5e House Rule: Luck/Hit Points

This is a fun fairly simple idea that came from a House Rule I used in Amber Diceless.

Instead of HP you have Luck and when your Luck runs out any damage bleeds out and reduces your Constitution Stat. Long Rest recovers your Proficiency Bonus + Current Modifier of your Constitution. So, a PC with a Con of 14 takes 4 damage and has a Prof Bonus of +2 would recover 2 Con or a Con of 12.

If your Con is so low that the modifier + your Proficiency Bonus is negative than make a death save and if you make it you gain a +1 to your Attribute. If you don’t then you lose that much more to your attribute.

Healing Touch can recover your Luck but can only be used once per week to recover a number of Constitution points equal to the caster’s spellcasting modifier. Any caster who knows healing magic can do this and it doesn’t cost them anything more than the time to take a short rest.

Proficiency with a herbalist kit or medicine can give Advantage on the healing touch test.

You can make this a bit more complicated by changing what Atrribute is hit by damage type like Psychic doing Wisdom or Intelligence damage. This is similar to Cypher System I suppose.

The Curse of BloodStone Isle Kickstarter

Mark Rein•Hagen’s Kickstarter in the Lostlorn setting has begun!

I am excited to see how this Kickstarter goes. Full disclosure is that I have a lot of friends who wrote this book so I am not unbiased here and I spent a year or more working with Mark and a half dozen others on creating the basics of the world before dropping out because of Covid and work etc. This Kickstarter is going to be completely new to me as I didn’t have a hand in creating or writing beyond starting a conversation about having an island as an initial setting for a zine to get the ball rolling by developing a process of production. A few of my classic brainstorming questions later and others ran with it and made it something special. I do however know that there are vampirates on Bloodstone Isle so you know you’re getting Mark going back to the basics and what he does best!

This is just the first of many books in the Lostlorn setting with the next being Badlander which I had slightly more of a hand in the earliest stages so keep an eye out on social media like our Facebook page for more like a new blend of Storyteller and 5e into a sort of possible future 6e.

For some fun check out their podcast too. I wish them a ton of luck. It is a bit bittersweet knowing that I could have had a real hand in making this rather than watching from a distance but I know that I just didn’t have the time and the spoons to be able to juggle homeschooling, parenting, and a crushing workload. Still rationalizing doesn’t completely defeat that lostlorn feeling ha!

Review of basura rpg

I sat down and played a game of basura today on discord and had a blast. It is a one GM and one player game. It took a bit less than 2 hours to play even taking into account mandatory rpg miscellaneous chat.

It is a simple game where you play an old gunslinger in the “Wild” West with just a few traits and stats who comes into town and has to deal with the consequences of his sins.

My character’s name was Emil Müll known as Basura whose traits were Focused, Tired, and Ugly. He has a giant scar that splits his lip whenever he grins or frowns and disconcerting eyes with one being blue and the other violet.

The other stats used in the game are Sin, Fatigue, Fame, Consequences, and Drama.

The game is framed as a Western “movie” with various scenes determined by cards drawn by the GM that are starting points or inspiration for what happens in the game. You use up to five d6 as a player with 2d6 being the base roll and can spend Drama points to get extra dice and/or spend your trait like my Focused mentioned above.. The game is quick and fast in design and is only a handful of pages. As a player you are told to stop reading a bit past halfway through the first page leaving the rest for the GM.

In my session my old tired gunslinging killer arrived into town passing a local who recognized me and was frozen with fear before basura arrived and went to the saloon starting the adventure.

There are many possible ways to go and things that could happen from there depending on what cards the GM draws which are used as inspiration to frame the scene as the GM and player collaborate together to describe what happens.

As you make decisions and face problems in the game you build up or decrease your Sin, Fatigue, Fame, and Consequences until the PC meets their Fate.

I heavily recommend the game for a fun one shot over the internet. The great thing is about micro-games like this is you can just drop into them and play and have no obligations. Sometimes it can be tough to get games in because of schedules and children and everything and a quick and dirty one shot is a relief. The story is tightly framed around a concept so there is very little burden for the player or gamemaster and since you use playing cards to build each scene the gamemaster has basically no real prep either to do which is freeing for those of us who might hesitate to run something that requires work to setup. I spent five minutes making my character and most of that was to make a name that was a play on words once translated.

Now that I’ve played it that means that I have to run it. Check it out.

