, but return after a short rest. Shields are included in this rule. I think shields should be persistent in their effect. I would give a character a bonus to their level for the purpose of defending against attacks from monsters of plus one for a small shield and plus two for a large shield. That way a first level character attacked by three hit dice monster could roll without any penalty to avoid getting hit instead of the plus two penalty for fighting a more powerful monster. The persistence would make shields particularly useful and would make the choice to "sunder a shield" to avoid damage a harder one to make.

Fighters get one attack per level every round. That is way too much rolling in combat for my taste. I like the speed provided by this system and after third level the fighter player would grind every round to a halt during his or her turn while rolling hits and damage. I'd replace this ability with the ability to use shields offensively against more powerful monsters so they get the bonus levels when attacking as well. I'd also allow fighters to roll to hit with two-handed weapons without the plus-two penalty. Those two changes should protect them as the most effective characters in any combat without putting the rest of the party to sleep every round.

Overall, these are small things and likely have as much to do with my gaming taste as anything else.

For two bucks this game is a steal! I printed my PDF out as a booklet on five sheets of paper. This thing will go into my bag for every face-to-face game I play. I'll probably put a small notebook in with it with some quick adventure generation tables and class-based equipment lists so I can use this game as a quick replacement if some players cancel at the last minute.

I think the best use of The Black Hack is probably introducing new people to fantasy RPGs. Its blend of old-school flavour with modern mechanics is a great doorway into the possibilities of tabletop role-playing. Its simplicity means no one is left behind and there's way less of the, "What am I rolling now?" and more, "I do X!"

Well done David Black!

National Game Design Month?

I posted an image last November of the notebook I was using to write down the details of my RPG. By putting it out there on G+ I was making a promise to myself to finish it. November is as good a month as any and better than some for getting back on it.

November is a popular month for writing or at least starting a novel. A few years ago the creative action spilled over into game design and we got the National Game Design Month or NaGaDeMon. Last year I jumped in knowing I wouldn't be able to finish because I'm busy this time of year but hoping the momentum of a month-long press would get me far enough along to that I'd be able to finish eventually. That worked for a while and it looked like I was going to have a first draft ready by January. Then my life exploded in December and I dropped the game along with pretty much everything else.

By the spring I was almost back to normal and I started working on the game again. I started carrying the composition notebook that still said "NaGaDeMon 2013" on the cover with me everywhere and working on it when I could. I had a system where I would write large ideas that were fairly well organised in my head on the right hand pages and use the "backs" or left hand pages for shorter ideas that just came to me as I was going. Trouble started when I found myself writing on the left-hand pages as much as the right-hand ones as the game came too quickly put down neatly into one notebook. I solved that problem with the chromebook I got for my birthday which wasn't much larger than the composition notebook but allowed my to work on multiple sections at once. It was slow going though since summer is my busy season. Which brings me back to now. It's a year later and the game that has percolated in my head, changed and grown basically the entire time I have played RPGs is now so very close to being a playable thing that I could share with the world instead of merely a collection of ideas and experiences that inform my play and GM style.

Over the course of the month I'll be sharing bits of the game I have already and more as I write them. Feel free to comment on anything you like, don't like, or think could be better with a change. I'll be continuing with posts on other topics as well so if my game isn't your bag I'll still have content you might be interested in.

So what is this game I'm talking about? Why bother when there are so many games out there? I have a half-finished blog post on the go that mentions there are so many systems out there you probably don't need to reinvent the wheel to get what you want so what makes me think what I have here is worthwhile or remotely necessary?

I've always liked fast play. In recent years, the rules-light games with little in the way of rules to slow down the fun are my favourites. I've been playing since the early 80s and I started with those early rules-light games, then moved to newer, more complicated games but the wild speed of the retro clones and some of the new games are the ones that have me now. It could be that I'm old and my life is complicated enough that I don't want to spend time with the rules any more. I just want to play. Maybe I'm just lazy.

