The Fangwitch’s Falls - Session Two Play Report

 

Background

This is the second part of my play report for EmemyCo’s The Fangwitch’s Falls, read Session One if you haven’t. The module can be purchased here, or alongside Em’s currently kickstarting module Try The Beetle Milk.

I’m using Brighter Worlds, which is my own hack of Cairn, Electric Bastionland, and Macchiato Monsters. You can pick it up here for free, or look at the SRD here, but if you imagine “Whimsical Cairn with Class Abilities” you’re most of the way there.

Previously On…

 

Granny Hexwhistle

Witch on a flying broom with a small, frog that sweats hallucinogen. All-around bad person.

Mercutio Smock

Gentleman and Runewright extraordinaire, crafting interesting logic-based magics.

Pele

Cleric of her Small God: a tiny golem with a volcanic head who is the God of Magmatic Renewal.

The party arrived at the town of Mahruko, chased down a rumor of quarreling ghosts, murdered some chickens cursed demons, treated with a magic 8 ball skull-based Seer, and chatted with two strangely long and tall normally proportioned fish sisters.

Overnight they’re joined by a new party member (our usual fourth player who was unavailable during session one):

Tibbius Sacrum

A Bag of Bones: a walking, talking skeleton wielding a (different) skeleton’s leg. Apparently the Seer’s college roommate. Able to switch between terrifying spooky skeleton and comical spoopy skellington on a whim.

GM’s Note: We spent maybe a minute trying to justify why a skeleton was joining the party, but I mostly didn’t think it was important for it to make sense “in the fiction”. Prioritizing speed over realism, we ended up with the absurdist idea that the Seer suggested he join this party because they “seemed cool” and everyone rolled with it.

Session Two

“The only good man is a dead man.” - Granny Hexwhistle welcoming Tibbius into the party.

The party (now including one boney boi) enjoys a morning teatime with the Yamuna Sisters before heading on towards the lake. They pass some strange stone structures and scrimshaw on the way, but cursory examination reveals no deeper or magical meaning.

Arriving at the lake the party spots a small boat riding deep in the water, containing two men waving for help. Mercutio whips up a set of linked runes carved into some driftwood: one to move the driftwood towards the men, and a second which triggers on contact with another piece of wood (the boat) that sets up a water current to bring the boat the shore.

As the boat is carried closer, it becomes apparent what the problem is: the boat is jam packed full of fish! To the point of nearly sinking!

GM’s Note: There’s a random table to determine what issue the fishermen are dealing with. I was about to roll on it when I spotted “Too Many Fish” as an entry, and decided that was far too funny to not be the case.

The party immediately begins questioning how the boat ended up in this situation, and why the fishermen don’t even have any fishing equipment. The fishermen have no good answers, which makes the party even more suspicious. Granny notices that one of the fishermen is wearing some sort of amulet beneath his shirt, and, being a covetous witch, immediately decides she wants it.

She makes a grab for it, which the fisherman objects to. Mercutio, always willing to escalate violence levels, pins the fisherman’s arms to allow Granny Hexwhistle to try and grab the amulet. The second fishermen, seeing the (totally unjustified) attack on his companion moves to try and push Granny back, who retaliates with a blast of magic. This breaks his spirit and he takes off running towards the woods, pursued by Granny on her broomstick.

GM’s Note: The fishermen’s initial inability to answer questions and their suspicious actions was a result of me not knowing why they had so many fish in their boat. I was mentally scrambling for a good reason, but in the mean time they were answering evasively. So, that much is my fault. What follows I take no responsibility for.

Tibbius begins tossing fish from the boat one by one back into the lake as a form of intimidation (???), while Pele and Mercutio interrogate Fisherman A. They find that the amulet is a large jade fish, apparently enchanted to make fish hop into the boat on their own. Despite belonging to a long line of excellent fishers this (still unnamed, whoops) fisherman had no skill at all. To fix this problem, the fisherman acquired this amulet trade from the Fae who are currently in the Deep Woods.

Meanwhile Granny Hexwhistle is circling the fleeing man on her broom, cackling madly the entire time.

Me: Okay so what is your goal with all this?

Granny’s Player: I want to completely terrify him, make this a total nightmare.

Me: Well, mission accomplished.

Hexwhistle eventually paralyzes him with the Staring Contest spell, then shoves her frog familiar in his mouth to dose him with hallucinogens, ultimately making him pass out from the extreme and wildly varying sensory inputs.

GM’s Note: Brighter Worlds uses a “Eulogy” system for earning XP. Anytime a character does something noteworthy enough to be read out at their eventual funeral gets added, and you gain 1 XP. Anything on the line gets voted on by the table. It serves to both let the table meter their own advancement rate, and also adds a “best of” campaign record to every character sheet.

In this case, the table voted that the extreme terrorizing of the fisherman qualified as an entry for Granny Hexwhistle’s Eulogy. I argued against it, both on the grounds that this feels like something Granny does all the time, and also because this is something I’d call a perverse incentive. Alas, I was outvoted.