Astral Bladderwort: A SF&F Creature

Watch the video above for ideas and the video at the end for an example of how an Astral Bladderwort might work. A purely physically based Bladderwort might be really fun as well. You could sort of run it like in Star Wars when they realize the cavern is alive!

A simple astral creature that provides excellent living defenses to magical portals, gates, and entryways from one plane or place for your fantasy game. By using differences in astral/dimensional/physics between two places the Astral Bladderwort can suck the unwary into astral pockets and slowly feed off of the emotional, mental, and physical misery and anguish of the victims. As this process takes time it gives the owner of the Astral Bladderwort time to scry on the victims and decide their fate safely at least in the case of purposefully planted Astral Bladderwort.

Wild Astral Bladderworts can become more complex as they feed on their victims and gain telepathy and telekenesis. In time they gather an impressive array of magical and technological artifacts from their victims which are transported down the astral roots to the heart of the plant which often exists in its own pocket dimension. Exposure to these items can mutate the bladderwort and awaken curiosity about the many worlds around it and with access to those worlds and planes it can learn to scry and offer victims deals to be its agents in the outside world.

An Astral Bladderwort can be an extremely useful ally when they start branching into other realms allowing easy transport for those it trusts or uses.

For D&D: Some rumors say that Yggdrasil itself is an evolution of an Astral Bladderwort made by giants to combat dragons and their habit of using gates to world hop or teleporting within the Prime Material Plane behind their lines. Thus, the enmity of the ancient dragon Nidhogg toward the Celestial Tree.

For Cypher: A creature like this would flourish in the Strange and certainly could exist in Numenera. Trapping visitors in recursions that exist entirely within the Astral Bladderwort would make things very difficult for PCs.

Shadowrun: A trap for the unwary astral traveler or security measure installed into a top tier facility this could be a lot of fun given time constraints for astral beings that have a meat body or the dual natured.

MICE

I was going through a bunch of old notes and about a decade ago I had an idea for a Rats of NIMH inspired spygame. I hardly remember anything beyond that and most of the notes are in my evil short hand that works great until years pass and then becomes a cypher all on its own.

Basic idea is you play as sentient mice involved in a war for survival among giants using subtlety and spy games.

MICE stands for and links to a suit of cards:

Money = Diamonds

Ideology = Heart

Clubs = Coercion

Ego = Spade

These four tools are used for suborning rival mice and for manipulating the giants. Spade represents technology as mice have access to elite scientific institutions via their Ivory Tower agents in laboratories all over the world or could be used to represent “ground work” ie reconnaissance.

Each adventure the troupe would draw a card from a deck of each suit and would have to use that “score” to pull of Mission: Impossible style tricks. The troupe as a whole would have access to these cards as bonuses during the game. If you had a 2 of hearts that means you could have a small bonus to one “Action” that involved using Ideology to manipulate an asset.

I can’t make out much more than that from my notes but I thought I should post this just to get the idea out there as it sounds fun and would be pretty easy to add into most any system of play.

Here is an example of something awesome the mice might have access to in your game where mice get night-vision: https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-019-00735-4

Review of Hellhound Caves: An Endless Dungeon, Levels 1 and 2

Hellhound Caves by post world games is an endless dungeon that so far has a handful of levels written and drawn up that you can drop into most any fantasy campaign. This a review of Levels 1 and 2.

I would have put the maps first to introduce the setting and the maps are really good.

It doesn’t spare any introduction assuming that you can figure out what it is. It would be neat to have some ecology discussion as an intro but that is just because I try and imagine my dungeons as things either made for a specific purpose whether recently or in the ancient past or something that sort of evolved over time like ancient caves or a blending of the two. I ran a game a long time ago in which the dungeon was made by sentient titanic worms hundreds of thousands of years ago that hunter gather goblins had moved into and built a civilization in for example and a retreat when the aggressive and genocidal elves went on the rampage.

I liked the descriptions and the occasional gm prompts sprinkled through the text.

We don’t know why they are called the Hellhound Caves but it would be easy enough to throw them in or as a totem of some sort etc.

Use of the term scimitar is a bit of a bugbear of mine in that it just means non-european sabre and is thus a sort of meaningless term and prefer specific terms if you don’t use the generic sabre like tulwar or shamshir or kilij. But, I do sadly understand that scimitar is probably here to stay thanks to D&D.

There are nice litte personalizing touches in the room descriptions that help them come to life and give something for the players to chew on.

