I just updated the “alpha” version of the GRAVEROBBERS system, my set of rules and tools for tabletop roleplaying games of stealth and sedition.
I thiiiink Gumroad might have sent out an email to folks who’ve downloaded it before saying there’s a new version? Maybe? Maybe not?
In any case, here’s what’s changed:
- Replaced the Murderer Crime with the Fence
The Murderer was kinda boring and never sat right with me - the ominous tone was fun for a moment but didn’t seem nearly as gameable as the other Crimes, plus it focused on Violence - pretty much the game’s antithesis.
The Fence as a title doesn’t carry the same weight (I think all the other Crimes more or less sound like something the character would get yelled at them in the street: “Traitor!” “Heretic!”. Fence not so much) but is way more interesting and gameable. Managed to squeeze a d6 table in there too, so you have variable starting items!
- Updated Tools of the Trade
Some minor changes to existing Crimes. The Harlot now starts with a hand mirror - a classic adventurer’s item! Vagrants get string, which is like a lesser version of the Burglar’s rope for tying things or could make a fuse. Traitors get some paper to go with their writing set.
The Heretic gets a ceremonial dagger - which now means the Fence is the only “unarmed” Crime. Not sure how I feel about all the knives... but they’re flavourful and a great drastic, dramatic final option. Plus, bad Odds in Violence is discouragement enough from resorting to it, and sharp implements can always be used to other ends.
- Renamed the Authority to the House
Pure semantics. “The House” has been a contender for a while and after some thought I’ve decided it’s the better option. Feeds into the casino motif and has a more subtle ominous-ness than the Authority, I think.
- General text and readability changes
Some very minor changes in text, plus I put Unicode symbols for dice in place of some clunky phrasing about how many dice are needed to roll. I’ve been using the Unicode dice symbols a lot lately for bits and pieces in BUTCHERY - super easy to parse and breaks up a wall of text. MORE 👏 EMOJI 👏 IN 👏 GAMES! 👏
Enjoy your new coffin of scraps! Feedback and play reports are as always more than welcome - hit me up here or on Twitter.
Sunday, 23 February 2020
Saturday, 15 February 2020
BUTCHERY GM Advice(?)
The following will not make it into the final BUTCHERY zine (still time left to back I think??) because the zine format is too svelte to warrant a DMG and I also think writing actual, practical GM advice is a task somewhere between Herculean and Sisyphean (most people seeking it don’t need GM advice they just need life advice, and the best actual GM advice is learned through play).
Still, here’s a thing:
Narrator Styles
The way the Narrator approaches their role is up to your group and specific to your game. Here are some ideas to get your started.
Old School Style
Classic tabletop adventure games leaned heavily on the conversation aspect of gameplay. In the olden days of the 1970s, rules and tools involving dice and numbers were only used as a fallback to adjudicate perilous situations or inject randomness into the proceedings for fun.
To play in an Old School style, the Narrator should present tricky obstacles of all kinds within the fiction - social, physical, mental, etc - and allow the players to come up with creative solutions. Players who think outside the box, work together and make cool things happen don’t have to roll dice; just use conversation to progress the fiction. They might not even end up fighting most monsters!
Storygame Style
Some tabletop games focus on creating a narrative around the table - not just playing around within a fiction, but making the events of that fiction look like a structured story during play. This can be tough for casual gamers, but is great for players who like writing, acting or improv!
Storygames like using rules and tools to govern aspects of the characters that are key to the stories being told; not just rolling for physical danger like the rules in BUTCHERY suggest but during “social” scenes as well. What if a butcher’s Alignment affected their personality, and they had to roll Ritual-style checks to determine how they acted in certain scenes? That could generate a lot of conflict or other interesting events to build a story from.
Modern Style
Mainstream games like those you see on big online streams often include tropes from video games, like stats that go up with each “level” a character attains, or more structured stories that allow the game to focus on the rules rather than working out events through conversation alone.
