City of Ghosts

It's off to GeyserCon this weekend, where I hope to get in a drunken argument about whether Spock's ear-points give him better or worse hearing in the air pressure maintained on Federation starships.

This is another city-based one page setting.  Like the previous one it's part of the far-future mythical post-apocalyptic world I call Earth-at-the-end.  In this case we have three factions camped in the wasteland around a city haunted by ancient machines and deadly electrical ghosts.  The city's homes automatically prepare fresh food, medicine and clothing every day.  It's the resource that allows the tribes to survive in the wilderness, but it's also a fatal trap.  The machines enforce an obscure ancient code of laws and their punishments kill.  An encounter with a ghost might be survivable - barely.  A second, probably not.  There are treasures in the city's residential towers and the Ice Market, but no-one has lived to describe them.

Made using Watabou's fantasy city generator, which deserves a lot more recognition.

Click the image to view the PDF

My girlfriend is an evil witch who turned me into a goblin and made me love her for it

Further thoughts on magic house rules for Knave.

The idea is to make magic more accessible by giving characters the opportunity to learn spells, instead of casting by reading from a spellbook.  The further idea is to have learned spells burn a tangible resource, because if it's the cheapest tactic in the game characters would be silly not to use it for everything.  Spell components don't have to be rare or expensive, but it seems to me it would be in the spirit of the Knave rules if gathering them is a mini-adventure all by itself.

When a character learns a spell, the player rolls on the table below to see what mundane resource it requires.  Each of these items should be available in pretty much any settlement where the characters are likely to find themselves.  Several of the same item would fit in a single inventory slot. Gathering them may require some fast talk, petty crime or an act of public nuisance, but none of them would be out of reach to tomb-raiding adventure-seeking ne'er-do-wells.

1. A strand of the magic-user's hair, knotted around a pebble from the last river they crossed.
2. A mystical sigil, drawn in soot from a widow's hearth.
3. A nail-paring from a left-handed man.
4. A tine broken from a rich man's fork.
5. The echo of a child's laughter, captured in a clay jar.
6. A black chicken feather.
7. A stone taken from a crossroads.
8. A pickled onion.
9. A feather from the fletching of a used arrow.
10. Moss from a grave marker.
11. A shard from a pot broken by a baker's wife.
12. A coloured stone used in a child's game.
13. A wheat stalk from the last hour of the day's reaping.
14. A bone from a fish served to a judge.
15. The tail of a rat killed by a calico cat.
16. A thread cut from a coat on a church's steps.
17. A boiled sheep bone.
18. Tallow from a candle burned by a fishmonger.
19. A lie spoken by an aunt.
20. A needle used to sew a bridal veil.

Wait, what was that about my girlfriend?

"You're totally a goblin."

"But... you bought me most of the dice I own.  And hand-sewed my dice bags.  And found me the book sale where I got half my games."

"I know."

"You're an evil witch."

"I know."

Adventure train

With the extra material contributors are adding to Skerples' Indefinite Train project, it's starting to seem like a practical setting to run a game in.  I've been thinking about how I'd run one, and the first step would have to be spacing out the carriages in the project folder.  Not every carriage would be a sphinx's den or a mad scientist's lab or a flooded compartment where the undead fight a never-ending sea battle.  The majority of them would simply be people living and working and getting on with their lives.  I think this calls for a series of nested tables.

What's in this carriage? (1d6)

1 - 3 Residential
4 - 5 Blended
6      Special

The way the train rearranges itself during storms, it's not likely there would be districts of similar cars.  Each car would be its own little community with the end doors as the border.  Trade routes would re-establish themselves with each new configuration and the car's fortunes would rise or fall depending on how close it was to resources, industry, commerce, etc.

What kind of residence is this? (1d6)

1      Slum - cheap boarding houses or penny-a-night flophouses.
2 - 4 Apartments - top floor split into cramped apartments, bottom floor is shared facilities like cooking, cleaning, laundry, sanitation.
5 - 6 Family homes - each compartment is a separate residence with all the conveniences built in.

Blended: a blended result on the first table is a combination of residential and shopping area.  The class of residences should be influenced by the kind of trade going on here. 

How many trades are represented here? (1d6)

1 - 3 One trade.
4 - 5 Two trades.
6      Three trades.

What kind of trade goes on here? (1d6)

1 - Market
2 - Shops
3 - Craftshop
4 - Hospital
5 - School
6 - Chapel

That's a lot of rolling already but we could break it down further.  (1d6)

1 - 3 One service.
4 - 5 Two services.
6      Three services.

Roll 1d6 to pick a service: 

Market
1 - 2 produce
3 - 4 livestock
5 - 6 craft

Shops
1 - 2 food
3 - 4 clothes
5 - 6 equipment (which lumps in everything from gardening tools to stationary)

Craftshop
1 - 2 carpentry
3 - 4 textiles (a broad category including cloth, rope, nets, canvas)
5 - 6 tools

Hospital
1 - 2  herbalist-apothecary
3 - 4 barber-surgeon
5 - 6 wise woman

In this case the wise woman assists with births and gives good advice like "that'll heal if you stop picking at it."

School
1 - 2 classrooms (for children)
3 - 4 lecture hall (for older students)
5 - 6 sage (for private consultations and lessons)

Chapel
1 - 2 shrine
3 - 4 cloister
5 - 6 mortuary

A cloister may not count as a service.  Let's call it a feature instead.

