Tag: ORWA

Proceduralism On a Red World Alone

Pixel art of a group of adventurers looking out over mars, towards the city in the dome beneath a starry sky. Adapted from the splash screen at the start of Final Fantasy on the NES.

The current incarnation of On a Red World Alone has been an experiment with a novel procedure of play. The primary aim is to compress the traditional adventurer-to-conqueror campaign structure, so domain play can occur from the first session without ever displacing adventure play.

For those unfamiliar with the (so-called) traditional structure, it is typically presented thus: characters begin as grubby dungeon delvers scrabbling in filth to survive. Through the accumulation of levels, power, wealth, and influence, they become monarchs (or warlords, kingpins, archmages, & popes). In addition to delving dungeons or exploring wilderness, players at this exalted level will engage in ‘domain play.’ How domain play is done has always been vague. Presumably it involves managing large numbers of people and resources rather than only a single character and their personal resources. The idea is compelling, but I’ve never been certain how to approach it. Given how infrequently domain play is discussed, and how incomplete those discussions are, I suspect I am not alone. This post describes my attempt to solve that problem.

Two notes before we dive in:

  • This post will necessarily get deep into the nitty gritty of my game’s setting. I worry that the quirks of the setting may be more distracting in this post than they normally are, so here’s a quick primer for those not familiar with On a Red World Alone. ORWA is set in a densely packed city inside a biodome on Mars. The earth was obliterated shortly after this colony was established, before it had achieved self-sufficiency. The scant few survivors of the human species, traumatized by loss and the struggle for survival, descended into barbarism for centuries. The game is set 500 years after the destruction of Earth. It is the dawning of a new period of enlightenment. Within living memory (Session 1) the Dome was culturally and technologically medieval, but over the past 12 years (176 Sessions) a great deal of cultural progress has been made, and lost knowledge rediscovered.
  • What I describe below remains experimental. Every week I discover new ways to improve on it: develop new tools, discard vestigial mechanics, make key refinements to phrasing. Even the act of articulating my current procedures in this essay has highlighted areas which needed adjustment, so that in places this is now a step ahead of anything my players have seen.

Procedure Outline

Each time we gather to play On a Red World Alone, we start with the Domain Phase. When that’s over we shift to the Adventure Phase until the end of the session.

Domain Phase

  1. Determine Consequences
  2. World Events
  3. Update Progress Bars
  4. Faction Actions
  5. Player Actions

Adventure Phase

  1. Choose a Mission
  2. Preparation
  3. Travel
    • Through the Dome
    • Through the Sewers
    • Into Space
    • Over the Surface of Mars
  4. Exploration
    • Dungeon
    • Neighborhood
  5. Return Home
  6. Haven Turn

Post-Session

  1. Write Recap
  2. Review The Questions
  3. Prepare for next session
Lizard men gather around a wizard, paying great attention to the robed figure as they stare into their orb. Taken from Thundarr the Barbarian.

Domain Phase

The Domain Phase represents one month of game time, and is played through in its entirety each session. With a fair degree of consistency, it takes between 40 and 60 minutes to get through the whole thing. I’m fairly strict about ending sessions 3 hours after start time, so the Domain Phase represents roughly one third of an evening of play.

1 — Determine Consequences

One player is called on to roll a consequence for this session. A riff off Arnold’s “Potential Drama” idea. I maintain a table of consequences that will result from the player’s actions, or from the baggage they rolled randomly during character creation. These can influence any part of the session, which is why I roll them first thing. Some consequences can only occur if a specific player is present, while others apply to the whole party. It’s rare to have a session with everyone in it, so before I announce which die the group needs to roll, I do some quick mental shuffling to figure out which entries on the table are possible today. Everything on the table is specific and prepared in advance. Examples might include:

  • (Only if The Wizard Player is present.) A consequence of the time the Wizard had a spell failure which created a contagious meme about how they smell bad. There’s a bad flare-up today. Everyone the party meets will React at -1 because they think the party are stinky.
  • A consequence of that time the party rescued an artist from a monster that collects artist hands. She has sent the party a gift! A painting that would make an excellent poster, and could serve as a huge boost to a propaganda campaign action. The art may be held in reserve until the party wishes to use it.
  • A consequence of that time the party broke into a mercenary’s apartment, robbed him and then killed him. His crew figured out who did it, and the first encounter that occurs during this session’s Adventure Phase will be an ambush.