You could make a game using BUTCHERY more like these kinds of games by letting characters improve their Skill Levels over time, perhaps offering “experience points” to spend each time you play. Focus on the hunt, and make sure you have a dramatic and interesting combat scenario to spring on your players at the end of each game.
Still, here’s a thing:
 |
| from Dark Cloud - not a direct inspiration for BUTCHERY but it shows up in almost everything I make so |
Narrator Styles
The way the Narrator approaches their role is up to your group and specific to your game. Here are some ideas to get your started.
Old School Style
Classic tabletop adventure games leaned heavily on the conversation aspect of gameplay. In the olden days of the 1970s, rules and tools involving dice and numbers were only used as a fallback to adjudicate perilous situations or inject randomness into the proceedings for fun.
To play in an Old School style, the Narrator should present tricky obstacles of all kinds within the fiction - social, physical, mental, etc - and allow the players to come up with creative solutions. Players who think outside the box, work together and make cool things happen don’t have to roll dice; just use conversation to progress the fiction. They might not even end up fighting most monsters!
Storygame Style
Some tabletop games focus on creating a narrative around the table - not just playing around within a fiction, but making the events of that fiction look like a structured story during play. This can be tough for casual gamers, but is great for players who like writing, acting or improv!
Storygames like using rules and tools to govern aspects of the characters that are key to the stories being told; not just rolling for physical danger like the rules in BUTCHERY suggest but during “social” scenes as well. What if a butcher’s Alignment affected their personality, and they had to roll Ritual-style checks to determine how they acted in certain scenes? That could generate a lot of conflict or other interesting events to build a story from.
Modern Style
Mainstream games like those you see on big online streams often include tropes from video games, like stats that go up with each “level” a character attains, or more structured stories that allow the game to focus on the rules rather than working out events through conversation alone.
You could make a game using BUTCHERY more like these kinds of games by letting characters improve their Skill Levels over time, perhaps offering “experience points” to spend each time you play. Focus on the hunt, and make sure you have a dramatic and interesting combat scenario to spring on your players at the end of each game.
Friday, 14 February 2020
It Came From The Blogosphere!: Valentine’s Special
First, a word from out sponsor... you! You’re the sponsor! Because you’re one of the lovely individuals who’ve backed BUTCHERY on KickStarter as part of ZineQuest 2 (hashtagzinequest2)!
If you’ve yet to check out my monster-hunting ruleset of investigative combat, you’ve still got, hm, like just under 48 hours? And thanks to our generous Heart-Eater backers, you can get the whole-ass zine for just £1!
look, there’s even a link to click right here, what a world
Also, and this is important - once you’re over on KickStarter, you can click my profile to check out all the ZineQuest blogs I’ve backed. I’m in an uncharacteristic period of relative financial stability so I was able to support quite a few, but there are absolutely, undeniably, a whole host of other fantastic projects out there worth your cash money. Please use my “backed projects” list as a springboard and thence go ham. Support the games!!
Now then.
It’s Valentine’s Day! So let’s share the love, shall we? As we prostrate ourselves at the feet of the mannequin of capitalism, propped up in place of the soul-affirming ineffability of human connection - let’s read some blogs!
Prolific OSR-adjacent visual artist Sam Mameli has some good thoughts on why old-school games are good to play. I agree with the thoughts! You can read the thoughts here.
Anne Hunter over at DIY and Dragons is good people. Her voice is one of those I miss from the little bit of the G+ days I’m old enough to remember. In this post, she draws brilliant connections between video game rogue like design and tabletop RPGs. This article is a resource unto itself - do read it.
A late (shoot me, the messenger - it was written well on time) Christmas gift from Dan D - space combat for the world’s other favourite fantasy RPG Troika!, plus d66 brilliant spaceships! Peruse here. Oh, and have you ever considered writing your own gaming blog but not known where to start? Or started one but run out of ideas for posts? Dan’s Joesky Tax d100 table is d100 good blog posts in the making.
