Let me pitch something

By Chris Riddell

Here goes:

A setting guide and ruleset for sky ship operation and combat; to work in accordance with any adventuring ruleset you desire.

Adventure, obsession, madness, and death.

Think Moby Dick, Sunless Sea, and The Edge Chronicles.

Think Veins of the Earth but sky instead of rock; agoraphobia and horror vacui instead of claustrophobia.

The players are crewing a sky ship, a rickety death trap with a thousand essential mechanisms each of which can and will go wrong. This hunk of junk is the only thing standing between these brave or insane souls and the Long Drop.

They explore an impossible archipelago of broken rocks. Mountains and islands, forested and wild, slowly drifting in the wind, skirting the yawning void of the upper air: the Mountains Untethered. Above; the Verge, too close to the stars, where the air and reality itself are too thin, below, the Murk, where the only sky is the darkness of millions of tonnes of rock, where ramshackle towns squat in darkness in which washed-up and has-beens drink themselves to death, and where listless scavengers paddle the Murk Sea for the wreckage of those who made the Long Drop.

The Mountains are a region uncharted and unchartable, filled with creatures strange and people yet stranger - certainly the natives and creatures of this odd land are bizarre, but perhaps moreso are the ones who come here voluntarily.

Cloudpiercers they are called: idealist settlers building utopia, discontent colonists hatching secession, treasure-hunters seeking their fortune, merchants want trade routs and to fatten their wallets, pirates slit throats and loot bodies, stormhunters and galechasers hunt in the shrieking air, flotillas of desperate men and the navy of empire - all fighting it out in the open skies.

Wild-eyed and manic to a man, they brave the abyss below and the void above for their particular obsession, their private insane drive - but all of them desire to make a mark on the maddeningly empty air before they too go to their Long Drop.

Name Change

I changed the blog name. It's now Sword of Mass Destruction.

It used to be Pammachon Sword.

The Pammachon Sword is something from Caráxe that blew up the Northern Invader. That land now lies on the bottom of the Searing Deep.

It was a Sword of Mass Destruction.

Well, then just say that, you idiot! At least that's got some punch to it.

What if magic items can't be identified?

By Mike Vivisector

The setup

Many OSR systems don't have perception rolls.

"Figure it out yourself!" they say, after telling you to get of their lawn. "Just say where you look or what you're touching, and I'll tell you if you find anything!"

Now, I think this is a good system. A perception roll is a boring way to resolve searching. It removes agency from the player and makes something that could make the situation very tactile and real into something abstract and gamey.

The logical end point of the perception roll is a game in which player input is completely superfluous and stats determine everything. And that isn't fun. So, some say, no perception rolls.

So, given that many people think that way, why do we still roll arcane knowledge or intelligence to identify magic items?

The problem

"This is a mysterious ring; ancient, covered in runes." 

"I want to examine it, see if it's magic." 

"After spending some minutes sniffing, touching, and examining the thing, you can safely say it exudes an aura of magic. It makes your hairs stand on end. Sparks jump between the metal and your fingers." 

"I want to figure out what kind." 

"Okay, roll an intelligence check." 

"Made it." 

"Yeah it's a ring that gives you +3 to lockpicking."

That's boring. Yes, also because I used a boring magic item in that example. But not only is it boring, it is soooo gamey.

An aside:
DnD uses numbers because it wants to quantify and make concrete certain variables. But just as "16 Strength" doesn't mean anything in the world of the fiction, so do the numbers on magic not mean anything. Or the words fire damage.

Numbers are an unelegant crutch; a necessary evil. They should be avoided in descriptive language if possible. They break the fiction.

A solution

When running the Tomb of the Serpent Kings, my players tried on the Ring of Eyesight that makes a player's eye go hard as glass and pop out of his socket, and the ring which turns a finger into a two-pronged poison dagger. They loved it and were horrified at the same time. They laughed and were fascinated and audibly disgusted.

They also figured out some magic effects by running intelligence checks. They went "oh, that's cool I guess."

