Magic variant for Knave

The star of the show.

It's starting to seem like the end is in sight for my group's current campaign.  We've just achieved one of the big goals and know exactly where the other one is and who we have to go through to get it.  It may all be settled at brunch with our enemies, provided we can make bail in time for it.  Our success has been thanks in no small part to a highly effective NPC.  That's him on the right.  The most capable member of the party doesn't even have opposable thumbs.  However, it's starting to look like he sold us out to the cops so I'm not ready to give him MVP status just yet.  I have questions, Johann.  Serious questions.  Your communication is limited to sarcastic eye-rolling but you're not eye-rolling your way out of this, rabbit.

This has all been in a house-ruled version of the Nemesis system, on the  planet of Harmony where the discovery of alien artifacts has triggered a gold rush and no-one is paying nearly enough attention to the local wildlife.  The next campaign is likely to be Shadowrun with James II as GM if we can find enough D6s.

After that, I've raised the idea of a short campaign to test out a fantasy module I'm writing: Elysium Bath House.  5e is the obvious choice of system, but we've talked about it before and there are elements of D&D that people find less appealing - classes, levels and dungeon-crawling.  I created Elysium with this group in mind, so it's not a traditional dungeon.  I think Ben Milton's Knave satisfies the other two points.  In place of classes, it uses an encumbrance system.  Want to be a fighter?  Fill your slots with weapons and armour.  Magic user?  Fill them with spellbooks.  Mix and match as you please.  It's level-based, but rather than adding feats, gaining a level just means adding a hit die and spending some points on improving stats.  Spells are level-less but increase in effectiveness and duration as a character levels.  That satisfies the group's objections.

The magic system doesn't quiiiiite match up with the game I want to run, though.  Spells can be found in spellbooks - one spellbook per slot, one spell per book.  Spellbooks cannot be created or copied.  Spells are cast by reading them from the book and work once per day.  I can see why Ben wrote it this way: he likes to encourage player creativity and thinks it can be best served by preventing spells from being overused or overshared.  Want more magic?  Get out there and quest for some.

I can see why, but it still seems a little contrived that spells by their nature can't be read more than once per 24 hours.  I'm looking to run a game where magic is more available.  I think my preferred solution is to say that spellbooks function exactly like the RAW, but it's also possible to learn spells and cast them at will.  Learning a spell is a normal Knave INT saving throw, with an added bonus equal to the learner's level and a penalty equal to the number of spells already known.  Failure means rolling on a magical mishap table like this one by the Hecatohedral Monk.  Check out some of those magical disasters - "Caster can no longer perceive sunlight."  "Caster is henceforth prone to being summoned by summon monster spells cast from other Material Planes."  Some of the entries are ready-packaged adventures waiting to happen.

Casting a learned spell consumes a slot of magical components.  Components themselves aren't hard to come by.  They can be as simple as a blade of grass twisted into a mystical sigil or a hair from the caster's own head tied in an associative knot around a stone from the last river he forded.  The point is to be something that has to be prepared, and then carried and protected in a slot of its own.

I have no doubt that characters with learned spells will venture forth every day with every spare inventory slot stuffed full of magic components, but that seems fine to me.  When you only have a hammer you might be inclined to look at every problem as a nail, but that's a space for creativity to occur in as well.

Boarding now for parts unknown

Skerples has had a remarkable idea.  A dungeon in the form of a train that never stops, driven by a mysterious Engineer, staffed by inhuman Conductors and composed of carriages picked up across the multiverse.  He'd like stocking it with carriages to be a community effort, and reached out via his blog for submissions.  One of the example carriages is a giant cannon designed to fire goblins in padded suits at other cars, currently on fire.  The fire is inching its way towards the magazine, but the goblins are too busy fighting among themselves to do anything about it.  The other is a mouldering library operated by a mocking sphinx who only collects unreliable reference books and bad fiction.

My submission is a brew car operated by undead-hunting monks.  Staking vampires is no job to be doing sober, now is it?

Skerples is the creator behind Tomb of the Serpent Kings, reckoned to be one of the best introductory dungeons for newcomers to OSR-style play.  I confess, I've wanted to be part of a community-driven dungeon design since I first started reading OSR blogs last year, but usually showed up at the wrong time.  This time I'm in at the start.  Creating that carriage was a fun use of an afternoon.