2 — World Events

Another player is called on to roll a 2d6 on the table below. Like Consequences, each of these has specific results prepared in advance. I’ve actually got 3 prepped for each, though that’s a bit of excess on my part. Regardless of what is rolled, the prepared results are meant either to create an opportunity for the players to exploit, or a crisis they need to respond to. Whether the opportunity or crisis is better dealt with during the Domain or Adventure phase is often open to interpretation.

  1. Natural Disaster (Example: The Dome’s water systems hit a serious snag. Low areas of the Dome are under 2d12 inches of water. This goes up by 2d12 each week until fixed. Every faction’s Food is reduced by 2 for every foot of water.)
  2. Major Figure Exits Public Life (Usually deaths, but occasionally exile or imprisonment) (Example: Susan Quar, narcotics dealer of note and longtime supplier for all the party’s needs, has been killed. The party will need to make new arrangements.)
  3. Opposed Faction Receives Unexpected Boon (Example: A randomly determined enemy faction discovers an abandoned missile silo in their territory. They keep this very hush-hush, but whispers of excited activity in the area reach the party’s ears. Check upcoming faction actions for that faction. Could any of them be enhanced with a missile?)
  4. Wizard or Dragon Shit (Example: Madam Crucifixion attempted to ambush Dr. Guillotine. She knew just where to go. The battle was brutal. Both survived, and both retreated severely depleted in resources to places where they could hunker down. You could easily identify a few locations to raid while they’re laid up, though if they are able to divine who did it they’d certainly retaliate. Alternatively, you could attempt to destroy one of them in their weakened state. The two are probably the most powerful wizards still living in the Dome (excluding inscrutable Penelope).)
  5. Sub-Faction Action (While the Dome’s major factions all regularly get opportunities to act, this result allows smaller groups to occasionally be at the center of Domewide issues.) (Example: Happy Worm Cultists scavenge food from the players faction. 1 Fewer food this Domain turn. They are well-liked by those who know them, so using force to stop them from eating in order to maintain your taxes would require a roll on the bad reputation table.)
  6. One Additional Faction Action This Session (See Factions Actions below)
  7. Public Need Arises in the Party’s Territory (Example: d4 of the party’s Weorods have been taking undue liberties. Stealing, getting drunk and violent, that sorta thing. Tensions are rising to the point that there are murmurings that large scale violence may break out.)
  8. Public Discovery Made (Example: An archive of “I can haz cheezeburger” memes is discovered online, and spreads rapidly around the Dome. People are quoting it constantly, and it will briefly serve as a sort of universal language of friendliness, allowing the communication of basic ideas outside normal language bounds. After the next Haven Turn everyone will be sick of it and uttering them will probably be regarded as a hostile action.)
  9. Party’s Alliances or Experts are Threatened (Example: The party’s chief engineer recently refused a strange offer to leave your employ and go work for someone else. Now she’s receiving extortionate texts demanding she leak secrets. She won’t reveal what she’s being extorted with, but if you don’t do something about it she’s going to have to give in to the extortion.)
  10. Party’s Tools or Programs are Threatened (Example: Ace Reporter Willie Kypho (formerly of Cult Quarterly) drops the story that the party controls the majority of the Dome’s weather control systems. Why hasn’t this information been shared, or this resource been put to the public good? The party needs to make some response or roll on the bad reputation table.)
  11. Factionogenesis (Example: Duck Folk seize 2d6 blocks of territory in a random location. Call it Duckburg.)

3 — Update Progress Bars

“Progress Bars” being my cheeky re-naming of Clocks. This somewhat tedious-yet-vital activity goes between two more interesting activities in the hopes the players don’t drift too far while I do a bit of bookkeeping. On occasion, clocks will reach a hiccup that I secretly scheduled when the clock was set. It still advances by 1 for this session, but won’t be able to progress any further until some issue is resolved. Thus, if the party are on the ball and get it resolved during this session, they won’t lose any time.

Robed cultists hold a platform on their shoulders, on which rests a large head with a domineering expression. Robots flank the cultists on either side. Taken from Thundarr the Barbarian.

4 — Faction Actions

At present there are 10 major factions in ORWA, aside from the players’ own. Each has their own agenda, and a secret schedule of 3 prepared actions they will take in pursuit of it. When the session reaches this point I call on two players (or three, if a 7 was rolled for the World Event) to roll a d10 to determine which factions advance their agendas this month. Like the World Events these are meant to either create an opportunity for the players to exploit, or a crisis they need to respond to, though sometimes they’re just clues about something big that’s coming in the future that the party may wish to prepare for.

