Hit Dice Dungeons Initial Playtest - Version 0.1.1

What's going on here?

 I'm writing an RPG that spun out of the idea of using Usage Dice to track HP.

What changed from the original blog post?

Following on from my blog post where I outlined the basic idea, I developed it into an actual RPG system. Compared with that original idea, I fully abandoned any effects that modify the range of  numbers that cause the Die to step down, and locked it at 1-3 for all situations.

Where weapons in that original version shifted the range that stepped down, weapons for my first playtest instead dealt a static amount of damage to their target. For each point of damage, you roll your Hit Die once, stepping down for each failure. This also solves the problem that the original idea had of Hit Dice capping the worst case scenario of a powerful attack to stepping down a single time. With damage causing individual rolls, a powerful attack can now step down your die multiple times and kill you outright.

Armor also had to be changed (it could no longer shrink the 'threat range') and now lets you reroll a number of failed "damage rolls".

I wrote up a small handful of backgrounds, in the style of Electric Bastionland's failed careers or Troika! backgrounds, to run a playtest with one of my usual groups. My original intention was to also have GLOG style classes, but I both didn't finish them in time and also wanted to test the core systems before I started layering things on top.

The Playtest

My players rolled (off of my expansive d8 table) an Exiled Neriad, a Rat Catcher, and a Traveling Salesman. Very early on in the night the Traveling Salesman player asked if he could be a Minotaur, which seemed like an excellent idea and was immediately added to the background itself.

For the module, I ran Tomb of the Last Tyrant from Dissident Whispers (technically now the 7th Dissident Whispers module I've run, although this won't get the whole micro review treatment I usually do) with the possibility of spinning it out into a sandbox hexcrawl to keep testing the system as it develops.

I won't give a whole play report here, than than to highlight a few fun moments:

• Yeeting "serpent guards" off of rain slick cliffs.
• Taking advantage of thunder to pick off guards from the back of the group.
• Interrogating terrified cultists as to why they were called the Serpent Guard if none of them were actually snakes.

The main takeaways I got from running the game, and talking with the players afterwards, is that although none of us like "to hit" rolls having no roll when you make an attack and just waiting for the GM to roll the enemy's Hit Die to see how it went is pretty unsatisfying.

Changes Made

I've made two changes to the system I intend to test to try and address this. First, instead of weapons dealing a static number of damage, they have damage dice that get put through a filter. This is soft of halfway between Troika! damage tables, and the Scarlet Heroes damage system.

 This adds a bit of fiddly-ness to the game I would have liked to avoid, but it adds some agency to attacks and hopefully doesn't cause much frustration. One other benefit of this damage dice system is that it let me add my Living Grimoires magic system almost unchanged to Hit Dice Dungeons, which is nice.

The second thing being changed isn't actually a rule change as such, simply that when you attack an enemy you are the one to roll their Hit Die to see if they get injured. This is really just a perception thing, but I'm hoping it makes players feel more connected to the results of their actions.

A couple also small changes were made:

• Added a temporary advancement system (until I get those GLOG style classes off the ground) based on collecting accomplishments that would go into your Eulogy.
• Allowed clever, fun, or daring attacks to be "enhanced" (similar to Into the Odd/Electric Bastionland) by stepping up the die that would be rolled for the attack. I may switch this from stepping up the die to giving a +2 to the damage die roll, but we'll see how it feels in play.
• Added some guidance for how to track different equipment (the cowardly way of presenting three systems and letting the GM choose, hopefully I'll zero in on what works well to make a definitive statement).
• Added the concept of "Clock Dice" which is a blend of Macchiato Monsters encounter usage dice, BitD clocks, and Dungeon World fronts.

The Game Itself

 https://awkwardturtle.itch.io/hit-dice-dungeons

Check it out if you're interested, it's even got a character sheet! Expect things to change a ton as I get more playtesting and development in though.

Hit Dice Dungeons!

While running Macchiato Monsters the other night, one of my players joked about how we should be tracking hit points with a Risk Die, since everything else in the game uses those.

But then we stopped, thought about it, and realized that it actually sounded like a good idea.

So here's a combat system using only a usage/risk die for tracking harm. It's designed to slot into something like ITO, but I included some potential ways to expand this into a full system at the bottom (or just go use Jason Tocci’s 2400 which is better than whatever I'll come up with).

Hit Dice Combat

Combat occurs simultaneously. Everyone involved declares their intent for the turn (usually moving a short distance + attacking, taking an action). The GM declares NPC actions first, but everything is resolved simultaneously.

Attackers do not roll dice to resolve attacks, instead every attacked creature rolls their Hit Die to avoid harm for each attack.

