Remember STEAL THE EYES OF YASHOGGHUH?

Still working on it.

I’m not dead just busy and depressed.

I’ve been working on some illustrations for STEAL THE EYES OF YASHOGGHUH though.

I was sorting through my files and found this list of random sci-fi items.

I have no idea why I wrote them.

 

[table id=182 /]

So like an idiot I got a full-time waste services job (which is actually great) so I’ve been doing more bin crawls than dungeon crawls lately. If you don’t like it pay me.

Justin Hamilton commented on Death & Dismemberment that he doesn’t like the idea of attacks causing wounds on max-damage because it means that smaller weapons end up having a better chance of causing actual bodily harm than large weapons, which for me isn’t a big deal, personally I really LIKE that the shitty knife you’re carrying around has a 1 in 4 chance of seriously stabbing the fuck out of someone’s internal organs. That’s a good trade-off to take a knife instead of a greatsword even though the greatsword technically does more damage.

BUT, in simplifying my rules I’ve also been trying to figure out how to make differences in weapon size affect combat without resorting to something like “longer always hits first”. In the past I made it so that if someone with a smaller weapon started a fight with you, you could make an Initiative check to attack first in the first Round. But god that’s boring to remember/play out.

So I had a potentially stupid idea.

What if when you attack/defend in melee (because I use contested melee rolls instead of the attacker targeting a static AC), you rolled a d20 AND your damage dice.

Now the size of your weapon directly affects your likelihood of hitting/defending against someone with a bigger weapon, and if you hit, we don’t have to wait for you to make another roll for damage: you already rolled it what’s the fucking number?

So the knife still has a 1 in 4 chance of causing a serious wound, but that’s because it’s hard to get it in there against an obese Plague Knight swirling a d10 damage carrion flail around his head, but when you do, you JAM IT RIGHT THE FUCK IN BETWEEN HIS RIBS UNTIL SOMETHING POPS.

Which also rolls in nicely to additional weapon qualities.

It’s pretty common for spears to have Reach, attacking first against charges and dealing double damage. So how about if someone attacks you while you’re wielding a spear (charge or not because personally I’d just stop charging people with spears if that’s the only time they do something cool?) you just straight-up roll double damage dice in the first Round. Now you attack/defend better and cause more damage because you’re the longest. Good job.

Big weapons should be hard to use in tight spaces, so how about you roll twice to-hit/defend and take the worst, which now includes your damage dice. It’s hard to carve someone up with a zweihander in a cave when you keep hitting the sides, you should have brought a knife.

That’s all for now love you x

YELLOW QUEEN

Equal parts mystic folklore and flesh, ruler of the Yellow City, smooth-limbed and whisper-voiced, a creamy advanced jaundice complexion and a face hidden behind a brocaded veil to be disposed of on her next wedding night.

Summoned by sects and cults to offer her a new groom that they might hear her rattled whispers of fortune and future.

She does so love them, her collection of suitors, though none have endured the consummation of their union unspoiled.

YELLOW CITY

A hazy metropolis the pale yellow-green colour of powdered bile. The features of the inhabitants seem extended somehow, their skin spongy, and they taste of soap.

Being half dream-scape, obtaining directions in the Yellow City is a hopeless task. To make your way you’ll need to focus on whatever it is that you desire to find.

For every attempt to find a place/thing/service, the player who rolls highest on a d20 must make an INT check, but if the player who rolled lowest fails a WIS check, roll on the Hindrances in the Yellow City table before you get there.

If the INT check itself is failed, roll on the Lost in the Yellow City table.

Much like a dream, anything encountered on those tables will become your new focus until they’re resolved or someone rolls a 1 or 20 in the process, in which case you may choose to move on (or re-attempt a failed INT check).

However, anyone that has been wronged without some manner of closure will likely intrude on you later.

Alternatively, guides can be employed, though their services are not free.

THE CHIMING CHAPEL

The immense palace bristling with bell towers where the Yellow Queen wanders her chambers amongst smouldering piles of incense, forever veiled and awaiting her next suitor.

BLACK EMPRESS

Smiling under a chittering black mass of beetles (or so it seems in the dark), the jealous false-sister of the Yellow Queen who wishes for marital celebrations to end and the mourning night to wake.

She can tell the past but there is always a price.

Her sarcastically sulky, smarmy, oil-tongued people live and travel through the shadows of the Yellow City, waiting for the night, calling out their Yellow neighbours.

LIGHT

Within the Yellow City time doesn’t abide by normal schedules, turning a corner might as easily turn morning into moonless night.

Lamplighters are therefore one of the most important and most harried occupations in the city, tasked with ensuring that the smoking lamps of streets and houses never go out, because we can’t have the shadow people moving out of their dank corners can we?

The position of the lamps are however untouchable, immutable, and while you may think you’re doing a good thing by moving a lamp closer to eliminate the shadow people’s lurking space, the people of the Yellow City will shriek in terror and beat you with fish until the lamp is returned.

Torches, lanterns, and candles are considered obscene and you’ll be drenched in buckets of spoiled condiments and pâté on sight.

THE FLORISTS AND THE BAKERS GUILD

The seething rivalry between the Florists and the Bakers Guild is as old as the city, though more recently the Bakers Guild have come to accuse the Florists of scheming in league with the Black Empress. After all, funerals require flowers, not frothy cakes, and the Necroflorists in particular are ever so shadowy aren’t they?

Both sides remain ever eager to conscript others into their elaborate sabotages, offering rewards of secrets and their more covetable creations.

