Life, Pain and Suffering in the Heartbreaker

[A Test - when there are sufficient (2 or more) stakes for a discrete action, assign a relevant die to each stake and roll under the relevant Score to succeed. The dice may succeed or fail independently of one another.

Stakes - Uncertainty, Consequence and Time or; can it be done, what might happen in addition and will it take a lot of time

Spite - a resource generated when you take damage, fail a test with Long Odds or draw a negative Quality from your deck of qualities. It is also generated when you are insulted, belittled or mocked. You may roll it in place of other dice and take the higher of the lot. It is stored in the Liver, up to 5

Love - the same as above but it comes from where you think it does. it is stored in the Heart, just 1 at a time]

Life is Pain Princess 

In my heartbreaker the sacred cow of Hit Points works a little differently:

1. They are represented by physical dice you physically put in your character sheet (I recommend good, corrugated cardboard)

2. They are rolled each morning so your HP total varies from day to day/skill check to skill check

3. You use them to roll for the various skills, procedures and resources in the game

 

This is because:

 

1. I hate erasing and rewriting HP fuck that noise and also physical memory 

2. It's more like real life, you just wake up feeling rough some days or better after certain tasks

3. As you lose HP, you get worse/more desperate because your skills depend on them

Called Life Dice instead of HP, you get one of them for each hot meal you eat that day, boast (current and complete) you have and for each Heart you possess. Hearts cover both Love and literal physical hearts you possess so you start with one. You should feast before dungeons if you can afford it and collect monster hearts like a freak. Just be careful, loving or killing changes you, gaining Qualities of those you Love and kill. 

"Oh look a handy graphic."

"Oh really? I don't its that gross." 

 

Life Dice sit on a special line of hole along the top of your sheet called the Life Line. Other things will be stored here as well like gold because your Heart is an empty coffer and devoid of Love and can act as HP up to a limit. The needs of addiction will build up here as well, threatening Life Dice in the precious few spaces on the Life Line. 

The Life Line can be further divided up between Flesh (FLSH), Mind (MND) and Soul (SOL).  It basically makes three dice pools kinda like Numenera or something. You can probably upgrade them as time goes on. I like the MechaHack thing where you have to roll dice higher than your Score at the end of each mission to increase it. 

When you lose all your dice in these pools/thresholds you gain a Scar, Memory or Trauma, respectively. Generally bad. 

You roll them for tests like jumping dangerous gorges and making complex attacks (regular boring ass attacks are just auto-hits but more on that later). I'll probably use them for procedures like Carousing and Delving into dungeons as well when I get to those. 

 

Failing a test with one or all of your die means that stake is lost. If you fail the consequence stake, foes gain an advantage or you lose a degree of fictional positioning. Or maybe you just take damage. If its Uncertainty, then the task fails with no further harm, though the referee has lateral in (consistently) interpreting this. Lost Time is as it sounds. You may succeed in performing the action (Uncertainty stake) but at the cost of much crucial minutes or hours (Time stake).

 

Snake eyes always means the worst possible thing that caa happen, happens. 

When you gain horrible Conditions like starvation, isolation and sickness you move your Life Dice from the Life Line to Condition boxes a al Mausritter. They exist in a Warning/ Danger set up and you get them back when you address them. They'll "explode" if they fill up, going into other Conditions, further wrecking your poor little guy. 

Damage removes Life Dice as you'd expect. If you take damage more or equal to the rightmost Life Die, it goes away but not off your character card. As this loss passes the thresholds of flesh, mind and soul you gain Scars, Memories and Trauma. 

It goes to your Liver where it becomes Spite, extra dice you can spend to gain advantage on tests. It can hold 5 Spite though you may store extra in the Conditions. Holding onto it hurts you. 

When you run out of Life Dice you are not Dead but instead Defeated. Your foes may Rob you of your Gold and Hearts, Scar you (giving you a vendetta) or kill you though this always threatens a ghost or worse, the living dead so it is best avoided. A vendetta prevents this. 

