Mysteries within mysteries

 Working on the phonecrawl adventure - a murder mystery setting for Mothership, mapped as d100 working phone numbers. Twin Peaks in an airport mall.

Once again it’s being rebuilt from the ground up, but progress is still being made from before as I’m using a lot of the same Lego pieces. Folks who supported the project by buying the ashcan version way back when will still get the final thing when it comes out. Also idk if it’s still called Odai 57. We’ll see.

Anyway. Update number one is that I’m shifting the campaign frame slightly. A maintenance worker being drawn into these cases as auxiliary mysteries to their main job is a fun conceit and would be great for a short story or two, but in game it’s an unnecessary layer between the players and the juice of the thing.

So now they’re insurance adjusters, getting to the bottom of android accidents and malfunctions and finding someone to blame so that their bosses don’t have to pay out. This has a more cynical MoSh feel and gives us some great actionable verbs for each case: Find fault, recover assets, prevent further losses. I’m this close to calling them the Android Claims Adjustment Bureau or something lmao

Right now I’m building out some of these cases. The structure here is vital as this adventure doesn’t have one otherwise - all areas being theoretically available at all times negates classic dungeon exploration, and I’m avoiding combat scenarios almost entirely  - though they still make a great failstate.

One of the main inspirations for the setting is the Phoenix Wright games. In those you examine a scene until you find all the clues, then the game unlocks the next scene and you can travel between locations freely. Obviously there are key differences between mediums, here players decide when they’ve found enough clues and where they want to go next, but the flow is similar enough.

Looking into how this flow is built in these games is proving helpful for organising my own cases. The above image comes from a presentation by the series director and covers the progression of a case in-game. You don’t need to understand the text, the key bit is that little loop in the middle. There’s a similar diagram in the Warden’s Operations Manual. Basically, the body of a case is a series of smaller mysteries, little question-answer loops that build until the denouement and climax.

These loops are crucial to play in a mystery-focused game. The overall solve can, and should, feel huge and out of reach, so players need these little victories that propel things along. Structurally I’m thinking of them like rooms in an exploration game or fights in a combat based one. They’re not the treasure or boss at the end of the dungeon, which the players might not even get to, but without them there’s really no adventure at all.

The difference is in the verbs. Players fight a monster and explore a room, but what they need to be able to do with clues is make connections. Everything has to point to something else, building up the staircase of little answers to hopefully get to the big one at the end. As the WOM says, the game also has to work if they fail, but ultimately this is a game of connecting dots. I’ve just got to write a whole load of dots.

Will try to keep posting as the project develops. Don’t want to give too many answers away though x

Lockpick Solitaire

 Happy Bonfire Night! To celebrate this most Graverobbers of holidays, here’s an in-world card game I’ve been working on. Like all card games in Lanton (you can get the rules to Pauper’s Crown as part of the starter adventure The Bell of Blackside, and I’m tinkering with a third game called Third Eye’s Folly) it uses a single suit of cards. I like the feeling playing with one suit gives you - the more predictable range gives the average player gets a taste of being a suave, card-counting gambler

(I’m also working on new rules for Graverobbers itself that supplant the standard mechanics of deck, dice and coins with just a suit of cards - it’s fun but I do think it loses something from the Bare Bones so will only ever be released as a variant rather than any kind of second edition. Characters from each version will work with the other, too.)

Anyway, the plan was to have a big update to A Pocket Guide to Smocklehythe out today, but I’ve had to shelve those plans for now. Still, if you download it now you’ll receive the current version of the rules with some lovely art and a nice character sheet, and you’ll get the full Guide as a free update when that does finally emerge.

(The last couple of posts on this blog are free adventures that go perfectly with the Smocklehythe rules, if you’re looking for a fun, seasonal one-shot heist!)

For now, though, here’s Lockpick Solitaire. I’ve caught myself playing a few hands now and then when i should be working, hope you enjoy.

Lockpick Solitaire

 

A game to while away the hours or practice one’s numbers. For one player with one suit of cards.

 

Cards are played directly from the top of the face-down deck into face up positions. First, the player plays two cards side by side in a “lock”. Then, the player must make a choice to “pick the lock” or move on.

 

To “pick the lock”, the player plays the next card in between the two played cards. If the value of the third card lies between those of the first two, the lock is picked and the player scores a point.

 

Alternatively, if the two cards played are subsequent in value, the lock is picked if the third card is either the next or previous in sequence.

 

To move on, the player continues by playing the next two cards to create a new lock.

 

Play ends when the player plays a card incorrectly, or when the entire suit is played without any locks having been successfully picked. If the entire suit is played and play has not yet ended, or if at any point there are not enough cards in the suit to continue play, played cards are collected and reshuffled and play continues.

False Equivalent Exchange

 So in this week’s Dandadan an 18th century alchemist who might be organising an alien invasion got a train across Tokyo to enrol as a high school teacher, which doesn’t even break the top 50 most bonkers things to happen in that manga but I digress

On the train, we get a like 1-page silent scene, a few panels illustrating his journey. At one point he offers his seat up to an older woman with a cane, and stands the rest of the way. Then when he arrives at the school, he comes in and just kind of takes a chair by a computer in the office, talking as if he’s always been there as he infiltrates the school right there in front of everyone. And while his new coworkers seem a little confused, they accept it. Something’s off… but it’s not this guy, we know that he works here, that’s his seat.

And it’s not confirmed or even particularly highlighted, but I’m pretty sure the train journey was a spell. Like, it’s made clear he’s using some kind of magic to alter peoples’ perception of him, but I’m fairly certain the innocuous train scene was him casting that magic, that giving up a seat allowed him to take a seat. The law of equivalent exchange is pretty well known esotericism, used to great effect in Hirofumi Arakawa’s classic Fullmetal Alchemist, but what’s happening here a bit different.

And i think it’s cool so let’s steal it 👍

The Law of False Equivalent Exchange is an FKR-style magic system that works thusly: Any character who can Do Magic may attempt a ritual. They must accomplish three tasks of their choosing which affect the material world in opposition* to their desired goal, represented by three “sub-“goals. If the GM agrees and they are able to perform the tasks, their goal is magically achieved.

*but not exactly. For example:

A character wants to become queen of a small kingdom. Instead of staging a coup or using some mundane trickery with the line of succession, they set out to achieve this via a magic ritual. The player proposes the following sub-goals and their “opposite” tasks:

- I will take the throne: I will give up a “throne”, a valuable seat.

- I will wear the crown: I will remove something precious from my head.

- I will rule the land: I will allow the earth to do what it will with me.

The player character takes a horse and cart to the current king’s castle, paying the fare of an elderly traveller and giving up their seat, opting to ride in the back. By night, in a storm in the fields outside the castle, they remove their own eye with a knife, dig a hole and lay in the dirt, allowing the soil and rain to smother them (GM probably calls for a save or something here).

The GM rules the ritual complete and accepts the exchange - when they wake in the morning, choking on dirt and blood, they clamber out of the earth and walk into the castle, where they are greeted as queen.

This could get boring if it’s too easy so I’d set limits - not silly once-a-day stuff, more like some overall larger price to messing with the material world like this. You’d be immediately set apart, visible by spirits and fairies, or maybe you’d have to reckon with the ghosts of the world you undid. Or just give it a bigger material cost, some specific magical ingredients that must be spent to finish the ritual, unicorn’s blood etc.

Odai 57

 Following on from last week’s post. What kind of game do we get when the world is presented as a phone book?

I love mysteries. I rarely watch TV as it airs, but right now I’m up to date with The After Party and Only Murders In The Building (both fun). I’m also rewatching Twin Peaks, including The Return for the first time. Also have had Ace Attorney lets plays on in the background while I write. Also replaying Ace Attorney Investigations. I know what I like.

Mysteries are well suited to dungeon crawling RPGs in the classic midwestern folk tradition. Someone has set out bits of useful information for you to explore and find and put to use, with possible rewards at the end. It’s the same premise. Mothership specifically lends itself to mystery, with Solving being one of its core tenets and Blade Runner being among its big inspirations.

There are mystery adventures for MoSh already - my own Piece By Piece is an X-Files style one-shot murder case, and there’s the tense social investigation of Picket Line Tango. Every module has some element of investigation, really. But what does it mean to expand from an adventure to a setting?

Long-running mystery series, from classic detective fiction to TV, run on their investigators. What energy does the lead sleuth bring to each case? And so for a Mothership setting we look to our PCs. Fragile but skilled, outgunned but clever, crucially working class.

The default for mystery fiction is cop, but thankfully there are plenty of alternatives. Private eyes, writers in over their heads, precocious teens and their dogs. What we’re asking here is the key question for most ttrpg settings - who are these people and what are they doing? This gives us the basis of our setting but also sets up the players, informs their characters’ actions and invites them in.