If the Hit Die rolls a 1-3 (the Threat Range) the Hit Die steps down in size. If the die cannot step down (i.e. it's a d4) the creature is incapacitated. They're bleeding out and will die in an hour if left unattended.

Armor and Weapons

Deadly attacks expand the Threat Range (e.g. if attacked with a +1 Sword take harm when rolling 1-4). This is written as +X, where X is the amount the Threat Range is expanded.

Armor shrinks the Threat Range, written as -X where X is the amount by which the Threat Range is reduced (e.g. wearing Scale Mail (Armor -1) means you take harm only when rolling a 1-2).

The Threat Range cannot be smaller than 1.

Example Items

Poison, apply to a weapon for +2 to the next attack.
Great Axe, two handed, +1.
Firebomb, blast, +1
Crossbow, slow, +2

Chain Mail (Armor -1)

Helmet (Armor -1)

Plate Armor, bulky, clumsy, (Armor -2)

Shield, sunder to prevent stepping down Hit Die when hit.

 (This doesn't read wonderfully. Positive numbers always increase the Threat Range, while negative numbers always decrease it. However it's sorta messy that +1 on weapons is good, but +1 on armor would mean it's easier to hit you.)

Healing

If you took harm during a combat, a few minutes and a drink of water lets you roll the Hit Die. A result of 4+ will restore one Hit Die level (e.g. d6->d8). This only works once per combat, and only if you were damaged during that combat.

Resting overnight with food and drink automatically restores one Hit Die level, then you may roll to restore a second level (as above).

Your Hit Die cannot exceed its original size through healing.

Example Enemies

Goblin Guard, d4, Dull Stick -1
Lizard Bugcatcher, d6, Spear, Net Throw +1 (On hit tangles rather than reducing Hit Die size)
Fungal Warrior, d6, Spore Cloud +1
Giant Toad, d8, Thick Skin (Armor -1), Tongue +2 (On hit the target is grabbed and swallowed).
Crystal Mimic, d4, Fragile (Armor +1), Shard Stab (+2 if attacking from hiding)
Iron Golem, d10, Iron Construction (Armor +2), 2 x Pneumatic Fists +2
Werewolf, d8, Bite+2, 2 x Claws +1, silver weapons force Hit Rolls at disadvantage.

Ideas for Expansion

Death and Dying

Look at the final Hit Die roll to see what happens when someone goes down:

1: Dead
2: Bleeding out with minutes to live.
3: Bleeding out with an hour to live.
4: Knocked out.

Morale

Roll an NPC’s hit die for morale, on a 1-3 they flee or surrender. Enemies roll Morale whenever their Hit Die steps down (in addition to the usual times). This is basically just how Macchiato Monsters morale works.

Everything’s a Hit Die!

Treat any risky thing as an “attack”. Expand the Threat Range (as with weapons) if it’s particularly dangerous or difficult. Equipment acts like Armor does and reduces the threat range. Rolling inside the Threat Range means failure or harm, rolling above it means success or avoiding the harm.

This has the benefit of folding the entire game into a single mechanic, and means characters are just one die and some equipment.

A downside to this is that reducing the Hit Die doesn’t always make sense for every risk. This could be solved by making failure consequences more diverse when out of combat (or even when in combat!). Reduce the Hit Die when the thing at risk is bodily harm, but other risks could be lost or broken equipment, being separated, being put into a bad position, or really anything that makes fictional sense.

Another downside is that this will tend to make characters death spiral, because they’re entirely represented by one dwindling die. Every failure makes future failures more likely.

More Hit Dice?

Characters have the Hit Die as described above, which represents combat prowess and physical durability. They also have a Skill Die (representing training, talents and dexterity) and a Will Die (representing mental fortitude and magical aptitude).

Use these dice as described in the previous section, but now there’s more flexibility and characters are less likely to death spiral since harm can be spread out.

This also gives a little bit of room for mechanically distinguishing characters.

Advantage and Disadvantage?

It’d be very easy to add Advantage and Disadvantage to this. A clever attack from a good position means the enemy must roll their die at disadvantage.

However, that’s an extra mechanic and this is already something you could handle by giving situational bonuses and penalties to Threat Ranges.

Parting Thoughts

This is entirely unplaytested, just a neat idea I wanted to poke at for a bit. I’d welcome anyone’s thoughts on it, or if anyone has seen it show up in another system.

The Dissident Maze, Part 6: The Incident at Muto Station

It's been a while since the last entry in this series, and will likely be quite a while before the next entry in this series. The group I've been running these with wants to return to our prior Scum and Villainy game, which I'm excited for but means I will have to convince some other group of people to play a year's worth of one shots.

If anyone is curious, the modules that were next up in the hopper were Grace Dynamics, The Dream of Nia Wen, and The Tomb of the Last Tyrant.