The Golden Sea AP (part 2)

Link to part 1.

It was late when the skiff approached the Drugtown docks and there weren't many people around.  There was a sign advising visitors not to leave the area without making arrangements with the dock master, so they went looking for him.  They found him in his office, high as balls and dead to the world.  One of the characters had an ability that allowed him to remove stress from another character, and we agreed that it could be used in this case to bring him down from his high and make him responsive.  The character did, and the master woke up, angry at the world because of his dissipated buzz and ready for an argument.

He told them he couldn't give them a permit without sampling their cargo for contraband.  "Contraband?  What's contraband in a town that manufactures drugs?"  "Trouble-maker, huh?  I'll keep an eye on you."  They briefly considered giving him the contaminated chocolate as a sample, but decided against.  He sampled an entire bar, then asked for more samples, to be checked over at a later time.  Instead, they showed him their dead bandit leader.  That changed his tone a little, and he agreed to let them proceed into town.

Sherlock made a roll to figure out where in town they were likely to get the best bounty for a dead bandit.  His roll was at +3 for Mental stat, +2 for an ability and +1 for the hometown advantage.  It was a good result, he remembered the details of the different gangs running the town from his childhood there, including one who particularly hated raiders.  He went by the name Dr Feelgood and his headquarters was up on the hill.

They headed up that way and managed to get in to see Dr Feelgood's secretary, who went by the name Butthead. He was a big guy in leather and a mohawk, so it wasn't immediately obvious what qualified him to be a secretary.  Maybe he was the only one in the gang who didn't eat the pencils.  Butthead told them the doctor wasn't seeing anyone today, and the smartest thing to do was leave the bandit with him and come back for their reward later.  The party immediately pegged that he was trying to cheat them out of the reward.  Yu Tuu tried to intimidate Butthead by opening his coat to show a brace of grenades underneath, but failed the roll.  The room was lined with ratty curtains and they immediately heard the click of a gun being cocked from behind one of them.  Sherlock talked to Butthead like a fellow Drugtown boy to tell him it was all just a stupid joke and the tension eased.  He negotiated a deal by which the party got to see Dr Feelgood immediately and Butthead got 10% of the bounty.

The doctor was brusque with them at first, but once again Sherlock used his hometown advantage to turn the interview into a performance, making him laugh with the story of the first bandit's failed attempt to climb their railing before getting smacked off his bike, and the sideswipe that killed the leader.  Some good rolling increased the bounty by 50%.  The reward turned out to be four bullets suitable for Sherlock's gun, some ancient army field rations (still in original foil packaging) and a set of matched Garfield-print coffee mugs.  They left the body with the doctor and left, paying off Butthead as they went.  He was happy to have something from ancient times to trade at the big market two days from now.

The party went back to the skiff to sleep.  Before turning in, Idonou fired up his ancestral heirloom laptop and created a spreadsheet to figure out profit percentages, putting together a plan to maximise their return at the market.  The crew went to sleep in the cargo hold, leaving Nameless on watch with a pair of night vision binoculars borrowed from Sherlock.  That was a good plan because near the end of his watch he spotted a couple of figures in black sneaking up to the boat.  He yelled for the others, waking them immediately, but also alerting the two skulkers.  They rushed him, pulling knives as they came.  He knocked one off the ramp with his pole, but the other reached him and dealt a minor wound with his knife.  After that, the others were on deck and Sherlock won initiative.  He made a difficult called shot and killed the raider with a single bullet in the forehead.  Nameless jumped down to the sand to threaten the second one with his pole.  That one considered the odds and surrendered, dropping his knife.  They tied him up.

Yu Tuu did a good job of intimidating him by pretending to pull a grenade's pin and dropping it in his lap.  He swore that they weren't working for anyone, a guy in the bar sold them the information that there was a skiff in dock with a valuable cargo and they just meant to steal.  Nothing more complicated than that.  It seemed like the truth, so Valium untied him and told him that since he wanted the chocolate so bad, he could have it.  He brought up the box of contaminated bars and informed the bandit it would cost him all the barter he had.  He went pale but reluctantly agreed to return home and fetch it all.  Yu Tuu and Idonou went with him to keep him honest.