Love can be used the same way as Spite without the nasty side effects but it's so much rarer in the world of your character's lives. It is precious and something unfamiliar to them and it's why they cut out more and larger monster hearts, thinking it will fix them, thinking harder work will make people love them more. Does it hurt yet?

 

Fighting, Violence and Pain

There are many paths to survival. Violence is one, one that begets itself all the way back to the first child struck by an errant hand. It has not forgotten the sting, for some the first Spite they could ever recall. Bruises are threats. Scars are promises kept.  

Violence is not always a Test (rolling under an ability score where multiple stakes are concerned). Just hurting someone almost always succeeds because it’s a bastard’s lot (along with begging, stealing and praying cursing). Just roll special die called a Hit Locator Die to see where you hurt them, or heaven forbid, where you’re struck.  

Hit Locator*

1.     Leg, left
2.     Leg, right
3.     Arm, left
4.     Arm, right
5.     Torso
6.     Head

[*I recommend doing the Macarena to remember]

Other forms of Violence may require Tests.  

When you fight you have Fighting Dice, which are just your current FLSH Dice. As you get beat up, you will get less good at fighting. 

When you wish to do Violence, first determine how badly you want to hurt something or what you want to subject another creature too. You have four options*: 

Pain: a punch, a flesh wound, a bruise, a ring to the dome. Roll all your Fighting Dice and choose whichever you like. You deal that much damage to your foe. If the damage chosen matches the Hit Locator die, it’s a critical hit; roll the damage again. Use this option to whittle down powerful foes for a maiming or killing blow.  

If it’s a critical hit to the head (6) the die explodes; if you roll a 6, keep rolling damage until you do not roll a 6. 

A helmet prevents this once or twice or so before breaking. 

[This gives you an occasional choice; do I choose a die with less damage because it matches the Hit Location and I could crit for more or higher guaranteed damage. Maybe not interesting but a choice nonetheless]

Maneuver: Test to trip, disarm or otherwise impede your foe temporarily. Roll Fighting Dice under your MND score you tactician you

[Or FLSH if you just want to brute force it I suppose you hunk you]

Maim: Test to permanently impair your foe by hamstringing them, gouging out their eyes out or breaking delicate wings. Roll over their current Life Dice. The Consequence is a crippling wound. 

Kill: Attempt to kill a foe in one fell swoop, head lopped off, knife in the back, sword to the Heart. Roll over their current Life Dice and under your FLSH or MND . The Consequence is a savage wound**

[*Stolen from Gundobad's excellent series here]

[**Or hell maybe just Defeat or even death. One fell swoop indeed] 

Violence can be done to you as well. Foes have the same options, and you defend yourself the same way you attack: roll your Fighting Dice and choose how much damage you take. Then roll the Hit Locator Die to see if you’re crit or not. Its only fair. 

Counters and Parries

If you ever only deal 1 damage or damage is reduced to 1 by armor, you are Countered!* and your foe may immediately interrupt you to attack you back. Your weapon gains a scratch as well. Roll the weapons quality; if it's under the number of scratches it breaks… 

Of course, you can Counter! their Counter! if its reduced to 1 as well. 

[*As a rule, when a Counter! occurs, all at the table must scream "Counter!" for purposes of morale.]

You can usually parry, if armed and whatnot, taking no damage but either your situation gets worse 1 step (your foe gets the higher ground, the ground cracks more, the ceiling finally collapses) or you are set back 1 degree (you are knocked to one knee > knocked prone etc.) whatever degree means to you. Should probably never have more than three degrees for any given fictional thing. Fictional positioning stuff we love and adore. Each set back makes tests harder. Each discrete degree or step gives enemies +1 damage, a dangerous thing where weapon damage and HP are measured with the same die. 

As always shields will be shattered. 

Wounds 

Wounds are longer lasting injuries. While Life Dice return each day after eating something hot (FLSH, ten minutes), recalling boasts (MND, an evening of stories) and feeling alive as your heart beats in your chest (SOL, sleep and then see the sunrise or a loved one), wounds may take much longer to heal.  

