Black science

Mention black magic and what comes to mind is curses, necromancy, blood sacrifice, summoning demons, making pacts with Things From Beyond. All of this is obviously bad and wrong. You can immediately recognise that magic is black because there's never any positive outcome from, eg., raising the dead. A curse is a nefarious thing, even if you're cursing for a good reason. 

I'd like to create a concept of black science. Not just science conducted by illicit means, but science that poisons its goals, offends the gods (if they exist) and generally gets the scientist chased out of town by a pitchfork-wielding mob. Which might turn out to be nothing more than magic with added blinkenlights, but if that's the case then so be it.

Science is often considered to be equal but opposite to magic, particularly in RPGs. If you're talking about black science, you're talking about:

• Re-animation
• Opening portals to the hell dimension
• Mind control
• Mutating victims
• Harvesting organs/fluids
• Killer robots
• Blowing up the moon. (Too specific?)
• Draining energy from intelligent beings
• Planarianism (learning by extracting the brain of someone who knows what you want to know)
• Altering history
• Biowar/chemwar
• Bargaining with evil aliens

(Note: Since assembling this list I've been informed that it's only black science if you don't know what you're doing. If you know exactly what you're doing, it's black engineering.)

There's obviously some cross-over here. You could imagine a guy in a labcoat and butcher's apron trading threats with a guy in a purple robe and butcher's apron over the top of a freshly filled grave. Elizabeth Bathory took blood from her servants to stay young, Alexander Bogdanov took blood from his students. In DC's old Captain Marvel comics, one of the villains was Dr Sivana, who could speak a scientific formula that allowed him to walk through walls.

What does a black scientist want?

Money, power, revenge, respect... the usual gamut. He may also be motivated by a pure but reckless curiosity about things that mankind were obviously Not Meant To Know. A willingness to sacrifice others in pursuit of forbidden knowledge is a given. You don't make a megalomania omelette without breaking a few egos. Black scientists aren't necessarily mad, but they have an intensity that smaller minds can't match.

 

Signs and portents

 

Evidence that there's black science going on should leak out in the form of mass headaches, deformed animal births, mass bird deaths. A hint that someone's messing with radiation and/or ultrasonics. Power drains? Stepford people? MIBs? Mysterious lights at night?

Stepfords could be people who've thrown their ambitions in with the scientist ("Dr Deathbringer is a respected member of our community! His portal to the vampire dimension will bring industry and business back to this town!") or actual smiling zombies ("Dr Deathbringer knows what's right. We should do as he says. Dr Deathbringer knows what's right. We should --"). In the latter case, they could turn into rage zombies if something takes them outside the parameters of their programming.

I like the idea that black science inadvertently summons or even creates Men in Black. Maybe they're observers from elsewhere. Maybe antibodies in a universal immune system. Always enigmatic. Sometimes working for the scientist, sometimes opposing him.

 

Witch marks

 

Lab coats, jacob's ladders, and cackling laughter are a bit on the nose, aren't they? So maybe we don't use those. Wild hair and a tendency to rant is fair game, though. Poor social skills. A general lack of patience for ignorant outsiders.

Question: is this just a reskinned magician? Mmm, possibly. Better question: what kind of game do I intend this for? Probably not off-the-shelf fantasy. Something pulpy? Something post-WWII-cold-war-red-scare-stranger-danger-ish.

Destiny combat

Image by Pete Linforth

I've been noodling with a concept I call destiny combat, which is how the very wise and powerful get their revenge on each other. The idea is that with a great deal of planning and effort, you can ensure a rival fulfils their destiny in the absolute worst way possible.

The foundational premise is that everyone has a destiny, whether it be large or small. You're fated to live and die in a particular way, and that's unchangeable. But while the outline may be fixed, the details are forever changing. That's why fortune-tellers are unreliable and oracles are mystical and cryptic. They can only see your current future and by the time it arrives it may have changed.