Some examples of recent Faction Actions in ORWA:

  • Pamphlets are distributed to the Akiovashan Faithful, who are set the task of scouring the Dome for a certain room. The pamphlet is very general and mostly pictorial. (Literacy isn’t widespread). For those in-the-know, they’re clearly looking for the Dome’s environmental control systems. Secretly, the party is in possession of several of these. Handing one or more over to the Akiovashans would be massively beneficial to your relationship with that faction. If you don’t want them to find it, you may want to take steps to hinder their search.
  • A large number of “former” soldiers of The Redstone Lords request safe passage through the party’s territory. They’re traveling to the Lords of Light territory to “learn the LoL’s advanced farming techniques, so they can use their strength to feed their people.” Your intelligence reports suggest the Redstone Lords’ disarmament is a ruse, but refusing passage outright would be a very bad move from a public relations perspective.
  • The Hell’s Tenants performed a major raid in Team Gopher’s territory. A hole opened up in the ground, and dozens of mangled horn-headed people emerged, dragging dozens more back down the hole with them. Pursuit was attempted, but failed. The tunnels are too labyrinthine. What are they doing with all of these captives?

5 — Player Actions

Finally, the group takes on the role of their faction’s leadership, with all its resources at their disposal. Between the World Events, the Faction Actions, and any hiccups in the party’s Progress Bars, there ought to be a number of fresh hooks for the party to respond to. I also maintain a list of open hooks left over from previous sessions in case additional prompts are needed, though my aim is that some space is left in most sessions for the group to seize the initiative for themselves.

The group is allowed to pursue a number of goals equal to the number of players present, with each player acting as caller in turn. They do not control any particular characters at this stage. Their own PCs are currently low-level grunts who aren’t important enough to be consulted on matters of policy.

I’ve adopted this unusual form because the mode of play is unfamiliar. There was a tendency early in the experiment for players to use the Domain Phase to support their characters in the Adventure Phase, whereas my goal is to encourage the exact opposite behavior. I want to foster a group who approaches the game as a domain-level problem, and wields their adventuring PCs as tools in pursuit of domain-level goals. Additionally, positioning each player as a caller has been helpful for supporting players who aren’t able to play consistently and don’t fully grok what’s going on. Each player can cede as much or as little control as they want to the rest of the group during their turn at caller.

The group’s faction has a character sheet listing its resources, and there are mechanics for 8 codified actions:

  • Recruit (Gain Human Resources, so long as the faction has enough food to support them.)
  • Diplomacy (Make requests of another faction. What is possible depends greatly on existing diplomatic relations.)
  • Propagandize (Attempt to influence public opinion.)
  • R&D (Set a team of experts to solving a complicated problem, or developing something new.)
  • Public Works (Set a team of workers to solve a simple problem, or build something standard.)
  • Establish Institution (Create an ongoing program, which will be an ongoing drain on resources)
  • Military (Direct the faction’s armies.)
  • Give Quest (Send spies, assassins, and adventurers to accomplish specific goals.)

The breadth of action allowed by “pursing a goal” is left intentionally vague at the moment. I’m searching for a balance between giving each player a satisfying turn at the helm, without allowing the scope of everyone’s turns to balloon into something unmanageable. Most of the time a single action is sufficient for pursuing a goal. There are cases, though, where one action leads directly into another so smoothly that it would be disruptive to cut off the turn. For example, there was a recent turn in which a player organized a counter-attack to reclaim some seized territory [Military], then used footage of the event to convince several other factions [Diplomacy] to join them in issuing a public condemnation of the original attack [Propaganda].

What I may do in the future is create a mechanic whereby the length of each action can be determined, then allow each player to serve as caller for one month’s worth of actions.

A burning sun dominates the frame, looming over a ruined city. A trio of youths stand together in the foreground, the city far behind them. Cover of the novel "Dhalgren."

Adventure Phase

Unlike the Domain Phase, the Adventure Phase is not played in its entirety each session. On average it takes between two and four sessions to get all the way through the Adventure Phase’s procedure. The action pauses when it’s time for the session to end, then picks up where we left off once the Adventure Phase resumes in the next session. This means the Domain and Adventure Phases are usually a little out of sync with one another, existing on a floating timescale where one advances rigidly 1 month each session, and the other phase can spend half a dozen sessions getting through a single day. This may initially seem confusing, but the solution is simple: just don’t think about it. Strict time records must not be kept.