You acquire a wound as either a consequence of combat (maiming and killing strikes) or when damage exceeds twice your rightmost Life Dice. If it exceeds the die by twice its value but less than thrice*, you gain a crippling wound on the part indicated by the Hit Locator Die.  

• A crippled leg can hold your weight but not run 
• A crippled arm can hold an object but not wield one nor parry
• A crippled torso lets you act or run in quick succession but not both 
• A crippled head is stunned; you act last when speed is required including initiative 

If the damage is more than thrice the Life Dice or its been crippled a second time, the limb is savaged.  

• A savaged arm cannot hold anything; ruined 
• A savaged leg cannot hold your weight  
• A savaged torso cannot benefit from armor 
• A savaged head is stunned and loses an eye or an ear.   

Crippling wounds take a week to heal IF all your Condition boxes are empty. This will be hard. Savage wounds take twice as long. This will be harder.  

[*Damage less than the Life Die are ignored. Damage equal to or more but not twice or more removes the Die but does not wound. Shit that's complicated. Will charts fix everything? Surely not.]

Conclusion

I think this is pretty neat and elegant. Dice pools are nothing new but it does what I want it to do: link conditions, HP and skills all together in a neat package that does all the remembering for you. You can see the tangible loss of HP due to starvation or lack of sleep. I'm sure with some fudging it could include Saving throws in there too. 

The goal is for the entire character sheet to fit on a single 4x6 corrugated cardboard card. It'll basically be a dice holder and your items will be note cards so when your sword breaks I can tear into pieces and give them back to you when you get it reforged. 

HP is now a physical thing the referee can now see. Lost HP becomes a resource in Spite. Condition boxes are something monsters can attack. That's a whole post right there. Ghosts might not do damage but what about when they possess you and the referee puts his own ugly ass die in your Condition box and now you're perpetually sick, lonely or starving until you exorcise it. Or worse, you're already dangerously isolated or exhausted and your Life Dice get thrown into the other boxes. Call that attacking the character sheet. Eat your heart* out OSR monster tactics weirdos

It's also sufficiently diegetic/Cottonmouth. Pissed you can't hold more than 5 Spite? Put an ogre liver in your abdomen. I'm sure that doesn't have gameable consequences. Does stealing someone's heart make them love you? That sounds cool as hell and really frightening. Write a poem about it. It would certainly explain all the weird obsessive undead we have in this undead-obsessed shit show game genre. 

And most importantly to me, it makes Love a palpable thing in a game. Yeah, it's just a mechanic but its intentionally vague. Sit down with your adult players and ask them what they hell they believe in. Is it love? If no why not? Define it in your game and then redefine it. Should this NPC love you? Interrogate what you think you can do in an RPG. We've all played badasses. Can you play someone broken? Can you fix them? Maybe not. Worth finding out and crying about it. 

[*Monster that literally eats your heart out of your chest and you got kill it/to steal its heart/ make it fall in love with you and then you kiss while shambling around as a loveless wight. This bestiary writes itself]

Simple Rules for Gunz and Lazer Beamz

Rulez for Gunz

I have rules for guns in my game that are fairly simple: 2d6 damage and a stat called Caliber. If your targets HP is equal to or lower than the guns caliber, they save or die. Fairly brutal but most calibers are between 1 and 5, slightly more than the average damage of all the weapons in my games (1d6) and those are likely to kill you to at that HP range anyways, just with saving throws. 

[Can make your rifles 2d8 if you want and your shotguns a 10 ft. cone if you want I suppose]

Of course, you may tack on as many misfire, gun jam, reload, critical fail tables as you like but they've never intrigued me. 

[Snake eyes on a 2d6 could be a jam if you want. The second jam in the same fight could blow the gun up for all I care]

Duels are kept very simple. Both Duelists roll under Dex. Over Dex is a miss. Lowest under Dex hits the other, save or die. A tie could be both dead. One of my players has won three duels this way against vampire cowpokes, gambling his life and its always the highlight of any session. 

Count your bullets! 