Returning to the rest of the group with the passed out Fisherman B in tow, the party puts together the whole story. Tibbius dumps the boat full of fish back into the lake right before the party remembers they wanted to have a large gift of food to potentially appease Old Tago (the giant monster that apparently lives in the lake).

They send the two, now traumatized, fishermen off towards the not-at-all suspicious Yamuna Sisters’ house after “confiscating” the fish charm. Following some discussion the party heads towards the cemetery to follow up on the rumor they’d heard about the gravekeeper, as well as it being on the way to the Deep Woods to meet the Fae.

Me: Wow, they’re actually pretty close to finishing the module. That’s way faster than we usually get through things.

My Players: I know we’re literally right next to our goal, but instead lets go head off in the opposite direction to meet (and probably pick fights with) the weird ancient creatures we just heard about.

The Cemetery is flooded, both with bog water and ghouls. There’s a large mound in the center with a huge Toad sitting atop, as well as a particular tree-mushroom that the ghouls seem to be centered around. Granny heads to that tree-mushroom on her broom, while the rest of the party kites the slow moving ghouls to reach the topped mound.

Granny finds, and rescues, the beleaguered (and previously missing) grave-keeper before meeting up with the rest of the party near the giant toad. The rescued gravekeeper is sufficiently polite and thankful for the rescue the charm Hexwhistle, and informs them that the toad is Gol, a local Demigod of the Ponds. Gol is asleep, and ignores all attempts by the party to wake him. Pele eventually speaks through his God and collapses half of the mound Gol is on, forming a ramp for him to roll down. Unfortunately some godly power keeps Gol floating in empty space.

GM’s Note: I gave Gol a WIL Save to remain in place despite the ground being removed from beneath him. My logic at the time was that the module lists some specific ways Gol could be woken, and I took that as a further implication that it should be difficult to do so.

In retrospect, I should have let this attempt work. If for no reason than the image of a carriage sized toad rolling down a ramp into a crowd of ghouls is extremely funny.

It would also also have played into my favorite line of text in the module, which is that he “prefers to roll around like a misshapen wheel.”

Realizing that their attempt to displace Gol has left an easy path for the hoard of ghouls to get at them, the party makes themselves scarce (after making sure the gravekeeper is headed back towards Mahruko safely).

Onward to the Deep Woods! The sun is beginning to set just as the party reaches the outskirts of the forest. Pitiful wailing and the sound of heavy footsteps emerges from deeper into the forest, causing the party to prepare for combat only to see a giant mushroom man fleeing in terror from a cloud of butterflies.

Granny Hexwhistle gets very lucky, and manages to kill the magical, illusion-projecting butterfly (and feed it to her familiar), then immediately turns to try and extract some recompense from the mushman. Gari, the mushman in question, explains that he’d been chased by the terrible butterflies who kept putting him to sleep with magic. He is very agreeable to preparing food in exchange for his rescue, but seems to be a bit unsure as to what food actually is.

After a few minutes of burning a mushroom, dirt, and pine needle patty over a fire the party realizes that Gari is simply too much of a himbo for them to exploit, and sends him on his way.

They make camp and settle in for the night.

Brighter World’s Playtesting Note: By this point Granny had earned 2 XP and her player was looking to purchase a new Advanced Ability. Nothing on the sheet was speaking to them, and the player really enjoys looking through spell lists and making careful choices. I offered them the ability to take on an ability from the (currently unpublished) Crystal Wizard which would give them a choice of any spell or ritual each time XP is spent. An example of my attempts to make different Callings appeal to different player types being semi-successful.

As a point of comparison, in my other group a player with the Demonic Sorcerer Calling is absolutely loving the totally random mirror of this Ability.

After Thoughts

This group has a bit of a tendency to go from 0 to 60 when it comes to random violence, those poor fishermen. The fishermen incident is a good illustration of the level of detail I like in a module though, which Fangwitch’s hits quite well. Enough to provide a framework that I can run and (relatively) quickly spin up new ideas, but not so much where things I invent are going to cause contradictions later. 

I recognize that a lot of people will want more detail or structure, but for me this is perfect. It’s a great middle ground where a single read through lets me understand the world enough to run without further prep and the flexibility to add more to the world.

Session 3 of the play report will go up whenever we manage to get out of scheduling hell and play session 3. Maybe this week? We’ll see!

It was this week, huzzah, read Part 3 here: https://academyofdoors.blogspot.com/2022/09/the-fangwitchs-falls-session-three-play.html

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The Fangwitch’s Falls - Session One Play Report

Module Introduction

The Fangwitch’s Falls is a fantasy adventure by EmemyCo. It’s written for Cairn, but easily adapted to anything rules light, and is a fantastic example of the “talking to weird guys in the woods” style of module that I’m a big fan of.

It features a point crawl navigation of the strange Fangwoods, beset by calamity as the legendary Fangwitch thrashes about as it wakes. Six of the seven locations have a unique calamity that can occur as a result of the Fangwitch’s movements, although if enough actually suffer them the entire location will destabilize and be totally destroyed.