It turned out that 'home' was a grotty flophouse where the town's poorest citizens sleep.  The bandit admitted that he didn't have any barter -- but he'd talk to his friends and they'd be sure to loan him some.  Yu Tuu and Idonou got his mark on an IOU, which meant that if they didn't see him again, they could sell the debt to one of the town's slavers.  They made sure he took the chocolate with him.

They returned to the skiff and all was quiet again until the third shift, when a rumble of approaching hoverbikes woke them all.  It was the three remaining bandits from earlier, coming at them from the desert side.  They didn't bother with stealth, they darted closer and threw molotovs, occupying the crew with putting out the flames.  They drove erratic circles around the skiff, ducking and weaving to make themselves harder targets for Sherlock's pistol.  Nameless smacked one off his bike with a pole.  Yu Tuu tossed a grenade and managed to take out the remaining two in a single explosion.  Idonou chased the downed bandit down to the sand, only to find he was wriggling underneath the skiff.  He called the information up to the deck and Valium took the skiff's controls, cutting the antigrav.  It settled to the ground, squishing the bandit under its prow.

The crew buried all the body parts they could find in shallow graves under the dock and claimed their hoverbikes.  One was in good shape, and the other two were repairable.  The session ended there, but the characters made a good profit off their chocolate and salvage at the Drugtown market and finished their trade run covered in glory.

The Golden Sea AP (part 1)

I'm part of a gaming club that uses rooms at a local university.  This is the time of year the university gets an influx of new students, so the club puts aside campaigns for three weeks while the students are on orientation and runs one-shots to let new gamers try out roleplaying.  This week just past I ran a one-off of The Golden Sea.

Golden Sea is a one-page microgame written by Grant Howitt.  Every month he writes a free 1PG and releases them via Patreon.  Grant is the name behind other games like Drunken Bear Fighter, Honey Heist and Pride And Extreme Prejudice.  Most of them lend themselves well to quick, light-hearted sessions.  Golden Sea is one of the more serious examples. (If you want to try it yourself, I really have to recommend J. Wagnaar's redesigned version.  Grant releases games as an angled photo of a collage document.  It's a unique look and I guess it's his signature style, but I personally find them difficult to read.)

Characters get three stats: Physical, Social and Mental.  Numbers are generated by rolling 5D6 and removing both the highest and the lowest.  The remaining numbers get assigned as the player prefers.  There are also eight Paths which each have three Abilities.  Each player selects two Paths for their character and chooses an Ability from each.  It's a very simple system, but the Paths and Abilities make it possible to differentiate characters well.  Task resolution is by rolling 1D20 +stat +any Ability that seems applicable vs a target number.

The setting is post-apocalyptic, but so far past its apocalypse that it's retreated into myth.  My big mistake of the evening was not communicating that aspect of it to the players.  When I described it as post-apocalyptic, they imagined a Mad Max-style chase across the desert.  There were five characters: Idonou, Yu Tuu, Sherlock Holmes, Valium and Nameless.  If you think the names reflect how serious the game was going to be, you would be right.  I went with it, although it would have been nice to explore the implied setting and I might suggest it to my regular group the next time our current GM is out of town.

As well as the Golden Sea rules, I had an oracle app for my phone to give me random ideas, and a copy of Joel Priddy's Knave Fancypants document which includes the Buildings Are People hex exploration rules.

I started the session by informing the players that they were a company of traders,with an antigravity skiff loaded up with chocolate bars from the last working factory in the area and their job was to travel through the characters' home towns swapping the chocolate for barter and returning with a load of water from the only river in the desert.  The players all marked the characters' towns on the map, and the logical choice for first stop was Sherlock's town.  I asked him what the settlement's major resource was:

"Drugs."

Well, okay then.  During the final discussion before starting the players introduced a couple of complications for the characters which I was happy to adopt.  First, they had to keep the chocolate from melting in the desert sun, and secondly they couldn't move diagonally across map squares, only horizontally or vertically.  That meant that drugtown was the only settlement within reach of the company's skiff with the provisions they had.  Valium suggested rationing their supplies to reach a second town (on the map its resource appears to be 'volcano') but the other characters vetoed that idea.

Before starting I consulted my oracle and informed Valium that one of the company owners took him aside on the final night before they were scheduled to leave and told him that one carton of chocolate (subtly marked on one corner) was from a production run that got contaminated in the machinery and it could potentially make people sick.  They still had to sell it, but it was his responsibility to make sure it went to a customer far away from the home town so they'd be less likely to make trouble.  Valium instantly told the other characters, because they were all in it together.  None of them objected to making the sale.  Margins were tight, they needed a profit.