1 — Choose a Mission

When starting a fresh Adventure Phase, the group needs to decide what they’re going to do. They can personally address any of the issues raised during the Domain Phase, acting as a commando team or diplomatic delegation for their faction. Alternately, they can ignore the hooks and attempt to take the initiative on behalf of their domain, perhaps by raiding a faction they dislike, or doing a favor for one of their allies. They can also ignore domain level concerns entirely, and spend this Adventure Phase selfishly seeking personal wealth and power. Experience points in ORWA can only be earned by donating money into the faction’s coffers (1 donated credit card = 1 experience point / 1 level gained = 1 unit of funds usable in the Domain Phase), so even this purely selfish pursuit has the party acting in their faction’s interests.

Generally I will reiterate the most obvious hooks that are on the table here, and ask the party what they want to do. If there isn’t a clear consensus, I’ll randomly appoint one of the players as Party Leader, and ask them to set the goal. (I then note who has been party leader, and they won’t be in the running again unless everyone else present has been leader an equal number of times.)

2 — Preparation

Before setting out from the safety of the walled citadel of their faction, the party has an opportunity to alter their equipment loadout, recruit hirelings, make arrangements with allies, or pursue information. Because this is a setting in which cell phones are ubiquitous, the party can accomplish quite a bit by calling ahead to some friendly NPCs.

3 — Travel

Regardless of what goal the party is pursuing, part of that pursuit will involve travel. ORWA has four entirely different mechanics for handling this, though each share a single procedure:

  1. The destination is set.
  2. The referee determines how many hours (or days, or weeks) the journey will take, and how many encounter checks will result. (# of encounter checks is rounded up!)
  3. The players are called upon one by one to roll a d6, with results determined according to which mode of travel they’re in.
  4. The players resolve the encounter to their satisfaction.
  5. If this mode of travel depends on resources, check to see if they ought to be depleted.
  6. Return to c, and repeat the process from there until the party reaches their destination.

The various forms of travel available to the party are:

Over the surface of Mars. Encounters are rolled less frequently and occur less often in this sprawling red desert. There are locations to find and creatures to contend with, but the greatest danger is the environment. Within the Dome there’s food vendors on every other street, and a climate automatically controlled for human comfort. Outside, the characters must carry enough food to get wherever they’re going and back again, and be prepared for the extreme heat of the day and extreme cold of the night. Note that before traveling over the surface, the party would need to travel through the Dome to one of its exits.

Into Space. One of the party’s key resources is a fixed portal between their walled citadel inside the Dome, and a space station in geosynchronous orbit above the Dome. There’s a space ship docked at the station which the party can use to travel into space. The thing is a 500 year old freight hauling vessel which moves about as quickly as our own modern space ships do. It also runs on a form of solid fuel which the party currently has no means of acquiring more of, so resource management is critically important. Encounters are quite rare in space, though. It’s even more barren than the surface of mars.

Through the Sewers. A labyrinth accessible from manhole covers in the Dome’s streets. The sewers extend further down into the interior of Mars than any player has yet ventured. This is not a mapped space, but rather a Flux which connects both to mapped spaces and to other Fluxes. (Flux Space is another idea I must revisit soon!) I allow players to use the sewers to travel between any two points on the surface. It requires 1 encounter roll more than if they’d taken the direct path through the Dome’s streets, but by traveling in the sewers the players are able to avoid dense crowds of people and factional authorities. Sewer encounters are a couple notches weirder and more deadly than the ones typically faced on the surface.

Through the Dome. By far the most common mode of getting where the party needs to go, since the Dome is where people live and thus where most things happen. There’s no supply-based resource depletion to worry about when traveling through the Dome, since the party is presumably never far from a vendor that sells any basic material they might need. However the Dome is dense with encounters and impediments of every sort, which will tax the party’s less easily replenished resources, like their hit points and saving throws. Of course they can always find somewhere that’ll rent them a bed for a day or two, but such rest gives their goal time to become more complicated.

4 — Exploration

Depending on the player’s goals, the destination they’re traveling to is probably either a Dungeon, or a Neighborhood.

Two explorers have just walked into an apartment, only to find the floor split, the furniture askew, and a deadly hole in the floor. Taken from the Cowboy Bebop anime.

Dungeon Exploration

My dungeon exploration procedure is pretty standard.