Much of the setup and content is randomized, from big details like what the Fangwitch is and what it wants down to small details like “why are those fishermen having a bad time and is it too much fish?”. I think the same group could probably run this twice without getting bored, but if nothing else running it multiple times as a GM means you get to see something new each time.

There’s a sizeable collection of the weirdo NPCs and creatures to be found, complete with fantastically adorable artwork, an encounter table (execution left to the GM), and a nice set of local events and rumors to help get the players invested.

I fell in love with this module while reading it, and have been looking forward to running it since then. The group I ran it with leans a little in the direction of “murder hobo” so it’s maybe not exactly the intended audience, but I think the ensuing friction was great fun.

You can pick up The Fangwitch’s Falls by itself here, or along with a new module by Em by the name of Try the Beetle Milk, currently being kickstarted and promising to be more of the same off-the-wall goodness.

System

I’m letting this mini-campaign also serve as playtesting for my system Brighter Worlds. In brief, Brighter Worlds is a game of modular crunch intended to let players muck about with the individual mechanics they enjoy without weighing down the game for everyone else at the table. It’s a more whimsical take on the OSR/NSR, as seen through the lens of Evlyn Moreau’s artwork, and I think is a good match in tone for the Fangwitch’s Falls. Mechanically it’s based on Cairn, Electric Bastionland, and Macchiato Monsters.

Grab it here (for free) if you’d like to read more, or check out the SRD here.

Player Characters

Granny Hexwhistle

Granny Hexwhistle is a Witch, and also an unforgivably awful human being. Her familiar, which assists her with spellcasting, is a tiny frog which secretes hallucinogenic poison. The frog is a prince she transmuted years ago, and can’t (or won’t) turn back. She has a broom to fly upon, as all proper witches should.

She’s here to try and weasel out any ancient witch secrets from the appropriately named Fangwitch.

Mercutio Smock

Mercutio is a Runewright, master of the subtle but flexible art of creating magical effects by chaining together rune elements. He specializes in adding logic elements to his runes, allowing them to be activated based on “if, then” statements.

He’s here to try and uncover the Rune of Mud, supposedly used as part of the original binding of the Fangwitch.

Pele

Pele is a Cleric of Small Gods, specifically of the God of Magmatic Renewal who takes the form of a small volcano headed golem. She can speak through her god to change the world within its domain.

She’s here because the waking of the Fangwitch is the end of a great cycle, something her and her god wish to witness.

Session One

The party arrives in Mahruko, a small town at the edge of the Fangwood, to a scene of widespread malaise. The road’s been washed out behind them, the square is filled with people fleeing a nearby town that was swallowed by sink holes, and a general sense of foreboding. They follow the sounds of activity to The Coiled Mare, a local bar where someone is blowing through their savings to buy drinks for anyone present.

Never one to turn down drinks, they tuck in while chatting up locals to find out what’s going on. A few interesting tidbits appear:

• The groundskeeper for the local cemetery hasn’t been seen in a few days.
• Someone swears they overheard some ghosts having an argument near the Old Well.
• Everyone in town has been having the same dream: the whale sized Fangwitch thrashing about in a mass of coils and spines.

The party hits the road to investigate the ghost argument rumors, despite the other townsfolk suggesting that old Bill was just drunk.

GM’s Note: There are no explicit instructions for navigating the point crawl in module. I don’t mind this, as it’s so dependent on system and group that I’d likely have ended up ignoring it anyway. For this playthrough, since the module operates on the scale of days with the calamities, I’m having it take about 6 hours to get to a new location and a similar amount of time to thoroughly explore it. This way the party can visit around two locations per in game day. I’m also rolling on the Encounters table once every 6 hours.

On the way, the party runs into a couple remarkably fat chickens pecking at worms on the road. Upon seeing these chickens, Granny Hexwhistle immediately decides she wants to catch and eat them. She captures one with magic while Pele, always willing to go with the flow, speaks through her god to turn the ground to mud and catches the second chicken.

On closer examination the chickens exude a sulfurous smell, and have a malicious look in their eyes. Granny Hexwhistle considers this, then snaps their necks but decides not to eat them.

Dead chickens in hand the party arrives at the Old Well. Mercutio approaches to drain it with some runework but finds is already drained due to a crack at the bottom, likely a result of recent tremors.

Granny snaps a chicken bone to perform the Bone Sense ritual to scout the area before flying down on her broom into a small space through the crack. Inside is a skeleton huddling beneath a blanket, a skull sitting on some armor, and a strange spectral figure dancing around the room.

The skull introduces himself as the Seer. After shaking him like a magic 8 ball and asking questions it’s discovered that that spirit is the spectral form of the Fangwitch. The party is unsure what to do with this information as the spirit seems unable or unwilling to answer questions. The skull accepts a new skeleton (one of the suspicious chicken corpses) in trade for his armor which Mercutio enhances with a set of runes to make it unyielding as stone.

GM Note: The Seer “speaks in poorly rhyming verse when able.” Super fun to try and come up with rhymes on the fly, but also quite difficult. Was made more fun by making the struggle to come up with good verse “in character”, it’s the Seer struggling! Not me!