To round it out, the mortuary does (1d6):

1 - 3 cremation
4 - 5 'sea' burial - the corpse is wrapped and dropped from the train when it reaches suitable terrain.
6      sky burial - the corpse is ceremonially dismembered and left on the carriage roof for birds to eat.

What does a special result mean? (1d6):

Some of these results are special because you wouldn't need many of them.  Some because you wouldn't want many of them.  In either case, they're not likely to share a car with homes or shops.

1 - Forge
2 - Factory
3 - Slaughterhouse
4 - Red light district (brothels, gambling dens, opium parlours, seedy taverns)
5 - Goblins
6 - Unique car (pick from contributor-submitted carriages)

I've included goblins because I think it would be fun and useful to have the occasional car of creatures that specialise in getting around the train quickly.  They wouldn't all have man-firing cannons like Skerples' goblin cannonade car, obviously.  Some of them would use sensible time-tested methods like firing harpoons at neighbouring cars, or running rope under the axles just inches from the track, or training giant birds of prey to carry people.

This means that the unique adventure-laden cars from the project folder should randomly come out once in every 36 cars.  That seems realistic and is probably a good result for the train residents' peace of mind.  Any game set on the Indefinite Train is going to be a journey even if the train never stops, because the linked cars are effectively one miles-long corridor with rooms leading off it.  This should provide the space to drop in a few complications on the way to and from a capital-A Adventure.

Let's try this out.  I roll a 6 (special), followed by a 5 (slaughterhouse).  So this car is going to have animal pens, probably on the top floor so the stairs would be replaced by ramps.  Downstairs there's a killing floor and butchery.  There's going to be a stream of carts with animal carcasses through the neighbouring cars.  I wonder how they feel about that?

For the next car I get a 3, then a 2.  Residential apartments.  They probably don't care for the dead animal traffic through their living area, but people gotta eat.

Next is a 4, followed by a 6.  Blended with three trades.  The first trade is 1, a market and 4, two services.  I get 2 and 2 for services.  2 is produce, and I'll take the next result since it's a double, which gives me livestock.  I guess this is where carriage one gets its animals from.  The second trade is 2 and 1, shops selling food.  There's probably another butchery here, turning large cuts of meat into small ones and making sausages.  The third trade is 6, a chapel, with two services.  I get 1 and 2 for services.  Both of those indicate a shrine, so I'll roll the second result down to a cloister.  Given the tone of the shops, the residences here are probably apartments.

Our fourth car is 5, blended, with 6, three trades.  For the trades we get 5, a school and 4, two services.  That's 2 and 3, classrooms and lecture halls.  The second trade is 4, a hospital, 1 for one service and 4 for a barber-surgeon.  The third trade is 2 for shops and 2 for one service.  The service is 5, equipment.  The trades we have in this car make it seem a little more up-market than the previous one, so let's say it hosts several family homes.  The equipment that shop sells may be high-class homewares.  (Can we interest the adventurers in a Live-Laugh-Love wall plaque?)

The fifth car is 6, a special and 2, a factory.  Maybe they manufacture Live-Laugh-Love wall plaques, or maybe they make something more useful.  Lamps, rope, precision scales for weighing your gold.

Our sixth and final car is 3, residential and 2, apartments.

On the other hand...

And of course now I've gotten all that out of my head, I start thinking okay, but it could be fun if each car was unique, if players had to worry about supplies and equipment, if they had to make opportunities to rest and tend their wounds, if they had to find allies and develop contacts on the fly.

Brain, why you do this to me?

Choo choo

Skerples' Indefinite Train project got mentioned again on Reddit this week when user Goblinsh made a post to bring it more attention.  I agree that it's a worthwhile scheme.  A train hundreds of carriages long, travelling through worlds and planes, picking up random passengers and cargo as it goes.  The engineer may be a god escaping from an apocalypse, or travelling to one.  Anyone can contribute.

I've added a couple more carriages to my initial contribution, the dragon teppanyaki restaurant and the feuding Croshaw sisters' family car.  If you didn't believe my claim to have no artistic talent, this might convince you.  But I hope there's some usable game content in there.  'Unpolished but fun' is how I'd describe the project's pages.

My current favourites from the submissions are the broken robot factory and Murder on the Infinite Express.  Go and check them out.  They're worth your time.

And now we are 12

Fair warning: this post may be NSFW if your work considers accidental text-based smut problematic.

I've been thinking a lot lately about my Earth-at-the-end setting, with its cities coiled around ancient technology that sustains them on a dying planet.  I've got the one city so far, but I mean to add more and it would be nice to have an overland map to tie them together.

I'm an artist the same way a dead horse is a life raft - it'll get the job done, but there are probably better alternatives.  The map generator at azgaar.github.io is one of them.  Click on the image below and you can see one of my experiments.

The T&C allow users to make use of generated maps for their own purposes and as you can see it makes attractive ones, so it's perfect.  I decided not to use this particular map because I wanted a single continent rather than several spread out ones, but then I noticed there was an even better reason not to use it.

The generator automatically creates place names for maps.  I assume it has a table of syllables and uses Markov chains or a similar technique to ensure you get pronounceable words.  You can edit place names, but I swear to you: I didn't do that.  May all my crits be failures if I tell a lie.

Imagine the travel brochure for these places.  "Take in the sights of Pornia, explore the hidden depths of Vilva, all the while anticipating your arrival at the final destination of Cum!"

Yeah, I am so twelve.