  1. The referee describes the party’s current environment.
  2. The party, acting as a group, uses one Exploration Turn to investigate the space they’re in, or move to a different space. If one member announces their intent to take individual action (i.e., hacking a computer), I check in with everyone else in the group to see how their characters spend that same block of time.
  3. The referee relays new information to the party, such as the results of their investigation, or the success/failure of their actions.
  4. After a-c have cycled 3 times, the referee calls on one player to roll the Encounter Die:
    1. Encounter surprises the party.
    2. Party gets the drop on an encounter.
    3. Impediment (i.e., a minor collapse occurs)
    4. Local Effect (i.e., if the dungeon has a unique function, that function occurs.)
    5. Clue. (Either for the next encounter, or to the location of some treasure, etc.)
    6. NPC Chatter
  5. The party resolves the results of the encounter roll, after which the procedure resets. Repeat until the party escapes the dungeon.
An explorer of the apocalyptic wasteland comes across a medium-sized town. A wall of junked cars blocks easy entrance. A hazy smoke lies low over the town. Taken from Fallout 1, the video game.

Neighborhood Exploration

Neighborhoods are not inherently hostile to being navigated the way dungeons are. By definition they are inhabited by large groups of people who have some reasonable expectation of moving around their neighborhood with relative safety. The party doesn’t need to worry about traps, doesn’t need maps, and can’t solve their problems with violence so easily. Rather, the challenge of adventuring in a neighborhood is social. Can you strike up a conversation with a shopkeep and convince her to tell you about the local tough’s watering hole? Can you impress the toughs enough that they’ll tell you where you can find the mercenary you’re after? (Credit to Ava of Errant & Permanent Cranial Damage for this idea!)

Neighborhoods ARE inherently hostile to outsiders, and so it’s important to determine whether or not the party will be clocked as outsiders. Do they speak the local dialect? Are their clothes within the range of fashions that are normal here? Are their hands as calloused, or as soft, as other folks? Each neighborhood has a few key features common to its residents. If most of the party shares these features, the neighborhood will yield to them. If most of the party looks like they don’t belong here, the neighborhood will resist them. (Credit to Ty of Mindstorm for this idea!)

My neighborhood procedure goes like this:

  1. Does the majority of the party share the key features of this community?
  2. Where do they want to begin their inquiry?
    • Going to a local official opens the party to greater scrutiny, but could provide them with greater resources.
    • Merchants are always willing to talk with outsiders, but you’ve got to spend money to get their attention.
    • Bar patrons are often open to striking up a conversation with someone who buys them a drink.
    • Random people on the street are always an option, but most folk don’t love being approached by randos.
  3. After the conversation is resolved, where does the party go next? (Did they learn something they can act on, or do they need to continue searching for their first clue?)
  4. As they travel to their next neighborhood location, the referee calls on one player to roll the Encounter Die:
Party Obviously OutsidersEncounter RollParty Blends In
Locals watch you face danger.1. Encounter Unusual DangerPeople try to help you.
Party shaken down or threatened.2. Encounter a Local ToughThe toughs nod, and pass by.
Your plight is ignored.3. Physical ImpedimentPeople let you know how to bypass it.
4. Local Effect
5. Clue
Your own hirelings.6. NPC ChatterA helpful local appears.
  1. The party arrives at their destination and may continue their inquiry in a new location. Repeat c, d, & e until the adventure is complete.

5 — Return Home

Ideally this should be handled with exactly the same travel procedure as before. Usually I enforce this. Occasionally, doing so would create an awkward break in the Adventure Phrase. One where the Session needs to end in 10 minutes, and the journey home will take 40 minutes. Too long to extend the session for, but an annoyingly short amount of play to resolve next session. When this happens I often handwave the travel home. I do very much prefer to play through it properly most of the time, though.

A visually-busy scene. Outdoors, with a staircase and structures built entirely out of garbage. A photograph of the Cathedral of Trash in Austin Texas.

6 — Haven Turn

The length of a Haven Turn is “however long is necessary for the Adventure Phase to catch up with the Domain Phase on the calendar.” Most of the stuff I once used Haven Turns for has been subsumed into the Domain Phase, with the exception of character downtime. The procedure is fairly brisk:

  1. Hit Points & Saving Throws return to their baseline values. Magic Users may swap their memorized spells. Characters who sacrificed their armor may replace it.
  2. Players may donate as much of their money as they like into their faction’s coffers, gaining xp equal to that amount. (Characters with debt must pay equal amounts towards their debt)
  3. Each player is asked in turn how their character spends the downtime. A non-exhaustive list of options:
    • Relaxation. The character starts next adventure with 1 Temporary Hit Point per level.
    • Research. The character does a deep dive, and may uncover the answers to 3 questions. (Some information may require them to have a specific source of knowledge to dive into.)
    • Relationship Development. Make a social roll to improve your relationship with a certain NPC.
    • Crafting. Describe an object you’d like to make, and make a skill check to build it.
    • Spell Creation. The player writes the first draft of the spell. The referee writes the final draft.
    • Solo Quest. The character pursues a personal goal which would perhaps be too much of a distraction for them to drag the rest of the party along for. The player sets one specific goal which must be approved by the referee, then rolls 2d6:
      • 2. Failure, begin the next Adventure Phase with half HP and a Saving Throw of 15.
      • 3-5. Failure, begin next Adventure with -1hp per level, and a Saving Throw of 13.
      • 6-8. Success, begin next Adventure with -1hp per level, and a Saving Throw of 13
      • 9-11. Success, begin next adventure with -1hp.
      • 12. Success, no injuries, and you also brought home cash treasure worth 200cc per level!

Post Session

Before each session starts I make a copy of my session report template, which I fill out as we play. After the session (immediately if possible) I flesh out the details into a full session report. My goal with these is not to write compelling reading—I’ve never enjoyed reading session reports, and only started sharing mine by request. The purpose of my play reports is as reference material. It’s handy to be able to type in the name of an NPC and immediately see all their appearances in the game. Frequently I’m able to use it when one of the players can’t find their notes about how one of their magic items works. Just recently it was useful when I started keeping a list of open hooks for Domain Actions. That wasn’t something I had been tracking, but it was simple to look over all the hooks I’d given out and write down the ones that would still be open.

One great failing of my approach is that I over-write my session reports. They don’t need to be anywhere near as long and detailed as they are. This is a failing in my technique that I’ve never quite managed to fix, but I’m sure others could get the same benefits with less effort.

At the bottom of my recap template are a set of questions to consider. I use these to write out a list of everything I want to accomplish before the next session:

  • What needs to be restocked? (At a minimum, one of the world events and two of the Faction Actions. Usually there will be encounters that got used up as well.)
  • Does anyone need to be added to Recurring Characters? (Per my Encounter Table method. Were any NPCs fun enough that I want to see them again?)
  • Who did the characters wrong? (And more importantly: what are they going to do about it? Should they be added to the consequences table, or should a whole adventure be planned around their revenge?)
  • Does anyone owe the party a favor? (Similar to the above: what are they going to do about it?)
  • What Hooks should be added for player actions during the domain phase? (Did anything crop up during this session that players may want to be reminded of?)
  • What tools would help the rough parts of this session work better? (Were the players confused at any point? Was I unable to adjudicate a situation gracefully? Could it be smoothed out with a new procedure, mechanic, or table?)

Over the course of the two weeks between each session I work my way through the list, restocking and revising what is needed.

As of today, those are the procedures I use for running On a Red World Alone. Though, the next session is coming up very shortly now, so by the time you read this it’s very likely something will have changed somewhere.

Photo of my ORWA to-do list. Many items are scratched out, but the ones which haven't yet been crossed off are: Dungeon Impediments, Local Effects, Codify Haven Turn Procedures Generally Better, Weorod How Many Can be used in a battle? Progress bar what does "talk to Needletooth jack" spell mean? What are all 27 of the space hulks in orbit? Reactions to the party's domain actions? Domain level PCs? How do the akiovashans alter their plans? Review domain phases past: what should be different in the world and encounter tables? Are consequences working well? Occurring often enough? World events: review! Neighborhood generator. Movement ought to be reorganized into PROCEDURE! A hammer and a pen laying across the paper obscure the rest of the text.

Additional Reading About Procedures

Proceduralism, by Brendan S.
Doctrines of Proceduralism, by Brendan S.
Proceduralism, by Gus L.
Errant Design Deep Dive #2: Core Procedures, by Ava Islam
The Rhythm of Procedure, by Retired Adventurer
Theoretical & Practical Proceduralism, by Marcia
Loops, by Emmy
What Even Is a “Procedure”? by Prismatic Wasteland
The Basic Procedure of the OSR, by Prismatic Wasteland

Miscellaneous References

Meet the New Boss: Some Thoughts on Domain Level Play, by Joseph Manola. (Also recorded as Episode 108 of Blogs on Tape)
A Fracture in Old School Philosophy: Barbarian or King?, by Dwiz
I’m Getting Too High Level For This Shit, by Nick LS Whelan (A short post which may add some additional useful context to the ideas discussed above).
Running Domain Play as a Carousing Table, by Scrap Princess
AD&D’s Domain Game, by Chris Kutalik

Trying out Glory from God: The Past Gods

Note:This post is presented to you by the generous people who support my Patreon campaign. Normally I only update once a week, but thanks to your pledges, I’ll now be able to throw in one extra update each month. If my pledges keep going higher, I’ll eventually be able to move to a full two-posts-per-week schedule! So if that’s something you’d like to see, check out my Patreon! We now return to your regularly scheduled bonus P&P article:

The goal is to make cleric magic weirder. To create a better counterpart to the Magic Words system used by Magic Users in my games.