The party continues on towards the Lake, passing some strange stone structures on the way, and arrives at a small hut set on the shore. The hut belongs to the Yamuna sisters, who are unsettling elongated fish ladies (long and tall) who invite them in for a cup of tea.

 

Over the tea they engage in a nice, not at all strange and foreboding chat, in which the party learns some local lore. After parsing the strange singsongy parlance of the sisters, the party learns:

• The Fangwitch is apparently behind the Falls that feed into the Lake
• There is an ancient Mask (possibly the source of the Runes Mercutio is looking for) at the bottom of the Lake.
• The Lake is home to a huge saurian creature by the name of Old Tago which may be an obstacle, although it apparently appreciates a good meal.

The Yamuna Sisters kindly offer the party a place to sleep, although Mercutio decides to set up a tent outside so as to not intrude on an otherwise all ladies night. After whipping up a quick dehydration rune the drizzle poses no problem.

Partway through the night Mercutio is awoken by a strange, skeletal creature approaching in the air. After rushing inside and waking the others, Granny Hexwhistle bursts outside to see who disturbed her slumber.

Turns out it’s the Seer! Now sporting a demonic skeleton! The chicken corpse they gave him was actually a demon cursed into the form, and the Seer was able to break the curse after gaining control of the body. The Seer stops in to thank the party for this wonderful gift, and heads off.

GM Note: The random encounter is demons cursed into chicken form, everything that followed was pure hilarious happenstance.

Session One Thoughts

So far, my players and I are having a blast. The module is fairly loose in structure, which some GMs may find insufficient without further prep. Personally, after just reading through it a couple times it provided me enough meat to go off of without having so much structure that I felt constrained. It gave me guidance but nothing I invented on the spot ever felt like it would contradict something else later.

The NPCs are lively, original, and very fun to play. The setting is fun and entwined enough that no matter which way my players decided to go I knew there’d be something to do, and it would connect to further locations to carry them along.

The only complaint I got was about the lack of combat, as mentioned this group leans a bit murder hobo-y, but don’t worry. In session 2 they found a way to solve that problem themselves. Read on now: https://academyofdoors.blogspot.com/2022/09/the-fangwitchs-falls-session-two-play.html

If this sounds fun, pick up the module here or alongside Try The Beetle Milk, Em’s currently kickstarting module which promises to be more fun of the same variety.

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The "Friction" Theory of TTRPG Mechanics

The Idea

I often see a rules light game complimented by saying its rules, "get out of the way" or "don't slow things down" during play. Whereas I also see (usually different people) say that rules light games are too ephemeral, or there's not enough "meat" there.

I've had the thought that both of these statements are actually talking about the same thing.

Mechanics in a TTRPG provide friction. They slow things down, and they provide grip.

When you encounter a situation that requires interfacing with mechanics, that often means pausing the narration, consulting the rules (depending on complexity), and rolling dice before you can continue.

This can be bad, if it interrupts an otherwise good flow of conversation and narration. But it can also be good, if it provides a slight pause at the right time. That pause can build tension, provide a moment of bated breath before the dice hits the table and we know what happens next.

The friction from mechanics also lets the players grip the game, and the game world. Mechanics provide knowable, predictable ways in which the players can interact with the world. A bit of grit to help hold onto the otherwise nebulous shared space of ideas everyone at the table is contributing to.

Not enough friction, and your grip might slip causing the fictional world to become ethereal and unreal and difficult to properly interact with. Too much friction, though, and it might become hard to move easily and lead to spending more time thinking about mechanics than what's going on in the world.

First Example: Increasing Friction

This is something I was thinking about recently while working on my Cairn hack Meteor. My original rules for flying a space ship around a solar system were very light and nebulous; my initial instinct for RPG rules is to go as light as possible and see if it works. In this case, all I had was rough guidelines for how long it took to get to "nearby" and "distant" locations. In practice this wasn't enough. A solar system is too large, too abstract, and too disconnected from the norm to be easily imagined in a way that everyone at the table will agree with. Not enough friction.

 

So I added some basic exploration rules. Broke the system up into orbital zones, provided a basic map that can be used for any system, and some simple navigation mechanics. Still relatively light, I didn't want this to bog down the process of simply flying form point A to point B, but now it had enough friction that there were actual decisions to make during that process.

I had to add a little bit of grit to make sure players could properly grab onto the game.

Second Example: Reducing Friction

As an opposed example, in my game Brighter Worlds I was anticipating a campaign where much of the time was spend hex crawling through the wilderness. I wanted a mechanic to track supplies and interface with wilderness survival to provide pressure to return to settlements to restock and recover. I originally had a complex set of mechanics involving usage dice and opposed Saves that were dependent on the severity of the environment and the skills of the characters. At the table, this was simply too much. I found myself apprehensive when finishing a day of exploration since I'd have to now interface with a whole new system. Too much friction.