I'll get through all of Dissident Whispers, by hell or high water!

Rather than try to find a new way to phrase this each time, I'm going to copy and paste the intro from the prior entry:

Some background on this whole thing: I'm attempting to play through every module in Dissident Whispers with the same players, and the same characters (or at least alternate universe versions of them). I don't really expect to actually accomplish this, but I think it'll be fun to see how far I can get. Dissident Whispers is a community created collection of one page RPG adventures to raise money for Black Lives Matter, I personally wrote a Troika! adventure, and a Mausritter adventure location for the project.

See Week 1 for more background on Dissident Whispers, as well as the setup for how I'm running a single party of adventurers through wildly different modules and systems. I will admit, now that we're 5 sessions in, my original framework of an interplanar maze, with soul points and such, has almost entirely been tossed by the wayside. As I very often do, I underestimated how much players will self motivate to explore modules and find their own fun, so I really didn't need to set up an elaborate system to encourage them.

Last week the players were beating the odds and exacting an improbable revenge against Flails Akimbo in MÖRK BORK. This week they're investigating what went wrong on a black market research station, in The Incident at Muto Station.

Disclaimer: I contributed to Dissident Whispers. I realized I didn't explicitly say that in this post, although I have in all the prior ones.

The Module

The Incident at Muto Station is a module for Mothership written by Brian Stauffer (website). The layout was done by Sean McCoy (the creator of Mothership himself), the spooky monster artwork is by David Hoskins, and editing by Matthew Getch, Jarrett Crader and Sam Zeigler.

The System

The system used was for Muto Station was (as designed) used Mothership RPG, created by Sean McCoy. I have a decent amount of experience with Mothership, I've run a bunch of one shots and one lengthier campaign with my players attempting to escape the Dead Planet.

The Characters

Seven of Nine, the naive Android.

Red Washburn, the opportunistic Teamster.

Tenzin Smith-Glaxo-Kline-Monsanto, a corporate Scientist with some regrets.

Play Report

I used the terminal and map screens created by the module's author (linked from his own play report)  to visual aids during this game.

I also tweaked the intro to the module to give the players a specific goal inside the station (beyond simply not dying).

Instead of the station being a mystery, the players were aware that it was a Xeno Poacher dropoff station, and (being xeno smugglers themselves) they'd done business with Muto Station in the past. In this case, they were hired to transport the head Xenobiologist Dr. Gallagher from Muto Station to Prospero's Dream, with maybe a little side smuggling gig from their contact.

Being very careful of their location, Muto Station sent encrypted jump coordinates, so the Crew wouldn't know where they were jumping to. Then, to leave, they had to get a second set encrypted jump coordinates since they didn't know where they were jumping from.

This meant that when they arrived, and picked up a distress beacon from a station that ostensibly runs dark, they knew they couldn't just turn around and leave. Random warp jumps tend to go badly.

After failing to raise anyone on the comms, they initially decided to try and enter through the Xeno Dropoff docking bay, rather than the standard one. They docked their ship (the Leaky Pete) at the Xeno Dropoff Bay, but found the airlock refused to cycle as long as their ship was docked. 

A halfhearted attempt to hack through the door's terminal failed, and after a discussion they decided that they probably shouldn't start bashing/cutting down doors until they knew for certain what was going on. So they undocked, flew the 100 or so feet to the other bay, and redocked.

They get through the proper airlock without issue and find a hallway filled with blood, smashed lights, bullet holes and hear a noise akin to flesh dragging on metal although it almost immediately disappears. Tenzin runs a scan on the blood, and finds it to be human. Very on edge, they move forward into the station and into the first room they find: the Mess Hall. Inside the tables and chairs are smashed and thrown about, while streaks of blood lead to and from various doors.

While Red is poking behind a pile of tables and chairs with a flashlight, the players suddenly hear the sounds of muffled voices from somewhere outside the room. Spooked, Red startles and knocks over the chairs making an enormous clattering noise, and by the time the racket stops the strange muffled voices are nowhere to be heard.

They leave the Mess Hall trying to find the source of the noise. Seeing nothing they head into the Crew Quarters. Seven of Nine and Tenzin start digging through Gallagher's quarters, while Red rapidly looks through the other rooms looking for a map of the station which he eventually finds in the maintenance man's room.

Tenzin finds a locked datapad in Gallagher's quarters, and with Seven of Nine's help is able to bypass the password revealing a set of notes about a xeno life form recently brought to the station. It seemed to be a mass of different creatures mashed together, with some sort of biomass connecting the brains. With this new information Tenzin resamples the blood and, knowing what to look for, finds that although it's human blood it contains nine different DNA patterns.