I was unfamiliar with Circas K and their blog Sword of Mass Destruction - until this post made I and many others sit up and pay attention. The thoughts I’ve had on clerics and “religion” in fantasy games, crystallised into not only a well-written article but actual gameable resources(!) by a genuine scholar of religion?! Yes please.
Arnold K at the esteemed Goblin Punch has some things to say about all these Birds.
Dai Shugars does a lovely bit of theory writing here, recrafting 5 guidelines for libraries written by a Tamil librarian in the 30s into 5 guidelines for RPGs. It’s all good stuff!
Over on her goldmine of a scrapheap of a blog A Monster Manual Sewn From Pants, the luminous Scrap Princess provides campaign frames for games that last about 2-4 sessions, and oh boy howdy am I here for it.
And finally, I always enjoy reading Zedeck Siew’s words. Here’s a big crab.
Read the blogs, write the blogs, share the blogs. See you next time, losers x
If you’ve yet to check out my monster-hunting ruleset of investigative combat, you’ve still got, hm, like just under 48 hours? And thanks to our generous Heart-Eater backers, you can get the whole-ass zine for just £1!
look, there’s even a link to click right here, what a world
Also, and this is important - once you’re over on KickStarter, you can click my profile to check out all the ZineQuest blogs I’ve backed. I’m in an uncharacteristic period of relative financial stability so I was able to support quite a few, but there are absolutely, undeniably, a whole host of other fantastic projects out there worth your cash money. Please use my “backed projects” list as a springboard and thence go ham. Support the games!!
Now then.
It’s Valentine’s Day! So let’s share the love, shall we? As we prostrate ourselves at the feet of the mannequin of capitalism, propped up in place of the soul-affirming ineffability of human connection - let’s read some blogs!
 |
| ah yes,,. the world “wide Web” |
Anne Hunter over at DIY and Dragons is good people. Her voice is one of those I miss from the little bit of the G+ days I’m old enough to remember. In this post, she draws brilliant connections between video game rogue like design and tabletop RPGs. This article is a resource unto itself - do read it.
A late (shoot me, the messenger - it was written well on time) Christmas gift from Dan D - space combat for the world’s other favourite fantasy RPG Troika!, plus d66 brilliant spaceships! Peruse here. Oh, and have you ever considered writing your own gaming blog but not known where to start? Or started one but run out of ideas for posts? Dan’s Joesky Tax d100 table is d100 good blog posts in the making.
I was unfamiliar with Circas K and their blog Sword of Mass Destruction - until this post made I and many others sit up and pay attention. The thoughts I’ve had on clerics and “religion” in fantasy games, crystallised into not only a well-written article but actual gameable resources(!) by a genuine scholar of religion?! Yes please.
Arnold K at the esteemed Goblin Punch has some things to say about all these Birds.
Dai Shugars does a lovely bit of theory writing here, recrafting 5 guidelines for libraries written by a Tamil librarian in the 30s into 5 guidelines for RPGs. It’s all good stuff!
Over on her goldmine of a scrapheap of a blog A Monster Manual Sewn From Pants, the luminous Scrap Princess provides campaign frames for games that last about 2-4 sessions, and oh boy howdy am I here for it.
And finally, I always enjoy reading Zedeck Siew’s words. Here’s a big crab.
Read the blogs, write the blogs, share the blogs. See you next time, losers x
Sunday, 2 February 2020
To Quest, Perchance to Zine
BUTCHERY is now live on KickStarter!
Get the system I wrote for my home game and try it out for yourself! The e-zine includes:
- full rules including a shortcut character creation checklist
- an investigative combat system that makes fights brutal, heroic and engaging
- a complete magic system in like two paragraphs
- a starter adventure (not the one from the play reports, something fresh!)