This but Agatha Christie

In Odai 57, my mystery-driven phonebook setting for the Mothership RPG, players are maintenance workers. They get called in to fix things on the titular space station, a stopping point in the Qilin Gate Company’s astral gate network.

Each job is its own case, an investigative adventure in which getting to the root of a technical issue on Odai 57 (the Solve) leads the players and the residents of the station’s Commercial district into danger (the Survive and the Save). While each job works as a disconnected one-shot, stringing them all together reveals a complete setting, and possibly a larger conspiracy…

It’s Twin Peaks in an airport mall.

(Also - I know MoSh is a horror game and this doesn’t sound like the scariest place to be. But neither did Elm Street until there was a Nightmare on it. This is a different flavour of horror than typical for Mothership, not the uncaring void of space but the insidious darkness in the shadows of suburbia.)

I’ve been at work on this project for a while already, and honestly I feel like I’m just getting started. This thing is going to be enormous. Like I’ve said before, this is all deliberately crafted adventure content, little to no random generation or work for the Warden.

Each case is a complete standalone pamphlet adventure, though every one impacts the wider setting in some way, from introducing a killer who may strike again to offering player upgrades. And while some span multiple phone numbers, some are at the end of just one call. At the rate I’m going I’m looking at upwards of 30 interlinked adventures before I’m done.

But! I don’t have the time or frankly the funds to work away at a project this big. I’d turn to Kickstarter but… ugh. So here’s what I’m thinking.

This but he’s the guy who’s come to do your wifi

Right now, three of the adventures are closest to completion, with a couple of them 100% written. These are:

Odd Jobs. An introductory adventure that gets players set up on Odai 57, eases them into the setting’s quirks and sets them on a few errands around town, with clues to a potentially deadly secret linking them all together. Vibe: small town sheriff’s department by way of The Wrong Trousers

All The Fun of the Fair. An investigation into old tech going haywire in Odai 57’s derelict amusement park quickly turns into a destructive chase with a despicable villain. Vibe: Scooby-Doo gone very, very wrong

Murder On Line One. An android shows up dead next to a public phone. Your job is to clean up the mess, not investigate a murder. But it looks like this case is going to keep causing problems… Vibe: Classic hardboiled noir with a Mothership twist

I’m putting up an ashcan version of All The Fun of the Fair, by far the easiest of the three to run standalone, for download. This ain’t going to be pretty, I’m doing the layout and scribbling some art myself, but it’s a complete adventure, as good as the best stuff I’ve done, finished and playable.

In lieu of a crowdfunding campaign, I’m selling this for £10. I get that that’s a lot for one pamphlet, but think of this like a donation to the overall project. I’m going to work on getting ashcan versions of the other two done as well, so bare minimum you’ll end up with for your tenner is a three-pamphlet miniseries, which seems like a better deal to me.

Realistically, any money I make off these is going to rent and bills first, but if I get enough support I’m going to fold it back into making these adventures better. I’ve got great plans and some amazing potential collaborators lined up, and I’d love to turn this into like a digital starter pack for the setting, maybe with some cool extra add-on materials too.

So, the plan:

- Ashcan versions of three cases.

- Any profit from those gets put into making the final files.

- If there’s enough support and interest I can continue adding cases, until the whole setting is done!

- Maybe, eventually, collect it all in one big physical phonebook?

If the final thing ends up being worth more than £10 I’ll up the price accordingly, but obviously anyone who’s already bought it will continue to get new files and updates for free. So what you get for your contribution is up to you.

Honestly I have no idea if this will work out. I’m basically just gauging interest. I’d love it if this were a project I was able to focus on, but what I want to make and what people want to play don’t always align. So if this is something you want to see more of, please support in whatever way you can - you can buy the ashcan and get in on the ground floor, or post about it and share it with your group.

If anyone buys it I’ll know I’m onto something! And if I can sell like 50 of these in the next month or so I’ll be off to the races. If not, no harm done. I’ll do the three ashcan pamphlets at the very least, and then move on to the next thing probably.

Anyway, that’s all that. You can buy the ashcan version of All The Fun of the Fair here, and doing so will get you any and all upcoming updates for free. Thank you!

*

General maintenance crew wanted for immediate start. Unskilled labour, minimum wage. For further enquiries call 00-57-01 or report to:
Maintenance Office
QGC Utilities Building
01 Commercial District
Odai 57
Odai System
GC101.108.977

Cities of Phones

 So in a recent post I had some vague thoughts about laying a city out like a dungeon. This makes the city feel a certain way: lets you spotlight traversal, define areas and position them in relation to one another, use encounter systems to emulate a vibe. This city will probably feel busy, maze-like, claustrophobic and sprawling, with a stable concrete layout made ever-changing by its inhabitants and happenings.

But that’s not all a city can be. I don’t feel like I’m traversing a dungeon when I head out into my city. I’m not delving or dealing with encounters, I’m moving freely and easily. I don’t have to learn complex systems, I have them internalised or handled for me - I can roll onto a bus or train or DLR, zone out and my destination comes up to meet me. I barely think about where places are in relation to one another, except to decide if I should just walk or not. I don’t drive, so I don’t have personal dungeoneering costs or equipment to maintain. Apps and contactless payments handle my journey. It’s not a quest… it’s not a dungeon.

So if we don’t want to focus on traversal, or encounters, or even where locations are in relation to one another, how else can we define a space? And why might we want to, what new game modes or vibes could open up to us?

In that post I briefly mentioned a Big Thing I’ve been working on, so I figured I might as well share!

Short answer, it’s a phone book. d100 phone numbers, each with a location on the other end. (Yes these are landline phones, this is Mothership.) Players can use the phone network in-game, but also travelling around between these placers is just as easy as calling. It’s a table of contents, a list of locations they can pick from as and when they want. In the same way that I can just decide to stroll up the high street and walk into any of the shops in any order or combination, the focus here isn’t on movement and space but on an open and accessible list, the points without the crawl.

So here’s what I’ve been working on and a few things I’ve found out so far. Hopefully this is useful to anyone who might want to do something similar!

The biggest drawback as I’ve seen it is that you need all your bits written up front. In a big dungeon-city I can make one “floor” or less at a time, and expand as and when the players get to the edge of my map. Here, every phone number needs to work straight away or it all falls apart. I can mitigate this with generators somewhat - different reasons a number might be disconnected, “filler” entry tables. But it works best with a whole lot of bespoke, specific gameable bits, so that’s what I’ve been doing.

I’ve found it easiest to do what I normally do, small individual adventures, and mosaic those into a complete whole. So one phone number might have its own complete mini-adventure at the end of it, or one adventure could be spaced across a few locations that lead to one another. Each adds a little bit to the city overall, and while I prefer to keep things modular I can sprinkle in some interconnected-ness to keep the space feeling cohesive. And numbers can be reused ofc. I can also fill out more numbers with non-adventure-specific game bits, like some of the item-list vendors I’ve posted here already.

The space, btw, is not a whole city. d100 carefully planned locations is a whole lot of game for me to write but is maybe one road’s worth of landlines in the real world. So this is a high street, a typical commercial/residential space, on a space station to give the space clear edges. I’m folding in some of the “at the gates of dawn” setting stuff I’ve posted here too, but the overall size and shape is something like an airport mall in a Stanford torus.

That means I’ve got more than enough distinct locations to be getting on with, without overwhelming the Warden with millions of phone numbers and characters to keep track of. Keeping things modular in individual adventures with their own relevant subset of numbers helps here too. Also means I don’t have to write as much, so I can focus on those deliberately constructed details over generators to fill things out. Detail makes space in ttrpgs anyway. I don’t even have close to d100 yet and this place already feels huge.

So what kind of a city does all this give us, and what kind of a game? I’ll go into that next time!

Building Smocklehythe - Slang & Sundries

“The thievery was boasted about and romanticized until it seemed a kind of heroism. It did not have any taint of criminality and the whole of the south coast had pockets vying with one another over whose smugglers were the darkest or most daring.” - Paul Theroux

Work continues apace on A Pocket Guide to Smocklehythe, the upcoming starter set for GRAVEROBBERS, my ttrpg system for adventure games of stealth & sedition. A reminder that you can buy in now and get the Bare Bones, then get all the rest of it for free when it’s finished and goes up to full price. Click here!

The final version changes shape as it grows. What was going to be two adventure sites is now one, the Smocklehythe Sewers: a fun little dungeon of foul tunnels players will have to smuggle items through - and can delve into for tosh. (I’m expanding the other site, the Old Graving Dock into its own thing and planning to release it alongside the final Guide, so if anything Smocklehythe is expanding rather than shrinking.)