There are other games that come close to what I want but don't quite hit it. I like a possibility curve because it allows skill and talent to shine in an opposed encounter. I like a single die mechanic because the question "What dice do I use for that?" slows down the game for no good reason. I like six-sided dice because there's no barrier to entry since people can usually get (or even make) a set of normal dice without any trouble anywhere in the world. I like having a simple framework of rules to allow a GM to give a fair and consistent difficulty for the roll so players can try any action without consulting the rule book. I like to do things in the game and rolling dice is a fun part of that, but I like games with a single roll to determine both success and the amount of success. If I roll well to hit something it should do a lot of damage or something awesome. Two rolls are a hassle and can give silly results. There's nothing out there that has all of that and emphasizes the kind of play I love.

Enter the 3D System. It uses 3, ordinary six-sided dice rolling on a simple resolution table. One roll gives not only success but also the degree of success. It depends on the GM being fair and applying the rules consistently but gives a lot of leeway for players who come up with wild schemes on the fly.

Mediocrity is the most likely result unless some exceptional circumstances come into play. It's not hard to succeed, but it is difficult to excel. In combat that means minor hits are more likely than a decisive, fight-ending hit. When rolling to do other things it means you can get by but won't be able to get a grand effect without some talent or a mismatched contest coming into play. I'll expand on that in another post. This time around it's just the basics.

My game design process is all about boiling it down. I originally started with 15 different attributes. As I ran it through different scenarios in alpha testing I would often find that two attributes are equally relevant to the roll. Every time that happened I combined the two. Eventually I ended up with only four attributes to differentiate one character or creature from another: Acumen, Physical, Social and Will. When I moved from hard copy to e-documents these became: Acumen, Body, Charm and Determination. I think the ABCD will look cool on a character sheet and make it easy to remember.

For the skill section I had a similar epiphany of simplification. I started off with with skill groups kind of like what you would see in ZeFRS where expertise in one skill gives a basic ability in related skills. This seemed a little unwieldy for playtesing so I came up with a simplification that I may end up using long term because it speeds up character generation in huge way!

What I'm working on right now is character generation. I'm creating a flow that will allow PCs to grow out of handful of rolls or choices so players can be ready to go in ten or twenty minutes. I'm going with the simplified skills for now. Even if I return to the more detailed skill groups I may keep the simple method as a basic version of the game. I'll test them both out and see.

Once I have some character generation documents and the rough draft of the magic system I can playtest with me as the GM to see how it all feels in play. Once the initial bugs are out I'll be able to put together a more complete rules document and maybe a couple of sample adventures or conversion notes for existing adventures so I can see how it works for another GM.

So here it is, the beginning/continuation of my #NaGaDeMon adventure! Here's to another big push for my own personal fantasy heart-breaker! Hopefully this year I keep the promise to myself to finish it.

A (sort of) new Class for your LotFP game, or how to get rid of those pesky elves!

I'm not a fan of elves. Not the tolkienesque ones we get in D&D at least. I like my fantasy elves as scary monsters that kidnap people and take them out of the world, only to get bored and return them after everyone they know has died. I like elves as evil bastards that can't make anything for themselves so they wrap themselves in illusions and steal what they can't craft from our world. This version, while completely awesome, is not really practical for player characters.

Elves as PCs in most games tend to be super-humans with all the timeless grace and beauty of old Hollywood.  They aren't really very different from humans, just prettier versions that are immune to ageing and charm. So what's the point? You can choose your character's age and appearance so the advantages of elfdom are few and not terribly interesting.

One of my favourite versions of "the world's most popular fantasy role-playing game" compounds this problem by placing its adventures in the early modern era of the real world. Lamentations of the Flame Princess has seven classes, one of which is the Elf. To play a human-only game would mean giving up nearly half of the payable classes. That means some reworking of what is there. Some of them are easy, the Dwarf class could be turned into a Barbarian just by replacing the Architecture skill with Climb and allowing them to be taller.

The Elf as a class is a lot more involved. It can fight well, cast magic, it has weird immunities and it's not quite in step with the world as it is. The best way to get all of these things and be human is voluntary demonic possession.

I like the idea of a Diabolist. A person who invites demons to share their bodies in exchange for power is pretty much the opposite of the idea of the elf while explaining all of the elfy class abilities. 

The way it would work is the character knows a ritual for summoning creatures from a dimension that borders on ours. Creatures that can't physically manifest but can inhabit willing and unwilling hosts. While they ride the edge inside a host they can interact with the world in some special way that looks a lot like the spells of other classes. It is a dangerous trade-off for power. Also, sharing a body with extra-dimensional beings would have a few side effects.