- developer commentary and play examples throughout so you can get your head around how and why I made this ruleset the way it is
- an introductory guide to hacking the rules
- and... more???
Campaign ends on the 16th of Feb!
Saturday, 1 February 2020
yet more BUTCHERY
The little makeshift coffin bursts open.
A thin tendril of flesh shoots out, plunging into the dark earth and planting itself like a root. Then, raising up by the mottled cord that extends from its torso, something wholly unlike the newborn it once was. It screams, mouth splitting open in a cross, full of too many needle-like teeth, its white eyes rolling and bulging. It reeks of death.
The butchers grimace at the sight. This being is not a child of witchcraft. They know the fell, unnatural magic that birthed it from the grave - the magic of monsters. These are not beasts of the natural world, but are created by humanity when they meddle in nature’s laws. And this abomination is what happens when a parent murders their own child.
Dannoll and Allas look to each other and nod. Dannoll flings his spear, aiming high but just missing the monster’s twisted body, the silvered point of his weapon instead severing the cord that binds it to the earth. With a fleshy, snicking sound, the stump of the cord grows anew, regenerating, shooting back down to the ground. The monster barely has time to fall before it has rooted itself in the soil once more.
The thing opens its mouth once again, an otherworldly scream building in the air - cut short, as Allas sends a silver-tipped crossbow bolt through the creature’s head.
It splutters and falls in a heap on the ground.
Under a dusky sky just beginning to fill with stars, the butchers set about placing the stricken monster on its pyre. It hasn’t been human for a long time now, but even so they feel as though they are putting the child to rest.
Returning to the farmhouse, Dannoll and Allas aim to wring the truth from the family. Confronting the women with what they know of the truth - that the blight was caused by a monster taking root in the ground, one that can only be created by infanticide - they ask what happened. If the young woman is the true mother of the dead child, and its killer, then she must atone.
The older woman, silent this whole time, finally speaks. She confesses everything: how her husband was wracked with worry over her pregnancy, how he believed they would never survive a winter with another mouth to feed. And then when the child came, and there were two... He did the unspeakable. The mother, seeing her child killed by its father, flew into a rage and took his life in revenge.
Overcome with guilt, she breaks down, weeping. The young girl has tears in her eyes too, but her expression is resolute as she takes her sister from her mother’s arms.
The butchers do not begrudge the older woman her actions, it’s not their place to judge. But men have their laws just as Nature does, and they tell her they will take her into town to face the guard’s judgement. She comes quietly and willingly, leaving her daughters clinging to one another, alone by the glow of the hearth.
The ride into town and back sees the moon rise high in the sky. Ivar and his guard hear the butchers’ tale, and take the woman prisoner as a formality. Their people will feed her better than she could’ve done otherwise. Good as their word, the guard load Donnall and Allas’ horses with enough supplies for a few weeks’ journeying.
The butchers look at one another as they pass the farmstead again. Tying up their horses once more, they unload the supplies. This family, or what remains of it, will need it more than they.
Under the waxing moon, the two traipse into the field one last time, to try their hands at an old ritual. Entreating the aspects of Spring, season of new life and regrowth, they attempt to encourage the land into bearing a healthy crop once more.
Nature is silent. No matter. She will take the land again in due course, now that the curse has been lifted. The smell of decay is gone, at the very least. Time will tell how the valley fares from here.
The butchers set off down the road again.
*
That concluded the session. BUTCHERY is nicely episodic like that, mirroring how I tend to play games anyway. That first quest was very Witcher-esque, wasn’t it? The full game takes from a wider pool of inspiration.
Now, let’s finish off talking about the combat mechanics in BUTCHERY, and get into why I call this an investigative combat system.
My earliest RPG gaming memories, outside of tabletop, come from Pokémon. I could go on and on about the hows and whys of what makes those games so dang good, but for now I’ll focus in on one particular aspect of the battle system.