While I was able to fit both in the tiny format I’m allowing myself for the guide (13 sides of A6!), it felt almost too minimalist, even for me. I’m so used to whittling down and distilling things into pamphlets and one-shots that it feels nice to loosen the belt a little tbh!

Also leaving the core Guide are all the little gubbins I wanted to add on, “flavour” stuff like the recipes and in-game card game. I’m being as ruthless as I can with only including the essentials in the Pocket Guide itself (going as far as having practically 0 NPCs because the game technically doesn’t need them), and as much as I love that kind of fluff it isn’t 100% necessary to gameplay (the fishing minigame is staying, dw. That’s essential). I want to collect it all and release it alongside instead, like the Old Graving Dock adventure. Maybe as a handout.

One thing I’m thinking of putting in there is a guide to rhyming slang. I had the pleasure of seeing the new Spider-Verse last week, and while there’s a million things to gush over in that movie, how they realised Spider Punk honestly meant a lot to me. It’s not usual to see working class Londoners celebrated like that, the way we talk especially. Daniel Kaluuya absolutely killed it. BIG STEPPAAAAA

Anyway, there’s a visual side gag in that movie “translating” some of Hobie’s rhyming slang, which sort of connected some dots in my brain that had been floating about for a while. I’m at an advantage in running Graverobbers, being from the part of the world its world is based on. I can pull out authentic accents, reference places, etc fairly easily. Packaging that up so that any Dealer running the game can do the same is impossible, and the only way I’d thought to come close would be through huge, boring lore dumps - pretty much the antithesis of how I make games.

So while I’d have loved to include a guide to fictional Lanton slang on that “fluff” handout, it didn’t seem doable. It also feels disingenuous - slang is natural speech that evolves through group communication, not a code you learn from a book. The best Smocklehythe slang would always be what each table comes up with. So I can’t prescribe anything anyway, really. But! If we present it as a game…

I don’t know why I hadn’t thought of this sooner tbh - just use actual Cockney rhyming slang. (A perfect fit. It’s literal thieves’ cant, just like how toshing is literal dungeon delving. See? I know what I’m doing) The twist is to not pre-list any terms and make it an exercise in lore-learning, but to give players the mechanics necessary to generate their own at the table (if they want to, obviously this is all optional funsies). And for that I’m literally just going to lay out the actual mechanics by which rhyming slang is devised.

Which, if you’re unfamiliar: take the word you want to say, substitute a rhyming phrase, then (usually) leave out the end (the bit that rhymes). Now each group can take that formula and do what they want with it. I’m guessing mostly making jokes, but for the one or two groups where something sticks, it’ll be a proprietary and completely unique part of their game’s world. (And idc about people doing it wrong or embarrassing themselves with dodgy accents, because I don’t have to play at their tables lol. As long as they’re having fun!)

Anyway, I think that’s most of it. Other than that I’m just scouring local history for more fun bits to put into the dungeons! No spoilers, but I did just come up with something based on playwright Christopher Marlowe. Specifically how he was murdered in a Deptford pub (probs by the queen’s assassins) and buried in an unmarked grave at the nearby medieval-era church of St Nicholas - the skull-and-crossbones gateposts of which (pictured below), according to legend, inspired Captain Morgan (yes, that one) to invent the Jolly Roger. I love this shit man

Don’t forget to check out Graverobbers here! More soon x

The Crimes of Smocklehythe

A Pocket Guide to Smocklehythe is out now (see last post) and I felt like going over some of the inspiration behind the 6 new Crimes in the game.

A bit of class design, a bit of history (like I did in this tweet thread going over the real history of a GRAVEROBBERS pamphlet adventure). Part of me is very David Lynch “the film is the talking” about stuff like design influences but part of me is a huge nerd with a big loud mouth sooooo

All of these are real crimes from real London’s past or present. With the original 6 classes in the Bare Bones, I wanted to allow for a lot of wiggle room as to whether a character actually committed a crime, make people think just a bit about what constitutes a crime, etc. These are a little more direct but hopefully still have some of that vibe

Btw while I’m at it “Smocklehythe” comes from the root word for “smuggle” and the -hythe suffix seen in various South London place names (Rotherhithe, the -eth in Lambeth) referring to a place where things were brought in by river. Rotherhithe: cattle, Lambeth: sheep, Smocklehythe: contraband.

Art by Jon Bliss

Firebrand. A fun word for “protestor” essentially, or “organiser”. Very fitting for Graverobbers’ setting, I’ve been wanting to do one of these for a while. All their starting items are real things used locally in non-violent protest throughout history, but also classic dungeon-y adventure game items. As a class they’re great for causing trouble

Also I’m aware people (especially outside the UK) might not know what a toffee hammer is, but it’s easy enough to figure out, plus you can just google it. I try to explain things I made up fairly thoroughly, so if something seems obscure chances are it’s from real life and you can just look it up.

Gaolbreak. Hey. How do you think gaol is pronounced? Yeah, I thought so too. Turns out we’re both wrong, it’s literally just an obsolete spelling of “jail”. Anyway I don’t think I need to explain that escaping prison was illegal throughout London’s history. Still is, far as I’m aware. I’m not certain. Never been caught.

This fills the same space as the Burglar in the classic Bare Bones, it’s the rogue archetype. I enjoy the thought of these tools meant for escape being used for a little b&e.

Mooncusser. real word! Real thing, real crime. Mooncusser is actually, gasp, an American term, but the English version, “wrecking” is a huge part of national criminal history. Wreckers were smugglers who supposedly deliberately wrecked ships, chiefly up and down England’s south coasts.

Smuggling is like a whole legendary folkloric concept here. It’s like the whole Robin Hood thing. Visit any seaside town, especially in the south west, and there’ll be a plaque or museum or guided tour about its smuggling history. I don’t sing the praises of much English culture but I do enjoy our predilection towards folk heroes being lower class folk “getting away with it”.

Also shrub is like a tangy citrus liqueur, later replaced with vinegar. Smuggled rum was often left hidden underwater, and adding a dash of shrub helped dilute the flavour of the seawater that’d seeped in. Ah and as far as class design, these guys are pretty much archetypal Graverobbers characters, primed for mischief

Nighthawker. The British term for metal detectorists who illegally steal the treasure they find. Very classic adventure game dungeon stuff. A good place to add in the only magic item, something practical and thematic that I’m sure has all sorts of nefarious uses. A touchstone is a real thing used to test for metals, but I like my magic version better.

This class is kinda the “finding and getting” class, which also extends to the Black Market as they’ve got decent average starting money plus a whole coin they can pawn.

Resurrectionist. Real thing, probably something most people have heard of. Surgeons on the cutting edge, if you will, of modern medicine wanted cadavers to experiment on and showcase in lecture halls. They had money and weren’t fussy about where the bodies came from. Resurrectionists were, wait for it, graverobbers. Burke and Hare are probably the most famous example and worth reading up on (there was a film, it’s not good), but this was a HUGE cottage industry for a long time.

The clothing is because they’d often disguise themselves as mourners to get access to graveyards. The wooden spade is because they make less noise! As a class these are kind of a variant nighthawker, there’s a decent amount of shared “archetypal Graverobbers” vibe between a lot of these which i felt was appropriate for a starter set.

Witch. Probably the one I need to explain least? So much stuff written about witch hunts and witch trials in England, and there’ll be a lot more of it to come in Graverobbers. This class is ideal for causing a bit of chaos. Start with no money but also the most expensive starting item so still p versatile. (Of course in an inventory-based system any character can redesign their whole deal fairly easily, but I like to think there’s something to the flavour of starting with a name and set of items like these)

You might think this’d be the class with the magic item, but I decided to go with what the witch hunt victims actually often were - women with above average knowledge of botany and medicine. Even at the time, most folk didn’t necessarily believe in witches, and there was growing awareness that this whole thing was just about oppression.

Oh, and a besom is a broom, that specific type of witchy broom with the sticks bundled around a central handle. There are a records of “witches” coating broom handles in psychoactive substances and using them as sex toys. Hence “riding a broom”, according to some theorists.

And that’s all of them! Check out the new rules here and roll up some characters, see what crimes you end up accused of! If you survive character creation.

How To Make A Mothership Pamphlet

 A pamphlet adventure is essentially 2 pages of GM notes. If you’ve found your way here, you already have all the skills needed to make one yourself.

As with anything, we start with an idea. Ideas are cheap and easy. Use your best one, they’re not worth hanging on to and you’ll have a better one before you’re done.

Because I have game design brain, my idea is for a random table. Yours might be more abstract but that’s ok, just represent it through a table entry or room description or blurb, something you’d read in an adventure. The writing doesn’t have to be good, we’re just getting words on the page, you can change it later.

I had the image of players frantically searching through trash, so I’m going to write a table of trash. I reckon they should be able to find something useful, so what’s something people would throw away that might be useful?

