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.

The Anthropophage

In a previous post I added a one-page setting document for a far-future city in a world inspired by Jack Vance's Dying Earth stories. One of the hazards mentioned but not described thanks to space restrictions is the anthropophage. And that might be best, because I think with the one page setting concept, it's proper for a GM to interpret the beasties in a manner that suits their campaign. Michael Prescott often includes creatures as a name only in his Trilemma adventure locations, as a kernel for GMs to form ideas around.

But I've been thinking a little more about my Mad City hazards. At first I intended the anthropophages to be poetically-named human cannibals, decadent and morally bankrupt. Now though, I think I like the idea that they're a separate species entirely. Something out of antiquity, from a previous age of the Earth. Maybe even that age's human race, devolved into savagery. I always wondered how Vance's deodands originated. Irresponsible magical experimentation? Visually, I'm inspired by Doctor Who's Futurekind. 

*     *     *

It's common wisdom that the Lighthouse has revived the human race from extinction on at least three occasions. Since the last revival, the world has been plagued by man-eating anthropophages. It's possible that during the last age of man the human race degenerated into this predatory form and no longer met the Lighthouse's minimum standard for 'human', triggering the next revival.

The typical Thropo is human-looking, but with a spine curved slightly forward and bowed legs, as though frozen in in the moment of springing at a victim. They also have leopard-like spots on shoulders and neck, where they can be easily hidden by clothing. And carnivorous teeth. There's a noticeably musky smell about them, like a lion or other large predator. They like to attack at night, when the darkness hides their nature. A common tactic is for a female or cub to pretend to be wounded and call for help, drawing rescuers into a pack ambush. They've been known to join travelling caravans, stepping into the column one by one until they have the numbers to grab someone and drag them away, quietly incapacitating them in the process. They have a talent for mimicry and learn languages easily.

Thropos are cunning, but not clever. They don't plan long-term. They can use tools or technology if they see a human use them first, but don't retain the knowledge. Specimens in captivity have learned to read, but they show no interest in doing it without the threat of punishment. They're highly sensitive to human moods and quickly pick up on stress or fear. Thropos themselves don't react to fear like human beings. They'll retreat from a conflict if the odds are against them, but if cornered they fight without hesitation or holding back.

Packs usually number around 3D4 of all ages. When food is scarce, Thropos cope by eating their weakest. A pack which has had lean times will have no cubs or older specimens with them. When there's real risk of starvation, they turn on pregnant females as well. They can supplement their diet with animal meat, but a Thropo that doesn't get at least half its protein from human flesh will grow sickly and become a target for others.

Communities which catch or kill Thropos like to dismember the bodies (so they don't distress residents with their human appearance) and put the parts on high stakes at a distance around their settlements. Thropos can smell their own dead for miles, and are less likely to hunt where other Thropos have been killed. Even so, their numbers have been growing in recent years. Well-known settlements in the plains have been wiped out by Anthropophage predation. In these times of lost hope, only creatures that never think further than their next meal can thrive.

HD 2, AC 6 [13], Att 2 claws (1d4) 1 bite (1d6), MV (120') 40', SV D12 W13 P14 B15 S16 (F2), ML 9, AL Chaotic

Specials:

• Howl. Once per combat a Thropo may spend an action to make a screech that triggers an atavistic dread in any living man. Human characters of level equal or less than the Thropo must save or freeze for a turn.
• Frenzy. A Thropo bloodied but still in positive HP gains 1D6 temporary HP that lasts until the end of the fight. It's quite possible for a Thropo to defeat all opponents and then keel over dead from their wounds.

If a player wants to play an anthropophage: why? Did their serial killer character get locked up? Create the character with -2 INT +1 WIS.  Each day they go hungry, make a saving throw vs paralysis.  On failure, immediately start hunting the nearest suitable prey.  -1 to the roll per extra day spent hungry. Each week they don't eat human meat, roll vs death or take -1 CON with no natural recovery until their next meal of long pig. Each turn, NPCs can make an opposed WIS roll to realise what it is they're standing next to.

Earth-at-the-end

A while back I posted my dying Earth one page setting, The Mad City.  I thought I was finished with it but it's been on my mind lately, because I'm not sure there isn't more to be done with it.  A single page doesn't have room for more than a sketch of the setting and in writing it I found myself putting aside ideas that interested me but needed more detail than I could go into without overflowing the page.  Some of them seemed like they were worth getting down in text.

This post is to serve as a kind of setting bible, so I can get my thoughts on tone, theme, etc. down in one spot.

The premise

Earth is old.  Unimaginably old.  Epochs have come and gone.  The sun has shrunk to a glowing coal.  The planet's core has cooled, mountains have worn down to hills.  There isn't a square inch of land that hasn't seen epic adventures of greed, altruism, lust, courage, tyranny, nobility, betrayal, redemption, rebellion and rebuilding play out a hundred times over.  The Lighthouse has revived the human race from extinction at least three times.  There's no history any more because it's all history.  Where would you even begin?

Earth is tired.  All the ores and useful minerals have been dug up and used.  The ground is nothing but stone and dirt now.  The magnetic field flickered and died.  The oceans shrank.  The environment is maintained by ancient machinery, but most of the land is sterile desert.  The other planets are gone, mined away to nothing.  Siphoned away into hydrogen fuel to feed the sun for another eon.  Now there's nothing left.

