Killer robots

Have you ever woken from a sound sleep with the best idea ever and forgotten what it was before morning? Today I had the opposite experience: an idea so terrible that my subconscious refused to take responsibility for it and kicked me awake. By morning it was still there, burning like an ember in my thoughts - goblin phone sex operators.

 I have no plans to develop this idea, and no idea how to develop it if I wanted to.

Anyhoo, robots. The first few OD&D games played must have been real kitchen sink settings. I was interested to read that Gary G's Greyhawk had dinosaurs and androids as monsters the players could encounter. It’s a shame there aren't more robots in fantasy game supplements today. Here's some I've statted up, hoping to capture what would have been the 1970s aesthetic:

Roberzerker
A towering armoured beast with a single glowing eye, flailing claw-arms and a grating electronic voice shouting "DESTROY! DESTROY!" Usually set to guard an area or significant artefact. Won't leave the room its guard point is in unless it malfunctions (2 in 6 if damaged).

AC 6 [13], HD 5 (22hp), Att 2 x slam (1d6) or 1 x sonic (1d8, see specials), THAC0 17, MV 90' (30'), SV D10 W11 P12 B3 S14 (F5), ML 12, AL Neutral, XP 550, NA 1d3, TT D

Specials:
Sonic - The robot can make a straight-line attack affecting all opponents in targeted squares. Ignores armour, 3-round recharge.
Boom - a destroyed roberzerker explodes on 2 in 6, doing 1d8 damage to opponents in adjacent squares.
Mechanical - immune to all mind-affecting spells and conditions.

Spider
A dog-sized machine that lurks in the dark in high corners. Has 8 dim red lights as eyes. Will attempt to surprise or swarm opponents.

AC 8 [11], HD 2 (5hp), Att 1 x shock bite (1d6), THAC0 19, MV 120' (40'), SV D13 W14 P13 B16 S15 (T2), ML 12, AL Neutral, XP 35, NA 2d4, TT C

Specials:
Climb - a spider can crawl along walls or ceilings at its normal movement rate.
Backstab - as per Thief.
Mechanical - immune to all mind-affecting spells and conditions.

Scrapper
A man-sized construction which collects all kinds of metal for depositing in the hopper on its back, where it's crushed into ingots for storage. Not inherently hostile, but it wants the party's weapons and armour and will attempt to yank them off.

AC 8 [11], HD 3 (8hp), Att 1 x steal (see specials), THAC0 19, MV 120; (40'), SV D13 W14 P13 B16 S15 (T3), ML 9, AL Neutral, XP 65, NA 1d4, TT B

Specials:
Steal - on a successful attack, the scrapper will cut one item of the target's armour free, reducing AC by 2 points.
Mechanical - immune to all mind-affecting spells and conditions.

Hound
A security robot in the form of a lion-sized dog. Usually found walking patrols in an ancient facility, they attack without warning and fight to kill. 

AC 6 [13], HD 5 (22hp), Att 1 × bite (2d6), THAC0 17, MV 150’ (50’), SV D10 W11 P12 B13 S14 (F5), ML 12, AL Neutral, XP 425, NA 1d2 (2d4), TT D

Specials:
Backup - A hound signals for reinforcements when entering combat with the characters. 2d4 more hounds arrive in 1d6 turns.
Mechanical - immune to all mind-affecting spells and conditions.

Lifter
A huge robot on thick legs or tracks, designed for moving loads around. It may be hostile, or simply oblivious to the tiny characters.

AC 3 [16], HD 15 (67hp), Att 1 × crush  (4d8), THAC0 10, MV 80’ (26’), SV D8 W9 P10 B10 S12 (F8), ML 12, AL Neutral, XP 3,250, NA 1 (1d3), TT G

Specials:
Horn - operates every second turn, characters are deaf and unable to communicate via speech while it sounds.
Mechanical - immune to all mind-affecting spells and conditions.

Docbot
The one helpful robot on this list. Docbots are willing and able to perform medical treatment on human and demihuman characters. 3 in 6 chance it's run out of anaesthetic and attempts to inject a patient with a dried-up syringe before performing surgery. Doesn't speak the patient's language.

AC 3 [16], HD 1 (4hp), Att -, THAC0 -, MV 120’ (40’), SV D13 W14 P13 B16 S15 (T1), ML 12, AL Neutral, XP -, NA 1, TT B

Specials:
Heal - can use one full turn to heal a character by 1d6+1 hp. Can only treat the same character once every six hours.
Space age medicine - can treat conditions that would ordinarily require magical healing.
Mechanical - immune to all mind-affecting spells and conditions.