The three meet back up in the common area of the crew quarters, but are interrupted by Dr. Gallagher herself appearing in the doorway, begging them to run before screaming and disappearing from sight!

Seven of Nine has a minor breakdown and sprints after her, but upon turning the corner finds no trace of the Xenobiologist. The android doesn't stop sprinting and runs all the way to the Science Lab, where upon opening the door she sees something wriggling on the ground and immediately closes the door again. At this point the other two have caught up and together they manage to break into the Control Room despite not having the access key card.

Inside the Control Room the scientist manages to extract the station's location data, meaning they can actually warp out of this place! Seven of Nine notices someone had entered half of the self destruct sequence before being interrupted by something that left blood and brains on the keyboard, but just wipes the keys clean in order to hack the computers to transfer all funds the station had on hand to their ship. Red finds a surveillance video of Dr. Nedry carelessly handling the xeno life form mentioned in the notes, and the three watch as the video captures the xeno's leap into the doctor's head. On video Nedry then turns to attack a nearby scientist, before screams and gunfire erupt as the action moves off screen.

Thoroughly stressed, but with a way out, they exit the Control Room to make their way back to their ship.  Unfortunately Dr. Gallagher waiting for them at the end of a hallway. She alternates between begging them to save her and imploring them to run, but Seven of Nine is no longer having any of this and immediately shoots her with a rigging gun, pinning her to a wall. 

Tenzin walks down the hallway to her to point blank tranq her, and put her out of her pain and misery, but while doing so notices too late the thin tendril leading from the back of her skull around the corner of the hallway. Looking in that direction, Tenzin has time to see the Amalgam only a fraction of a second before it grabs him.

The Amalgam is a horrible conglomeration of the entire crew of Muto Station, melted and molded together with faces still visible and trying to communicate. With a tendril it keeps Dr. Gallagher separate, but controlled, acting as a lure like some sort of eldritch angler fish.

All three characters immediately panic. 

Tenzin completely loses his mind and welcomes the Amalgam as it begins to absorb him into the mass. Red panics and feels his heart being to beat erratically, and knows that if he takes any damage or fails any save before he gets medical attention his heart will stop (using a slightly altered panic table to avoid the common and instant "death by heart attack result). Seven of Nine's circuits begin to act erratically, and if any player fails a save nearby she will panic again.

It is at this point that I give Tenzin's player control of the Amalgam as his character is consumed.

Seven of Nine, realizing their only hope of escape lies in the set of coordinates sitting in Tenzin's pocket, dashes forward and manages to grab the datapad. She sprints past the Amalgam which tries to grab her and misses by inches.

GM's Note: If you've read other entries in this series, you'll know I often poke fun at how unreasonably lucky this group of players is. Well, what follows is the Amalgam's player (formally of Tenzin) losing a coin flip roll 6 times in a row. The one time a player's luck fails, it's when that player is working against the others. There is no hope against such monstrous fortune.

A chase ensues, as the Amalgam lurches after Seven of Nine who desperately sprints through the hallways to make it back to the ship.

Red, meanwhile, is running in the opposite direction with the plan to bust through the Science Lab and make his way to the Xeno Drop-Off Bay.

Willfully ignoring the wriggling tendril in the Science Lab, he uses his laser cutter to smash through the glass barrier and clambers through into the Clean room. Not stopping for anything, he runs through the Clean Room, then Specimen Storage, and into the Xeno Drop-Off Bay before realizing he doesn't have a space suit. Luckily (I do 50% luck rolls to see if something plausible falls in the player's favor) he finds a sealed hazmat suit, which he over-inflates with a tank of oxygen before yeeting himself into space.

Simultaneously Seven of Nine reaches the docking bay, and cycles through the airlock into the ship just ahead of the Amalgam (the Amalgam's player got one extra secret roll to try and sneak the parasite onto the ship, but sadly failed that as well).

Seven of Nine quickly undocks and heads out into space and, seeing Red floating towards the ship, through space tries to open the cargo doors to catch him. After a very close miss, Red vents the remainder of his oxygen tank to send himself tumbling into the Leaky Pete. Finally safe, and only missing one crew member, they enter the jump coordinates and leave Muto Station behind.

Unbeknownst to them, as they enter warp space the station's distress beacon turns back on, hoping to lure any future visitors.

Thoughts on the Module

First of all, this module was run by TheBardCommunityCollege/TheDnDMom and streamed on twitch, so if you want to see another run through of this check out the VOD on youtube. A very different crew and some different decisions made by the GM made for a pretty different experience, so it's interesting to see how flexible the module is.

My players and I all had a really good time in this module. A black site xeno smuggling outpost is an excellent location for things to go wrong in a sci fi universe, and lends itself really well to a sort of built in story. The premise of the location makes enough intrinsic sense that it's easy to fill in details, or invent new things as needed. An evocative setting is much preferred to one packed with specific details I need to remember while running.