This is Mothership so there’s probably a monster, so the item we’re looking for is something the monster is weak to. Let’s say this monster has a great sense of smell, it’s a hunter type beast thing. So the trash smells really bad - now it’s something the players can use as a weapon, but that would realistically be here.

Let’s put something generically smelly on the table, plus something like… weapons-grade smelly.

1. Moulded old fish guts.

2. Hot sauce bottle, unopened.

“Unopened” will make players more likely to hang onto it even if they don’t know why they might want to yet.

That’s 2 entries, we’ll go for 5 or 10 because MoSh uses d10s, probably 10 to convey variety. No need to come up with them all now, move on to something more exciting.

*

Let’s think about this monster. All we know is that there’s trash nearby and it can smell well. Also it’s normal everyday rubbish, food waste and stuff. So our location is a restaurant or an apartment complex or something.

Pick somewhere small and contained, the unity of place is good for both horror and game design, plus you don’t have much space as far as wordcount. A good word count for a pamphlet is like 1000 words. 800 if you have a map and lots of pictures, never more than 1200 or so. Just not enough space.

Let’s say this trash is in the skip outside an apartment building. Why is the monster here? Idk I’m thinking it’s basically a werewolf type thing. That’s what I think of when I think of good sense of smell + monster. Don’t have to decide what exactly it is yet, or indeed ever. It’s “the monster”.

The players have tracked it to its nest. Maybe it’s out hunting and there’s a time limit to investigate and set up an ambush before it gets back. That’s pretty good! Good enough, at least. Good enough is better than perfect because it’s achievable.

This might be a good time to check over the advice in the Warden’s Operations Manual, things like the TOMBS system are great for outlining these kinds of details. I’m just gonna rawdog it tho lmao

*

So, we have a bit of a random trash table, a setting and a monster, and kind of a mission. Let’s outline the rest of our location and see if things come together.

5 or 10 distinct locations is a good shout because then we can roll for one if needed later, plus it’s not too much for our word count. Start with 5 and expand if we think of more good ones. If you have between 5 and 10, don’t stretch to think of the last few, just cut the worst ones.

1. Alley. Round the side of the building. There’s a big communal refuse bin, nearly overflowing, faded recycling warnings.

Then the table goes there. It’s not a great description, I’d probably go back and add details about the smells, the sounds, the lighting.

Also I’d probably add something interesting that would make players want to look here because they might not care about a dumpster otherwise. A suspicious rustling noise from inside would be good - turns out it’s just a fox.

Anyway i can note that now and come back to edit later, we need more words on the page first. More locations for a start.

Let’s make the ground floor of this building a shop, that differentiates our locations a bit. Go for variety, if two rooms are too similar just merge them. Unless you’re separating locations to establish exploration, put secrets somewhere else or something. Idk I’m not a cop

2. Store.

I can’t think of what the store is so i just note this for now. Go for something that’d be full of potentially useful items. Maybe a cafe, kitchens are a great source of danger and utility, you got hot and sharp and heavy and everything, water, fire, food to distract the monster etc.

Anyway we’ll name our other locations before working out the details.

3. Stairwell.

A side entrance for people who live here to get up to the apartments without going into the cafe. Around this time I feel the need to get a mental map of where shit is so I’ll sketch a flowchart.

Can always change this later, make the apartments connect to the alley if you can jump out the window for instance. If you don’t have the ability or budget to put things like maps on your pamphlet just make sure you describe what each space connects to as part of the rooms descriptions.

Btw we like to divide places into rooms or hexes or whatever because they’re good little individual spaces for players to focus on in the present, then file away for later when they move to the next one. More complex mental geography like how these spaces all interconnect is best learned over time as they play rather than a big dump of description.

Anyway I did locations 4 and 5 like they’re the two apartments. If I can’t think of two separate rooms for those that are interesting enough to deserve being 2 locations I’ll probably change 5 to be the rooftop or something else.

For now we need to work out why the stairwell is interesting, I know why it’s there from a layout perspective as it handily connects things up and would logically be there if this were a real place, but idk why anyone should care as far as gameplay.

If I can’t think of anything I’d just fold the stairwell description into another location, like 4 could be “apartment plus hallway”. But I think a decent use of this space would be building dread and maybe dropping clues. Like claw marks on the walls, but less shit than that.

I can’t think of anything right now but I’m sure I will at some point, so I make a note and move on.

*

The apartment, whether it’s location 4 or 5, is where the monster lives so is a key location for our concept. Maybe it’s normal on the surface but shit’s weird once you take a closer look, or maybe it’s more horrifying to have a normal flat in a normal building be this fucked up beast lair. Go with your gut about what would be better in a horror context, you can only really scare yourself.

4. Nest. Darkness, no power to the lights. Stench of musk and piss. Fixtures ripped out, clothes scattered and piled up, human bones strewn about and riddled with teeth marks.

That’s good enough for now. I’ll put more info and some fun interactive items or elements once I’ve decided more about the monster.

5 I’m not certain about yet. If it’s another apartment I’d swap its location with 4, so the players pass the more normal location first, maybe a neighbour turned victim or someone who’s locked themselves in their place because they know who lives upstairs (and has found a way to deter them? Decent idea).

Anyway, at this point I have a decent idea of what’s in each location, and a decent premise of why the players are there - set a trap while the monster is out. I’d set a time limit for this one, the monster returns in 1 hour or whatever, maybe add a system for tracking it into the adventure because I don’t know that MoSh really tracks time like that.

And that’s basically it, we have the skeleton of our adventure done. Everything else is just filling in blanks, going over bad writing and redoing it until it’s playable. Things like statblocks can come last, just copy one that’s basically as strong as you want your guy to be and change the details.

We’ll probably get close to 800 words just filling in each of these locations with a table and paragraph or two, but if there’s still space it’ll be time to think of something else to add. Maybe more items in the shop or something. Nothing just to fill space though, it has to be good in its own right. If you have space and don’t know what goes there, just leave it for a while. Come back once you’ve watched a movie or gone for a walk or something.

Anyway, that’s one way to do it. Reckon you could pull that off.

Then just lay it out across two pages, 3 columns each, on some free software. Add a royalty free cover image, maybe look up a fun font. Then email TKG to submit if for a 3rd party publishing license, info’s probably on the discord or somewhere like that. Upload to itch or somewhere. Now you’re as much of a professional as any of us!

Or just keep it for yourself and have fun in your home game.

Looking forward to seeing what you come up with x

Mothership character names

 This sneak peek at a bit of Another Bug Hunt (the starter module that will come in the Mothership 1e box set and the reason I haven’t been posting here much lately) got me thinking about character names.

I think naming things in general is something I’m good at, and I know it’s something other people struggle with sometimes. And it comes up quite often in this hobby as a thing that needs to get done.

But unfortunately like most times when people are just kind of good at a thing I don’t think I can really explain how or why I can do it. I just find it easy. (That’s what “style” is by the way, in creative work, leaning into the things that come naturally. If you don’t think you have a style, get lazier.)

I thought maybe if I wrote a bit about my thoughts, those ramblings might be useful to someone? I don’t have a process but if you see something you want to take here, take it. It’s what a lot of this blog ends up being, haha.

And since we’re talking about Mothership characters, here are some I’ve named. Minor spoilers, maybe.

The Haunting of Ypsilon 14

has maybe too many characters, but you know I had to fill out that sweet d10 table. Plus they don’t really serve “character” functions so much as being like… hit points.

I tried to include names from different parts of the world. Since there wasn’t enough space or any real need to detail character appearances, this would suggest that these people each looked a bit different from each other. But again, part of a new whole. Ypsilon was intended as an “introductory” module (to players, if not necessarily to Wardens), and that bit of cultural mish-mash is a good setting shorthand.

Thinking of cohorts of colleagues I’ve worked shitty jobs with myself, and with an image in my head similar to the crew of the Nostromo all sitting round and eating in that early scene, I tried to suggest what Mothership’s future looks like. Basically, a lot like now.

I also made sure to get differently gendered names in there, as well as at least one that could be read as either masculine or feminine. Like how the Alien script was supposedly written gender-neutral, because these things both matter and don’t.

Other than that I didn’t put a lot of thought into each specific name. They’re not references to characters or anyone I know. If I’d had more time maybe I would’ve done that, but I don’t know that it would’ve added anything. If the meme had been meme’d already I would’ve called Mike Dave.

Dr Ethan Giovanni is the only character with a first and last name given. This and the title makes him seem more important, so hopefully the next question, even if it’s subconscious, is “important to who”. Why is this guy written with a family name, a lineage, and the others aren’t? Spoilers: it’s classism.

Speaking of the good doctor and names, on his personal cassette he refers to someone, probably Mike, by a number rather than a name. Worker number something-or-other. Again, the question of who “gets” a name, an identity, and how much, and in whose eyes. In the corporation’s eyes, Mike is a blip on a spreadsheet.