Note on treasure tables - robots don't carry cash, items or spells. In each case the treasure table given represents the value of the advanced metal scraps you can pick from a robot's wreckage. For each line on the table that indicates a non-money reward, roll again on the highest value money reward line.

Fascinating OSR material

Image by Pete Linforth

In this post I'd like to focus some attention on other people's creativity.  This is a list I started keeping so I could find my way back to blog posts and adventures I really enjoyed.  Some of these resources are well-known in the OSR-space, others less so.  They all deserve to be played and talked about, and I hope you enjoy reading them as much as I have.

 Adventures

The adventures I like are strongly themed dungeons or challenging environments that are only technically dungeons.

The Boswitch Bath-house - infiltrate a bath-house, interact with the patrons, sneak around to accomplish your goal.  The adventure has three different hooks for getting the characters involved.

Prison of the Hated Pretender and The Dread Machine -some people call Prison the best module for introducing new OSR players to this gaming style.  An undead king is imprisoned in a building shaped like his own screaming head.

The Stygian Garden of Abelia Prem - explore a house and its grounds, interact with a variety of mystical plants and then head into the underworld in search of Hell's roses.  A LotFP adventure with a broad stroke of beautiful gothic decadence.

Mad Am I - a well-populated hexcrawl on an island hosting an asylum where terrible occult experiments in psychiatry have leaked out.  Also LotFP and similar in style.

Hell on the Moon - explore a crashed spaceship taken over by demons (not necessarily hostile ones) while working nights in a 50s-style diner run by the last Elf family on the moon.

 

Cool mini-fied rulesets

The basics for playing D&D 5E is three books.  The quickstart PDF is around 200 pages.  (Is it because they pay their freelancers by the word?)  The question of how much you can reduce a ruleset and have a game with effective character differentiation and challenge is one I keep coming back to.

Here Is Some Fucking D&D - based on an expanded Searchers of the Unknown. Characters have no stats, they're built from race, class and level.  4 pages.  Includes a bestiary and random adventure generator.

Dungeon Nights lite edition - trimmed down character creation ruleset in which characters can have both a race and a culture that modify their stats.  A blog post which would probably come out to a couple of pages.

Tenebrae - probably the longest ruleset on this list.  It simplifies D&D rules down to a sleek core and adds some innovative ideas.  Characters can swap classes between each other at will.  This game ought to be much better known than it actually is.

Tunnel Goons - three stats and an item list.  The rules fit on the character sheet.  A monster's only stat is a threat die.  The rules have been adapted to several different game genres.

The Golden Sea - also three stats and an item list.  This one simplifies combat and HP.  The character sheet fits the rules, a bestiary and a map on it.

Mimics & Miscreants - my favourite GLOG-derived game.  The resolution mechanic is to roll 1d20 + stat (not stat bonus) and reach 20 or higher.

Tales of Mordhearse - the simplest ruleset in this list.  A character's class is determined by their starting HP.  They have that and one to three randomly-rolled qualities/powers.

Settings developing through blog posts

The Thawing Kingdom - ages ago the kingdom was frozen into magical ice by the machinations of a mad ruler.  Now it's thawing, releasing the citizens who have been trapped for so long.  But it's not thawing evenly and the magical ice has some odd properties, which carry over to people who only thaw halfway.

The City of Infinite Ruin - everything in the city is slowly being drawn into the centre.  As it moves, the space it moves into grows paradoxically larger.  The buildings themselves expand from hovels to houses to mansions to palaces and their history becomes more complicated.

HSM Apollyon - a ship as large as a city, becalmed on an endless ocean for generations.  Inside, brave adventurers from the engineering section make forays into the passenger quarters hoping to bring back treasure and avoid monsters and demons.

Magical industrial revolution - a world where magic is codified, refined, mass-produced and made the basis for a developing industry.

Centerra - a broad-ranging set of creative world-building posts, especially the ruined cities.

The Gustatory - restaurant district the size of a mountain.  Orc chefs, soup baths, mummies in the cool room.  I'd love to run this, I'm just not sure what sort of campaign justifies a fantasy food court...

Nukaria - especially the Handsome Men posts, Nukaria's take on elves.