Rulez for Lazers

Lazer weapons do not require reloading, only recharging and cooling off. They deal 1d6 damage + 1 for each point of Heat it possesses. They gain 1 Heat each round you use them and each time they roll 6 on the dice. If you ever roll less on the dice than your current Heat, the laser gun Overheats, gaining +3 damage and +3 Heat. If it happens again before the gun completely cools off, roll on the Kablooie! Table. 

A laser weapon sheds 1 Heat per minute. Their cores can be swapped out in a round or so though they are prohibitively expensive. 

Kablooie! Roll 1d6. Add Heat to roll!

2. Gun fizzles and pops, shorted until it cools off in 1 round. 

3. Gun fizzles and pops, shorted until it cools off in [Heat] rounds. 

4. Gun fizzles and pops and deforms, -1 damage, +1 Heat at all times. 

5. Gun spits and 'splodes and begins to melt, dealing 1d6 damage to the user.  -2 damage, +2 Heat at all times

6. Gun spits and 'splodes and begins to meltdown, dealing 1d6+ Heat damage to the user. -3 damage, +3 Heat at all times

7+ Gun explodes in your hand dealing d6 damage per heat. Try throwing it before that happens?

Of course, the fun of ray guns is modifying them. These could be weird alien treasure or taken from defeated enemies. 

1. Splitter - Fires 1d3+1 beams that deal 1d3+Heat damage to number of targets equal to beams. 

2. Cooling Cell - Slakes off 1 extra Heat per minute but is bulkier (extra inventory slot, two handed etc.)

3. Prism Cap - added to the business end of the weapon, shifts the beam into alternate dimensional frequencies, e.g. you can now shoot ghosts or other ethereal/incorporeal creatures. 

4. Sci-Fi Dial - Can now set lazers to stun as opposed to vaporize! Save versus Paralysis or whatever

5. Atomizer - Disintegrates chunks of enemies into nothing but dust, perfect for pesky healers. 

6. Antimatter - Target must save vs total annihilation (Death). A successful save is a dodge. A failure also does 1d6 damage to anything within 10 ft. If you ever roll a 7+ on the Kablooie! Table a small blackhole is formed at the center of the antimatter core instantly destroying all matter within its event horizon (15 ft.). Anything within 15 ft. of that must Save vs Death or be sucked in and also destroyed. It disappears after 1 round due to Hawking radiation. 

Here's a great fighter class that uses is guns with some more meat on its bones  

Fable! Land of Myth, Menace and Magic! #1

I have started a few campaigns that haven't went anywhere which is fine. Seven in ten games don't make it past session three in my experience and only one in ten make it past ten. Nothing is ever truly wasted in this hobby, however, they'll return one day. 

As such, I've started a new one (surprise surprise) I'd actually like to run at some point, probably for OD&D or some such. And I thought this time rather come at from just a "lore" or "primer" perspective, I'd also document how I set about making the campaign. It's never the same process twice but I'd also like to show some of the awesome things out there other people have made that helped! So here goes.

The Setting

I feel like compared to lots of other people in the GLOGosphere, my campaigns tend to be on the tamer side. Hell most likely isn't coming for you right now and the moon is no centipede's egg*. The Winds have not yet been tamed by the church but that's ok. I still enjoy the gonzo and take a lot from old appendix N stuff which I generally really enjoy reading and worms its way into my settings

Fable is also more specifically framed around a recent song called "No One Left to Kill in the Sky" by Seb Lowe. It's a song about, metaphorically, a mad emperor, who after the war is over and he's conquered the whole world, unlike the metaphorical Alexandre, turns his eyes towards the moon to conquer it instead. Interpreting songs literally for a campaign is great fun. Go listen to it. 

Anywhoosies, in a land of 70-odd hexes, after a terrible war yoked the various peoples of Fable to the Red Emperor, things are mournful and quiet. The Emperor's draconian soldiers have forced order onto the extant roads. Most of the dead, those who choose to remain that way, have been buried. The horses still have not come back and won't for a long time. The Emperor has not yet learned the white apes have killed one of his sons in the White City of Eku and hold the other captive, but even if he did, people would not learn of it. 