Oh, and Prince. I think that was probably a reference to, y’know, Prince, but also I was likely thinking of that bit in The Simpsons when Santa’s Little Helper has puppies and one is “the puppy formerly known as Prince”. Prince is just a good solid pet name. (My rule for dog names specifically is that it must sound good when shouted across a park.)

One last thing - Kantaro, one of the workers. That’s a surname, not a first name. I think maybe in the back of my mind I thought “oh yeah, at this workplace, there’s probably that one guy everyone refers to by their surname”. American Office vibes, i don’t think there was a character like that in the show but that’s a thing people like that would do. “Hey it’s Johnson, hey Johnson”.

But now I think maybe that’s not something i should’ve expected the average reader (I assume, perhaps uncharitably, white and North American) to pick up on? So maybe it just confuses things. Then again, on those cool fan computer things I’ve seen people do, they list it as his last name. People get it. I’m probably just overthinking.

So next up was

Hideo’s World

Which, as a module itself, was named by Sean. Because as I recall I think I literally just forgot to name it. So maybe I’m not so good at this after all!

There’s only one character with a person name and that’s Hideo, and I didn’t name him - he’s an NPC from A Pound Of Flesh. So go bother someone else about that. I’m guessing he’s a reference to that one guy.

Mr Goodnight™ is the only other named character I believe. I’m pretty happy with that name. It sounds ominous enough while also sounding like a thing you’d actually call a mascot character, friendly and silly. For a pepsi that makes you sleepy lol. Yeah Hideo’s World is a bit chaotic overall but I’m very happy with the way it does setting.

And, to me at least, there’s something very unsettling about how his name is trademarked in the text itself! I don’t think anyone but me thinks of that as “horror”, but personally that’s one of the most weird and existential things I’ve come up with for MoSh, at least it effects me that way! I think he’s a very good baddie

Piece by Piece

Contrasting Ypsilon, everyone* in Piece by Piece has a first and last name. That’s because this is a murder mystery style adventure, like an episode of the X Files. And the police going over the case in that kind of film or show will always call people Firstname Lastname. Nobody stands over an establishing shot of a crime scene and says “yeah this is the victim, Brian”.

*except Curtis. This isn’t a tie-in to Gradient Descent but it came out around the same time-ish as i recall, and I was thinking about those themes, and the role of the android in MoSh. I like to play with the baked-in setting elements when I can, because it’s cheap, good grist, and Mothership has Androids. An android character playing through this adventure is going to have a very separate experience, I think. I wanted to emphasise that separation.

And “Curtis” specifically because in the Alien movies the androids are named alphabetically, and this was my third pamphlet.

As for the human names, I had a similar tack from Ypsilon. A bit of cultural variety makes it feel more specific and real, and at this point more Mothership. But still just normal people names from real life.

I think I tried to go in on the metaphor layer a bit more this time, not aiming for a “hidden meaning” just adding to a vibe. There are the surnames Nishida, Flores, Fuentes, Dragavei, all plants or Spring- or plant-related words. Growth, life. Human lives being the only(?) living, sentient things in this cold, sterile lab, the contrast between the organic living world and the not. And then we can blur those lines.

Dr Ojo was a more specific choice, she has a Yoruba name. Where I’m from there’s a huge West African population and in Yoruba culture you typically name a child based on the circumstances of their birth.

Anyway, Abidemi means “born without the father”, which ties into themes of parenthood, fathers failing their children and cycles of trauma in the adventure. As does Daedalus labs. (Also the map is a circle, did u notice. Also there’s a bit of a circle/eye/camera thing going on oh ok you’ve stopped reading, that’s fair)

The only other character is ABI i guess. Which is a robot-y name, and also a short form of Dr Ojo’s name. So it implies maybe she made her. Themes innit.

The only other one out right now is 

The Horror on Tau Sigma 7 

which I wrote for Magnum Galaxy games. Another one I didn’t name, because they already had a name for it. It sounds like The Haunting of Ypsilon 14, which btw I named that because it seemed like a good mix of pulp horror and pulpy sci fi. I think every game needs adventures with names Like That. The Thing of the PLACE.

Anyway, Tau Sigma 7.

… oh there’s no named NPCs in this one! :D

I specifically chose to not use any, because I thought that would serve it well as an introductory thing. One less thing to worry about whether running or playing.

And so we’re done.

Again, don’t really know what anyone is supposed to learn from this, but hopefully you got something from it. There will be more adventures with more names to come!

Btw, normally when I’m coming up with names for sci fi characters they’re absolutely terrible. Everyone sounds like the worst cyberpunk bounty hunters you’ve ever heard of. Things like Jimmy Lobster and Dusty Marie. I literally just made those up while writing that sentence. I’m doing a stream of consciousness thing. Here’s another one, wonder what it’s going to be, Ronaldo Ballsack.

So if anyone ever wants names like that, hit me up. I bet I could do d100 of em. Wenceslas the Viper. Artificial Ron. Marjorie “Good Grief” Golightly. I’m going to stop now.

(There’s one character with a silly cyberpunk-y name in an upcoming module, actually. He’s an asshole.)

Structuring Horror In Adventures

 So I don’t know if you heard but uuuuuuhhhhh

Mothership raised over 1.4 million USD. That’s like 1 mil in real money!

(you can still back it for a bit with the late pledge manager, go for it, early Christmas innit)

I wasn’t involved in the campaign but in case you missed the announcement I will be contributing to the starter module that comes free in the box set, Another Bug Hunt. Very very excited and pleased for the whole team. This box is gonna knock your sox

gimme gimme gimme

So i thought I would do a post about Mothership in some way, since a lot of people are going to be getting this game soon or are currently trying out 0e. I haven’t really posted any serious MoSh Content on here before. But I had this idea that might be useful to some so here we are

This is going to be some macro design stuff about making horror adventures in general.

Btw, I don’t actually like horror very much! I’m more into stuff with horror ~elements~ than the genre itself, I’m not into straight up scary movies. I’m a chicken, a wuss, a weenie, a putz I tells ya, a palooka, a real jimmy jamoolie

But I’ve also written more published mothership adventures than… um, anyone lmao, so

Also worth pointing out that this structure isn’t a Thing I Do, it’s just me reverse engineering some stuff I’ve done before. There’s some amount of value in trying to codify vague ~artistic processes~ into something more tangible, at least for practical purposes. I’m very wary of academia, death by analysis, but as long as we’re still talking in (hopefully) useful, practical terms and not ThEoRy then we’re all good.

All good? Good.

The upcoming Warden’s Guide is going to walk you through the TOMBS structure, something Sean I think came up with to describe horrors - as in, monsters. It’s pretty useful, maybe I’ll do a post about it. What I’m going to try and do here is make a similar framework for looking at the overall adventure structure.

(This is just an idea I had last night so I’m going to see if it works as I’m writing it, if you’re reading this post then I guess it does haha)

A way of looking at the horror adventure scenario is in layers, which I’ll call:

- Fear

- Terror

- Dread

- Despair

These names are arbitrary and I’m sure if you’re an actual horror fan they already mean specific things! Sorry!

Picture it like a cross section of a planet or a jawbreaker, with fear at the core and despair as the outer encasing layer.

Let’s look at what I mean by each of these and why it matters. Then you can maybe look at your next adventure in a similar way. Check that you have each layer present, and you should have a functional horror adventure, or at least enough of the aesthetic of one

Oh! And I’ll be using examples from The Haunting of Ypsilon 14 because I think it’s the one of mine most people are familiar with, but SPOILERS if you’re not. If someone is going to run Mothership for you soon there’s a chance they’ll be using this adventure, so proceed with caution.

Ok. the actual post

Fear

Immediate, emotional reaction.

Boo! In movie terms these are things like jump scares or gross-out effects, but that’s not really an inherent function of this medium. We do have Fear saves though, for these moments of sudden emotional upset - just they’re for the characters, not the players directly. (The players might be scared too but i don’t really see that as relevant, that’s probably another post entirely though haha)

In Ypsilon the monster may suddenly show up at any time, or the discovery of Dr Giovanni or the goo effects could be played as Fear Moments. I’ve seen people use Prince as a fakeout 

You need these in MoSh games for practical reasons, to make use of the Fear (and Sanity which is the same but for mindfuck logic-based stuff) saves, but as part of the Horror Jawbreaker these are core to the experience.

A scary movie without these moments probably won’t be classed as horror at all, or it’ll be like Arrival or The Lighthouse where people have boring, beard-stroking chats about how and why it “straddles” genres. (I have seen and liked both those films btw, which tells you something about the part of all this I’m less into haha).

We all know what counts as gross and scary, and you have a wealth of genre staples to pull from, so getting Fear into your adventure shouldn’t be super difficult.