These side effects would explain most of the class abilities and add some flavour. Some of these side effects are positive. With all the extra voices in their heads, Diabolists notice more than the average person so they get an enhanced Search score. As the Diabolist advances in level the voices multiply and the control of them improves so the Search skill improves as shown for the Elf class. This same hyper-awareness makes them difficult to sneak up on, resulting in a one-in-six chance to be surprised instead of the regular two-in-six chance. Charm and Sleep would also be ineffective against them because it would be impossible to target the host's mind amongst all those others in there. As a possessed creature and the host to extra-dimensional beings bent the destruction of our reality the Diabolist is of Chaotic Alignment, is detectable as such and can be turned by a Cleric.

These demons hate our reality and our world. The reasons are unintelligible to us as their goals are so alien. Exposure to that hate makes the Diabolist aggressive. This aggression makes them fierce combatants and allows them to use all the martial manoeuvres available to Fighters (Press and Defensive Fighting).

Elfs look different, with exaggerated features, strange eye colours and pointy ears. Diabolists tend to look different from the average human as well. If they're lucky, they'll have pointed ears. The presence of demons in a body is going to cause some pressure, especially as they manifest their power. Diabolists are in a constant fight for possession of their own bodies. This internal conflict leads to changes in the Diabolist's appearance. Part of the inspiration for this class was this image I first saw a few years ago. The obvious loss of humanity in exchange for power needs a mechanical expression for LotFP. Tying it into the acquisition of spells and the option to push things a little too far is the cherry on top for the Diabolist Class.

(Update: Thanks to Zach Marx Weber and Wayne Snyder who let me know this awesome image was created by Doug Kovacs for the Dungeon Crawl Classics core rulebook. I'm going to need to check that out! You can find more of Doug Kovacs' art here!) 

For this I need a random chart. I don't have it yet, but I plan to put together a chart of mutations with three progressions for each roll of any single number. After three, repeated results mean two more rolls (which can just keep going if a player is particularly unlucky). An example of the three entries could be horns. The first time the horns would be relatively small and not difficult to hide. The second time they'd be grow to be larger and curl upward and possibly outward. Not impossible to hide, but certainly more difficult. The last result for horns would give the PC large horns like a big ram's that curl around the head and are virtually impossible to hide. Eyes could progress from strange colour, to glowing in darkness to glowing bright enough to show in the daytime. The farther down the line they get the more likely the PC will be burned as a witch. To get a good number and fit the situation I'd go with a D666 table. Using 3D6 with each die as a hundred, ten and single digit. So three ones (111) would be one-hundred-and-eleven. That gives 216 possibilities, which seems like plenty to me. Obviously three different colours would be useful, but a single D6 could just be rolled three times in a pinch. 

The only problem is the spells. Sure they could just sacrifice some little creature every morning for each demonic presence (spell) to prepare a spell in the same way a Magic User memorizes a spell from their book. That falls short of what could be done with the class though. A Diabolist should be a different sort of caster. With their own method of learning spells, their own spell list and custom descriptions to turn up the weird on the class. Diabolists are bad people. They have sold their souls for power in the worst way. Diabolists still need to concentrate to harness the power of the demons inhabiting them though, so all the regular limitations of spellcasting apply. Except that it doesn't require the intricate movements that Magic User spells do, so a Diaboist can cast spells when heavily encumbered and with only one hand free.

A Diabolist starts with three randomly assigned spells/demons and a random mutation. For every level a Diabolist gains the PC can use a ritual to add a new spell/demon. They don't have to use it right away. They can wait until they are higher levels in hopes of attracting a better class of demon and having more high-level spells, since they can only summon a demon with an ability of a spell level that they can cast. When they cast the ritual they need to sacrifice an innocent creature. Any animal will do. It is painful and likely to be loud so the PC will need some privacy for the process that will last the whole night. The player chooses the spell level. Fifty silver pieces per spell level needs to be spent on materials for the ritual as well. At the end of the night the player rolls a save verses magic minus the level of the spell. If they fail they get a random mutation but they also get a randomly rolled spell of the level they chose no matter what the result of the save. If they roll a spell they already have, they get to pick one.