Sunless Horizon - the human race has survived into the final age of the universe, living in a single titanic world-ship: Ein Soph.  They're ruled by an AI given the task of finding a way to punch through into a younger universe.  The machines that run the ship are slowly going mad.

Base building mini-game

I've been playing a lot of Subnautica lately.  It's an open-world exploration game, set 90% underwater.  It has beautifully rendered environments and creatures that really sell it as a completely alien planet.

A big part of the fun is the base building mini-game.  You start basic and level it up as you uncover new blueprints.  My preferred method of gathering resources has become moving to a new area and building a small base with a scanner room that can pinpoint all the useful spawns for me.  When you disassemble a base you get 100% of the materials back, so the only investment is time.

(Meeple Girl has been playing a very different game.  It involves waiting until I'm under threat by a Warper or a Sea Dragon, then walking quietly up behind and tapping me on the shoulder... it ought to be a crime.)

The last couple of weeks I've been thinking about a method for adding a base-building mini-game to OSR games.  Admittedly, some of them already have it, in the form of castles and strongholds from 9th level onwards.  But that's intended to be a significant investment of time and resources for the characters, and a reward for the players who levelled their characters that far, as well as a completely new mode of play.  I'm going for something a lot simpler and self-contained, that the players can get into almost immediately.  This is what I've come up with.  I think it would work best in a system where XP is earned by spending treasure.

It's assumed that the characters will be taking over the available space across several buildings instead of renting a house or workyard.  They'll modify it to suit their needs, as much as practical given the restrictions.  The spaces they have access to are represented by the seven unique Tetris blocks:

Each square in a piece is 10' by 10'.  The first costs 100 GP, or whatever amount is suitable for your system.  Each additional segment doubles the cost.  The characters can keep building until they have everything they need or run out of money.  Each time the players ask for a segment, roll 1d10 and give them the piece indicated.  If the result is higher than 7, repeat the last block.

After the first piece is placed, roll 1d4 for each additional piece to see which cardinal direction from the original piece the next is added to.  The players can rotate the pieces as they like.

The edges at the outside of the pieces (not the individual squares) are assumed to be walls.  The spaces the players put together have no access to each other until they start knocking out walls.  The edges for each piece must be more than half wall to support its weight.  That's five edges for the O piece, six for the others.  Take out any additional walls and the roof falls in.

Example

My budget for rooms is 1,000gp.

First room = 4, the O piece.  100gp.

Second room = 1, the I piece.  The d4 shows a 1, indicating that it's placed at the top of the O piece.  200 gp.

Third room = 4, the O piece again.  The d4 shows a 2, indicating that it's placed at the right of the first O piece.  400gp.

Fourth room = 2, the J piece.  The d4 shows a 3, indicating that it's placed below the original O piece.  800gp, so no more rooms.

If I remove the walls between the two O-pieces, I get a nice big, open space.  Each O-piece can have one additional wall removed, which gives access to the smaller rooms, like this:

Within the limits above, pieces are placed and rotated at the players' discretion.  So if I preferred I could have had a base like this:

And that second layout looks more useful because of the next rule: courtyards.  You can extend the outermost walls in a straight line.  Where they intersect, they enclose a courtyard.  That long, semi-wide layout gives us a couple of decent courtyards for extra space.

For upper levels, start the pricing again from base.  Use the same layout but with each new floor remove 1d2 of the outermost rooms.  There must be at least one staircase on each floor.

What's the point of all this?  The base is mostly intended to be a fun way for characters to spend more gold, and something for the players to feel invested in.  If you're using the XP-for-spending-gold rule, you're probably also using a carousing table.  The rooms you add to your base will give some minor bonuses for mitigating bad rolls on that.  A forge can knock out the dings in armour, an apothecary can shorten the duration of a hangover, etc and you can hire retainers with the skills to use them on a temporary basis.

So next we slot in rooms.

Apothecary - 1 square.  Gives access to a herbalist.  +1 to saves vs disease, allergies, hangovers, etc.

Armoury - 1 square.  Sharpens blades, repairs weapon handles and straps.

Barracks - requires 1 square for each character that sleeps there.  Restricted to one open edge.  Reduces gold lost during a bad carouse by half because you were sensible and left your big purse at home.

Common room - at least 2 squares.  +1 to retainer morale rolls while in town.

Forge - at least 3 squares.  Must be in a courtyard.  At least 1 empty square between it and the nearest building.  Gives access to a smith, who can repair armour.