The main “issue” is that you don’t know if these moments will actually show up in play because it’s the players driving the action! The best plan I think is to put a few possible Fear moments around the place, make the adventure site small enough that they’ll probably find at least one, and just give up at that point. Players gonna play.

If they don’t find any of your spooky bits - hey, good for them. The other layers should have you covered just about, all you’ll miss is that sense of immediacy of Pure Horror but that’s not a problem - Arrival is totally a MoSh pamphlet. You can have a laugh after about how they missed everything.

Terror

A few seconds after the shock, when the mind makes sense of what’s happening - and doesn’t like it.

This is deeper than fear, which is a bad way of phrasing things because we’re going one layer up in the jawbreaker but whatever. Fear is “AAHH! A dead body just fell out of that vent!”. Terror is “Oh god… that body is Barry, and he’s got no face”.

Basically these are moments of realisation. Ypsilon examples would be things like “there’s an alien”, “it’s invisible”, “the goo is fucking people up”, “the Dr is fucked up”, etc. Mothership mechanises this, if you want to, with Intellect and Sanity. And Panic, these layers are all about Panic in a way.

To put these in your adventure, just have things going on the players don’t know about that they can work out through play. You probably have this covered already without realising it tbh. The genre suggests A Sense Of Mystery.

You don’t have to make this an actual mystery with Clues, these can be obvious! There are sooo many ways of finding out what’s going on on Ypsilon. But at the end of the day it doesn’t even matter if you do or not. Survive, Solve, Save, pick one - you might not Solve anything.

So don’t worry so much about the moments of revelation - Kinda like Fear that’s all player driven, and not 100% necessary anyway. Just have enough questions in the air. The suggestion that those revelations are out there somewhere is enough - be bold though. You achieve that sense of suggestion by posing questions, not by just kind of vaguely hinting. Players don’t get hints.

And even if nobody else does, you should absolutely know the answers yourself! Failing the investigation exercise is totally fine, but if there’s actually nothing real there to Solve, the exercise is hollow. And the answer can ultimately be a bit of an “I don’t know”, something like “an unknowable cosmic entity messed with shit”, just give it enough consistency and verisimilitude to feel somewhat satisfactory.

Give your players good questions, hide the answers, but the answers ultimately don’t matter as long as they do actually exist. Does that make sense?

Dread

Slower. Takes root and grows over time.

After the initial emotional reaction, after the terrifying revelation (or simply more questions suggesting  more terrifying possibilities) - where does that leave the players? The answer is here, and it’s nowhere good.

Dread isn’t a moment, though it can involve moments of Terror or Fear. It’s the creeping sensation of knowledge. Things are bad, sure, but it’ll become clear overtime just how bad things are, and for the players specifically. In Ypsilon it’s that you’re alone in deep space with a monster and some goo. It’s the full scope of the character’s immediate reality - and specifically, their odds of survival.

I don’t know if you’ve played Mothership but those odds? not good!!

This one’s mechanised throughout the system. Hit Points, Wounds, Stress, Panic. You achieve Dread (again, in your characters, not necessarily your players) basically through just playing the game. Dread happens from Being In This Situation. All you need to do is give the players a decent grasp of how fucked they are, and so much of that is done by the maths already.

I guess the question is how can you make them understand how bad the situation is if they might not fully understand what that situation even is? Mostly through those inner layers i think. Enough Fear and Terror will instil Dread automatically.

Yeah, this one just kind of happens. It’s about situational awareness, and Mothership is kind of about that on its own anyway. Again, player driven, they need to be paying attention - so just give them shit worth paying attention to and the Dread will follow.

And, obviously, make things difficult! No stakes, no dread. Isolate them in one way or another, present seemingly unbeatable foes and obstacles, take away obvious solutions (careful with this one) and add Stress with the steady drip of a CIA waterboarder.

Despair

And after all that… what’s left? Nothing.

“Despair” was once considered a sin that superseded the 7 Deadlies (I’m half-remembering this from Marlowe’s Dr Faustus so like Elizabethan Catholicism, don’t quote me). It meant, basically, atheism. A loss of belief in God’s ultimate power, plan and protection.

Can you even imagine the emptiness of someone in that culture losing faith? The shape of the void that leaves in a heart? What’s left? What’s the point?

Even if the characters Survive, what kind of a world are they living in? One where shit like this happens to people like them and there’s nothing they can do about it. If they Solve - so what? Now they know just how little the universe cares. And if they Save… do they really?

Rent is still due. The ship is a loaner. You made a quick buck risking your life and mind but that’s only worth so many weeks of Rocket Noodles until you have to do it again. You escaped the Squid Game - congratulations! Welcome to Seoul. Is it any better?

Ypsilon 14 is underfunded, understaffed. The bare minimum for survival and hygiene. it wasn’t even designed with a medbay, someone thought of that later and set it up in the workspace - probably to avoid being sued. The only things that offer any kind of enjoyment - a pet cat, video games, music, drugs - were smuggled in by workers who’d probably get their pay cut if anyone cared enough about them to find out. Someone went missing last night and the company hasn’t done a thing. All they have is work.

And for what? Someone with a much nicer ship than yours is doing research. Metals are being mined and sold for someone else’s profit margins. To the management, as we hear in Dr Giovanni’s cassette recording, these workers are numbers in a database.

There is power out there. But it will not protect you. And its plans are to prosper only itself.

How to put this into your game? Just make sure everyone’s aware whose fault this all is - and how very, very far away they are from here.

*

I hope all this is of use to anyone preparing horror adventures for their friends! Just make sure you have all the layers of your jawbreaker in there at least somewhere and you’re good to go.

1. Fuck!

2. This is fucked.

3. We’re fucked.

4. Everything’s fucked.

The Three “I”s

Doing some work on DEADLINE! Check the tag if you’re not up to speed on this one.

A big goal of this design is easy onboarding regardless of experience. Zero-or-thereabouts “RPG jargon”, a cool framing that makes people want to GM and makes the GM’s role clear and easy, making “play culture” explicit through text, etc.

Coming round to player actions - I want to codify these in some way, for said onboarding, but codification is the death of the playstyle. Once you name something or list options, readers get tunnel vision and the breadth of play available in a game run on imagination can be easily forgotten. Even the humble attack roll is often a step too far for me these days tbh.

So, how to structure play in a way that makes it digestible but not limited? Procedures are an answer - I’ve sung Errant’s praises in this regard before. How to do it but never what to do.

Here’s a play procedure I’m tinkering with for DEADLINE, early stages. (You may see some familiar language from GRAVEROBBERS. I know what I like!)

The main thing this misses I feel is delineating LIFELINE as the primary structure of play, but I’m sure I’ll find a balance once it’s all put in context

-

If there is no meaningful obstacle or danger preventing the Agent from following an order, they do so and the action is successful. The Agent describes the outcome, and the game continues.

If there is an obstacle preventing success or significant danger involved, the action succeeds only if the Operators direct the Agent to use an Item, some Information or their own Instinct.

The Operators must select from the options available to the Agent, or else plan another course of action.

👁️‍🗨️ Item. Any object in the Agent’s control that renders the task at hand achievable. This could be a gadget or anything the Agent obtains while on a mission. Find items and use them creatively.

You could take out a guard with a sleeping dart or distract them with an explosion.

👁️‍🗨️ Information. Knowledge that negates danger or obstacles. This could be intelligence about an individual or some other secret that precludes harm. Gather information and act on it.

One might bypass a guard with a password or avoid them by learning their schedule.

👁️‍🗨️ Instinct. Allowing the Agent to act without direct command. Agents can take care of themselves in a pinch, but acting without an Operator’s careful supervision can have unforeseen consequences. Select a relevant Skill from the Agent’s profile. Roll a die and advance the DOOMSDAY clock by the result.

Simply knock out a guard with Defence, charm them with Bluff or sneak past with Stealth.

Frames and Chains

 More notes on That Game! Last one for a while as I work on other bits,  but stay tuned.

Where we left last time we had an idea for the overall “”narrative”” framing of the campaign - fairy rescue mission - and something beginning to resemble a mechanical framing. Players leave Avalon, enter… somewhere, do Combat. Then exit the way they came, and repeat. It’s the town-dungeon-initiative trifecta.

Today, let’s have a crack at that “somewhere”, and see what other ideas might coalesce because of it!

I’m going back to some old notes for this. This is the idea for a frame I had, oh, two iterations of this combat system ago.

I was leaning away from it and trying to find something new because it doesn’t quite fit the image of the game I’d had in my head, but I couldn’t come up with anything quite as easily digestible (as I’ve said before in this little series of posts, mechanics that are good but not easy to grok are, in fact, not good).