If a player is ruthless they can use a human sacrifice to automatically pick the spell they want or roll for two spells of a given level. The extra anguish provided by a person allows the PC to have more control of the ritual and its results. It also means an automatic roll on the mutations table. The Referee should make sure these kinds of murders are recognizable and cause more than a little uproar in a community when discovered. Players should also keep in mind that the weird guy with the glowing eyes is definitely going to be blamed when people start mysteriously disappearing so there are plenty of good reasons to avoid this option.

Casting spells is the other departure from the regular rules. Diabolists would use the spell progression table for the Elf to get a total for spell levels that can be cast safely in a day. A first-level Diabolist would only have one spell level, but a fourth-level Diabolist would have six (1x2 and 2x2)! Diabolists don't need to prepare their spells, they can't forget with those demons bouncing around in their heads, but coaxing their passengers into doing what they want takes concentration and gets difficult the more often they access any one demon's ability. The first time in a day the PC casts a spell is costs as many levels as it is. Each subsequent time it is cast in a 24-hour period or without at least six hours of sleep its cost goes up by one spell level. 

For example, a fourth level Diabolist (let's call him or her Bob) has six spell levels per day. Bob casts Spider Climb (a level-one spell) and it uses up one of Bob's potential spell levels for the day, with five spell levels remaining. Bob casts it for a second time and it's harder, using two spell levels and only leaving three of Bob's total of six daily spell levels. That means Bob can cast Spider Climb one more time using all remaining spell levels without getting into trouble.

But what happens if the spell levels are just slightly over the daily allowance or the Diabolist wants to push their demons beyond the safe number castings in a day? That's where the 216 entries on the mutation table become important. If the caster has too few levels to cast a spell safely the PC can simply cast unsafely. They will receive a random mutation and must save verses Magic at a negative equal to the difference in levels or take 1D6 plus that difference in damage. Even if they fail the save the spell is cast successfully. For example, if Bob only has two spell levels left and wants to cast a spell worth four spell levels Bob needs to make a save against Magic at -2 or take 1D6+2 points of damage. If the caster has no spell levels left and wants to cast they take a random mutation and save against Magic or take the spell levels in D6s damage and the spell fails. So if Bob tries to cast a spell that costs three spell levels when he has no spell levels left it means risking 3D6 points of damage. A desperate move with no guarantee of success.

That's the basics of how I use the Elf class in my LotFP Early Modern Era Campaign. I'll add the spell list with custom descriptions later this week and maybe whip up the random mutation table too if there's enough interest.

Retro-Speculative: D6 Star Wars, What Is It Good For?

West End Games' D6 Star Wars is by far my favourite version of the game. It did exactly what it said on the tin. It gave our group a cinematic gaming experience in the Star Wars universe. Granted, the first game was a lot of roleplaying into situations where we could use quotes from the movies, but after that we had some grand adventures as part of the Rebellion.

A couple of things have pulled me back to my shelf to have a look at my well-worn Star Wars RPG books. I've seen the WEG D6 System attached to a few projects for RPGs based on different intellectual properties lately. I wondered at the choice of this open system instead of the others out there? And why not design a new system? All these questions had me itching to take these down and read through them again, but there's only so much time in the day. Then I saw the pilot for the new Rebels animated series and started wondering how the game holds up and if it might be worth running some old Star Wars?

I think the last time I played Star Wars was in the late 1990s. Reading through it now is extraordinary! Not only does the game hold up for Star Wars, but it just might be the best Sword and Sorcery RPG ever written.

The game is beautiful in its simplicity. The majority of the rules are in the first 24 pages! The pulpy action this RPG emulates is the same pulpy action George Lucas was copying from the wild adventures of speculative fiction from the early 20th Century. With these things in mind it should hardly be a surprise that there is so little adjustment needed to bring the game full circle and use it to run a Sword and Sorcery game.

I'm a different person now than I was when I first encountered this game. It didn't occur to me back then that you could reskin a "sci-fi" game for another genre. I hadn't read the same breadth of material in the Sword and Sorcery genre that I have now either. This time I had all that and a pile of extra RPG hacking experience riding my shoulder and whispering in my ear while I turned the pages.