Each of your lil boys can learn four moves, which are like cool combat techniques. Attacks, buffs, all the JRPG things you’d expect. And monsters also have types, abilities and other aspects unique to a species which mean certain moves are going to work better when executed by certain ‘mon, or against a particular opponent.
Mastering all these interactions is the first key to high-level play - but the initial rush I felt as a kid is what I’m chasing here. Something as simple as the three-step mental process of:
- hmm, that guy looks fiery. I haven’t seen him before, but he seems to have a big Fire thing going on.
- I have a water guy. Water puts out fire, right? So... What happens when I use this water move?
- “Super effective”! I win!
The appeal to a little kid is straightforward. It’s hardly master strategy, but at that age it feels like it is. And it’s a thought process that I think is at the core of good problem-solving in games, video and analog. This thing *should* work, so I’ll try it... and it does! Games that focus on letting the players try things and having them produce at least some result, like Breath of the Wild or, I dunno, all OSR games, tap into that creative problem solving loop.
Which brings me to BUTCHERY? Well, kinda. First it brings me to Monster Hunter.
Monster Hunter is a HUGE franchise of action-RPG games from Japan that’s only recently started breaking through overseas in a big way. I came onboard with MH Tri back on the Wii and have been hooked ever since.
MonHun hides that core problem-solving loop within layers upon layers of design. Everything about the game’s boss-level enemies - their creature design, animation, movesets and game stats, even the local ecology where they’re found in-game, all feeds back into that loop.
It’s not just “Fire... water!” with MH, although that’s one of the layers for sure. It’s big footprints... big target” and “old scattered bones... carnivore?” and “tunnel... shortcut... trap?” and “bathes in mud... protective coating... wash it off during the fight somehow” and “if I can find out what it eats I can drug the food, or leave a trail to get it close enough to this other monster’s territory and get them in a fight, then jump on the monster’s back and ride it away as it flees to its nest where I can fight it one-on-one -“
*inhale*
And you find all this out through playing. Fighting monsters makes you - the player, not the character, characters don’t level up - better at fighting monsters. It was Dark Souls before Dark Souls.
It’s a good game.
Which, finally... BUTCHERY.
I’m loathe to put more mechanics in a TRPG. So much of what I love about these games I found through the OSR and subsequent takes on that genre - light and streamlined rules that you hack apart and work around in play.
But you, or at least I, need that intersection between pure freeform play and The Rules to really hit a sweet spot, and when i run BUTCHERY I feel like I’ve hit that same spot that Pokémon and Monster Hunter did for me. People burnt out by 3e through 4e often complain about TRPGs that try to bring in “video game” elements, but if my dang golf game hadn’t clued you in yet, I’m all about that noise. Or, at least, if not bringing in elements directly, then the feeling they evoke.
BUTCHERY’s monsters have individual parts, each a hit location with its own HP. (This is never as crunchy as it sounds to prep - there’s a basic template formed around a d6 table that can be easily adjusted on the fly.) Taking parts out can disable a monster’s abilities or kill it outright. Avoiding damaging parts lets you harvest them later. And, crucially to that investigative combat - each hit you make in BUTCHERY, each reaction the monster takes, tells you more about your prey. And the more you know, the harder they fall.
No lore to read or boxed text or intelligence rolls. Just roleplay and combat - the meat of the game.
I didn’t even have to suggest that my players start keeping a Bestiary with details of all the monsters they fought, to reference during that same fight or in case they come across the monster again. But they did. BUTCHERY just makes these things happen effortlessly, and I love it.
BUTCHERY is coming to ZineQuest on KickStarter tomorrow. Click here to follow the project!
*
That concluded the session. BUTCHERY is nicely episodic like that, mirroring how I tend to play games anyway. That first quest was very Witcher-esque, wasn’t it? The full game takes from a wider pool of inspiration.
Now, let’s finish off talking about the combat mechanics in BUTCHERY, and get into why I call this an investigative combat system.