Don't allow your players to identify magic items. Yeah, not even wizards. Let them detect if it is magical. Then, if they succeed what would otherwise be an identifying roll, let them find out only how the magic works. Is it an ongoing power? Or is it a power that can be released? Is it an on-target magic? A self spell? Or a latent power, like a buff? Tell them what they perceive, so that they at least have some notion of how to activate the power. Using an unknown power is fun; clicking all the pixels in order to find the one that lets you proceed isn't.

Then tell them the associations they pick up: "You can tell that it's something to do with throwing." "You think the magic has something to do with food." "You think the magic is dangerous." "You feel an immense sorrow", "You smell burning". Roll a 1d6 for associations. There's a 1 in 6 chance the associations are totally wrong.

Then, let them find out the effects by experimentation. Because that's fun and unpredictable. Furthermore, it keeps magic strange and potentially dangerous.

And it saves you form saying the words "it gives a d6 bonus" or something equally magic-breaking. Just tell them, when they use it, to roll an extra d6. Don't tell them why. Don't break the magic. Remove the extra die when they remove the magic item. But never acknowledge that the object is responsible for the d6. That makes it knowable, concrete, gamey. As long as you never name the effects in concrete, numbery ways, it might still have other secrets to reveal and as such, it might remain mysterious.

I will be playtesting this idea.

21 Minor Spirits your players might run into

Spirits live everywhere.

They're not like spells. Spells are from another realm, scintillating with power; these things were just born in the mud and the dirt and the trash. They arise out of the structures of their place the way human minds arise out of the structure of the brain.

Spirits are magical and mysterious. Most of them come out at night, and they possess an odd ability to go unnoticed even when taking shape. They vanish if spooked or attacked, and might leave you with curses. They probably can talk, but just don't.

A bridge spirit hiding in the water. By Theodor Kittelsen.

SPIRIT HP 1 Def 0 Movement 13 (but can vanish at will) Attack 0 Intelligence 10 Reaction 10 Morale 0. Cannot be hurt by physical weaponry. If a spirit is destroyed with magic, it simply reforms in 1d6 days unless it is driven away by dispelling, or if the place it is bound to is destroyed.

They're like gods, but really puny. Each well spirit is THE well spirit, if you catch my drift. They're both less and more than individuals. They're less in that they are more like natural things, such as rainbows or earthquakes or trees, but more in that they are multiple fragments of the *concept* of the thing they are bound to, such as home. They aren't just a creature tied to a place or object. They *are* the very notion of "home" themselves.

All of them are shapeshifters and not bound to a physical form, but one shape is the default one, their "chosen" shape. But they might as well be that passerby that asked you that really strange question.

Tomb of the Serpent Kings write-up 1

So I've got a bit of a confession to make.

I've never DM'ed before.

I know!

And I've only played Dungeons and Dragons for what must be less than 15 sessions, too. That was 5th edition, and the people I ways playing with cared about a lot of stuff I didn't care about (lots of combat and very little thinking or discovering). So what am I doing writing a blog? Well, in my defense, this blog is mostly for me; and secondly, you're in no way obligated to read.

Anyway, I DM'ed Tomb of the Serpent Kings yesterday, for five players, four of which had never played a table-top RPG before. They were all friends and family - one of them was my mom.

I thought this dungeon would absolutely destroy them.

So far they're all fine.

So yeah.

I learned many things. I learned that a DM must keep track of *a lot* of things. I learned that you shouldn't go too easy on players. I learned much more. Here's a write-up.

I Loathe Elves

Elves are just the worst.

And I'm not blaming the big grandad here. Tolkien's elves are not "elves" as trope. In Tolkien's world,

• elves don't have pointy ears
• elves and humans are apparently of same appearance; people and elves get mixed up (eyes and voice might give it away)
• elves don't have alien-level tech. They wear mail like everybody else.
• elves and humans are not really different species as much as they are different spiritualities, or something. You can see this in Elrond and his brother both being half-human, half-elf; and they get to pick which they want to be.

So there's a lot with Tolkien's elves that's less elvish than the trope they codified.