 

Instead I collapsed it down to a single Save each day (using the same mechanic as the rest of the game) plus an abstracted "Supplies" item. This created a small moment that paused conversation and had me ask "okay who's in charge of food tonight" and a single roll to see how that turned out and if they had to expend supplies. That's all that was needed to focus the conversation, remember that we're out in the wilderness, and let the players know they should usually have some emergency supplies on hand in case fishing or hunting isn't successful. Possibly most importantly, it was a nice ritual to create routines and encourage the players to develop out their character's habits and opinions. This is how we ended up with a canon where magically duplicated pickled eggs formed the basis of every meal, and one of the characters may or may not be a cannibal (he says it really depends on the definition!).

The original system had too much friction, but if I had taken it all the way down to zero there wouldn't be that slight sticking point to spark all these fun conversations.

Vague Outro

So that's the thesis here. Add friction to your game when you want to make things pause, either to breath or for dramatic effect, or when you want to provide a place for players to "grab onto" the game and interface with the world. Remove friction from the game when you want to speed things up, when you find you're spending time on something the table isn't interested in, or when you're finding the flow of the table is being interrupted by the rules.

I don't think this view of mechanics is revealing some hidden truth or particularly groundbreaking, but it's been a useful mental model for my own writing and it might be helpful to others as well.

Social Combat for Into the Odd

Into the Odd Social Combat

For Into the Odd, Electric Bastionland, Cairn, and similar games. This is completely unplaytested, but it was bouncing around my head after some discussion in the NSR discord and I wanted to take a crack at writing it down.

I reference WIL specifically here, but swap out with CHA for Electric Bastionland (or whatever other ability might be appropriate in your system of choice).

Goals

Combat prowess in Into the Odd is mostly not dependent on a character's stats. Instead success in combat is determined by your choice of weapons, your tactics, getting the drop on your enemy, and the choice of whether to engage in the combat in the first place.

I wanted to know what a social combat system with similar ideas would look like. A way where your success is based on your arguments, rhetoric, strategy, knowledge and knowing when to fight it out and when to cut your losses. I want something that's freeform enough to not get in the way of good conversation and debate, but mechanical enough to allow the GM to "disclaim" having to simply choose when an argument is good enough, or when a character will capitulate.

Set Stakes & Resilience Points

Decide what each side stands to gain or lose.

Arguments are not mind control, you can argue people into giving ground, compromising, or retreating from a situation. However without significant leverage you cannot argue people into acting against their own self interest.

The more a side stands to lose, the greater the effort required to push them to that point. Resilience Points (RP) is a measure of how much they will resist Capitulation.

If it's something small their RP is a d6.

If it's something significant their RP is 2d6.

If it's something they would only barely consider their RP is 3d6.

Remember that both sides must have something they stand to lose.

The RP is shared across all members of the side of an combat. Roll the RP as combat begins.

Choose Leaders

A single character should take the lead for each side of an combat. Their WIL is used during the combat.

Set Social Armor

Social Armor represents any situation or environment in which one side might be shielded from full social consequences.

If one side's leader is in a significantly elevated social position compared to the other, that side should gain a point of Social Armor. This will change based on the setting of the combat. In court, a Noble would have Armor when arguing with a Commoner, the opposite might be true if the setting is instead in a bar or back streets.

Other factors that can mitigate Social Damage should also be represented with armor. For example having the audience of the combat supporting one side or the other.

Combat

Combat proceeded with each side taking turns. If it's not obvious which side should go first (social precedence, ambush, etc) the leaders of each side should make an opposed WIL Save.

On a side's turn, they may make an Argument and individual members of the side may make Gambits.

An Argument attacks the opposing RP directly. When you make an argument, roll a d6 as its damage.

Argument Modifiers

If an argument is based off of previously undisclosed information, attacks from an unexpected direction, uses the opponent's points against them, relies on some external leverage, or is otherwise advantaged it is enhanced. When your argument is enhanced roll a d12 in place of the normal die.

If an argument is similar to a previous point, has already been rebutted by the opponent, is a weak point lacking leverage, undercuts your own previous arguments, or is otherwise disadvantaged it is impaired. When your argument is impaired roll a d4 in place of the normal die.

Damage

Roll the argument's die, subtract any Social Armor, and deal the remaining to the opponent's RP.

Capitulation

If there is damage in excess of the opponent's RP, it is dealt to the leader's WIL. They must then make a WIL Save to avoid Capitulation.

If the leader fails the WIL Save, they Capitulate and receive one additional turn of combat. During that turn if they are able to force their opponent as well, the Combat ends in a Compromise. An agreement is reached that benefits both parties, or at least disadvantages both equally based on their initial stakes.

If they are unable to force the opposing party to Capitulate during the extra turn, they have been utterly routed and lose whatever they have staked on the combat.

Gambits

Members of each side may make Gambits to try and shift the argument in their favor. This could include shifting the audience to their side, thereby gaining Social Armor, uncovering or revealing information or evidence to advantage arguments, or any other actions that seem reasonable.

If there are risks inherent in a Gambit, they require a successful Save as usual.

Final Thoughts

 I suspect simultaneous turns would work better mechanically, and avoid the awkward "extra turn/parting shot", but also going back and forth matches the flow of an argument or debate more closely.