Kennel - 1 square per 4 dogs.  Must be in a courtyard.  Gives access to a master of hounds, who can provide training and treat sick dogs.

Kitchen - 2 squares.  Rations prepared here will never be tainted or inedible except by deliberate enemy action.  Requires a well.

Library - at least 1 square.  Gives a bonus to research actions and somewhere for magic-users to work.

Shrine - at least 1 square.  A place for rituals.  Gives clerics and paladins a bonus to communing with their gods.

Stable - 1 square per horse.  Each square must have one open edge facing a courtyard or the outside of the building.  Gives access to an ostler, who can replace shoes and treat sick horses.

Staircase - 1 square.  Gives access to other levels of the building.

Training room - at least 3 squares by 2.  Gives access to a trainer if required for levelling or learning new techniques, subject to GM approval.

Trophy room - 1 square per 4 trophies.  The perfect space for displaying souvenirs of past adventures and impressing young wenches or farmboys.

Wash house - 1 square.  removes fleas, tar and feathers, various other forms of soiling.  Requires a well.

Well - 1 square.  Must be in a courtyard.  At least 1 empty square from a forge.

In this case I'm going to have a training room, an apothecary, an armoury, a wash house, a kitchen, a trophy room, a forge, a well, a kennel for 8 dogs and a stable for 4 horses.  My characters can sleep off site.  Opening up all the stable squares to the courtyard means blocking the stables off from the building interior, but that's not a problem.  If you're riding a horse, you're going outside anyway.

Key:
A - stables
B - forge
C - trophy
D - apothecary
E - armoury
F - training
G - kitchen
H - wash house
I - well
J - kennels







And now the part I'm sure my players will spend the most time over: traps.  200 GP each.

Arrow trap

Collapsing ceiling

Fire trap

Gas trap

Glue trap

Magic item trap

Pit trap (if on an upper floor, requires 1 square of unused space on the floor below it)

Poisoned dart trap

Potion trap

Swinging blade trap

There's no reason to restrict player creativity here.  If they want a false wall that releases angry bees, they can have it.  Any 5' square (4 per map square) can be trapped.  The players can set or deactivate a trap as an automatic action, unless you're a particularly hard-nosed GM.  If characters let a retainer get caught in a trap, make a morale roll at a penalty.

Hey, isn't this starting to look kind of like a dungeon?

Yes!  And for your players, this might be an opportunity for introspection that leads to a revelation about their behaviour and real change on a personal level.  Mine are more likely to say "Hey, why not a trap that douses intruders with shrinking potion then drops them into a trebuchet?"

B/X class reskin: Wombat

Wombat

Requirements: Minimum Con 9
Prime Requisite: STR
Hit Dice: 1d8
Maximum level: 12
Allowed armour: Any, including shields
Allowed weapons: Small or normal-sized (see below)
Languages: Alignment language, common, wombatese, dwarfish, gnome, goblin, kobold
Saves and level as per Dwarf

Wombats are stout, hairy marsupials who average a height of approximately 4 feet and weigh about 150 pounds.  Wombats live underground and value community, sensible planning and well-built earthworks.  They have a reputation for being pragmatic, practical and utterly without romance.  That last part isn't true of course, but other races find "My darling, my only one, I've invested in a blue chip stock that pays an annuity which will support us in our old age" an unconvincing declaration of love.

Abilities
Combat: Wombats may use any kind of suitably-shaped armour, but only small or medium-sized weapons.  A wombat can use digging tools such as picks, chisels and shovels as weapons without penalty.
Infravision: Wombats have the ability to see in the dark with infravision up to 60'.
Fateless: Due to a common ancestor making a deal with the gods, divination spells with wombats as the target automatically fail.
Padded posterior: Backstabs against wombats do normal damage, even on a critical.
Strewth, what a beauty: Immune to fear effects from magical creatures.  Does not apply to undead or spell effects.
Burrowing animal: Suitably-equipped wombats can tunnel through soft earth at 1/4 normal movement rate and through hard-packed earth at 1/10.
Sapping: Provided there is access to the earth beneath, a wombat has a 2-in-6 chance of undermining a fortified barrier in a useful timeframe.

Drawbacks
Vegetarian: Wombats require 2 rations for every one that another race would eat, due to picking out and discarding the meat.  A level-1 wombat in a wilderness area has a 1-in-6 chance per hour of foraging enough edible tubers to make 2 rations.  The chance increases to 2-in-6 at level 4 and 3-in-6 at level 7.