Everything I loathe about elves is a later invention - that sterile, boring, emotionless, technically superior and more skilled but in motivation still exceedingly human. It's a regular person, but more capable. Not wiser. That's mary sue. They're a nation of mary sues. Now if they had a totally different system of value or way of experiencing life - that would be interesting, right??? But no. They're people but better in everything except where it counts.

This has been reacted to by people like Scrap Princess and Arnold K of Goblin Punch. Their elves are terrifying because they are physically superior to humans but mentally and spiritually in no way wiser or more enlightened. They're scary; they're psycho's because of their superiority.

Of course elves are also storystelling shorthand. Elves are elegant; bam, done. Are brabbo's elegant? I don't know, because I have no frame of reference. That's an important point, but I LOATHE ELVES.

So there's no elves in Circassa. There's goblins - they're good guys now - there's orcs. There's fairies and spirits. No elves. The ancient rulers of Tel Ammon might have been elves. The scary kind. The imperial kind. The superior kind. The psycho kind.

But playable elves and half-elves? No. Cause an actual elf would not go adventuring. It would sit around moping and meditating on a higher plane of spiritual development, or it would be a terrifiying force of conquest. It would not adventure. Takes me out of every game.

The Bladeless Blade of Kammorachû

TL;DR: It's a blade that works as a spell. Any spell.

In the north the legends of the ancient kingdom of Tel Ammon are still whispered rather than spoken aloud, and never at night. Their enormous ruins, tombs, and broken statues still dot the north, and the darkness pooling in those tombs and in the shadows of those ruins is unquiet.

Still more is whispered of the Ammon mage Kammorachû, a bitter and black-hearted man, who deep in his cavernous lair beneath the city of Akh-Ammon forged the Bladeless Blade.

The Bladeless Blade, has, as the name tells, no blade; it is hilt only. Just a hilt. Useless. But for the gifted, those in the know, the Bladeless Blade is also a cage. It can capture spirits. It can capture spells.

When Kammorachû wielded it in battle against the southern birdmen the blade sizzled and thundered; some spells of water and lightning where intertwined there. It soaked and electrocuted the enemy simultaneously.
When the foul mage wielded it during the Ammon Kinstrife it sputtered and flared like oily flame. Fire and grease was on it. It set the enemy in flame as if they had been drenched in lamp oil.
When he cut off the head of the leader of the third slave rebellion, he had no spell on the blade at all. It is said that the Bladeless Blade caught the soul of the slave leader; sucked it right out of his heart, and used it as blade and that afterwards, the invisible blade screamed in anguish as it cut down its former comrades.
He wielded it with a spell of Cutting against the mountain hordes. Its blade was invisible but cut through sword, armour, and flesh as if it was nothing.

Rumour has it the dark one, Kammorachû, assassinated his own king and usurped the throne with the Bladeless Blade, using some vile curse set in the blade. He cut the king by stealth; the blade was mere hilt, after all, and easy to conceal. The curse could not be seen, nor did the king feel anything when he was cut; but it bit deep, and worked its way inside the king for 50 years, while Kammorachû waited patiently, till at last he died of some sudden illness - which the race of Ammon does not suffer. The Fifty Year Sword it is also called because of this. Deep its bite can be, but slow the blood to run...

Yeah it's a hilt you can put a spell on and I mean any spell. This is gonna fuck your game up.

New mage class: Earthsea Mage

I often dislike magic systems in games. It's often sterile, boring, or a very specific solution to a very specific problem.

Very rarely does it feel like magic truly connects to the fabric of the universe, to the very nature of existence.

By Tim Robbins

It does feel like that in Ursula le Guin's A Wizard of Earthsea.

So I built a GLOG class of this type of magic.

Get ya pdf here

Summary:

• It's very wonky. There's only 4 spells and 1 unique ability. Yeah, you heard me. 

• It's subtle. There's no explosions here. Rather, there's a deep and subtle manipulation of almost anything.

• The spells are: Call, Command, Summon, Change. That's it; but you can use them on almost anything. Much will be up to the DM.

