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.

Shit Wizards - Gastrointestinal Spell Casting

 "Malazarich the Great? He's a shit wizard, right?"

"What? No, he's a great wizard, it's in the name."

"No no, a shit wizard."

Written for Electric Bastionland/Into the Odd, but applicable to whatever game you'd like. Taken from conversation in the Electric Bastionland discord (special thanks to CosmicOrrery for their part in crafting this abomination).

Check out another take on this idea here.

What's a Shit Wizard?

A Shit Wizard (colloquial term, they prefer Excremancer) is a magic user who performs their magic by consuming spellstones, spells in physical form.

What are Spellstones?

Bezoar stones taken from the stomachs of magical beasts.

The residue of their magical abilities are accumulated in these stones, and once removed can be tapped into by a Shit Wizard's highly trained digestive system.

How's it work?

The Wizard consumes the spellstone and immediately gains the effect of the spell. Then, some number of hours later they pass the spellstone the usual way (hopefully behind a bush or around the corner) and after suitable cleaning the spellstone is ready to be used again.

Passing a spellstone will usually happen the next time the Shit Wizard makes camp, so long as at least 8 hours have passed. (Technically speaking it probably takes a 1-2 days to pass a solid object, so adjust to your desired level of "realism".)

Gross

Yup. Power at any cost.

Example

Malazarich chokes down an oversized spellstone recovered from the gut of a red dragon. His eyes begin to glow, and he belches a huge gout of fire before him dealing d12 Blast damage to everyone in the area. 

Some time later, he is heard grunting behind a tree and cursing the gods for the size of a dragon's lower intestine.

Optional Rules

Slippery Spells - Spellstones don't like being inside a wizard's digestive tract, and will hasten their exit. Spellstones are passed in 1d6 hours. 

Bonus, the number of hours is secretly rolled by the GM, although the wizard likely gets at least a few minutes warning.

Indigestion - Having more than a single spellstone in your body at once gives an awful stomach ache. You're deprived and cannot regain HP until all but one are passed.

Laxatives - Certain drugs and substances are known to wizards for speeding the passage of a spellstone through their systems. Consuming a laxative reduces the amount of time before passing by 1d4 hours. If the duration is reduced to less than zero, the spellstone is passed immediately with dramatic and explosive consequences.

Getting more Spells

Hunt down magical beasts, slay them, and extract the bezoars from their intestines. Any suitably magical beast will have a 1 in 6 chance of containing a bezoar stone, granting a spell related to the abilities of the creature. A given creature might have more than one potential spell.

Alternatively just find (or create) a dead Wizard and recover some spellstones from within their guts.

Failed Career

Excremancer's Apprentice

You thought you'd be studying under a distinguished and learned wizard, unlocking secrets to bend the universe to your will. Instead, you're spending all your time guzzling prune juice and uncomfortably squatting behind bushes.

You start with a bottle of prune juice and a Gutting Knife (d6).

How does the Bezoar stone did you managed to recover from your master's remains feel going down?

1. Uncomfortably large - Dragon: Deals d12 Blast damage.
2. Uncomfortably scaley - Basilisk: Shoot a petrifying ray, d6 STR damage and critical damage turns to stone.
3. Uncomfortably sticky - Giant Spider: Spray sticky webs over a large area.
4. Uncomfortably cold - Banshee: Unleash a horrific scream dealing d4 Blast CHA damage, critical damage stuns.
   
5. Uncomfortably fuzzy - Blink Dog: Teleport to any location you can see.
6. Uncomfortably moving - Mimic: Change your shape into any similarly sized object, lasts until the spellstone is passed.
   

What have the consequences on your gut been?

1. Iron Constitution - You have 1 Armor if you have a spellstone currently inside you.
   
2. Highly Absorptive - You can use a very minor version of the effect of any spellstone currently inside you.
   
3. Extremely Regular - Spellstones always pass in exactly 3 hours.
4. Magic Intolerance - The first time you consume a new spellstone you have 3 CHA until it passes.
   