The monster at the core of the module, the Amalgam, is a horrifying and unpleasant creature; the conglomeration of the crew who are still alive and conscious, but far beyond saving. The crew's good regard for their leader means Dr. Gallagher was "spared" absorption, but in return she has the probably more horrifying role of being the lure to bring more beings into the mass. It's technically possible for Dr. Gallagher to be freed from the Amalgam and rescued, but I honestly cannot imagine the band of Mothership characters who would be both inclined to make the attempt and capable of pulling it off. 

An upshot of all this horror is that the Amalgam is specifically said to have all the knowledge and skills of anyone it has subsumed, so this isn't some mindless monster. It knows the station inside and out, and can likely predict what the players are going to do next. A smart monster that can actually operate station controls, doors, and computers isn't something the players are likely to expect right off the bat.

The Amalgam, up until open conflict breaks out, is controlled by a behavior table not totally dissimilar to the one used for the Alpha Gaunt in the Screaming of the Alexis (from Dead Planet), but with one significant difference. This encounter table is rolled with a 1d5 + the number of rooms visited. That means the behavior will continue to escalate as the players spend more time in the station, eventually leading to the Amalgam being all but guaranteed to lay an ambush for the players and force a confrontation. This is a really cool way to keep the behavior somewhat random, but slowly crank up the dial until all hell breaks loose.

Muto Station lays down a reasonable path for the players to take (learning about the xeno, finding the video, getting a keycard, figuring out the self destruct sequence) but as evidenced by my table it's flexible enough for players to forge their own path. There are also a handful of small details I think are really fun even if they're not likely to make a big impact on your game, like how the items left in each crew member's bunk tell a tiny story about who they were.

There are a few places I think the module could use a little bit of work. First, unless your players are naturally inquisitive, it is left to the GM to find a good reason to force the players onto the station in the first place. This is by no means unique to Muto Station, and is something I often find to be a problem in the first party modules as well, but it's worth pointing out.

Second, the layout of the ship combined with the amalgam behavior sometimes requires some creative interpretation by the GM to make things make sense. Particularly where this comes up is when the Amalgam needs to move around, there's often no immediately obvious way for it to move from place to place without being immediately found by the players. An easy fix for this is to add ventilation shafts, and to time encounters such that the Amalgam shows up behind players to ensure movement makes sense, but it's still something the GM needs to keep in mind while running the system.

The layout is as excellent as you'd expect from Sean McCoy himself, and I can't finish this section without mentioning the bone chilling, almost psychedelic rendering of the Amalgam by David Hoskins prominently featured in the spread.

Thoughts on the System

I'd be very surprised if this blog post were anyone's first exposure to it so I won't give an overview of Mothership RPG, and instead I'll just give my nitpicky issues with the system. I've run a 10 session Dead Planet campaign, and a handful of one shots prior to Muto Station so the system was a known quantity to me going in. I really like Mothership and I keep running more games with it for a reason, so take my complaints with a grain of salt.

The stress system is functional at providing a building tension and pressure for the players, without dictating behavior from them until things get very bad. However, I dislike that panic rolls are 2d10 roll under, and not percentile like everything else in the game. Mothership is extremely straightforward and easy to teach, so having one system that works entirely unlike everything else is a speed bump that requires re-explaining almost every time it comes up.

Mothership stats feel largely arbitrary to me. Creatures don't feel appreciably different from one another based on stats, and looking at the laconic stat block doesn't give me a good feel for what a given monster is really capable of. This isn't a huge problem, since much of the time players will try as hard as possible to not interact with a monster's stats, and monster description carries the majority of the weight, but it still rubs me the wrong way.

I also both like, and dislike the hit/hp system. By design it prevents massive damage from immediately wiping out enemies, but that also runs directly counter to my intuition for how something should react to massive damage. It didn't come up in Muto Station at all (the players made no attempt to fight the Amalgam) but when running Dead Planet I often found myself letting a single attack burn away several hits, particularly when explosives were used against relatively small and soft targets. My preference would be for multiple hits to be reserved only for the beefiest, most durable creatures. I understand rulings over rules so I can run the game how I like, but I don't believe the system as currently implemented carries enough weight on its own (although, technically it's not currently in the rulebook, so who knows).

Mothership is still a fantastic system, and I don't think there's anything better around for this particular brand of sci fi horror roleplaying.

Final Thoughts

Muto Station is an excellent Mothership adventure with a great layout, a really cool escalating monster behavior table, and a monster that's horrifying on both practical and existential levels. It takes a bit of extra work from the GM to really make it sing, but as shown by TheDnDMom's playthrough it can serve as an excellent introduction to Mothership RPG.