I'm not convinced I've achieved the goals I set out, but I think more theory crafting should wait until I actually try the thing. I plan to test it in one of my games if the opportunity arises, and I'll revisit this when I do so.

Mothership Decisive Combat Hack

Rules

Combat

When you commit violence, roll Combat:

If you under both your Combat stat and the weapon's Hit%, you deal a full Hit of damage.

If you roll under just one of the two, you deal damage equal to the sum of both dice (if you rolled a 45 you deal 9 damage).

If you roll under neither, you deal damage equal to the lower of the two dice (if you rolled a 93 you deal 3 damage).

Criticals that roll over both are a complete miss, deal no damage.

Criticals that roll under one or both activate the weapon's critical effect, or grant some other appropriate bonus.

Health and Hits

Players start with Health equal to the 10's place of their Strength + the 10's place of their Speed.

Players start with 2 Hits, except the Marine which starts with 3.

Conversions 

Weapons and Attacks

Weapons no longer have a damage value, they instead have a Hit%. To convert existing damage values multiply the number of dice rolled for damage by 10 to obtain the Hit%.

Grenades and other explosives don't have a Hit%. Instead they deal 2 Hits on a successful check, and 1 Hit otherwise.

Weapons with unique damage values (like the laser cutter) should be converted individually as it makes sense.

NPC and Monsters

Convert NPCs and Monsters by dividing their health by 5 (round up) and keeping their number of Hits.

The wide range of Health and Hits on NPCs means this won't always work, so adjust as necessary.

Armor

Armor provides single use Hits. They are removed first, and doing so destroys or damages the item.

Notes

Why?

I consistently enjoy playing Mothership, I love the flavor, the characters, and the modules. However I do not like the combat.

Because of the normal starting values for stats in Mothership, most characters are more likely to miss than hit making many combat rounds result in nothing happening. Even worse, the relative values for Health and damage are such that most attacks functionally don't do anything. 

In short combat feels boring and low risk, which is especially a problem when held against the usual tone of the game.

Nothing kills tension faster when the space crazed scalpel wielding doctor stabs you and deals... about 5% of your Health. It takes a dramatic and tense situation and makes it feel pointless.

I don't disagree with the advice I've seen Sean McCoy and others give, that you don't have to use the combat system to resolve situations. That rolls are only for during high stress, panicky situations. That you should progress the fiction on all rolls, that the situation should always change.

This is all good, but it's working around the combat system. It's mitigating it. I believe it would be much better to create a combat system that intrinsically supports the horror feel and high drama of the game.

Violence in a sci fi horror game should be dramatic, decisive, and scary. I want getting into combat to have real consequences, and I want those consequences to happen quickly.

Inspirations

This system is a combination of Into the Odd's "autohit" combat and Delta Green's "lethality" system, plus quadra's house rules.

Into the Odd has no to-hit rolls, instead damage is dealt directly to HP which is Hit Protection, the ability to avoid harm rather than a measure of physical endurance. It creates a fast, dynamic combat that is quickly decisive. There are no "nothing" rounds, and the situation gets resolved rapidly.

Delta Green's lethality system sidesteps the problem of "HP bloat" by simply letting dangerous weapons instantly kill their targets. This creates a tension, that makes a dangerous situation stay dangerous regardless of stats or equipment.

And from both, low Health totals. 

The Numbers

The above chart shows the expected amount of damage dealt on a hit or miss with varying combat skill (ignoring Hit% of weapons). There's a bit of weirdness at the extreme ends of the skill, but those are unlikely to actually come up in play. Otherwise, Hits usually deal about 50% more damage than a miss.

The average character and roll will usually end up dealing around 5 damage per attack, which means that the average player will lose a Hit in two attacks. I like this amount as it means combat can't drag out too long, and it makes acting first very important which encourages use of clever tactics and fictional positioning.

Final Thoughts

This is currently untested, although I've played and enjoyed similar systems. I don't think this is perfect, or the end all of what I'm trying to achieve, but I do think that the weakest part of Mothership by far is the combat and something has to change. Dramatically reducing Health values, as I believe is the intent for Mothership 1.0, would go some way to fixing my problems but I still believe there's additional changes that can be made.

GLOG Wizard Class: Gatormancer

School: Gatormancer

Drawn by the illustrious Brian Stauffer.

Gator Mutations

At first level, and whenever you gain a Gator Mutation roll an additional Perk and Drawback.

Perks

1. Your teeth are those of an alligator They grant you a 1d6 unarmed bite, and will grow back if lost.
2. You have a slow metabolism allowing you to hold your breath for an hour and go without eating for two years.
3. You have alligator jaws that can exert unbelievable force. You can bite through anything you can get your teeth around.
4. You have second eyelids that allow you to see clearly in water, and protect you from any sort of dust, sand, or liquid that might impair your sight.
5. You have sensitive, vibration sensing nodules on your skin. Nothing touching the same surface or body of water you're in contact with can get the jump on you.
6. You have scaley, tough skin with bone plates beneath which grant you +2 AC.