Reaching 9th level
When a wombat reaches level 9, he or she has the option of founding an underground burrow that will attract wombats from far and wide, who will elect them mayor.  Wombats usually live in townships, so businesses and community groups from other nearby settlements will expand into the wombat's burrow.

*     *     *

Digger by Ursula Vernon is my favourite fantasy graphic novel.  It's about old curses, forgotten gods and the value of making friends in strange places.  It knows the value of following tension with a little comedy or even just some time for the characters to sit on a stump and think.  It's a compelling story, which I'm not going into because I'd genuinely hate to spoil it for anyone who has a chance to read it.  It won a Hugo award and you can read it online for free as a webcomic, so there's nothing stopping you.

It's probably not giving too much away to say that the main character is a displaced wombat who's uncomfortable dealing with gods and regards magic with nothing but contempt.  Named Digger, because that's a perfectly respectable name for a wombat.  Ever since noticing the OSR movement, I've wanted to play a Digger-style wombat in a game.  When I read Patrick Farley's article in Fight On! about penguins as a player race, it didn't seem quite so far-fetched.

Wombats are tunnellers and builders, which puts them in the same conceptual space as dwarves.  The class template above is mostly reskinned Dwarf.  I tried assembling it from scratch using Erin Smale's article on building classes, but it quickly began to look so Dwarf-like that I gave in and used Dwarf as a base.  The wombat has more race abilities, but they apply in very specific situations, so I hope the vegetarian drawback justifies levelling like a Dwarf.

A wombat's life tends to be more prosaic than a dwarf's.  They don't write grand sagas, but they do write their elderly aunt Matilda, because she doesn't get out much these days and could use the distraction.  They like comfortable burrows rather than grand underground galleries, because if you dig too deep it's balrogs, isn't it?

Six Hells

You know where I've never taken my players?  Hell.

Hell (at least for the purposes of this post) is a place of supernatural punishment.  The condemned aren't necessarily dead, they've just pissed off a god or other powerful supernatural being and been sent away to suffer forever.  They could potentially escape, or be rescued, or even revolt and take over the damn place.  Imagine Hell as a stronghold for a cross-planes game!

Here are six concepts for places of supernatural punishment that are awful, but not necessarily so awful that player characters won't have time to come up with a plan together.

1. The Bubble
   An air-filled bubble at the floor of a boundless ocean.  A dusty road winds around, over and past itself, forming an endless loop.  Condemned are forced to march without food or rest by harpies with whips.  Periodically, sea leviathans break through the encircling wall of force in search of food.  The harpies beat them back, but any condemned who are injured in the attacks are forced to walk or drag themselves without treatment or any kind of assistance until their wounds heal.  They can't die here.
2. The Chimney
   The condemned are imprisoned in cramped cages that swing on the end of thick chains together like bunches of grapes.  Things like monkeys swing from the bars and climb around the outside, occasionally swiping at the occupants with razor claws. Below is a landscape of fire and ash, sluggishly flowing lava rivers, and thick acrid smoke.  Vast living shapes move purposefully in the darkness like hills of flesh outlined against the firelight.  Sometimes clouds of cinders billow up from below to singe flesh.  The real punishment here is boredom.  For all the awful nature of the place, the condemned are stuck in their cages, watching it.
3. The Ice Caves
   A cavern with an icy floor.  Wolves chase the condemned across the ice sheets, which crack and spall under their feet.  Move too slow, and the wolves catch up.  Death is painful, but temporary.  Move too fast and the floor shatters, sending them tumbling down amidst the frozen boulders to sprawl across a lower floor.  They have only a moment before the howling starts again and they have to struggle to their feet, which sends new cracks racing across the ice.
4. The Labyrinth
   A confused and back-turning maze of rusted iron and ice, sentient but blind and continually hunting for the condemned with other senses.  When it finds them, it creates monsters or twists its walls and corridors into traps that crush and sever.  Hours later, the victims are reborn from metal compartments that dump them back in the maze.  The worst aspect of the labyrinth is the knowledge that there's an exit and if you find it, you can simply walk out and free.  But you probably never will.  No-one else has.
5. The Leviathan
   The condemned are on an island in the stomach of a colossal beast.  They're under constant attack from parasites native to the leviathan's digestive system.  If injured, they mutate into parasites themselves, compelled to join the next attacking wave.  A fatal injury mutates them back into condemned and they have to wade ashore before the leviathan's digestive juices or parasites injure them again.  In between attacks, the condemned build what fortifications they can out of debris the great beast swallows.  They know the next time it feeds there will be an avalanche of wreckage from its throat, smashing their defences and bringing more condemned.
6. The Past
   The condemned are forced to endlessly repeat their final battle.  They know the outcome, but their limbs carry out the scripted actions against their will.  The only freedom is the short period at the end of the battle when the field turns back time and resets for the next set-piece.  It may be only minutes or an hour before the magic takes hold of them and they're forced to march back to their positions for the next play-through.