As mentioned at the top, I'm unfortunately going to be putting the series on hold for a bit. The playgroup I was doing this with wants to pick up our older Scum and Villainy campaign, so until we switch it up from that or I find another group to keep this going this is on hiatus.

In the mean time, please go pick up the book and try out some of these modules yourself! Dissident Whispers is full of fantastic modules like this; no matter if you're looking for one shots, places to populate a hex crawl with, or just great ideas to pillage for your campaign you'll find it within these pages.

DUEL AT HIGH NOON - Simple Duel Procedure for Into the Odd or Electric Bastionland.

Stare down the opposition in a dusty street under a burning sun, then...

DRAW!

Both duelists make a DEX save to draw their weapons.

AIM!

If one duelist succeeded and the other failed, the duelist who succeeded is the WINNER.

If both duelists succeeded, whoever rolled the higher number is the WINNER.

If neither duelist succeeded, there is no WINNER. 

FIRE!

Anyone who succeeded has their attack ENHANCED (+1d12 Bonus).

If there is a WINNER they shoot FIRST. 

The other duelist can then take their shot if they’re still standing.

If there is no WINNER, both duelists shoot simultaneously.

Macchiato Monsters - References, House Rules, Hacks

Collected resources for Macchiato Monsters

By no means is this intended to be comprehensive, just stuff I've come across and found useful (and a couple things of my own).

Play Aids and Advice

Spell Cost Reference Sheet (this one is mine!). I found that trying to create prices to spells on the fly was a bit taxing, so I wrote up a flowchart to get a rough cost as a starting point. Partly inspired by Blades in the Dark magnitude tables.

Combat Example by the author of Macchiato Monsters. Very helpful for getting an understanding how how it's supposed to play out.

Settings and Item Tables

UVG Equipment Tables and Rules by aincumis

Post Human Orbital Structures - really cool alternate setting, equipment tables thing by 

House Rules and Hacks

 Inverted Risk Dice (personal house rule)

Risk dice step down in size when the highest three values are rolled, not the lowest.

Rationale is that for consumables it makes more sense (I just ate a ton of these rabbits, that's why there are less of them), and it also spreads out the feel bads. Currently it's a double feel bad when you both roll low (and get very little benefit) and also now your thing is running out.

Downside, slightly more mental overhead since the numbers to watch for are different for each die size.

 Monster Dice (personal house rule/hack)

Replace monster's Morale Die with an all purpose Monster Die. If they try to do something in their nature, roll the skill die. 

1-3 are degrees of failure, and the die steps down until they get a chance to rest.

4+ are degrees of success.

If a monsters is particularly skilled at something, roll with advantage.

If they're bad at something or it's out of their nature, roll with disadvantage.

This can be used for everything from sneaking and ambushes, to resisting magical effects. It mostly felt weird to me that the advice for these things in the book was to just invent a stat for them on the fly, and roll under that. Risk Dice are used for everything else, why not also this?

The Dissident Maze, Part 5: Flails Akimbo

I know I said it was going to be a few weeks before the next installment, but scheduling issues with our Vamp game lead to me learning on Sunday night that I'd be running a one shot Monday night.

Some background on this whole thing: I'm attempting to play through every module in Dissident Whispers with the same players, and the same characters (or at least alternate universe versions of them). I don't really expect to actually accomplish this, but I think it'll be fun to see how far I can get. Dissident Whispers is a community created collection of one page RPG adventures to raise money for Black Lives Matter, I personally wrote a Troika! adventure, and a Mausritter adventure location for the project.

See Week 1 for more background on Dissident Whispers, as well as the setup for how I'm running a single party of adventurers through wildly different modules and systems. I will admit, now that we're 5 sessions in, my original framework of an interplanar maze, with soul points and such, has almost entirely been tossed by the wayside. As I very often do, I underestimated how much players will self motivate to explore modules and find their own fun, so I really didn't need to set up an elaborate system to encourage them.

Last week the players were hunting for Snail Eggs in Ootheca, this week they're fighting for their lives in Flails Akimbo!

The Module

The full art and layout for this module is worth seeing, go buy the book!

 

Flails Akmibo is an adventure for MÖRK BORG written by Pablo Dapena (with art by Michael Harmon, layout by Matthew Johnson, Rolland and Pablo, and editing by Flora Van Den Berg). It's an over the top, hyperviolence send up of Guns Akimbo. I'd actually had the pleasure of playing through this module when a friend ran it, so I had a pretty good handle on it going in (part of what contributed to me picking it as a last minute thing).

The System

MÖRK BORG is the recently Ennie award winning Art Punk created by Pelle Nilsson and Johan Nohr. 