If one avoids the Red City of Edu and its dozens of failed towers and ziggurats to climb to the moon, one can almost feel at peace again, besides the ache in one's heart. Just peaceful enough to fear your neighbor. To fear the next war the Emperor plans. And it's this fear that creates giants. Because monsters are a sign something somewhere is fucked up. Good thing they're extinct right?

As Above, So Below

The cloud kingdom of the giants is as real as bedtime stories and things that go bump in the night. It is timeless, an archetype and very very real. To quote Pratchett [1]:

“They were myths and they were real,” he said loudly. “Both a wave and a particle.”

The Cloud Kingdom exists in the heavens, where the upper atmosphere touches the Ether, where the planets roll about in their great crystal grooves, tugging restlessly on the fates of men. They war and ally amongst themselves and the Saturnians, craven and slovenly foul creatures and the Martians, those proud and deadly Tharks of Barsoom. There under the hanging moon, silent and pale as a sun-bleached, they do battle, though few remain, slowly wiping themselves from history. 

They pay little heed to the planet below, wave to their particle, inconsequential to them, carrying on their battles amongst the stars. Until they trip. And fall for what feels like nine days and nights and land in a turnip patch, losing their sword and horn and cussing all the while heaving themselves up, leaving footprints there behind them. At least that's how they myth goes. Time is a flat circle they say, a tightening spiral, where one cannot be certain what came first, the giant or its footprint. 

But beneath the Red Emperor's land which lies beneath the Cloud Kingdom, a kingdom exactly as old as life grows fat on the mildewing results of war. Memento mori! Living Graveyards, growing bolder by the day, take advantage of the supply lines and infrastructure of their de facto Emperor who has made them so rich. Tunnels, cave systems and necropolii all connected via the Mythic Underworld, its ranks swelled with new naive soldier-shades now tax the living! 

The dead who have been around centuries scheme madly. The dead who are new struggle to detach themselves from what they knew. People struggle to mourn for loved ones that scratch at their thresholds at night. Or rage against enemies they are impotent to kill a second time. They look to myths and rituals to aid them, customs the Empire outlaws now. 

Lightning Strikes!

The impetus to write Fable down began as a mix of desires: to make a cool map to just relax, to make a world my wife might like to play in (simple and somewhat familiar), and to get a vison out of my head of three maps laid on top of each other to run an "As Above, So Below" type campaign. I wrote Fable on the map with an exclamation point and later added the tagline "Land of Myth, Menace and Magic" because it sounded fun and I like alliterations. Became important later. 

The two major post inspirations were:

Phlox's excellent terrain generator post here.

And Squamousss terribly evocative post on undead here. 

As is I think is usually the case for these undertakings, it was a confluence of events, inclinations and inspirations that leads to campaign.  

Generating a Map

To generate the hex map I used Phlox's post above. It led to me making this:

Took me hours to learn how to figure out I could just skew a hex map in MS Paint

I rolled the dice as directed and sorta placed the biggest regions first and organically placed everything else from there. My understanding is that this is more or less the way to do it and I like it.

For broad inspiration I rolled on these tables from Cairn 2e to get my biomes. Got lots of jungles and savannahs which I thought was cool. I learned what a pampas was and read about those for awhile. here are the raw notes:

long thin regions 14 (3d6) 

Safe and free, not quick 

Prairies, Heart Tree 

 

Prairie Dog King dinner parties are not fun 

He holds court at a great Heart Tree 

 

~~~ 

 

Miniscule region, 1 hex 

Free, not quick or safe 

Cliffs, Land Scar 

 

~~~ 

 

Safe, not quick or free 

Thick regions are vast and broken up by other regions. Irregular, about 2d4 x 2d4 hex (3x8) 

foothills, pit of cold fire 

Mountain trolls  

 

~~~ 

 

Safe, not quick or free 

Inclusion regions are embedded or abutting other regions. 3 (1d4) hexes 

Pampas, land of cowboys, silver face landmark 

 

~~~ 

 

Free, not quick or safe 

Really thick region. Irregularly shaped, about 4d4 x 1d8 hexes. 

Jungles and crystalline forest, crystal land jungles? 