• You can only enchant something if you have the True Name of said anything. Finding out the True Name is an unique, once-a-day-ability.

d20 Escaped Spells

We all know that spells are actually spirits from another dimension that a wizard traps in his brain.

But we usually don't bother with the implications of that. He always meets them in books, doesn't he? He *could* meet them face-to-face, right there in the dungeon. Wild Spells. Escaped Spells. Spirits, for all intents and purposes.

Roll on this table for a random spell encounter. Or use it when your player's spells gain sentience.
Here they are.

by Apofiss.

1. Meln. A small, pink candlelight floating without a candle. Will strike up a conversation. 
1. Personality: hey heeey, my man! 
2. Speaks: like a ridiculously disarming friend with this voice who hasn't seen you in a long time. 
3. Wants: everyone to get along. 
4. Spell: Charm Person. The person regards you as a good friend and ignores the obvious spell you just cast on them. If you invest at least 4 dice into this spell, the duration becomes permanent.
2. Tutatat. Looks like any of the perfectly normal d3 following: 1. a red apple 2. a fresh fish (1 out of 6 odds it's swimming through the air) 3 a silver spoon. Ideally players take it with them before they realize it's a spirit. 
1. Personality: very, very shy. Will be embarrassed if the players figure out what it is. 
2. Voice: like a 4 year old girl, including the child-like cadence. 
3. Wants: to hide and to be hidden! 
4. Spell: Disguise.
3. Sashaan. An upside down green-stained copper mask wreathed in blue flame. 
1. Personality: seemingly harmless, but will express alarming interest in cutting tools and facial injuries. 
2. Voice: hoarse and after a while kind of creepy. 
3. Wants: to replace and become a face. All human corpses in the dungeon are missing their faces. 
4. Spell: Death Mask
4. Xoixoi. A floating eyeball in a reddish vortex. If it spots you it will scream and scream and scream until you can calm it down (CHA check). This may attract enemies, for which it will apologize.
1. Personality: skittish and anxiety-riddled. 
2. Voice: high and hysterical. 
3. Wants: for everyone to DON'T SNEAK UP ON ME LIKE THAT, CHRIST. 
4. Spell: Alarm. Becomes a floating eyeball for [sum] / 2 hours; if it sees an intruder it will scream; you’ll hear it at any distance.

The air is made of dragons

DRAGON

Silvery serpentine air spirits. Arrogant, powerful, knowledgeable, inscrutable.
Loves speed, victory, freedom.
Wants: heat and magic items to devour, to show its strength and dominance, to be sovereign, SPEED!

Dragons have kinship with air and fire; they throne as Lords of the Middle Air among the clouds. Their bodies are serpentine and subtle; swift coils of feather, scale, fur and talon. No wings; they swim in the air as if in water. Their areal nature makes them hard to see. Only a silver shimmering, faster than thought, is what an untrained mortal may see of a dragon. 

Dragons are of air, and air is of dragons. Every breeze and zephyr is governed by a minor dragon. The Cardinal Lords govern the winds of the cardinal directions.

The Lords of the Middle Air meddle mostly in their own affairs, which are incomprehensible to mortals and have much to do with movement. Their parliaments scheme and battle amongst themselves up there in the sky. It can be cramped up there in the Middle Air; there's many a seething mess of coiling dragons whizzing around, as if in constant dance and constant battle. Movement is to dragons what territory is to mortals. They compete for speed and power. They race around the entire sky. They fight terrifying duels over cloud formations and pillars of rising heat. They court each other in break-neck race-like dances, whizzing by mountains. Salori legends say they chase the sun around the sky.

Dragons have infinite life spans and are nigh unkillable. Young dragons die if they stop moving - like the wind, falling still means that they simply become air - older ones just don't like it. If a dragon dies, its subtle body melts into clean air within hours. They know much - the air flows everywhere - especially about spiritual and cosmological matters and shifts. Dealings between dragons and mortals are exceedingly rare; for a dragon to deign to slow its all-important speed and listen to a mortal, the mortal must either be in possession of something a dragon wants (heat, mainly, or energy in other forms, such as magic or magical artifacts that they eat and consume) or very, very interesting. 