Drawbacks

1. You are ectothermic. Cold temperatures make you sluggish. If you don't bask in the sun for an hour each day you cannot regain HP from lunch, and a night's rest only restores 1d6+level HP.
2. Tiny gator limbs. Your arms and legs become stubby, and you have difficulty with tasks that require manual dexterity giving a -1 penalty to relevant skill checks.
3. You have a huge gator tail that drags on the ground behind you. You always have +1 point of encumbrance, and you'll have to get new pants tailored.
4. Your eyes are on the sides of your head, giving you poor depth perception. Ranged attacks have a -2 penalty applied.
5. You gain a menacing alligator visage. Reaction rolls with you present are rolled twice with the more hostile result kept.
6. You gain gator instincts. Advancing or gaining skills that are not related to being an alligator is twice as hard.

Doom

1. You are transmuted into an Alligator and summoned to answer another Gatormancer's spell (d6). If you survive the duration of the spell you're returned to your original location and shape, plus an additional Gator Mutation.
2. For the next week rather than summoning an alligator when you cast a spell, you transform into the alligator to complete the task.
3. Each morning Save or gain a new Gator Mutation. Each night, Save or the Mutation is permanent. When you gain all 6 Mutations, you are fully transmuted and care only for the obscure and esoteric desires of an alligator.

Avoid the doom by being eaten by an ancient 30+ foot alligator and surviving, or by petitioning the Great Celestial Gator to retain your mind when you are fully transmuted into an alligator.

Mishaps

1. MD only return to your pool on a 1-2 for 24 hours
2. You take 1d6 damage.
3. Random mutation for 1d6 rounds, then make a save. Permanent if you fail.
4. For the next 24 hours all alligators are hostile to you.
5. You lose your gator perks for 24 hours, but not your drawbacks.
6. Transmute into an alligator for 1d6 rounds.

Cantrips

1. You may stay perfectly still while floating in water. While doing so you appear as a log to casual inspection.
2. Burn a spell die after a successful unarmed attack to make the target Save vs Strength. If they fail, perform a Death Roll as per the alligator ability.
3. When you eat raw meat for lunch, the next time you cast a spell you may choose to set one of your spell dice to 1 rather than roll it.

Spell List

1. Instigator
R: [DICE]x10 feet T: Point D: [SUM] minutes

Summon a [DICE]x2 HD alligator at a point you designate. You do not control the alligator.

2. Navigator
R: [DICE] miles T: Location

Summon a [DICE]x2 HD alligator that will guide you unerringly to a target location within [DICE] miles. Once there the alligator will attempt to eat you. The alligator will allow [DICE] riders on its back during the journey.

3. Subjugator
R: 20' T: 1 Creature D: [SUM] rounds

Summon a [DICE]x2 HD alligator that exists for [SUM] rounds. The alligator will do everything in its power to immobilise a target of your choice. It disappears after doing so.

4. Interrogator
T:  Falsehoods

Summon an [DICE]x2 HD alligator which will attack anyone that lies in its presence. It disappears if it hears no lies for a full minute.

5. Reptile Projectile
R: 100' T: Creature D: 0

A [DICE]x2 HD alligator is summoned next to the target and makes one attack before disappearing.

6. Conflagator
Summon a flaming [DICE]x2 HD alligator which will immediately rampage. It deals [SUM] damage to itself and anything adjacent to it. When it would die, it instead disappears. If there is a source of water nearby it will rush directly towards it.

7. Investigator
R: Sight T: Person, Place or Thing

Look with gator eyes at something that is Ancient, Forgotten, and Unrecorded to gain insight about its history and function. For each [DICE] spent, ignore one of the conditions.

8. Consegatory Prayer
R: Touch T: [DICE] Creatures D: [SUM] minutes

Grant up to [DICE] creatures you touch [DICE] Gator Perks for [SUM] minutes.

9. Impregatory Prayer
R: Sight T: Creature D: [SUM] days

Curse a creature with [DICE] Gator Drawbacks for [SUM] days.

10. Prognostigator
T: Event D: Varies

Pick a specific event that will occur within 10 [DICE 1: Minutes, 2: Hours, 3: Days]. An alligator is summoned that will communicate the outcome of that event perfectly, but the alligator cannot speak and can only communicate through charades.

11. Eradigator
T: Description D: [SUM]

State a description [DICE] words long and summon [SUM] HD worth of alligators (divided between as many alligators up to [SUM] as you choose). The alligators will attempt to destroy anything nearby that fits that description for [SUM] rounds before disappearing

12. Adjudigator
R: Nearby T: Creature D: Instant

Summon the Great Celestial Gator to judge a target of your choice. Make a flat opposed roll against them, and gain a +1 bonus for each [DICE] and each Gator Mutation you have. Both you and your target may attempt to sway the Celestial Gator with reason, sacrifice, or supplication for additional bonuses. If you win the roll, the Celestial Gator judges the target wanting, and consumes their heart. If you fail, immediately suffer the next stage of your Doom.