 

Quick, not safe or free 

Moorland, titan's table 

I drew in the rivers by hand, realizing that a few of the hexes in the north-east somehow escaped categorization and made them a shallow sea, which all the river flowed towards. The rivers imply a sort of bowl or valley, mouth opened to the sea, the jungles and moors bordering a valley on three sides. I don't think its important that rivers follow real world rules (We don't seem so bent out of shape about ocean currents or jet streams) but I do think it's important we believe in our worlds to sell our players on them, and if realistic river behavior helps that then more of it I say. 

From here I used the infamous Laws of the Land, rolling once, twice if "not safe", to develop some of these broad regions. I really like these because they force you to interpret them and that's good for the imagination. 

For example, in the crystalline jungle to the south-west I've named the Tiger's-Eye Jungle (probably due to the crystals found in the area) I rolled and got

    YOU MUST BE QUIET
    YOU MUST NOT GO OFF ON YOUR OWN

This strikes me as a very dangerous place. From my notes "The woods are alive here, more so than usual, and they listen. The dense dense foliage makes most creatures hunt by sound and vibration including the drop leeches and hang man's moss. The craven nymphs of the ancient trees will seduce or capture and then kill and eat you if alone, but even large groups of them flee from small parties of two or three or more"

Locales

The final thing I did was populate the map with locations. Rather than one large city surrounded by wilderness, I wanted something cozier, something more extant. Small towns and forts here and there. So I used the rules from 1977's Traveller on making subsectors. In Traveller, each system (hex) has a 50% chance of having a world in it. A series of complex tables from there determine the starport, size, atmosphere and so on from there. I only needed the System Contents Table and a few changes 

I turned the starport rating into locations and changed the rarity slightly to make civilization more likely around rivers (see above about realism)

towns and cities: +1 if river, -1 if not safe biome

 

1. A. Ruin 

2. B. Lair 

3. C. Village 

4. D. Fort 

5. E. Castle 

24. X. City 

I eventually ended up with this monstrosity:

Spreadsheets!

I was not terribly worried about realistic Medieval population demographics when I made this. The world is a billion years old, so old that pterodactyls re-evolved on the jungles of Venus. We've frankly got bigger Cambrian jawless fish to fry. However, per OD&D there's a few hamlets around every castle (in case of the Conan rule), I picked a d5, and each village is going to be its own weird little place like all the weird little places out of Cudgel's Sage or any other Vance novel. The cities will be grand and venal filled with Leiber's smokey dens and surrounded by the weirdness of Howard's barbarians and their antagonists. It'll work ok?

Themes

To fill out all those "empty" hexes I'll also need a spark table for when I get stuck. I've learned filling hexes is a marathon, not a sprint and even the most vibrant imaginations get stuck after a while. So here are mine:

Moron can't even spell sorcerers correctly 

I find spark tables really help me keep thematically organized. If I can't think of a good motivation for an NPC I can choose one that relates to the theme of the setting. You can see here I decided to make the tag line thematically relevant: menaces will be those gonzo things from the weirder side of Appendix N or awesome stuff with cavemen like this adventure

For B7 I got the following: Glory, Portal to the Heavens, Barbarians.

A group of barbarians, Martian in garb and temperament, have set up a hall around a Jotun cenotaph, a portal that can take you to the jungles of Venus, fields of Mars, seas of the moon or the ice fields of Saturn, with the correct planetary stone. Or else at midnight it will teleport you to the planet currently closest to the horizon. It has a rough map on it that shows all the other cenotaphs in the region, accurate to about a dozen miles. 

There are 21 barbarians including priest and leader.  

Next post we can talk about the various regions and important NPCs and how I "stat" them out. Maybe we can use these barbarian guys here to do so. I'll also probably go over lairs and how I used OD&D's Monster's and Treasure and Underworld and Wilderness Adventures to do so. 

*It's actually the carved-out eye of the Chaos serpent or in this campaign a Silurian Paradise full of lovey anomalocarids. 

[1] Guards! Guards! by Sir Terry Pratchett. Required reading under penalty of having your figgins impaled.