My earliest RPG gaming memories, outside of tabletop, come from Pokémon. I could go on and on about the hows and whys of what makes those games so dang good, but for now I’ll focus in on one particular aspect of the battle system.
Each of your lil boys can learn four moves, which are like cool combat techniques. Attacks, buffs, all the JRPG things you’d expect. And monsters also have types, abilities and other aspects unique to a species which mean certain moves are going to work better when executed by certain ‘mon, or against a particular opponent.
Mastering all these interactions is the first key to high-level play - but the initial rush I felt as a kid is what I’m chasing here. Something as simple as the three-step mental process of:
- hmm, that guy looks fiery. I haven’t seen him before, but he seems to have a big Fire thing going on.
- I have a water guy. Water puts out fire, right? So... What happens when I use this water move?
- “Super effective”! I win!
The appeal to a little kid is straightforward. It’s hardly master strategy, but at that age it feels like it is. And it’s a thought process that I think is at the core of good problem-solving in games, video and analog. This thing *should* work, so I’ll try it... and it does! Games that focus on letting the players try things and having them produce at least some result, like Breath of the Wild or, I dunno, all OSR games, tap into that creative problem solving loop.
Which brings me to BUTCHERY? Well, kinda. First it brings me to Monster Hunter.
Monster Hunter is a HUGE franchise of action-RPG games from Japan that’s only recently started breaking through overseas in a big way. I came onboard with MH Tri back on the Wii and have been hooked ever since.
MonHun hides that core problem-solving loop within layers upon layers of design. Everything about the game’s boss-level enemies - their creature design, animation, movesets and game stats, even the local ecology where they’re found in-game, all feeds back into that loop.
It’s not just “Fire... water!” with MH, although that’s one of the layers for sure. It’s big footprints... big target” and “old scattered bones... carnivore?” and “tunnel... shortcut... trap?” and “bathes in mud... protective coating... wash it off during the fight somehow” and “if I can find out what it eats I can drug the food, or leave a trail to get it close enough to this other monster’s territory and get them in a fight, then jump on the monster’s back and ride it away as it flees to its nest where I can fight it one-on-one -“
*inhale*
And you find all this out through playing. Fighting monsters makes you - the player, not the character, characters don’t level up - better at fighting monsters. It was Dark Souls before Dark Souls.
It’s a good game.
 |
| Etrian Odyssey’s battle system - also an inspo |
Which, finally... BUTCHERY.
I’m loathe to put more mechanics in a TRPG. So much of what I love about these games I found through the OSR and subsequent takes on that genre - light and streamlined rules that you hack apart and work around in play.
But you, or at least I, need that intersection between pure freeform play and The Rules to really hit a sweet spot, and when i run BUTCHERY I feel like I’ve hit that same spot that Pokémon and Monster Hunter did for me. People burnt out by 3e through 4e often complain about TRPGs that try to bring in “video game” elements, but if my dang golf game hadn’t clued you in yet, I’m all about that noise. Or, at least, if not bringing in elements directly, then the feeling they evoke.
BUTCHERY’s monsters have individual parts, each a hit location with its own HP. (This is never as crunchy as it sounds to prep - there’s a basic template formed around a d6 table that can be easily adjusted on the fly.) Taking parts out can disable a monster’s abilities or kill it outright. Avoiding damaging parts lets you harvest them later. And, crucially to that investigative combat - each hit you make in BUTCHERY, each reaction the monster takes, tells you more about your prey. And the more you know, the harder they fall.
No lore to read or boxed text or intelligence rolls. Just roleplay and combat - the meat of the game.
I didn’t even have to suggest that my players start keeping a Bestiary with details of all the monsters they fought, to reference during that same fight or in case they come across the monster again. But they did. BUTCHERY just makes these things happen effortlessly, and I love it.
BUTCHERY is coming to ZineQuest on KickStarter tomorrow. Click here to follow the project!
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