Trying to make humans not boring

Humans are pretty weird, man. There's so many cultures around the world that are just staggeringly different from generic-kindofmedieval-europe. So why are the "human" places usually the normal places, the generic places, the medieval-europe places, complete with king, castle, and Church? Especially the last one baffles me; presumably Christ didn't show up in your world (unless you're C.S. Lewis), so how can there be such a construction as a Church? Monotheism does not equal Church.

The Salori are a group of humans who are definitely not medieval-european, and certainly have no church. They're black, for starters - except that the concept of race hasn't been invented, so really I should say that their skin tone varies from reddish brown to light brown; with sometimes odd, mottled crimson markings appearing, especially in the heartland. They keep saying this is somehow related to the betrayal and death of some ancient god-king which stained the entire land with blood. Whatever. Their faces are sharp and long, and they have sharp cheekbones. Salori are tall and a bit lanky, they often have bright eyes.

Salori have the sharp features above, the skin colour below. Not pictured: red skin variations.
Art by theminttu

Many Salori, even mere farmers, are proud and haughty, and don't shirk confrontation if they detect offense. Almost all adult Salori, men and women, are armed with a long, thin dagger tucked in the sash around the waist. It's usually an heirloom, and they're not afraid to use it.

They came into Circassa from the North, over the Shield Wall mountains which block the subcontinent from the rest of the world. They came here from some half-remembered distant strife, following the Sage called Salor, after whom their entire people is named.

When they got there they found that the place was already inhabited by a staggering variety of goblin-species (seriously, how do these guys keep ending up everywhere) and the proud last remains of a waning, non-human empire called Tel Ammon. Exactly how this empire was non-human the histories don't mention; they might have been elves or even vampires. After a tense co-existence war broke out, the tribes united, and the empire was destroyed. It's said that the region Tel Ammon is still haunted by vengeful specters, clad in mottled gold and opulent robes turned to tattered rags, which is of course, totally true.

The Salori remained nomad tribes for a long time, until some guy named Carahir was instructed in the secret arts of agriculture and architecture by one of the thousands of spirits living in the volcano. Tradition calls him Maskurat, Old-Man-of-the-Volcano. They say he's got one eye, black hands, and a crown made of antlers. So Carahir built the ancient city now known as Godsgrave, and then, according to who you talk to, tried to conquer all the continent, what a dick, or tried to conquer all the continent, what a hero. Some complicated stuff went down, Carahir ended up killed by a cowardly assassin/heroic freedom fighter named Alkoveran still despised/venerated to this day, and the landscape of Circassa was forever changed.

When the dust settled, the Salori were now split up in the settled peoples and the tribes of the old ways. The settled people organized in Manses, which are like a mix between dynastic oligarchies, republics, political parties, and corporations.

There's four of them now, and they own most of the fertile land of Circassa. Here they are:



Manse Neraan are a bunch of fat merchant slavers. Their ancestral seat, Kratum Neraan, sits right on the flanks of the volcano, a mother-of-pearl bulwark of domes, aquaducts, many many terraced bloodrice paddies, and many many slave pits. They buy slaves from overseas or overmountain, but they also have a dedicated in-house slave hunter branch, which organizes raids on the tribes and even ordinary travellers without Freedom Papers which are sold at exorbitant prices. They're filthy, filthy rich, and very untrustworthy. Their taxes are incredibly high but they beat down peasant revolts mercilessly. It's an open secret that the Neraan employ some sort of assassin guild, possibly assassin-wizards.

Like a bunch of these buildings stacked into one giant upside down chandelier. Not pictured: terrible slave pit conditions.