I rolled for weather and got a result of 'worsening from yesterday'.  I ruled that meant clouds and wind, with the potential for a sandstorm to develop if it picked up further.  The characters were cheerful enough, clouds made it that much easier to keep the chocolate solid.  They left early in the morning, had no encounters, and enjoyed an uneventful day.  The weather steadily worsened over the next few days, but the threatened sand storm never arrived, and eventually there was a sudden change back to sunny skies.  That raised the prospect of the chocolate melting, so they rigged a cover out of white sailcloth to keep direct sunlight from hitting it.  That worked and they were able to proceed.

That same day the dice ruled for an encounter and they noticed a column of smoke in the distance.  Sherlock had picked a set of binoculars as his starting equipment.  He checked for the source, but found it was below the horizon.  If they wanted to know what it was, they'd have to turn aside from their route and maybe add an extra day to their trip.  They were on their last day of supplies, so voted to leave it and continue on to drugtown.

They never saw it, but the smoke was from another trading skiff that had been brought down by desert raiders on hoverbikes.  On the map, they were now on a direct line between the crash site and drugtown.  Sherlock had described it as a town run by opposing gangs.  That make it seem like a reasonable destination for the raiders to be headed to trade their plunder for a good time.  I asked the players if they altered their route at all.  No, they decided to stay on the most direct path to drugtown.

The skiff had nice big sails to catch the wind and attention from any observers nearby.  The approaching bandits easily noticed their vessel.  The characters spotted them on the approach and Idonou tried to sharpen a couple of poles into spears.  He rolled badly and failed to put a point on them, but handed them out anyway.  A pole is better than no weapon.  The bandits overtook and separated into two groups of two and three, approaching on opposite sides of the skiff.  Their leader made an obvious 'pull over' gesture.  Instead, Sherlock showed his pistol.  That group of raiders dropped back, and one of the two on the other side threw a burning molotov onto the skiff's deck.  The rag fuse went out before it hit and the petrol failed to burn (a bad roll by the GM).  It made a fairly good distraction though, and the bandit who threw it used the opportunity to try climbing onto the skiff.  The going was difficult (another bad GM roll) and Nameless kicked him off before he managed it.  He went tumbling into the sand.

The riderless hoverbike wobbled away and toppled over, kicking up a fountain of dirt.  The second got closer to throw another molotov, but Nameless fended him away with a pole. (Nameless had 6-5-4 for his stats, and would be the hero on more than one occasion during the evening.)  Sherlock made a difficult called shot and smashed his remaining bottles with a bullet to the saddlebag.

With one bandit dispatched and other disarmed, the party thought the fight was over.  That was when the bandit leader swooped up from his position directly behind the skiff and threw a molotov.  This one splashed burning fuel across the deck.  The characters scrambled to smother it with a tarp, while Yu Tuu swerved the skiff and knocked the leader off his hoverbike.  At the same time, Sherlock shot the other bandit in the head.

Yu Tuu saw two dismounted hoverbikes ahead and discovered that the last two bandits had stopped in order to throw molotovs in tandem as the skiff passed.  He swerved again, but at the speed involved he was only able to get out of one bandit's range as they passed.  A molotov smashed against the skiff's hull and they were on fire again. Yu Tuu brought the skiff low and turned it in a tight circle, scraping the burning fuel off against the sand.  They were scorched but undamaged and turned back to claim the dead bandits' hoverbikes as extra barter for drug town.

Link to part 2.

Road Trip AP - part 10 (conclusion)

Session 8:

Dawn arrived and a lot of racers who spent the night around Team Alabammy's fire were wishing they'd drunk less and slept more during the night.  The morning also brought Chad with it, looking ten years older and mumbling that no-one should get involved with Ziggy's family issues because it could never be worth it.  Ziggy stayed behind to try and sort things out.  (The player moved to another city to start his new life as a barista.  We wish him good luck.)  He was shocked to hear about George's fall from grace, and late night return.