So, we’re going to do the opposite of what we did last post, basically - change the ~lore~ to better fit this mechanic, rather than coming up with a new mechanic that better fits our currently established lore.

The mechanic in question is very much a case of me writing what I know - it’s an encounter table with a modifier that slowly ramps up, similar to things I’ve done before.

Basically:

roll 1d6 on a table of encounters. Do the encounter you roll - could be a treasure chest, a trap, or of course a Combat. Once you’ve done the encounter, add 1 to your overall “score” (call it “progress”? Or just “delve” or something? Idk). Roll, again, adding your current score. Repeat.

There will be 9 encounters on the table at first with no. 9 being the “boss”, so you’ll definitely have a few non-boss encounters before rolling that combat.

A couple of caveats:

- rolling a “unique” encounter again (i.e., a chest you’ve already emptied, a foe you’ve already slain) means you slide back down the table until you get to an encounter you haven’t done yet OR a non-unique, repeatable encounter (the same grove of mushrooms could be found over and over, f’rinstance.)

- bosses block progress. Rolling over a boss’ number means you slide back down the table to the boss - until you beat it, then you can roll higher and continue.

Oh, and you can choose to go to a numbered encounter you’ve already done at any time if it’s lower than your “score”. So you can go back and find that mushroom grotto because now you’ve explored enough to know exactly where it is.

It’s incredibly simple! But I think it needs to be. At least for me, i can only keep track of so many things at once lol

Drew Duncan

So how and why are we amending the fiction to suit this new exploration mechanic?

Well, the initial idea I’d had was a vast, forested wilderness reclaimed by nature. The fights would be in ruined castles holding out against the tide of entropy, their lords clinging to life through misplaced chivalric will.

I’d wanted a map that could be freely explored, basically. Buuut this mechanic suits a more linear progression. I guess the fiction could make sense if you don’t think hard about it (why can’t you just pass by a castle and go to the next one if you want?) but I’d prefer something that clicks more coherently. Mechanics lining up with flavour and “just kinda making sense” is a hugely powerful tool in onboarding and teaching players.

So now it’s a megadungeon! The bosses guard the stairs to the next floor down, that’s why you face them in order and can’t pass one until you’ve defeated it.

(And geez… a linear progression like this will be SO much easier to design than an open world you can tackle in any order… board games are tough)

This thing’s been getting more and more game-y, JRPG flavour and I kinda like it >:)

Drew Duncan

Thoughts about bosses, then? Well I had the idea last post of fairies in cages you could free mid-fight and I kinda like that. Makes me think of the first boss in Persona 5, where there’s a special action you can send someone to do outside of the fight. Taking time out of attacking to try a new, special, optional action is a great decision-making moment I think!

(In P5 you have to do it and the decision is who to send, but here I think the decision is more whether or not to even bother doing it, or just killing the guy and freeing the fairy after.)

So first boss is probably like… the Lord of Chains, and there’s a special action while you’re fighting him to like… turn a crank to lower a cage until you can free the fairy. But if it gets to his turn and he sees the cage lowered he’ll just yank it back up and you have to start again. Can you do X amount of heavy actions on your turn? Or should you just fight the guy?

It’s a rough idea but there’s something there. The point is that after all this noodling about lore and whatever, I now have goals to work towards with the mechanical design. Instead of just messing with the rondel system to see what can be done, I have a character to try and bring to life with it. That’ll be fun!

I’m also thinking the next boss after that is where you get the bow maybe, and you can hide behind pillars to avoid being shot by him but you have to come out to actually hit him… and the fairy cage is out in the open so you’re a sitting duck while you’re trying to free her?

(And then the fairies you free… Maybe the first is a Tinker? I don’t think we’ll be doing weapon HP after all, if nothing else it’s just annoying to track another number, but maybe she can upgrade weapons? And the second maybe gives you an “elfshot” power to your bow, that’s nice and thematic.)

Just sketches of ideas, but if I’m having all these ideas already then I think this frame is a good shout overall!

So, we’ve got our three modes of play - Avalon, Bdungeon, Combat.

Looks like a good frame to start thinking about some campaign content! I’m going to get to work tinkering on the first level, those first 9 encounters and the boss.

As I’ve said I might not be posting as frequently as I have about this project going forward, but there will still be updates - and even if this ends up just being a thing i make for me, I’ll cobble something together so that you’ll all be able to play it too once it’s done :)

Fairies and the Campaign Frame

 The Arthurian-ish game continues. (Thanks for all the feedback last post! How did that playtest battle work out for you?)

Also - green Knight UK release confirmed! Finally! 😭 I’ll be seeing it with friends at the end of the month. Hopefully by then I’ll find a better tag for this game lol

btw I’m pretty busy with Journeylands and other projects right now so I’m going to take a break on this one - or at least take development a bit slower, workshop it some more. So posts about it will be a bit more irregular, but like all my projects it’s still going on in the background!

Ok!

In this post I want to examine trying to reverse-engineer mechanics and gameplay stuff out of lore a bit more clearly. This has been a mechanics-first project in terms of the process of coming up with the game itself (I think all the best games are tbh!).

So far our “Influences” list has been useful mainly in divining the direction of these mechanical decisions. We haven’t really added any mechanics to the game entirely based on the flavour, it’s either been the other way round or a mish-mash workaround of both, and I think going flavour-first can be a valuable option.

The resulting mechanic will, hopefully, be a crucial part of defining the game’s feel, because it comes out of a purely theoretical space.

Not sure I’m making a lot of sense? And at the end of the day, this sort of thing doesn’t matter too much. Really it’s just a frame to talk about my most recent development notes.

Basically, I decided I wanted fairies in the game.

Creative decisions are nebulous things and there were a ton of factors, but the main ~lore~ tendrils leading me to this were

- I was thinking up what the standard healing item could be. Potion was my first thought and for good reason, but before I committed to it I wanted to consider other options. I thought “fairy dust” or similar would be a good item for that, or in general. Berserk has Puck the fairy companion for our grim knight, that’s a nice image from our Influences list.

- both Dark Cloud and Dark Souls have “repair powder” as items, and they’re both in the list. Though I’m still unsure about using weapon HP/breakage as a thing here, it got me thinking about including different “powder” or “dust” items with different effects. That could be the standard unit of consumable magic-thing

- Dust > fairy/pixie dust. And I’ve already got Morgan le Fay in the lore through the Morgen’s Favour item. Going back to the time in myth when elves and fairies and witches and ghosts were all kind of the same thing is a good fit for this project. So if she’s a fairy, or implied to be…

- A big commons thread in the Brythonic mythology on our Influences list is the idea of nine sorceresses - or witches, or sirens, or elves, or magic priestesses. Or, Morgan le Fay and her sisters. Blending all that up into some lore juice seems good to me.

- So, there are nine witches/fairies. We already know you’re the knight of one of them. What about the others?

it’s puck

My current train of thought is that Morgen’s sisters have been captured and that’s what you’re doing on this quest in the first place. I imagine fairies/elves/witches can’t die, so they’re just being held captive in these castles by these knights who are using their power or whatnot.

(This is… kind of a damsel in distress narrative, which I’m not keen on. It fits the tone I guess. Hopefully we can mitigate that through some other creative decisions. For one thing, there’s nothing saying the player character and the evil knights aren’t also women. And not all the fairies need to be women either. We’ll do our best to give the fairies agency in the narrative through mechanics, too. Maybe there’s an action to free each fairy mid-battle instead of rescuing them at the end, and they join the fight? Idk. Just something to think about going forward.)

Your progress in the campaign can be marked by freeing these fairies by defeating their captors in duels, then maybe a 9th “secret” boss battle. Each freed fairy would unlock something - which brings us to the mechanics again.

See, I’ve been going back and forth on what would constitute a good “campaign frame” for this duel system. There needs to be more game around the battles - whether that’s something as simple as an encounter roll/meter, a whole choose-your-own-adventure style branching narrative, or something else… I’m not entirely sure yet.

(I do know that I don’t want to write a whole book lol. And I reckon the frame should be as simple to grasp - and take up as little space on the table and in the player’s head - as the battle system itself. Or less.)

But I do think that an overall “progress sheet” is not too much to ask. I’m envisioning three layers to the game - the duels, something in the middle, and a kind of bookend “safe zone”. This is where you’d return between “missions” to tick off objectives, store items you weren’t using. Call it Avalon, or one of the many other mystic isles of the otherworld. This structure mirrors the zooming in and out through town>dungeon>combat in standard RPGs, and I really like games that use this structure. (Put things in your game that you have fun playing in other games! Good rule of thumb!)

So on your “Avalon” sheet, you can note down the fairies you’ve freed so far. And each one can unlock an ability that you can use when you go back there between excursions. Building up your “home town” through dungeon progress is something I love in games - including Dark Cloud, which is on our Influences list, so this is all fair game for inclusion!