Play Report

I started off by telling them they were almost certain to die during this, so to be prepared for that. When I played in this, I personally died 3 times, so I felt pretty confident in this warning.

 

Tenzin, Gunter and Dillinger awake with spinning heads and hurting hands in small stone cells (Garimir couldn't make it this week). They look down, and each realize that weapons have been crudely nailed to their hands! Tenzin has warhammers, Dillinger has knives, and Gunter has a zweihänder fixed to each hand (lots of damage, but combat rolls are penalized due to the difficulty).

They immediately come to the conclusion that this is some sort of battle royale thing, and Gunter loudly yells that he can't wait to kill Dillinger before the booming announcer voice even has a chance to introduce today's game of DEATH GALORE.

Finding their cages unlocked, they all run out and through the only door into the next room. Two cagefighters, and a handful of terrified looking prisoners were waiting in the room, and leap to attack the players as soon as the announcer's monologue was finished.

One cagefighter runs with spinning axes towards the zweihänder wielding Gunter, and this is where the first hints of how absurdly lucky my players would get in this module appeared. Gunter gets a critical success on defense, giving a free attack, which hits, and one shots the cagefighter.

Dillinger rushes the other cagefighter, managing to get behind him and slashing through the tendons in the back of his feet. Tenzin, meanwhile, avoids the fray and tries to figure out where the hell the announcer's voice is coming from. Seeing this as a sign of weakness the small band of prisoners try and swarm him, but Tenzin spins into a whirlwind of smashing hammers (using the special "Thou twirl me fair round, dearest, fair round. Like a breaking wheel, fair round round round" move included in this module) driving them off and narrowly avoiding falling into the huge open pit in the middle of the room.

Gunter finishes off the wounded cagefighter, Tenzin kills two of the prisoners attacking him with another spinning attack, and Dillinger shoves the remaining live prisoner down into the pit. Dillinger briefly considers going full Hunger Games by shoving Gunter into the pit, but is interrupted as Tenzin hears some "booing" sounds coming from the bottom of the pit where one of the prisoners had landed.

With some difficulty due to their weapon hands, they quickly splice together a rope out of the clothing of the dead, and lower Tenzin down into the pit to see what's going on. Dangling from the end of the rope, Tenzin finds a three fancily dressed, and very drunk, nobles halfheartedly punching and stabbing the body of the dead prisoner, complaining that they paid good money for this and it's bullshit that this guy is already dead. As Tenzin drops in among them though, they excitedly turn to him and declare joy at the prospect of a "meat pinata" and rush in. He releases the rope, and unleashes another cyclone of hammers upon the nobles. Hearing the commotion, Dillinger takes a high risk leap into the pit, managing to land on and messily crush one of the dilettantes, sending the other two fleeing in fear. 

While Gunter more carefully and safely climbs down into the pit, Tenzin and Dillinger chase down and finish off the two remaining nobles. Through a door and up a set of stairs, the players find themselves in a narrow hallway populated by spear wielding nobles, after bringing destruction down upon them they find they can see into areas of "The Stage" through small slits in the walls. This, along with interrogating the lone noble they spared, allows them to realize these are the "spectator booths" through which the slaughter can be witnessed (and participated in by poking spears through slits). While looking through one of these slits, they see a group of three cagefighters dash through a door after hearing the announcer call for someone to go deal with the PCs.

Rounding a corner, and pushing their noble captive ahead of them, a huge armored man wearing a leather pig mask bursts through a door at the far end of the hallway, as the announcer introduces SNOUTFACE and promises a spectacular fight, even if it's a shame their paying audience can't see it.

The captive noble is shoved into Snoutface's path, bravely soaking a massive mace attack to protect the players. Then Tenzin rolls past Snoutface's feet, coming up behind the gladiator and smashing his warhammers directly into the back of his head (a critical hit, dealing almost all of Snoutface's HP, and damaging his armor). Gunter quickly follows up with his zweihänders and finishes off poor Snoutface before he managed to do anything more than kill a single noble.

As Tenzin retrieves the leather pig mask as a trophy, Dillinger passes through the door Snoutface has entered through. He finds a storage area with an armored, locked door, and a portcullis leading to a large amphitheater. In this room he can hear some very loud panicked breathing coming from behind a set of shelves storing hammers and nails. As the other two join him, the portcullis begins to open, and the three cagefighters they had seen before arrive in the amphitheater and rush towards the PCs.

Tenzin, however, simply steps forward and tosses the bloody pig mask of the arena champion onto the ground striking FEAR into the hearts of these three men. Two immediately break and run, while the last collapses the ground begging for his life.