Fred was wandering the camp looking for Judith, who couldn't be reached by phone.  WTF didn't know anything.  (They'd last seen her reluctantly taking their insane friend away, but the players decided that Judith is some kind of action hero and has a personal teleporter so she clearly doesn't need their help.  If we were playing the full ruleset of Genius: the Transgression, they'd all take Obligation hits for that, but we weren't.  My players are terrible people.)

The other Geniuses were packing up their camps, and found themselves treated to the sight of Arthur stomping away, yelling that Howard and Samantha should just get their parents to buy them the race like they did everything else, and they could both just f--- off.  It seemed like Team Rocket had lost their main driver.

WTF received their car, and it needed plenty of work to get it raceworthy.  Eve attended to that, while Chad, Dmitri and Leroy put their efforts into installing Kevin the gearbox.  This was the final race and they were so far ahead on points that they could come in dead last and still win.  The only thing that could keep them from taking the race is if something prevented them from finishing altogether.  Every other team would now be targeting WTF.  The possible exception was Alabammy, who had failed to finish a previous race, which eliminated them from the win.  They were only competing to try and achieve a personal best.  Edith used her time to try and earn some planning dice in George's place. In the end they had to forget about go-faster paint and ziggyfuel and concentrate on Kevin.  They only had to finish, and Kevin seemed like an important tool for that effort.

The race got off to a subdued start, with all the drivers seeming to have their eyes on each other more than the road ahead.  Chad, Dmitri and Leroy hopped the train as usual.

Leroy went to buy snacks and Dmitri shut himself in a toilet so he could drink without being disturbed by a conductor.  Chad dozed in his seat.  It had been a long, sleepless night.  He woke up when someone dropped heavily into a seat opposite.  He was an older man that Chad hadn't met before, but his features marked him as a close blood relative of the Alabammy team's twins.  He introduced himself as their father Bobby-Earl.  He was here to make a proposal: Team Alabammy couldn't win the race any more, but they were still in it, and in a position to help out WTF if the WTFers would agree to stand aside for them in the next race, and maybe return a little help when it was needed.

Chad heard him out, but didn't think WTF needed the help, and wasn't comfortable with the idea of getting into a race-fixing arrangement.  He politely told Bobby-Earl thanks but no thanks.  Bobby-Earl seemed to take it in good humour and got up to leave, commenting that he hoped Chad didn't come to wish he'd decided differently.

Moments later there was the sound of an explosion and the train screeched to an emergency stop.  Looking out a window, Chad saw that the rail ahead was buckled and smoking.  There was a man who could be Bobby-Earl blasting away on what looked for all the world like a saddled cruise missile.

The train wasn't going anywhere, so Chad called an Uber.

In the race, Eve and Edith discovered Team Rocket's car in their rear view, which was a disappointment.  They'd hoped losing Arthur would put them out of the race.  They were shocked when Edith's phone told them "Hi girls" and the dash cam swivelled to look at them both.  It was George, driving Rocket's car.  Next moment, the WTF car's brakes activated, throwing them forward in their seats and dragging their speed down. 

Eve cracked the console open and started ripping out wires, hoping to break George's control over their car.  It worked, and Edith kicked it down into low gear to build up their speed again.  She activated Kevin as a precaution and they pulled away from the Rocket car.  George wasn't as good a driver as her, and without an Interdimensional Phasing Gearbox of his own, he couldn't ignore the road's bumps and dips the way she could.  He shrunk in their rear view until he couldn't be seen any more.

Then there was a thump and a bang and they realised that George's car takeover was at least partly a distraction.  Looking in the rear view again, Edith discovered they were leaving a trail of oil behind them.  Something was wrong with the engine.  Yelling at Edith to keep it steady and not stop, Eve climbed out the passenger side window onto the front of the car and released the bonnet so it came free and sailed away over the roof behind her.  Looking down into the engine bay, she saw a star-nosed mole in aviator goggles looking back up at her in surprise.  She grabbed it by the scruff and tossed it over the car as well.  Looking back, Edith saw it activate a tiny parachute and drift to a safe stop.

Eve was now looking at a mess of severed tubes and cords.  The mole had done a good job of sabotage.  Leaning halfway out of her window, she was able to use her ever-present duct tape and a couple of fanmail dice from the other players to repair them.  Edith was once again in control.