5. Irritable Bowels - If you take critical damage, immediately void any spellstones within you. Their effects activate immediately and in random directions.
6. Chronic Constipation - Passing a spellstone takes 24 hours without assistance.
   

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.

Learning to Jam with ELECTRIC WIZARDS! - Eclectic Bastion Jam Post Mortem

 

I recently participated in the Eclectic Bastion Jam, an RPG game jam centered around Electric Bastionland. Hacks, modules, items, adventures, and more were accepted so long as they were at least tangentially related to Electric Bastionland or Into the Odd.

ELECTRIC WIZARDS! was my entry into the jam, and I'm honestly pretty pleased with how it came out.

I wanted to get down "on paper" my process for the design, writing, and layout of the module,  collect the specific resources I used to put everything together, and talk through some things I learned along the way.

This ended up being much more meandering and unfocused than I'd originally envisioned, but hopefully someone else finds this info useful! If you'd rather skip me blathering on about my "process" and just want the resources I used, scroll to the bottom.

Game Jams?

Something I've learned about myself and writing is that without deadlines, I'll never get anything done. I mostly learned this in academia (research papers, proposals, conference submissions, even my friggin dissertation) but it has stayed very true in RPG writing. The first piece of RPG writing I actually finished (outside of stuff for personal use) was for Dissident Whispers, where I wrote and laid out one module, and wrote another (and then people much more talented than me created art and layout for it). During that project, the time from starting to when the writing was due was 72 hours. My first module (The Mechanical Menagerie of Michael Moreau, MD) was something I'd been working on prior to joining Dissident Whispers, but once I was in a position where things had to get done I was somehow able to actually do it. And then do it a second time, because I finished earlier than expected and wrote another module, The Crumbling Carmine Ruins, for Mausritter.

After Dissident Whispers was done, I went back to fiddling with a bunch of different projects and not really making any progress on things.

Which is all a long way to say, I need deadlines and specific goals to actually finish things. If you have similar problems I highly recommend joining game jams As far as I can tell they are designed specifically to give you a deadline to get you to finish things.

(Dissident Whispers is a community collection of one page RPG modules published and sold to raise money for the National Bail Fund. Get it here (it's incredible) or read play reports for my playthroughs of several of the modules here).

Module Goals

So deadline ahead of me, I decided to pull up an old blog post of mine about using the Goblin Laws of Gaming wizard magic (as filtered through Masuritter) in Electric Bastionland. Electric Bastionland is all about items and objects, rather than innate power, so cassette tapes containing magic spells was my plan to fit both the mechanics and the aesthetic of the game. 

What I wanted to do was go a bit deeper with the mechanics than I did in the original blog post, and flesh it out into an actual module.

I went through a spectrum of different options for what I wanted in the module: starting with simply the rules adapting GLOG magic plus a handful of spells, all the way to a huge module with an entire borough including 8 wizard towers each of which would be a fleshed out adventure location ready for running heists to steal ætheric technology. There was going to be a faction war between the litigious Royal Thaumaturgical Society trying to keep magic locked down, and the FLOSS (Free Legerdemain and Open Sorcery Society) trying to spread it to the masses.

In the end I managed to fight back the feature creep and created the following goals:

• Rules for Cassette Tape GLOG magic integrated into existing Electric Bastionland rules.
• 6 "GAUNTLETS", the devices used to cast Cassette Tape spells.
• 18 total spells, suitably "Bastionland-y".
  
• 6 GAUNTLET mods to customize the above GAUNTLETS.
• 2 Failed Careers, as a way to communicate the tiny slice of setting, and as a quick way for people to start with a GAUNTLET and SPELL.
  

Once I got into the writing and layout, it ended up shifting a bit. One failed career got cut and I added 6 oddities to go alongside the 6 GAUNTLET mods. But this is what I had in mind once I sat down to start working on the module in earnest.

Making Magic

I'm not going to restate the full set of rules here, but to briefly explain: it's GLOG magic. contained in physical items, combined with Electric Bastionland's HP system. If you want the full explanation, just go download my module, it's free!