REMOVING OBJECTS FROM THE YELLOW CITY

When leaving the Yellow City, if you have stolen, requested more than your fair share of a reward, or purchased an outlandish item (so buying a sword is fine, but not so much if you focussed on finding the Returned Ironmonger, who forges blades in the image and essence of his near-death terror), you’ll need to make a WIS check for each instance. Unless you fail the check, you’re unable to ignore the unreality of the item and it decomposes/melts/fades/floats away as a cloud of thin-legged moths/otherwise disappears as dreams so often do.

If this happens to 5 or more items at once they’ll amalgamate into a mocking representation of your greed, separate from the Yellow Queen and free from her influence, with HD equal to the number of items. It will escape cackling wildly into the night if it can; only to keep coming back to upset your plans when most inconvenient/embarrassing, or simply to keep ruining a good night’s sleep.

[table id=181 /]

[table id=178 /]

[table id=179 /]

[table id=180 /]

Fiona ran STEAL THE EYES OF YASHOGGHUH again at GenCon and (at least as someone that didn’t go) it was the most entertaining thing about GenCon aside from her documentating her search for a temp sissy.

I don’t have a play report, but I do have screenshots of her google+ updates, and they are glorious.

Read the rest…

Emmy Allen just put up a great post over at Cavegirl’s Game Stuff about wounds/not automatically dying at 0HP, you should read it.

On a tangent, last year I found time to start thinking about D&D again, and I found that after such a long time without playing at all it really changes/solidifies what you want to actually get out of playing. And for me that’s FAST, RECKLESS FUN.

In looking at things I’ve written in the past, there’s a lot of doom you guys. So much doom.
I think previously I got a bit carried away because doom is fucking fun and interesting to write, but after having time away from it I read some of it and think “fuuuuuuck how would I even make than fun or even work in a game?”
I love horror, I love GROT, and I want to bend things back around to that kind of comedic gore and debauchery rather than the pockets of everything’s-fucked-forever that I had accidentally stumbled in to.

That said, I really don’t mind terrible things happening to players: My brother’s wizard having his 3 remaining good limbs torn off by thin air the first time he tried to cast a spell was fucking hilarious, and lead to him hiring a little mercenary girl who the dice told me thought he was the most amazing thing in existence and carried him around like a backpack. IT WAS THE BEST.

I also don’t mind cataclysmic game-changing things happening to the world – it’s part of why I built Corpathium to be something I could just re-generate over and over again.

I just want those things to be FUNNY (even if just in the extremity of their terribleness), and USABLE.
If I’d struggle to know what to do next if it came up in a game I don’t want it anymore.

And one of the most important things I’m keeping in mind is something Rose once said to me after a game, which to paraphrase: the players need something good to happen to them, otherwise it’s just all doom and terror and pain forever.
Which might be fun to dream up and write, but isn’t so fun to play through if that’s all there is.

So don’t expect to see my stuff suddenly become less gory and demented and psychosexual, I just want to make sure that it’s actually all usable, funny, and allows space to breathe, rather than just turning into a macabre writing experiment.
More Return of the Living Dead less Day of the Dead.

Corpathium is being re-written, my magic tables and system are being revised, I don’t know where I’ll get the time but I want to make some really great things.

And if my rules thought they were safe they were so fucking wrong.
For starters I stopped pretending I was playing Lamentations of the Flame Princess with house rules – bitch your game has been pure house rules for a long time.
Then I started looking really hard at things to decide what was important and what wasn’t, ditched what wasn’t, and pushed and poked what was to make it as simple and quick as possible (e.g. my original Weapon Breakage/Notches rules: it used to be that every weapon had a quality rating 1-5 and you checked it for breakage using the weapon’s damage dice whenever an attack roll came up as the quality rating or less. That makes perfect sense as an exercise in simulation! But not in fucking play! Now it uses a simple Shitty/Basic/Quality rating that the player actively chooses to test to do cool shit which I’ll explain some other time), with bonus points for using the same mechanics as other rules. Because I really can’t be bothered tracking 50 subsystems anymore.

It’s not all finished, and I don’t know when I’ll share things, but when I started revising everything I decided to type it up like an actual ruleset which is now tentatively titled GROT.

Long freaking story short here’s an excerpt straight from it explaining MY new way of doing HP/wounds/dying covered in filth:

Read the rest…

If it’s not clear yet, I’ve been raiding some unfinished tables (and by ‘tables’ I mean the giant spreadsheets I start putting together like “oh I should make a wilderness travel table… okay so I’ll need a table of human encounters and a table of creature encounters and a table for the scenery and a table for interesting plants and then I’ll need to do the same thing for swamps and mountains and…”).

SO HERE’S SOME PEOPLE YOU MIGHT ENCOUNTER IN YOUR TRAVELS!

[table id=174 /]

[table id=175 /]

In showing a friend some character sheets I realised that I had a couple that I never posted, so here we go:

The Glitterchild Monstrosity

The first illustrated character sheet I ever made, for a mutagenic Jeremy Duncan game that never actually happened.

Barnaby Barrachus

From a couple of sessions of Mateo Diaz Torres’ FLOWERLAND.
He killed a swamp bear, got shot by an overly protective mother, saw his witch groupie get mauled to death by a starving coyote and had her possess his armour so they could stay together, lost it a bit when butterfly men tried to put him to sleep and vomit acid on him, and walked into the forbidden black tower and became MAGIC.

Following on from Use Protection, who the hell is in charge here?

[table id=173 /]