It was getting late and a couple of the players had to catch buses, so we couldn't play out the rest of the race (including Maggie bending the rules to breaking point by trying to burn away their tires with her raygun), but with this last success there was nothing to stop WTF from winning.  They came in midway through the pack, achieving victory and entrance into the Nine Vertex Devils Club for all, George excepted.

Incarnari, city of the mad

Created with watabou's fantasy city generator

Over at the RPG subreddit, user /u/Dan_Felder proposed the idea of the one-page setting.  His example, The Echoing Wood makes it seem like a great idea.  It's a fae-haunted forest that could be dropped into any adventure that requires overland travel.  One page is just enough information to supply a framework to hang your own ideas from.  A few more followed:

The Iron Dunes, a desert where the sand is a mixture of tiny metal filings and ore grains, and corroding clockwork monsters steal children.

The Slugslime Sedge, a dry lakebed given over to vegetative rot where disease festers and only weird loners seem to thrive.

The Savage Tundra, a cold region facing multiple threats in a climate where the environment can kill you if nothing else does.

The Ashlands, a sci-fantasy wasteland with the hook that a war was fought with a superweapon that erased the survivors' memories.

Out of all the examples above, Savage Tundra would have to be my favourite.  The author (Dungeon Possum?  His blog profile doesn't give him a name) describes the region, the locations, the factions, the important NPCs and day/night encounter tables in just the right detail to invite a GM to colour it in.  There's months of gaming in that page.  I think he's also arrived at exactly the right format for showcasing a 1PS.  Everything's available at a glance and easily related to the map in the corner.

I've written a setting of my own and tried to match that format as closely as possible: The Mad City.  It's a far-future setting in Earth's dying years, inspired by Jack Vance's Dying Earth stories and M. John Harrison's Viriconium novels.  People are falling to despair and desperately looking for distraction.  The city is a permanent drunken party that can switch to violence at a moment's notice.  Player characters may be natives looking for revenge, redemption or profit in the time they have left, or the forgotten heroes of a bygone age revived as entertainment.

Click the image to view the PDF

Suddenly, ninjas!

This ninja is disguised as:

1. Farmer
2. Travelling musician
3. Priest
4. Juggler
5. Herb seller
6. Itinerant scholar

And armed with:

1. Tanto (knife)
2. Ninjato (short sword)
3. Tonfa (sword catcher)
4. Bo (staff)
5. Naginata (Pole-arm)
6. Shuko-te (claws)
7. Kusari-gama (chain-scythe)
8. Fukiya (blowpipe)
9. Nunchaku
10. Johyo (Rope-dart)
11. Meteor hammer (chain-mace)
12. Bow

But also conceals (x2):

1. Shuriken (throwing stars)
2. Metsubishi (smoke bombs/pepper spray)
3. Kakute (poisoned ring-blade)
4. Tetsubishi (caltrops)
5. Kanzashi (sharpened hairpin)
6. Kunai (darts)

And has the power to:

1. Be invisible at night.
2. Distract with ventriloquism.
3. Travel unseen in a cat's shadow.
4. Walk over water.
5. Heal wounds with secret herbs.
6. Pass without leaving a trace.

As well as:

1. A supernatural ally.
2. A prized ancestral weapon.
3. The patrol schedule for the closest stronghold's guards.
4. A lover who will take revenge for their death.
5. A flute stolen from a demon.
6. A letter of introduction to a wealthy merchant.

This ninja is attacking because:

1. The clan swore an oath of eternal revenge against a character's ancestor.
2. The clan's demon patron has decreed the character's death without explanation.
3. The ninja intends to take the character's place to infiltrate a location or organisation.
4. The clan elders have divined an evil fate for the character.
5. The clan is allied with the character's political rivals.
6. The character has trespassed in an area sacred to the clan.

The ninja has also:

1. Poisoned the character's/party's food.
2. Rigged a trap in a place the character is sure to set foot.
3. Sent a message to local authorities denouncing the character as a criminal/traitor.
4. Concealed a poisonous serpent/spider in the character's belongings.
5. Hired a gang of thugs/killers.
6. Sabotaged the party's transport.

In dying the ninja:

1. Strikes an effective final blow.
2. Sets off an explosive.
3. Curses an opponent.
4. Dissolves into mist.
5. Summons ghosts.
6. Escapes, having fooled the character into killing a bystander.

The law of conservation of Ninjitsu: a ninja takes -1 to attack rolls and AC for each allied ninja present.