To bring magic into Electric Bastionland I had a few goals to help it mesh together nicely:

Goal 1: It had to be very rules light.

Electric Bastionland has very few rules so adding any new ones has to be done carefully. GLOG magic is pretty straightforward and lightweight, so no trouble there, but the main trick was stopping myself from layering even more rules on top.

Starting with Mausritter's version of GLOG magic, I had originally been tracking charges per spell (or per cassette in my case) with unique recharge conditions. This is very fun, and I like it a lot (it works great in Mausritter) but for the scale and pace of how I run Electric Bastionland I found it unwieldy. Making the GAUNTLET holding the charges meant only one number was tracked, and it played more nicely with creating different GAUNTLET variants.

The next thing to handle was saving throws or hitting moving targets. Originally I just had nothing, spells simply did what they said. That restricted possible spell designs too much, as lots of potentially fun effects would also become instant kill spells if used on enemies.

The simple solution was to just let enemies make a DEX or CHA save to avoid a spell's effects, but I dislike that sort of binary resolution when handling things like spells. If you've sunk resources into something, it's frustrating when the outcome is just "nothing happens".

The solution I ended up sticking with was to tie the magic directly into the usual Hit Protection system for Electric Bastionland. HP in Electric Bastionland is already explicitly the ability to avoid harm, so if casting a spell is treated mechanically like an attack it works perfectly.

When you case a spell it is treated as an attack(using the highest die rolled as "damage" and only if it gets past their Hit Protection will it effect the enemy. Now even on a miss, you're still exhausting their ability to avoid further spells or attacks. It encourages teamwork in combat, since you might need your party to keep an enemy pinned down with normal attacks in order to get your spell through. Plus I get to take advantage of Bonus Damage (Enhanced in ITO) and Impaired attacks without any further complication on my part. Any time rules can do double duty it's a win.

At one point rewinding a cassette safely took time, a full 10 minutes, but you could rush the process by manually (maybe with a pencil) at risk of things going wrong. I eventually realized the main reason I had included this was just to make the pencil rewinding joke, and that wasn't worth the extra rules baggage. After a couple more iterations, I ended up dropping rewinding tapes altogether.

In the end I like where the systems landed, although I am probably just about doubling the total rules word count. Electric Bastionland is so pared down it's very hard to add extra systems without everything seeming unwieldy or heavy.

Goal 2: It had to be item based. 

It should be something anyone could pick up and use. It had to be a physical item that could be traded, bought, or stolen. Magic being a tangible thing you could hold was important, and Mausritter provided a great starting place. 

Cassette tapes are a fun, eminently tangible thing to use. The nice "cachunk" they make as you slot them into a player is permanently burned into my brain.

Using power glove type things as the requirement for casting is also great, because who doesn't want to run around shooting fireballs out of a power glove?

Goal 3: It had to have a high "shenanigan coefficient". 

 By which I mean straightforward spells with an obvious, useful purpose are boring. Weird, obscure spells that lend themselves to several convoluted purposes are better. I want players to be initially confused or amused by a spell's description and then start scheming. Spells shouldt lend themselves to odd uses, or encourage players to come at a problem sideways. 

Just imagine the goofs players would get into using this.

There are already literally hundreds of GLOG spells out there, and I don't think anyone benefits by a few more reskins of standard DnD spells being thrown onto the pile. I don't think I was entirely successful in this, but I'm generally pretty happy with my final spell lists.

This same process is also what went into the design of the Oddities and GAUNTLET Mods. The Troika! spell list was also a great source of inspiration, showing that you can make traditional effects interesting again with strange enough trappings (see the Invisibility spell for my favorite example).

Layout

I'm very much a novice at layout, but wanted to try to do something that would be visually exciting to look at. This ended up turning into doing a different visually exciting thing on every single spread, which in retrospect was probably a bit over the top and also makes the entire module a bit incoherent to read through. I do like where it ended though, so I'm not too down on myself for this.

I used Affinity Publisher (technically the free trial of it) for doing the layout (with a bit of Affinity Photo for editing).