Manse Tennion is a collection of feudal matriarchies around bitter old witches, allied only by pragmatics and tradition, because most of them can't stand each other. Their ancestral seat of Al Hneren to the north was devastated by the magic Chernobyl that concluded a war against the Northern invader long ago. Their new home, Tuhmas Tennion or Home-In-Exile lies in a desert to the south and is a collection of separate towers and fortresses, one per sorcerer-matriarch, and very well guarded (they're nothing if not paranoid). The towers are composed of the bone-like organic rock called hulac that grows in the region; they look like huge shelves of enamel; square teeth the size of hills. Manse Tennion is busy colonizing the Floating Mountains to the south in flying ships, but they've been having trouble with declarations of independence and piracy.

Hulac buildings kind of look like this, but less evil, less mountains, and the weather is nice.
Minas Morgul by John Howe.

Manse Hnennao are a bunch of cult followers and those who make a living by starting a cult. They're not fanatics, mind you - monotheism hasn't been invented; most people move between cults as we do between Netflix series. Their ancestral seat of Kogo Hnennis, City of a Thousand Cults, has statues, shrines, sacrificial pits, and temples on every street corner, and that's just the ones that aren't secret. You literally can't spend a minute without some chanting procession passing by. Kogo Hnennis straddles the Great River Huliac, which is how they trade with other parts of Circassa and, since recently, overseas. Despite the river, Kogo Hnennis has been dying of thirst for at least two centuries now. See, the springs of the Huliac lie to the north in the rocky highlands of Renca Ur. The same magic WDM which destroyed the Tennion homeland cursed the whole region, including the springs. Now the fertile land surrounding Kogo Hnennis is called Hurgliath, the White Wen. Everything is drained of colour and the ground has become a sickly mire emitting poisonous fumes. Trade caravans are manned by brave, brave folk - but the coin is good. There's all sorts of magical threats and unnatural things going on, and certainly the water isn't drinkable. The whole city is covered with criss-crossing copper rain catchers and pipes; water is sold for exorbitant prices, and the entire region around the citey is honeycombed with old wells, all of which end up poisonous after a few days of clear water. After invoking at least a thousand gods - most of whom didn't answer - the Hnennao are now sending scouts into the cursed North to see if anything can be done about the curse.

In Kogo Hnennis, you're constantly running into these kind of things.
Art by Marc Simonetti.

Manse Carahir is, everyone agrees, over. They all hope for the return of a king like the legendary Carahir, but that's just wishful thinking. Their land is shrinking everyday, swallowed up by the long disenfranchised tribes and rival Manses. They've struck a trade deal with the far-away empire called the Azure Eleven, but that may prove to be a deal with the devil, as the first operations of this empire in their ancestral seat of Godsgrave look a little bit too much like the beginnings of colonialism. Godsgrave is said to be built on the place where the ancient god-king who throned on the volcano fell down after his betrayal and death, and it is incontrovertible that the ancient palace of Carahir is built on a strange round hill, that just before it meets the level soil, juts out in places that almost suggest that just below the surface lie... eye sockets?

The cities are populated by much more than just the red-skinned Salori; there's many foreign traders and expats, as well as enormous amounts of goblins, some Rafa, bird-men from the south, and all manner of strange creatures beyond count; be they native to the subcontinent or from other lands or even realms.

Art by Jeff Brown.

And that's just the settled peoples. Outside, in the dangerous regions; the steppes, the cursed waste to the north, the boiling swamps, and the deserts, live the disenfranchised tribes. They speak Ohr Kirkes, which no Manse-folk now understand. The Manses call them the Savages and regard them as an embarassment, little more than feral goblins, and the tribes themselves view the Manses as blasphemous traitors to the Great Ancestors and the ancestral ways. They're not even true Sons of Salor; they're nothing.

An uncommonly light-skinned Salori might look like this.
Art by Alison Howle.

Among the tribes there is a legend that one day the ancient god-king will wake up from his long sleep, retake his throne on the mountain of fire, and drive out the thrice-cursed trickster Maskurat, who tried to fool the Salori with the vile magics of agriculture and building, and destroy everything wrought with them. Then the land will be healed, the blood of God will flow back and no longer stain the soil and the people, the vile curse of the northern wastes will be undone, and the tribes will hunt and keep their herds freely in the fertile and free lands of Circassa.

This might be what Manse art looks like. From Borobudur, Indonesia.