The outline of your destiny is important to the world, but it's the details that are important to you personally. For example, your outline might be that you're destined to inspire generations of the world's great philosophers. That might be through founding one of the great colleges, with a strong tradition of sharing knowledge... or by getting tortured so horribly that a religion forms around it. Obviously you'd prefer one. Your enemies might prefer the other.

The very powerful are capable of reading destiny (theirs and others) but they usually don't. In the process of looking hard at someone's fate, it gets fixed in place. Both the outline and the details. That might mean the good outcome gets selected, but then again it might not. It's a heavy responsibility to bear. And if you fix your own bad outcome in place you'll have good reason to regret being so curious.

Naturally, wizards will ward their own destiny to prevent someone else examining it. Even so, there are ways and means to get partial but accurate glimpses of a future without running into a ward or altering fate. Certain places, times and rituals you can follow. To outsiders, the process seems even more vague and mystical than normal wizardry. Use them properly and you can observe a fate like a bird in your peripheral vision, ready to fly away if you turn your head. You can make guesses about it based on that, and maybe nudge it a little to move in the direction you want.

This is the work of years, or perhaps even lifetimes. Great sages trying to uncover and fix their own good end in place, and infer from unexpected changes who’s working against them and how.

In a world like this, what happens to people who achieve their great destiny and survive? If you believe that the workings of destiny are as perfect and omnipresent as physics, they probably just live quietly until they die unremarkably. In a world where it’s a legitimate threat that a god might drunkenly lose your planet in a game of cards, things might not be so neat. I think a party of former Prophecied Heroes would be perfect agents for a high-powered wizard. Cut loose by destiny, unpredictable and un-divineable. And it makes sense of the way players will stomp all over a GM’s plans for them.

And it makes this scene possible:

“You’re a former chosen one of the prophecy? So am I!”
“And me! I fulfilled a prophecy. What about you?”
“Well, yes. But I don’t like to talk about it. There were spiders.”
“‘Scuse me, I just recently fulfilled quite a big prophecy--“
“Shut up, assassin. We’re still turning you in for the bounty.”

World turtle immobilised part 2

Further exploration of the thought experiment in which we have a world carried on the back of a turtle crash into a spherical one.  This time, the landscape underneath the turtle.

In this post I talked about a full-sized globe planet which has had a second planet, a flat one carried on the back of a juvenile world-turtle, land on its surface with minimal damage.  (IE. we still have two worlds, but they're not in great shape.)  Generations have passed, civilisation has more or less recovered from the turmoil and they're in a position to start looking around and wondering what actually happened.

What's known is that the weather is wetter, there are vast salt marshes forming to the East where the a new geographical feature blots out the sun for half the morning, and strange new animals have been seen in those regions.  And the sages, who have read the antique writings, say the winters are now milder, the summers are hotter and the year is two days shorter than it used to be.  Gods were probably involved, but there's no consensus on who they were punishing or for what.

Expeditions sent by the new empire to explore the area don't actually see the turtle with any kind of clarity.  It's too vast.  On a clear day, from a hundred miles away, you might see a hint of a head or a flipper, with a titanic disc above.  The water pouring off the disc falls into vacuum, which instantly converts it to a fog.  It drifts down, where the jet stream helps by pushing it away to the West.  There's still enough water in the air around the turtle to surround it with clouds.  They figure out it's turtle-shaped by mapping it.  On horseback by land, and by ship where its hindquarters overlap the ocean.  In the process they discover The Bite and the curious effect the blood which is still oozing from it has had on the local wildlife, but that's for a later post.

(I did a back-of-the-envelope calculation of how much water is pouring off the disc if it has the same flow rate as Niagara Falls.  Then I decided that that magic which recycles that water back onto the disc is still working — otherwise it would have doubled the amount of water on the planet's surface in the first five minutes.)