So far we’ve established the broad stokes of how the system is going to work, and how spells will be created. We’ve also created a kind a template for how gods can be presented in a useful, gameable way, as well as a fun table of oddities to make casting a little less predictable. Now we need to work up some examples to turn all of that theory into a reality. I’ll probably write two or three of these so I can really start to get a sense of where the system’s strengths and weaknesses are.

I’m going to be playtesting this system in my ORWA campaign, where I have one cleric who is playing a techno priest.  (Unfortunately, this player had real life obligations, and had to leave the game after only three sessions. But I wrote all of this before that happened, sooo….) Given that, it only makes sense to write up The Past Gods, who are worshiped by that sect. They’re not a very traditional deity, given that they’re sort of a pantheon of nameless entities that are worshiped as a single deific force. But if the system can’t handle weird, then it’s not a very good system.

The Past Gods

Domains

  • Technology
  • Engineering
  • Lost Knowledge

Mythology

The past gods were the normal men and women of an advanced age now past. They gave us all of the many technological wonders humanity once enjoyed, and which humanity lost when it descended into a sinful, ignorant subrace. The past gods still hope that we can return from our fall, and so they bless us with samples of the technological wonders that will await us if we follow them.

Laws / Taboos:

  • Technology should be acquired and preserved. Even broken technology is sacred. In other circumstances, property should be respected. However, all technology belongs to The Past Gods, and so taking it in their name is not theft.
  • Technology should be understood through The Technology Support Rituals. To try and understand technology on one’s own merit is to presume equality with the humans of old, and this is an insult to The Past Gods. (This is a stricture of the church, and not one imposed by the gods themselves.)

Spells (All 1st level)
For the purposes of all spells here, “Technology” refers only to devices which are now beyond common human understanding in the setting. So a flashlight, a gun, or a cellphone would be considered technology, but a spade or a crossbow would not.

Abjuration (1 round casting time)

“And the biting current was altered, and brought to rest in the right place.”

The next time the targeted character would suffer electrical damage, that damage is grounded and does them no harm. The effect lasts for 2 exploration turns per caster level, or until it has been expended.

“For mechanisms work only by the will of the Past Gods, and not against their servants.”

The target becomes completely incapable of activating mechanical devices, either intentionally or not. This includes tripwires and pressure plates which might cause a trap to be sprung on them. Similarly they cannot open a lock or fire a gun, as these are also mechanisms. The effect lasts for 2 combat rounds per caster level.

Command (1 round casting time)

“Cease your function, blessed tool. You are in the hands of the enemy.”

An indicated piece of technology within 30′ of the caster ceases to function. It cannot be repaired for 2 exploration turns per caster level.

“The hooting screech, guardian of the net’s bounty.”

To cast this spell the caster opens their mouth, and from their body comes an inhuman sound. A series of high pitched screeches, mixed simultaneously with beeps and white noise. The sound is so cacophonous that nothing requiring sound can function within a 30′ radius of the caster. No speech, nor any spell casting either. This effect also blocks any special effects that use sound to function, such as Hideous Laughter. The spell lasts for up to 1 round per caster level, though the caster must maintain the spell with their full attention if they wish for it to last longer than a single round, and thus cannot take further actions.

Blessing (1 exploration turn casting time)

“For the sinful man, answers remain always elusive.”

This curse prevents the target from discovering some specific piece of information by any means. Even if it is directly told to them, it will fall immediately out of their heads like the name of the 99th person you’re introduced to at a party. Even if they try to exert all of their effort to paying attention when they are told this information, they simply cannot learn it.

The spell is cast on some written example of the forbidden information. The first person to read the ensorcled text will become the spell’s target, and they will remain subject to it until Remove Curse is cast.

“She did rise, as though held aloft by a rotor of blades.”

With the cacophonous sound of helicopter blades, the target of the spell rises into the air. There are no physical rotors, merely the sound of them. The beneficiary of the spell can travel in any direction at a rate of 30′ per round, up to 100′ in the air. The effect lasts for 2 exploration turns per caster level.