I approached the layout by trying to make each page resemble a specific thing. Layout was much easier when I had an end result in mind, so aiming for something real I could look at to reference helped a ton. I could usually figure out how to mimic the layout of something, but struggled much more with making the layout both easy to read and visually interesting on its own without there being any "gimmick" to the look. Evocative is easier than original, at least for me.

In order, after the intro and rules page, the visuals I was attempting to replicate are:

• Patent Document
• Cassette Tape Insert
• Dot Matrix Printout
• Government Form
• Comic Book Advertisement Pages

For specific aspects of layout details I highly recommend finding things made by people who are actually good at layout, and shamelessly stealing their ideas. The first thing I tried to lay out myself was my Troika! module in Dissident Whispers, where I used a flowchart style "map" which I borrowed from Sean McCoy's layout in the Ypsilon-14 Mothership Module.

The rest of Dissident Whispers (i.e. the parts that I didn't do layout for) is an amazing exhibition of tons of different layout styles and techniques. It's a fantastic smorgasbord of excellent ideas to borrow from.

One layout "trick" I used that's is worth highlighting, if only because it's on nearly every page, is how to apply a texture to an entire spread to give it a "used" feel. I'd find an appropriate texture stock image, set it as the bottom layer of the spread, and then set the layers above it to "multiply" which translates that texture through all the elements on top of it. For black or very dark elements, like text, I used "pin light" or "hard light" blending, although I think simply lowering the opacity would accomplish something similar.

Paper texture blending. I didn't blend the "4. EPOXY" text particularly well, but you get the idea.

 Beyond that, desaturated colors made things more visually easy to look at, and a more "authentic" feel in a lot of cases (specifically the Oddities spread).

Tipping text a slight angles can be visually striking (look at MÖRK BORG, or a bunch of the Dissident Whispers modules for examples) but I mostly used it in ELECTRIC WIZARDS! when I was trying to make something look hand written. 

It's perhaps too subtle here, but looking at the whole page the slight misalignment between each desctipion sells the feel I was going for.

An Affinity specific goof I made was while using mixam's booklet templates, I did all of my layout using a single "page" within the software for each two page spread. What this meant was when I finished, I had no way to split each spread into individual pages for export (or at least, I couldn't figure out how to do so). What I should have done from the beginning is to use the single page templates then under Document Setup checking "Facing Pages". This lets you edit in two page spreads, but export as either spreads or singles.

The last piece of advice I'd give is that there are tons of really cool and interesting fonts out there, absolutely use them but don't forget that people should actually be able to read the thing at the end of the day.

Final Product

You can find the final ELECTRIC WIZARDS! at itch.io. It's totally free, and I'd love for anyone to give it a look and tell me what they think. While you're over there check out the rest of the incredible entries into the Eclectic Bastion Jam.

A friend of mine got the module printed and shipped to me for my birthday, for which I'm incredibly grateful. I recorded a video of a flip through so you can see what it would look like in print:

I'm very thankful for the Eclectic Bastion Jam giving me the framework and impetus to produce something I'm actually quite proud of. I highly recommend joining a jam just to get the experience of working on, and finishing a project.

For the curious, at time of writing the module has been downloaded 119 times, although some of those are people downloading both the singles and spreads pdfs. I don't have a following of any kind to try and market this to, plus it's a very niche crossover module connecting two relatively niche RPGs so the potential audience is pretty limited to begin with.

Resources Used

Fonts

Google Fonts

League of Movable Type

Misprinted Type

Moonbase Press - Specifically for the Dot Matrix style font.

Images

British Library Flickr - All the old timey images came from here. Searching for specific things can be a bit wonky, but digging around will provide a bounty of excellent stuff. A lot of my ideas came from things I accidentally found while looking for something else.

Unsplash - The large background images of cassettes all came from here.

photos-public-domain.com - Used for paper images to provide texture to backgrounds.

The US Patent Office - So it turns out most patent art is public domain. All of the images on the gauntlet page came from here.

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.