Alligator Stat Block

HD: Variable
Damage: HDd6 damage + Save vs Strength or Death Roll
Special: Death Roll, the alligator clamps down and rolls dealing HDd6 damage and leaving the target prone.
Size: 4+HDx3 feet long.

Alligator Reaction Table

2. Angry
3-5. Perturbed
6-8. Waiting
9-11. Basking
12. Sleeping

Notes

Inspired by the many excellent "-gator" spell names created by the NSR discord.

Thanks to Skerples for the excellent How To Design a GLOG Wizard post, which contains excellent advice I have failed to follow. No idea if the damage numbers or stats makes sense, I have very little experience directly with GLOG.

Probably a joke and not a real class... haha... unless...

Physical Media and Compositing Hybrid for Not a Place of Honor

One of the main visual goals for Not A Place of Honor (NAPOH) was to achieve a found footage aesthetic that made the spreads seem "real". The usual, and easiest way, to make a collection of documents as a spread would be to create each element individually and composit them together into a pile of papers.

This can work quite well, see this example (forwarded to me by Emanoel, the incredible artist I'm working with for this project). However, especially at my own skill level, I felt that the spreads still seemed composited. They didn't feel "real", more of a pastiche of realness.

My original thought to get around this was to cheat. That is, since I'm not skilled enough to replicate reality why not just do it all for real? Print out each document, assemble, and scan back in.

This sounded good but I ran into the problems that one, my printer is not nearly high quality enough to make that work, and more importantly it's a huge pain. Any small change, edit, or typo correction means redoing the entire spread from scratch.

The approach I've settled on is a hybrid one. I assemble and scan physical media for the "structure" of the spread, then digitally add the "content" after the fact.

Here's a walk through of my process to accomplish this. One large caveat is that I really don't know what I'm doing, so I'm sure there are better ways to make this happen. I settled on this after a lot of trial and error, including the two preview spreads shown during the Kickstarter campaign (seen here on the main page, and here on twitter). The spread shown here is still not final, the Pictogram is unfinished (you can see where I roughly removed the background) and the handwriting font will be replaced with actual scanned handwriting once everything else is finalized (including the text going through final edits).

Hybrid Physical Media and Digital NAPOH Process

Step 1 - Rough Layout + Size

 

I scanned a size reference in using identical settings to what I planned to use for the actual spread. Then with that reference, roughed in the various bits of text, art, and layout. I calculated the scale between actual and scanned size using the reference, then used that ratio to measure the size of the paper I needed.

Step 2 - Cut Physical Media

 

Another important step is to move your gremlin of a cat who's trying to "help".

Using the sizes from step 1 I cut the paper into the sizes I need. One important thing to do here is to cut every paper into the wrong size at least once because you flipped your scale ratio. The paper itself is a bunch of differently textured papers in various shades of brown I got from a local craft store. I was mostly looking for things with enough textural and color variation to give good contrast.

Step 3 - Scan

I arranged all the paper and other elements on the scanner, aiming to roughly replicate my original rough layout. I used paper clips to ensure a slight physical gap between overlapping pieces to get depth in the image. As a background, I used a printout scroll from an extremely old spectrometer dating from a time before digital readouts on research equipment. You can find some wonderful things if you by digging through drawers nobody's opened for years in research labs.

 

This step took a lot of tries between adjusting the positions, scanning, realizing I'd shifted something off the edge, and repeating.

Step 4 - Composite

With the spread scanned in I position the art, symbols, and text where needed (using Affinity Publisher). For each piece of paper, I traced a shape around the edges and use it as a mask for anything that needs to only appear on that paper. This also accounts for places where different pieces of paper overlap with one another. In this example, I'm primarily using it for the artwork, but this would also work for applying digital textures to the paper (necessary before I purchased actual textured paper).

 

The mask is a little loose around the edge of the notebook, because I added an extra layer to make it blend nicely afterwards.

In this unique case, because the artwork is mostly dark there was an obvious, sharp edge to the art that didn't blend nicely with the lighter colored paper I had scanned. I fixed this in a roundabout way that I'm sure is more complicated than necessary:

1. Make a copy of the "artwork" mask.
2. Apply a Gaussian Blur to the copy.
3. Extend the edges of the unblurred mask only in the places where I want the edges to be softened.
   
4. Apply the unblurred mask as a mask to the blurred mask.
5. Apply the masked, blurred mask as a mask to the actual artwork.

Step 5 - Finish

How gorgeous is that artwork by Emanoel?

At this point I just fiddle around with anything that doesn't look quite right. Futz with the masks where they don't line up, apply extra filters, blurs, effects or textures where necessary to improve the look. This often involves using different "blending modes" (usually multiply) on the text and artwork to preserve the texture and "depth" of the scanned image with the composited artwork. This is also where I'll add in the BANE stamps and watermarks.

Once I'm fully happy with this, I'll nicely ask my fiancée to transcribe the journal and card text and scan those in to replace the handwriting font.

This is all probably overkill for what I end up with, but I'm pretty pleased with the results so I plan on sticking with it.

Now onto the rest of the artifacts!