For those of you unfamiliar with the game, character creation uses templates of different character archetypes. It works because it takes a player minutes to customize the template to fit their own preferences for play but still gives a wide variety of choice with the 30 odd templates in the core rules. Each template comes with a description. You get basic equipment and starting money. There's also a typical background, personality, a quote to show the flavour and a possible connection to the other players. Any of these can be changed, but they are a great starting point. After that the player only needs to pick name, write a physical description and assign seven dice to the skills.

The templates are where the majority of the work of conversion is going to come from but it's a fast way to deliver setting information without cramming it down the players' throats. Players are not going to read your world setting document but they will definitely read the descriptions of all the character classes (at least until they find one they like).

The skills need to change.

It's fairly easy to switch out the sci-fi references like "blasters" and "planetary systems" to something more appropriate like "bows" and "lands and kingdoms." The technical skill under Knowledge could be swapped out for Arcana or Magic.

The Mechanical section can keep its name and just change to things like navigation, charioteering, catapults, handling small watercraft, sailing ships, etc. Beast riding can stay though.

The Technical section has to go. It could be renamed Arcana and could include things like rituals, ancient technology, magical creatures, the old ones, wards and sigils, etc. Medicine could stay in this section since effective medicine relies on knowledge typically gained from cutting up cadavers. Something which is often frowned on.

That leaves the Force.

Things like Force Points can easily be reskinned as Fate Points. Heroes are often fated for great deeds so it fits the sword and sorcery genre. The Dark Side works well with S&S too. When a character commits some heinous act of evil, dark forces take notice. This interest is represented by the Dark Fate Points. Instead of rolling to lose the character because it turns, you could roll for a dark gift and have a table of hideous mutations. As soon as the character mutates the Dark Fate Points are set back to zero as the nameless extradimensional entity or ancient intelligence moves on to other pursuits. The sorcerers would be able to make use of the Dark Fate Points when casting just like Jedi do, but the fluctuation and the stream of mutations would make evil sorcerers unpredictable and grotesque.

Magic can pretty much stay as it is. The force powers Control, Sense and Alter are wonderful, low-magic ways to express magical ability. Call them magical disciplines and you are good to go. The list of force powers in the book make a fine starting point for common spells. You could also have powerful summoning rituals for terrible creatures and spirits with all sorts of requirements as part of the magic system that would make great seeds for adventures.

It's starting to come together, but we have all these space-opera templates. A Pirate is a Pirate in any genre but it might be harder for the others. Let's take a look at the first three: Alien Student of the Force, Arrogant Noble and Armchair Historian.

The Arrogant Noble is another easy one. There are arrogant nobles everywhere and it looks like the skills can all stay where they are. No problem. The Alien Student of the Force could be a Mysterious Foreign Sorcerer. I would probably drop the Strength down to 2D and bump "Arcana" up to 3D as well. The Armchair Historian presents something of a problem since it doesn't fit the new genre. Looking at the stats though we could easily reskin this one as an Indiana-Jones-style Relic Hunter.

The text on the back would need to change to match the setting. The short list of equipment fits Sword and Sorcery well but it would need to be altered to work in the setting (no blasters for you!). The credits could just be removed or turned into coins after a couple of zeros are knocked of the total. The backstory for the Arrogant Noble fits multiple genres. There's not much work to do here. The Alien Student of the Force needs a major rewrite but the focus of the character is still to seek magical knowledge in a place far from home. That is likely going to take the background text in a similar direction. The Armchair Historian is a total rewrite, but since we are using a well known character as a reference for our tomb-robbing Relic Hunter the text should come easy. Just think, "What would Indy do?"

I'm liking this reskin better than my other options for sword and sorcery. It's more simple than ZeFRS(TSR Conan) and more robust than Barbarians of Lemuria. As much as I love the other options I may dig into this sometime over the next few months.

Maybe I'll return to this one with some developed templates and that random table of mutations.

Still Searching... and the Mash-Up!

My first couple of posts came really close together so the time since may have a few of you thinking that I've given up on this whole blogging thing already. Nothing could be farther from the truth.

First of all, I hope to get a post out at least once per week. To me that means any time in a seven day period so it's possible to have as much as 12 or 13 days between posts. Don't panic! And don't worry, this isn't just a "hey I'm still here" post. I'll include some actual content in this post too.