I think it would be cool if the maps were all collected and printed as battle maps for minis at some point with some sort of discount for people who bought the pdf’s.

I look forward to throwing this into one of my fantasy games sometime soon. I think I would have the fungal maze connect to the feywild because mushroom rings as gates to the fey is an ancient trope and to the shadowfell like if there was a graveyard where the sentient creatures of the caves deposit their dead and maybe other realms so you could use that room as “room 1” and have the PCs start there as they enter from another plane or world. This would be great as they PCs might not find out they are on a different world until they escape the caves and see the sky with two suns or three moons etc.

Speaking of ecology I could totally see the fungal maze supplying the food for most of the animal life there along with fish from the waters.

Lostlorn: A New RPG Setting

Art by Derek Stevens

Mark Rein-Hagen is back at the rpg creation with his Lostlorn setting. You can read about his team’s creations on itch.io and at his Patreon. If you prefer your lore audio than check out the Lostlorn Chronicles Podcast.

Here is a bit from a post that I will lift from to describe the setting:

“For the first time in fifteen generations, renowned visionary Mark Rein•Hagen, creator of Vampire: The Masquerade and the World of Darkness, enters the world of 5th Edition OGL-D20 with this premier Kickstarter campaign. An unholy matrimony of the world’s most popular system and his unique storytelling and worldbuilding sensibilities, Lostlorn: The Curse of BloodStone Isle promises an experience unlike any other!”

An epic fantasy RPG destination of spellbinding imagination and masterful artistry. A human cargo bound for servitude in exile on a lost land. An outlaw island that moves across oceans as well as the planes of existence… A hidden miracle with ancient secrets is finally revealed… These are the ingredients of an astonishing story of Bloodstone Isle, which must be puzzled out issue-by-issue of The Accursed. It is the story of a Freeboot journey. Of the search for true masters of a forgotten people, for the most astonishing and titanic beast in the seventy seas, and ultimately for a fabled island—a tempest scar rent upon reality, a font of unthinkable power and danger.
Designed as a D20 5e Campaign Setting, But also the first campaign setting for our new TaleSpinnerD20 game system (5e compatible, but dot-based) game, Badlander. First in the Accursed series of fantasy monster games.

As a proper disclaimer I was involved in the early brainstorming for a year or so and I am a moderator on the Lostlorn FB Group but life interfered with my continuing with the project in a managerial or lead sense in 2020. I’m quite proud of the work that the various writers have done taking the setting far beyond the initial seeds planted by the early brainstorms I was involved in. I was lucky enough to get a whole slew of awesome friends from this project and I wish them all luck with their new Kickstarter!

Loke Battlemaps Review

I highly recommend these maps if you like to use minis in your games. I have the Dungeon and Towns and Taverns both physical and vtt along with Sci-fi and the Big Book of Battle Maps along with two of the little maps and various vinyl kits.

The VTT has been awesome using with the new Role site during the pandemic but I am still a bit old school and use my minis with the battle maps and then take a pic to upload to discord. It works surprisingly well to be honest.

I backed them on Kickstarter and it was a great decision. I just received the Towns and Taverns this week and excited to use them more going forward in my various games.

They are easy to link up together combining the books and they lie flat which is very convenient so if you need a sprawling space and you have the books you can do some really cool things quickly. The main thing here is that you can set up a whole dungeon with feet of territory laid out in under a minute if you know what you have in mind which is great as a GM/DM when improvising. I have the Dungeons and Lasers set which is great for when you have some time to prepare.

My little boy loves these guys to use my minis on to have wars which is another bonus for parents rocking this set. I’ve even got him started on painting his own minis.

Enjoy a dozen or so pictures of the various sets with minis below.

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D&D 5e House Rules: Simple Arms and Armor

Weapons:

Primary Weapons: 2d6 damage. 10 gp for bludgeoning and 20 gp for slashing and piercing.

These are weapons of war whether a musket, a longbow, a heavy crossbow, a spadone (warsword/greatsword), a polearm like a poleax or partisan, rifle with a bayonet, a dane-axe, or in a modern setting an assault rifle and in a future setting a plasma rifle.

Most are used with two hands the majority of the time but may be paired with a small shield like a buckler. These weapons are often heavy and big making them inconvenient to take while shopping at the market and likely to disturb social interactions in certain settings or environments or be illegal in some jurisdictions.