What the explorers actually see is cloud-covered lands with a strange top-heavy mountain at the centre.  It's never truly dark here  There's a bright point in the fog, lighting it from the inside.  Sometimes it's above the mountain, far away and dim, sometimes it's close and the cloud glows with a diffuse light.  (One explorer described it as 'akin to being shrunk down and standing at the centre of a cold candle flame'.)

The turtle is ringed with concentric circles of volcanic chasms because it's slowly crushing the continental plate under it (its magical nature gives it some buoyancy even in death, otherwise there'd be no slowly about it). If you remember the first post, the turtle world is the size of Ceres, which is shown on the left here compared to Earth. Its weight has created a depression around it which has filled with brine, making an inland sea a few dozen miles wide.

The area around the turtle was damaged so badly in the cataclysm that none of its life survived. The landscape is slowly being recolonised by hardy plants and a few animals that would be equally at home in a desert. The only intelligent life is a few small, migratory clans of orcs and gnolls.

Wizardly Traveller tech chart

I've never played Traveller, but I do own a core rulebook for it that I picked up on spec.  It was on the bring & buy table at a small local wargaming tournament.  I was there because the website said there might be a couple of RPG sessions running, but that side of things didn't work out.

It turned out to be a fun system just to play with on my own, following the lifepath system to generate unexpected characters, designing ships and the like. Of course, me being me, even before playing a session RAW I had to start tinkering with the rules.  I wanted to add magic and generate a galaxy where Alien, Star Wars and Lord of the Rings could all happen at the same time.

This is the  tech  magic chart add-on I came up with.  It's surprisingly hard to find a title for each rung on the magic ladder. English just doesn't have that many words suitable for quantifying the mysterious and ineffable. 

ML 0: (Primitive) 

No magic.  This world has no active gods, no awakened spirits, no natural sources of mana and no afterlife.  It is not possible to reincarnate here, or from here.  Spells cannot be cast.  Any open-ended spells or artefacts that rely on local mana resources will fail to operate. 

ML 1: (Primitive) 

Magic is mostly superstition.  A few meditation techniques are in use to improve concentration and memory.  Gods are unresponsive.  Local conditions prevent spirits from being contacted or summoned.

ML 2: (Primitive) 

Magic is limited to a few adepts or institutions.  There are a few unsophisticated techniques for contacting spirits.  Invoking spirits or elementals is done through rituals requiring large-scale sacrifice or the participation of entire populations.  The number of spells available to learn is severely limited.  Alchemy is not distinct from normal chemistry.  Enchantment is not understood.  Gods can only be contacted after long ritualistic preparation and their communications require interpretation.

ML 3: (Dabbling)  

Cantrips are available to the educated.  A few low-quality alchemical materials are available.

ML 4: (Connected)  

Low-powered spells are available to the educated.  Gods offer minor blessings in exchange for a suitable sacrifice.

ML 5: (Involved)   

Low-powered elementals and spirits can be bound.  Divination is possible, but unreliable.  Cantrips are available to the average citizen.  Spells are understood  among the educated.  Medium-powered spells are available.  Reasonable alchemical materials are available, but resource-intensive to produce.

ML 6: (Practising)   

Divination is common, but inaccurate.  Small, isolated industrial use of magic.

ML 7: (Arcane)   

Godly activity is often erratic, with poor understanding of the gods' motivations and reasoning.  Small-scale blessings and curses are available without godly involvement.  Moderately powerful elementals and spirits can be bound.  Bound low-powered elementals and spirits are common.  Enchanted items are available to the wealthy or politically-connected.

ML 8: (Far-sighted)   

Gods manifest signs and portents.  Divination is trustworthy.

ML 9: (Adept)  

Gods send visions.  Visions can be accurately interpreted.  Bound moderately-powerful elementals and spirits are common.

ML 10: (Learned) 

A well-defined pantheon of gods with clearly-marked domains.  Gods may be spoken to in their temples.  Magic is widely available, with golems in use for dangerous work and access to informed spirits through government and private institutions.  Many citizens use health charms for minor beneficial effects.  Physical immortality is available to the wealthy or politically connected.  Divination can be verified with a high degree of accuracy.  High-powered elementals and spirits can be bound.