Speaking of content, I've been thinking about what I want to have up here. Obviously I want it to be interesting and that may be enough when it comes to some of my choices. When it comes to the things I write about gaming  though, I'd like it to be interesting and useful. That means this thing is going to be an eclectic bucket of random gaming goodness. Sure my tastes run toward the old school set, but I am a polygamerist at heart so you might see just about anything up here. The one thing you can count on is if it's here, it's something I want to use at my table.

For the next post I'm going to try out an idea that I may use again, depending on how much fun it is and the response. So stay tuned for the Retro-Speculative! I'll be tearing up an old game from the days of yore and reapplying it to a different genre.

But for now, the Mash-Up!

I love a good mash-up! Mixing together two intellectual properties has a lot of advantages when it comes to creating a setting for play. It wipes the slate clean as far as what the players know about the world. If you've only read three Conan short stories and want to use it in a game because it's so cool and one of your players has read every Conan story ever written by all of the authors that took up the character after Howard and has maps of Hyboria on the wall, you might run into some issues with the player knowing more about the world than you do. The easiest way to fix that is to add more cool things! So you like the theme of the value of the barbarian over civilization that runs through the Conan stories, but you also enjoy the fatalism of Vance's Dying Earth? Perfect! Smash them together and make something new and even more fun to play in. Instead of the world being new, it's impossibly ancient and more decadent than even the most noble Hyborians could have dreamed. Still, such a place always has its frontiers and wild places. Untamed lands will still produce men and women like Conan.

I say it's more fun for the players as well because that blank slate gives everyone more room to roam. All the stories belong to the players. There are no principal characters to cast shadows over the campaigns. There are also no characters with script immunity walking around (unless you put them there).

What I love about the mash-up is how good it can go if you put together things that seem like they could never fit. The process of roping together opposites in a way that makes sense and is compelling can give you something better than either of the two things you started with. For instance, mashing up Firefly and Farscape is kind of pointless because they are both science fiction about a small group of criminals on the run from powerful governments who just do their best to make ends meet and keep moving. One has aliens, the other has cowboys. Not much of a gap to bridge with new ideas there.

You need friction between the two settings to get that creative spark going. The farther they are apart, the more original the new setting will feel when you have it.

I've been mulling over one of these "impossible" mash-ups over on G+ for a while now. Some smart people have chimed in and I can see it growing into a setting that might see some play in the next few months. What I'm talking about is my idea to put together Ursula K LeGuin's Earthsea and Edgar Rice Burroughs' Barsoom. It turns out melding a desert world with an archipelago is not as hard as I thought it would be.

Luckily I had the forethought to hashtag the posts with #Barsoomsea so I can share part of what I have so far:

The Archipelago could gain the same fatalism of Barsoom by having the water raise instead of recede. If the trackless sea replaces the desert then it only needs to rise to consume the world the way the drought does on Barsoom to convey the sense of doom that hangs over those stories.

I picture fishing villages where the docks and piers are built onto the roofs of the houses the sea claimed as the villages build on higher and higher ground every generation.

The green men could be replaced by a race of amphibians who live in the sea in between the islands. They fight with the humans because they need the land to lay and hatch their eggs. A process that takes years.

Some intrepid folk might sail out beyond the relative safety of the Archipelago searching for more and higher land. They might even find the ruins of lost empires half swallowed by the sea, with only their greatest forts and towers remaining on the cliffs and mountaintops.

In rare and exciting times a volcanic eruption might bring a new island to the surface. All such islands carry terrors from the depths that must be tamed. Some of these mountains are surfacing for a second time, covered in the ruins of buildings from a forgotten age. These ruins could have anything inside but who is willing to go and look?

The slow loss of the world has left the populace of the Archipelago with a strange mixture of half forgotten science and sorcery saved or recovered from the past while ordinary folk toil as they always have, fishing and farming while clinging to the land that remains.

People fight with the sea, the amphibians, each other, and the results of their own schemes or vanities. There should be plenty of room for adventure in such a place.

With no set mythology, all kinds of things can find their way into this new Archipelago. Islands on the backs of ancient turtles? Flotillas of boats lashed together and surfaced with dirt to make floating farming communities? It's all on the table because there's no expectation or history to disrupt. And even if we just start with the premise above, what we have feels similar to both settings but doesn't copy either of them.

What do you think? Should #Barsoomsea have some kind of airships gracefully travelling from one island peak to another? Do you have a better mash-up?