Sidearm Weapons: 1d8 damage. 1d10 damage versatile. 5 gp for bludgeoning and 10 gp for slashing and piercing.

These are weapons of convenience that are easy to carry around in daily life or as a backup when the Primary Weapon fails. A revolver, a light crossbow, a sword, a mace, or a bearded axe. The Romans in contrast famously used their sword and shield combo but one could say that their primary weapon was the large shield from a certain perspective but usually these are backup weapons or for civilian use.

 

 

Close Weapons. 1d6 damage. 1 sp for bludgeoning. 1 gp for  slashing or piercing.

Thrown weapons using muscle power like a javelin or a dart or a throwing star and weapons used in close while grappling such as a bollocks dagger or even a hand crossbow or holdout/pocket pistol.

 

 

This system makes weapons a bit easier to handle and gets rid of bad decisions mechanically inspired by role-playing. I’m really not certain why they decided certain weapons are finesse weapons (rapiers are one of the harder weapons to use if you don’t have strong forearms, wrist, and grip for example while many longswords are very nimble plus you get to use two hands so the weight is easier to handle and you have a lever.

If you want to add a bit of complexity consider that most melee weapons are either tip heavy (Powerful) and do more damage or they are quick to defend and strike (Nimble) because the point of balance is near the grip.

Nimble weapons could use Defensive Duelist rules without buying the Feat. This would be most swords and many spears.

Powerful weapons could add Proficiency to Damage. This would be maces, axes, and pole-axes.

You can also specify that a weapon is Simple or Martial and adjust prices and damage. A Martial weapon could bump the die by +2d and double the price or you could have simple weapons be 1/10 the price and drop it by -2d this would give you daggers in the PHB and darts for example.

Another option would be to have weapons of quality used as a social/virtue signal showing your status and taste or lack thereof using things like mass manufactured munition grade gear and weapons as objects of art that cost much more and immediately warn others of high status (while also attracting attention from the more nefarious).

Shields:

+2 to AC. 1d6 bludgeoning (unless spiked then piercing). 1 gp for buckler. 10 gp for martial shield.

I usually assume that a PC is carrying a buckler shield unless otherwise stated because in most cultures for over a thousand years from India to England the buckler was ubiquitous for its usefulness and compact size. It is easy to strap to a belt or over the handle of a sword. Convenience rules for shields for civilians. Spiked bucklers were fairly common at certain times and locations and often made illegal as a response to roguish elements being fond of their use in closed in alleys and in crowds.

 

To the left is my buckler shield along with my arming sword and two handed longsword from Sigi Forge. You can see how easily such a shield could be carried compared to a two handed talhoffer dueling shield weighing thirty times more.

 

 

 

 

For war you might consider allowing large shields that offer Cover. A Tower shield, Tallhoffer Dueling Shield, or a Pavise that would be slammed into the earth all provide excellent cover (three quarters) for archers and crossbowmen. A kite shield or boss gripped viking shield might provide half cover while instead. Both would be much heavier and be much more inconvenient to carry around and mostly used for war.

When you make the shield bigger you end up gaining and losing advantages as you size up or down. From my experience in a duel they are basically equivalent thus the +2 AC for all shields but I know if I’m being shot at in a battle that I’d much rather have a more martial shield to hide behind thus a PC going into war might carry a big shield but a PC going to shop at the market will wear a small buckler.

 

 

 

 

 

Armor:

Full Coverage: +2 to AC, 2 Damage Resistance, and Resistance to Slashing. Double cost and double weight. Stealth Disadvantage. Max Dexterity to add to AC is 2.

This is armor for war or martial tournament that covers most or all of your body. It is extremely hard to injure a person in even a good cloth armor with a slashing weapon let alone someone garbed in a coat of plates, plate armor, or mail. You would not wear this around socially. Imagine if you’re having dinner at a posh restaurant and a SWAT officer in Riot Gear sat down at the table next to you.

 

Core Coverage: the standard assumed armor for adventurers out on the town that protects the head and torso mostly and may have some arm and leg parts. This is armor that you could wear out on the town and not be overly inconvenienced and in many settings not attract undue attention. It could be a simple gambeson made of linen (Padded Armor in D&D) or a really tough and padded leather jacket in modern day.

 

 

 

 

Light Armor: +2 AC. 10 pounds. 10 gp. May add Dexterity Mod to AC.

Medium Armor: +4 AC. 20 pounds. 25 gp. May add Dexterity Mod -1 to AC if Strength is 13+.