ML 11: (Wise) 

Elementals and minor spirits are bound to power and operate common machinery or mystical engines.  Blessings and curses can be performed at interstellar distances.  High-order artefacts can be created (eg. "The Sword of the Prophecy").

ML 13: (Masterful)  

Widespread use of tutelary spirits in education.  Frequent consultation of ancestral spirits.  5 - 10% of citizens are physically immortal.  Gods may be invested to manage specific small domains.  Average citizens have the use of bound elementals.  Divination is well-understood and probably highly-regulated.  Bound high-powered elementals and spirits are common.

ML 14: (Transcendent) 

10 - 15% of citizens are physically immortal.  Reincarnation is a controlled process and may be used as a criminal punishment or to schedule the re-emergence of great heroes.

ML 15: (Celestial) 

Most or all natives are born immortal and have innate spell-like abilities. Elementals and spirits are invoked and bound for trivial purposes.  Godly activity can be regulated.  Destinies can be altered.

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.

World turtle immobilised

Picture a world-carrying turtle. Four elephants on its shell, and a flat planet on their backs.  We want the turtle to be visible from the edge of the world, so have the turtle's length overlap the planet's by about an eighth at front and back.  That should give us a bit of flipper and a head to look at if we're peering down from the very edge, where the ocean turns into a waterfall that tumbles endlessly into space.  For the planet to have the same surface area as the Earth, that would make it about 19,000 Km or very roughly 12,000 miles across.  Big.

We want it to be smaller, because we're about to crash it into an inhabited world.  Let's make it a baby, only about the size of Japan.  That gives us 1,200 Km (750 Mi) of turtle, and makes the world on its back 900 Km (560 Mi) across.  Still big.  If we take a Loggerhead turtle as our template, it's a turtle the size of Ceres, the largest asteroid ever discovered.  It's not a dinosaur killer, it's more like the school bully that beats up dinosaur killers and steals their lunch money.  So instead it makes a semi-controlled landing and immediately dies because something much larger than it is has taken a bite out of its side.

(Sages of the day recorded that something whale-shaped blotted out constellations over several nights, other mystics point out that it had a triangular fin on its back.  Educated men know the world is round and can use parallax measurements to estimate the creature's size, but they quickly run out of beads on their abacus in the attempt.)

Even a controlled landing by a 1,200 Km turtle is going to mess up your planet.  First there's the noise, the loudest ever heard.  Birds are knocked out of the air by the pressure of the sound wave.  Then there's the hurricane of displaced air, tearing up forests and stripping fields.  The impact (no more than a kiss, really) sends millions of tons of soil and rocks billowing into the atmosphere, blotting out the sun.  All across your continent, dormant volcanoes erupt back into life, spewing magma and toxic gas.  Earthquakes shiver your cities apart.  The first of the great forests far enough from the crash site to have survived begins to burn.  Rocks the size of houses crash down, entire countries distant.

A third of your population dies in the first few hours.  Half that number again starve as crops fail and the landscape plunges into a winter that will last three years.  More are killed by bandits and wandering companies of looting deserters during the civil war that follows, or forced to flee into the wastes as refugees.  It takes a while for civilisation to re-emerge, establish a government and rule of law, and solve enough of its ongoing problems to think about sending an expedition to the site of the impact to see what the hell happened.  Two generations doesn't seem like an unreasonable length of time.

In the meantime, strange rumours have been filtering out of the East (which is arbitrarily where our turtle landed in relation to the new centres of government).  Never-ending salty rain.  An inland sea where none existed before.  Oddly symmetrical mountains on the horizons.  A shining globe above those mountains, half-hidden by a haze of distance.  Enormous, glowing spheres crashing across the landscape.  Strange, savage animals and plants.

It would be a whole new world, within reach of the recovering old world.  I think I could make a campaign out of that.

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.