GM Note: Tossing down the mask of the defeated arena champion, someone the cage fighters would fear, was a clever idea and I decided to simply roll morale checks for the three men. ALL THREE FAILED! After rooms of nothing but successful combat checks (by this point, the PCs had taken a grand total of 2 damage, and that was to the guy who started with NINE HEALTH) this was the final nail in the coffin for any hope I had of demonstrating how lethal this game was. At this point, I had no choice but to bow my head and accept that my players were simply too lucky to be killed.

The players then tore down the shelves, revealing the poorly hidden announcer (a man with a megaphone sewn to his mouth), then made their way through a door to find the "Bacchanalian Chamber" the secret room containing the hidden master of this blood arena the Grand Duchess Rottundha. Cowering with her are all the remaining nobles that had fled from the players approach, and Tenzin fell upon them in a tornado of whirling hammers.

His constant use of the spin attack finally almost came back to bite him as he managed to donk himself in the head. Fortunately, for him, his absurdly good HP roll meant he was pretty much fine. The rest of the players joined, and they made short work of the Dutchess and the remaining nobles. From the corpses, they retrieved the key to their freedom, and left the bloody arena injured but very much unkilled.

Thoughts on the Module

Well, first of all, my players had an absolutely fantastic time. After we finished they couldn't stop gushing about how fun it was, although they admitted it was likely in part to how absolutely unstoppable they were. Gunter's player did express some sadness that they hadn't died, after I'd hyped up how unforgivably deadly the module was. They loved being put in an awful, probably unwinnable situation and being able to let loose and damn the consequences in a bid for revenge.

This module is jam packed with horrible, hilarious, and fun things. The setup is perfect for putting players into the right frame of mind to play MÖRK BORG. You start off in a cell with weapons nailed to your hands, you're probably not getting out of here! Might as well go down swinging! The announcer provides a really fun excuse to give dumb, booming voice narration to everything the players do, and a vehicle to try to goad them into poor decision making.

I can't say that my players' experience will be the common one, my own experience playing in it had 5+ deaths among 3 players. However, from a player perspective, everything was so over the top, bloody, and gruesome that dying never felt bad. No matter if you defy the odds and escape alive, or die half a dozen times trying this module is a fantastic introduction to MÖRK BORG and I can't recommend it enough.

Thoughts on the System

I'm not going to have many original thoughts on MÖRK BORG, people much more eloquent than me have already waxed poetic about the incredible layout, the heavy metal influences, the fantastically disturbing artwork, and more. 

 

The mechanics are light, but very functional. Character creation is extremely fast, a thing you need in a (usually) very lethal game. All the rolls are player facing (players roll both to attack and defend) and against generally fixed difficulties which is a thing I really enjoy. It always puts the ball in the players' courts, and means the game runs very fast and easily. Being able to quickly tweak the target numbers based on whatever goofball thing the players were describing let me mechanically show the impact of their ideas, which is not something I always want in a game (see Chris McDowall's blog post about handling variable difficulty in a game with fixed rolls) but it worked really well for this group. 

The main thing running the game made me realize though, is how brilliant the "Calendar of Nechrubel" and the Miseries are. For those unfamiliar during a game of MÖRK BORG each dawn the GM rolls a die (size chosen based on the intended length of the campaign) and on a 1 a Misery is activated. When the 7th Misery occurs, well, I'll let the book express itself:

The table you roll the other miseries on is the coolest looking random table I've ever seen in an rpg.

 

When I first read this my reaction was, "Woah, extremely metal and cool. Sounds kind of annoying to use at the table though, since you'd get a weird anticlimax end to your campaign, right?" However, reflecting on Flails Akimbo I've realized this does something very important.

Since the world is going to end, DAMN THE CONSEQUENCES AND GO DOWN SWINGING. Players enter the game knowing that their characters will assuredly die and the entire world is going to end, and there's nothing they can do about it! They're already in an awful situation, so there's no need to be precious with their characters, instead they should play them like you'd drive a stolen car. 

 

Flails Akimbo does this on a smaller scale, it puts the players in an awful, essentially unwinnable situation. They're going to die so they might as well try to strike back and take everyone else down with them. And hell, if they manage not to die? That makes a story worth telling.

Final Thoughts

Both the system and the module are great but I won't retread what I've said above. If you were looking for a way to get players introduced to the nihilistic, black metal violence of MÖRK BORG I can't imagine a better vehicle than Flails Akimbo.

 

My RPG schedule is still a bit up in the air, so I'm not sure when the next time we'll be playing a Dissident Whispers module is, but keep an eye out for our next adventure (where we'll return to my players voting on the next module). If this sounded great, and it was, go buy Dissident Whispers! It's got fifty seven more modules in there, including five (!!!) other MÖRK BORG modules. It even has a MB module written by Johan Nohr himself, and other amazing layout work by him can be found in a couple other places in the book.