Heavy Armor: +6 AC. 35 pounds. 50 gp. May add Dexterity Mod -2 to AC if Strength is 15+.

And just like weapons you can tweak these by having bespoke gear be tailored to a wearer so the weight is properly distributed cutting the “effective” weight of the armor in half and you could have elegant works of art armor like something made by Negroli that cost the annual taxes from an entire duchy to make. You can have special advantages of certain armors made by smiths in different lands and cultures. If you have better steel and can mass manufacture breastplates than mail becomes regulated to just the gaps between plates. If labor is cheap than mail is cheap but if labor is expensive few will wear mail if anything else is available. So, in one kingdom a mail shirt might cost fifty gold while in another it might cost 10.

You can put a jupon on plate and pad out everything to make it more stealthy at some cost in weight and size.

Armor doesn’t have to involve much dexterity limitations. People wear plate and do gymnastics and run marathons. Well made plate, primary weapon, sidearm weapon, and close weapon with pack is about the same weight that a modern day infantryman in full gear would wear and go tramping around in the hills, woods, or deserts of the world today.

You could also have Simple and Martial armor with some sort of simple differentiation with AC and having Simple be cheaper.

Oddly enough historically a buff coat made of layers of leather was often more expensive than a steel breastplate which would often be put on top of it as usually the buff coat was tailored or bespoke for the officer while the steel breastplate might be munitions grade and roughly sized like buying a tshirt today online with all the vagaries and guessing games between makers.

In the middle ages a full set of leather armor would be very expensive too and would be extremely rare. Usually leather was saved for gloves, boots, and straps to hold on better things.

Studded leather was a mistake from the early days of D&D looking at a coat of plates or brigandine styles of armor which gain their protection not from the leather but the metal, bone, or other material that was studded to the leather. This would be like calling a modern kevlar vest with plates inside pockets: pocketed kevlar and assuming that the extra layers from the pockets are what provided the extra protection!

A fun thing might be to have dwarven steel armor put out most of the neighboring human armor makers out of business in a game…maybe the PC’s get hired to steal their steel secrets!

 

 

 

Agon RPG Preview Review

I’m reading through the preview pdf of Agon by Fred Hicks/Evil Hat and I’m impressed by the art and “smoothness” of the game despite it being a draft. I’m hesitant to say to much beyond a few generalities as the game is new but you can grok a fair amount from the copious data on the kickstarter page I linked to above.

You have your typical players and you have your GM/DM/SG/ST etc referee called the Strife Player with this system which is very open to swapping who is the referee which is great for groups trying to avoid referee burnout or trying to train up new referees.

I’m a big proponent ever since I discovered the idea of purposefully having beta Storyguides in Ars Magica as a kid and having one session tryouts for referee is a great way to test the waters without overwhelming a new referee. Since the system is not very crunchy and more story focused that takes part of the distraction of heavy rules away making Agon appealing as a referee trainer as well. Since it does have mechanics that avoids the opposite pitfall of games like Amber Diceless which become a bit scary to newcomers because there is so little hand-holding.

As the Strife Player or referee you play an island which the other players face off against with various challenges. This makes it easy to hand off referee duty to the next person!

Each hero has just a small handful of traits as you can see below. It is blessedly free of formulas and algebra that made up a lot of the crunchy games of my youth (which I loved back then but I only have so much effort to spend these days and even the thought of min/maxing a complicated system sounds terrible.)

I’d like to see more epithets get added as it can be daunting for some players to come up with good descriptors. I’d really recommend taking a look at the new Cypher rulebook for ideas if they don’t and then just give it a divine greek twist or go and look up epithets used by your divine ancestor or even look at other pantheons like the Celts such as Lugh Lámfada “of the Long Arm” and Samildánach “Equally Skilled in Many Arts” (basically means jack of all trades in today’s speech).

The mythology booster pack from The Story Engine on Kickstarter would probably be a great tool to use with this game. I’m looking at the beta for that right now too and it looks great.

If you like story based role playing with Scions of Greek Gods I think you’ll dig this and it does have a short section on taking the game beyond Greece and I really liked that they mentioned the lasting influence Greek art and thought had outside of Europe. Might be fun to have adventures in Greek Bactria but instead of islands have valleys or something like that.

And since my website is Scion House Rules originally you can probably guess why I am so enthused and eagerly awaiting the finished product to take my players on a new adventure.