Let’s say that Morgen, presumably already “unlocked”, heals you completely when you return to base - the kind of ability I think you should have from the start, so let’s tie it to her.

Other fairies could supply you with items - the dust! - or give other buffs. Maybe one can craft you items if you bring back the right ingredients. We can go nuts with these. Maybe some of the fairies can go with you as companions, taking up an item slot and offering a passive buff or special action. One could repair items, if we do indeed take that treacherous path…

This all begs the question of what that middle “level” to the gameplay is - our “dungeon”. Can you rescue these fairies in any order? How do you explore and traverse the world - do you have to “find” them? Or is the game just nine fights in order with loot and a new fairy after each? (That would certainly be easier to write…)

Anyway, I think we can leave all that for next time.

Hopefully this post was useful to some of you! Mainly I wanted to show how the spark of a purely “flavour” idea, adding fairies into the game somehow, led to me starting to create this overall 3-tier structure as well as the main thrust of the “story”, and making all kinds of mechanical decisions around it.

I find posts reverse-engineering the creative process like this can sometimes help me tackle challenges in future, thinking back on things more as a piece of work I did than an idea I had. Ideas are cheap! Work is where it’s at.

Happy gaming! x

Items, Actions, Playtest!

 The main thing left to do on this Arthurian-esque project is player actions.

As I covered before, each player action in this mini game is tied to an item. Swords have an attack action, for example. And an action requires a roll, which advances a token (now a die) round the rondel. Read the last few posts if you need catching up.

(And yes, it’s a rondel I think. That’s already a board game term for a school of mechanics that are similar enough, and it’s a suitably medieval word.)

We’ll need to assign the different actions to items, work out a basic concept for how items are held/stored, and figure out what an item “looks like” in this game - is there any thing to them besides a discreet rules action.

I’ll also explore possible other concepts for items, but I won’t be finalising those for inclusion just yet. Once all that’s done, we’ll have a playable “test” fight ready to go.

Oh, and it should be clear by now that this is pretty much a board game and does not align with how ttrpg combat works best, in which PCs can attempt to do pretty much anything. So, uh, sorry if that’s what you come here for, but that’s not this game.

Ok then! Items.

There were 3 actions available to me in the last rough test based on the general ideas for actions in the original concept, and those worked fine.

(Oh, and I need to call the die that moves round the rondel something to make it clear when it’s mentioned over the other dice or whatever, so for the moment it’s called the heart die.)

Attack: “heavy” roll (2d6 take higher). If the heart die passes “midnight” on the rondel due to this roll, action fails. If the heart die does not pass “midnight” due to this roll, deal 1 hit (move the hit token 1 space clockwise).

Defend: “light” roll (2d6 take lower). If the heart die passes “midnight” on the rondel due to this roll, negate damage caused by overkill for this roll. If the heart die does not pass “midnight” due to this roll, reduce hits by 1 (move the hit token 1 space counter-clockwise).

Claim: “spell” roll (2d6). Roll equal to or under the current tally of hits (as indicated by the current position of the hit token) to claim the foe’s soul and end the fight. Roll over this number, roll fails.

Probably worth noting - these are written terribly. There’s probably no way to understand them unless you’ve read all the posts in this series so far and somehow understood those.

These are all just notes, remember - turning this all into a rulebook that allows the reader to teach themselves the game just by reading alone is a whole other battle, one that a lot of big-name board game publishers can barely fight. Some can’t! Thankfully you won’t have to see that bit of the work.

Anyway.

Let’s assign each of these to an item, and also decide how items are depicted in general. Dark Souls famously tells its story and world history through item descriptions, to the point that just the phrase “item descriptions” is something of a meme in itself. And I’ve always loved the little flavour blurbs that come with item logs or bestiaries and such across JRPGs in general. So let’s have a go at that (remembering this is all first draft stuff…)

Old Sword. Its blade is nicked and weathered but still holds true. It will not fail a valorous knight.

Black Ram’s Shield. Bears a sable crest beneath dents and scars. Lightweight and trusty.

Morgen’s Favour. A talisman from the witch queen of the otherworld. Contains a spell to bind the souls of those bested in battle.

Good for now!

Inventory-wise, I like the idea of having spaces for the left and right hand, creating risk if you want to switch things around mid-battle. So let’s say that you can freely use the actions of items in either hand, and putting an item you find into any space is a free action. But to switch the positions of two items in battle is an action that requires a 1d6 roll.

… Seems ok. Oh, and Morgen’s Favour is a vital thing that you’ll always have need of, so while I could make it eat an inventory space and force the player to switch it in and out, that seems kind of needless and unfun. So let’s say it’s always “equipped” (attached to your helm or something idk), and you can use the spell whenever as if it were in your hand.

Then for the rest of the inventory, call it 9 spaces total - enough for a spare weapon or two and some other fun items. With the two hands and the “favour space”, that brings us to 12 items altogether - same as the numbers on our clock. I like my numbers to align! (I mean, have you seen GRAVEROBBERS?) I’m sure someone could arrange the spaces around the clock in a very pretty way on the character sheet, too.

So what could those other items be?

Just a jumble of thoughts so far, but:

- Healing items. First thing that pops into my head is a magic potion, but I quite like the idea of fairy dust, like from Berserk. Dark Cloud has some great items and that’s on our influences list too. But yeah, a one-use item that you’d have to take out of your inventory to use in battle, that heals your heart die back up. There can be different levels of healing item, like all good JRPGs.

- Consumables. Other one-use items with fun effects. Buffs could make your next attack do more damage or eat up hits for a turn. Fire vials that deal damage to an enemy, poison that coats your weapons and makes your next attack have weird side effects. These could be fun and quite powerful, since they’d disappear after a single use. Offers a fun choice of if or when to use them.

- Armour. Each bit could be its own item, meaning you can mix and match armour sets with different effects, and choose how much armour you want to wear vs what other items you might want to take. Or, I might just handwave it? For some reason the idea of helms being the only armour item is really appealing to me - the rest is implied, and then the helm lends flavour and a special effect, and you switch between them depending on your goals and preferences. Dunno. I can make that decision later I guess.

- Gear. Not armour but items you hold to get a passive effect. I keep thinking about boots for some reason. Like, they could let you dodge attacks. Or “move” quicker - how could that be represented? Fun to think about. There could be all sorts of other passive effects, and the prep game would be in choosing whether each slot in your inventory should be armour or one of these, or a spare weapon or a consumable, or a free space in case you find good items… etc etc. The more “good” options the better.

- Other weapons. I think the concept of a bow you load and aim with a heavy action and fire with a light one is solid. Some more tweaking would need to be done to make it feel balanced and worthwhile. I also definitely want a greatsword in the game, something that takes up both your hand spaces. Beyond that… idk, weapons are fun. Whips, staves, maces, axes. Each with their own mechanic and potential drawbacks. I’d definitely treat these more like Monster Hunter weapons where none is “better” and picking one is all about what feels right to you - but then there could be different versions of each, like magic swords or whatever. A lot of the game’s potential longevity is going to be about making these feel right!

- Craftables? Ingredients that don’t do anything on their own but can make things. This would be… a lot of work, and it’s not something I want to do right away. An earlier version of this game that is languishing in my notebooks was built around a crafting system. Maybe worth a revisit down the line but… it really is a whole thing.

How does the player get their hands on these? Well, for now we don’t need to worry, we’re just focused on the Bridgekeeper fight and those three basic items. But once the battle system is down I want to start looking outside it - a way of exploring castles, making decisions about where to go and how best to explore before taking on the resident Lord using the various bits and bobs you’ve collected along the way. Y’know… dungeon stuff.

As for that Bridgekeeper fight…

If you’d like to play along at home, you should now have everything you need now to try out this basic fight! Remember that this is an early playtest - the point isn’t to work out whether or not the game is fun (it probably isn’t just yet!), but whether it works.

Are their points in your playthrough where the rules don’t say what should happen next, or are all the bases covered? Are there edge cases or freak occurrences that can severely disrupt the experience, or does the randomness feel logical (if mildly unfair at times)? These are the relevant questions for now.

For what it’s worth, I’ve tried the fight a few times and i think it works ok! It’s very easy, which makes it a good baseline for the future. But the basics are there, and I’m happy with how far this project has come in just a short time.

So, give it a go if you’d like - you’ll need 3d6, a coin or token and a clock face to play on (just draw one). Your three items/actions are listed above, and your opponent deals damage equal to Overkill, or OK+1 if you reach 9+ hits on them. Yeah, all the rules are spread across like 4 posts now and I can’t be arsed to compile them, sorry. That’s a job for future me to worry about!

For now - have fun, and next time I come back to this series I’ll start thinking about new ways to beef up fights, items and a structure to bind it all together.

Peace!