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.

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.

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.

Combat engine

I'm learning to love little tools for running games - tables, charts, simple minigames for specific situations. The most fun I've had as a GM is when the game takes a turn I didn't expect, but I have the resources at hand to roll with it and keep going without hesitation.

I have two favourite adventures from my long-running Genius: the Transgression game. The first was when the party's mad psychologist decided to ignore all the advice he was getting from trusted NPCs and overrule the other party members by walking right up to the spooky shut-down asylum and knocking on the door to ask about renting the place. The other was when I asked the players if they wanted to travel to darkest Africa to hunt for forgotten treasure in the jungle and they decided that no: they wanted to open up Mad Science Craigslist and look for gigs in their home town to make some quick money. (Millennials. They'll surprise you.)

In both cases I flailed a bit before continuing, so I have an ongoing quest for little minigames I can run with half my brain while I furiously sketch out the basics of a scenario with the other half. I created this system to see if it was possible to use a chart for NPC tactics in a fight and reliably get a result that looks like deliberate planning and tactics, or a slow slide away from deliberate planning and tactics. It might also work well for a solo game, but I haven't tried it that way. I was in a swashbuckling sort of mood when I wrote it.

Combat tactics

NPC opponents have an Aggression rating of 1 to 6, with most starting on 4.

To find an opponent's tactic for the round, roll 2D6 of the same colour and one of a different colour. If the single die comes up a 1, 2 or 3, continue the same tactic from the previous round. On a 4 or 5, total the two same-coloured dice and add Aggression, then pick from the Tactic table. If it shows a 6, roll it again and pick an action from the Twist table.

As they take or inflict wounds, gain or lose the advantage in a fight, NPC opponents' Aggression will rise or fall. Experienced fighters will change only a small amount, while green, frightened or vengeful opponents will change more. Each time someone in the fight (either PC or NPC) suffers a setback, there should be a chance for Aggression to change. If the NPCs are nervous or demoralised, Aggression will drop when they suffer a setback and rise when a PC does. If they are angry or undisciplined, Aggression will rise when they suffer a setback and drop when a PC does.

If you want a more straightforward fight, without unexpected moves, drop the Twist die. If you don't want to bother with Aggression, roll 3D6 for a tactic.

Tactic table

3	Panic	Flee without caution, open self up to opportunistic attack
4	Surrender	Throw down weapons and submit to opponent
5	Disengage	Attempt to divert opponent's attention away from self
6	Retreat	Move towards cover or out of range
7	Guard	Defend only, no attack
8	Probe	Attack cautiously, testing opponent's defense
9	Wear down	Draw the fight out and try to tire the opponent
10	Stand-off	Wait for opponent to make the next move
11	Balance	Attack and defend evenly, no particular strategy
12	Feint	Try to trick opponent into defending against the wrong move
13	Reverse	Rapidly switch between defensive and aggressive fighting to off-balance opponent
14	Taunt	Try to anger or dismay opponent into making a mistake4
15	Press	Stay on the offensive and hope opponent's skill is inferior
16	Strike	Try to penetrate opponent's defence with a fast attack
17	Charge	Attack with ferocity, risking injury to wound opponent
18	Frenzy	Attack wildly, risking death to wound opponent

Twist table 

1	Reinforce	Call for help from allies/bystanders
2	Change	Weapon/objective/ground
3	Disadvantage opponent	Throw a burning candelabra, maneuver into uneven terrain, cut a curtain so that it falls over their head
4	Advantage self	Take the higher ground, move so that they are not facing the sun, draw/pick up a second weapon
5	Bargain	Try to persuade opponent to surrender/back out of combat/change sides
6	Trick	Try to convince opponent they are about to suffer a setback or gain a false advantage