Earth is dying. Everyone agrees that the sun is in its last decade of life.  It might explode and destroy the world in fire, it might gutter out like a cooling ember and freeze the world in darkness.  There are different schools of thought, but there doesn't seem much point in arguing about it.  Whoever's right won't have much time to gloat.  The skills to operate the machines that might have saved us vanished megayears ago.

People are handling this knowledge in different ways.  The majority carry on the way they have their whole lives.  If crops don't get harvested and replanted, they'll starve before the sun has a chance to kill them.  Perhaps they make more time for family and friends than previous generations have.  Others are giving in to despair and letting it degrade them.  Abandoning responsibilities, chasing grudges, surrendering to hedonistic urges they might have kept buried if there was going to be time to have regrets.  A few (and hopefully this is where the player characters would come in) aren't ready to give up easily and spend their remaining time doing what good they can and chasing rumours and folklore about forgotten technology that could save even just a few.

The style

People live fairly primitive lives for the most part.  The majority are subsistence farmers.  They might enjoy a few conveniences that need advanced science to develop but function just fine at a subsistence level - farmhouses are very commonly heated and lit by burning methane gas fermented in simple biogas plants under the building.  A village might be built around a single surviving machine from an earlier age that provides an important resource.

Cities tend to be where the most ancient technology can be found.  It's no longer under human control but it carries on working by itself, providing heat, light, food, etc.  Sometimes it's a threat as well -- robot cops run amok and killing indiscriminately, industrial processes poisoning the streets -- but people still hold on in the cities because the deterioration has been gradual and their cultures have developed rituals and taboos that keep them safe for the most part.

Technology is, and isn't, a mystery.  In most cases how it works is unknown, but what it's meant to do is obvious.  The methods of the people who built it half a million years may have been swallowed up by the dust of history, but in any age people are people, with reliably human motives.  Magic is technology.  Monsters are machines following orders from long-dead masters to walk a perimeter and kill intruders.  Building a golem is done by assembling parts stripped from defunct mechanical arbeiters.  A healing 'spell' might be a device produced to keep meat edible by reversing entropy.  (Knave seems like a good system for this, since it already treats spells as inventory items.)

The situation

As the end comes, forgotten devices all over the continent are starting to reactivate on their own.  Transport networks are coming back to life and automated vehicles have started moving - often with no regard for any structures that might have been built in the way since they last rolled or flew.  (One of my influences is pulp novels from the 1970s in which artificial intelligence could be maddeningly simple-minded.)  Many of them are in an indifferent state of repair and adventurers using them to access the isolated areas of the continent need to be both agile and prepared.

The reactivation has encouraged some people to hope for the world's survival, but for the most part they're working at cross purposes.  Lighthouse cults practice human sacrifice to give the giant orbital installation the power it needs to save us.  Scholarly cabals sabotage each other out of fear that if there are still-working spaceships, there will only be enough to carry a few.  Powerful nihilists want to ensure the world dies because their twisted philosophy tells them that to be the final generation is to be the most important of all generations.

The tone

What I'm going for here is bleak-but-with-hope.  Even with the player character efforts, things are probably going to end badly.  They're surrounded by examples of people who've lost hope and decided to forget about it and carouse their remaining time away.  But if there is salvation, even if only for a few, it'll be because PC action made it happen.

The Harry Clark project

Emmy Allen has proposed a community-sourced bestiary based on the artwork of Harry Clark.  Clark's artwork is perfect for this.  It's surreal and symbolic and in many cases you have to project your own meaning on it.

The image I chose is probably a bit more straightforward than that, it's a Madonna with child.  But she's black-robed and standing next to a black-flamed candle and there's an eye in the floor observing her.  I decided to write the image up as a dark reflection of religious iconography, sucking the light and the sanity out of the room.

Anti-Madonna

Armour Class: as unarmoured. Immune to non-magical attacks.
Hit Dice: 1
Move: as human unless new light is introduced (see specials)
Attacks: Impious aura
No. Appearing: 1
Morale: 9
Treasure: 1D6 shards of curse-glass
Alignment: Chaotic

Magicians are a perverse lot, always tampering with the natural order. A wizard's mirror which has held the reflection of a saint has a chance to produce an anti-Madonna, a profane likeness of a holy figure. The image moves as if alive and whispers a constant monologue of baffling blasphemy, but is immaterial and non-intelligent. More like an independent illusion. It desires worship in the form of sacrifice and can be temporarily appeased by destroying an item of personal value. It has the following powers:

Anti-light: When an anti-Madonna appears, all natural light sources become sources of darkness and change to suck light out of the surrounding area. Magical sources will be dimmed as though appearing through a thick gloom.

Speed of dark: If new light is introduced, the anti-Madonna can instantly jump to any space the light touches. It will become a dark source at the end of the round in which it is lit.

Litany of ignorance: Intelligent creatures close enough to hear its whispered words must save vs paralysis. Clerics who fail to save lose a prepared spell.

The creature can be dispelled like an illusion or destroyed with any kind of magical attack. It is immune to fear and mind-control effects and cannot be turned. Turn attempts at a high enough level to destroy it outright work as normal.

https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/.

PDF version here.  There's a Reddit thread for the project here.

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.