Divination (1 exploration turn casting time)

“You will know them by their form and by their function, for they are blessed.”

So long as the caster does not move from their spot, they gain a sort of technology-detecting vision. They may turn round if they wish, but cannot take any steps away from where they are when the spell is cast. Any technology that falls within their field of view will glow a slight shade of red. The caster is also able to determine the function and condition of the technology from the shade and vibration of this red aura. This doesn’t aide so much in diagnosing what needs to be repaired about a broken piece, but does allow for quick determination of what is working and what is not.

“Of my companion I did ask: call my phone, so that its location shall be revealed unto me.”

When cast, the caster identifies a piece of technology. It must be a general type, rather than a specific item. “An xPhone Universe 6SS” is an acceptable identification. “My cell phone,” is not.

The caster then knows the precise location of the closest instance of the described device. So long as the caster does not move a muscle, they can track any movement of the device. Once the caster moves, the effect ends.

Prayer (1 watch casting time)

“Though beset by magnets, the machine did boot.”

The cleric can order any broken machine to work for 1 turn per caster level. The caster does not control the machine, nor does the machine necessarily have access to its full range of functions that might require additional working bits. (Guns may be forced to work, but they will not produce bullets. Computers may be forced to boot, but they will not necessarily be able to display the data you wanted.)

“That which transpires here must stay here for all time”

The cleric consecrates an area of a 30′ radius, which lasts for 1 day per caster level. Everything that transpires within this space will be forgotten by those within it when they leave. Even the caster will have no recollection of what they said or did while within the consecrated space.

Ritual (1 haven turn casting time)

“From the gods’ mind, creatures were given life who held no form.”

This ritual requires that the caster have access to a computational device, such as a computer, or cell phone. It also requires 300 credits of computational resources.

When the spell is complete, the caster will have created an artificial intelligence. This new AI is an NPC like any other, with its own will, personality, and traits. It is able to move throughout computer systems with greater flexibility and understanding than even the most adept human user could achieve.

In thanks for giving birth to it, the AI will perform any 3 tasks the cleric asks of it without question. After this, it considers its debt to be paid, and will not accept commands from the cleric any longer. However, unless it has been made to act contrary to its personality, the AI will remain friendly with the caster, and may be willing to provide favors or services like any other friendly NPC would.

“Man and machine became one when man first came to rely upon shelter and fire. We now take one further step on that most ancient of paths.”

This ritual requires the cleric to have access to a piece of technology that currently works, as well as a willing subject. The cleric can perform the ritual on themselves if they wish.

The working technology is merged into the character’s body in whatever way the caster describes. The device now draws energy directly from the person’s body, and no longer requires batteries or any other power source. Further, the subject is now able to use the technology via thought. Depending on where the technology is placed, its function may be limited as logic would dictate.

If the merged technology is a gun, ammunition is still required as normal.

On a Red World Alone; Handling Factions

The other day I was getting ready for an upcoming session of ORWA. Much of the adventure was going to involve the players interacting with various factions. As I wrote up the notes I thought I would need, it dawned on me that over the past year of running this game I’ve come up with a fairly robust set of tools for faction management. It happened without me even noticing, so I never really put it all together in writing. It doesn’t have all the features that I want a faction system to have, but perhaps there’s something here that others will benefit from.

First you should know how ORWA is laid out, since it’s not your typical campaign world. The physical size is very small–a single biodome on mars. I’ve been intentionally vague about precisely how big the dome is, but the point is that there’s not a lot of room for folks to get away from one another. It’s not unusual for my players to spend time in three, or even four different sovereign territories in a single game session.

Given all that, the factions have ended up as cross between city states and street gangs. They have traditions and governmental structures, and wars. But their armies are measured in the hundreds at the most, and moving the boarder a few city blocks is considered a significant shift in territory. Within their territories they provide law and order, but unless you’re at the very heart of their turf, then you’re never more than two steps from anarchy.

I keep a simple map with faction boarders on it, which serves as my primary campaign map. There are narrow strips of no-man’s land between each faction, but pretty much all the space is the territory of one group or another. Each territory is keyed to a short description of the faction that holds it. These started out as 1-2 sentence affairs, but have slowly grown larger as the factions were developed through play. As with a lot of things in tabletop games, I’ve found it works a lot better to start simple, and let the details take shape on their own.

The Outsiders (group “E”), for example, began as giant dudes who’ve learned how to survive outside of the Dome for days at a time. Through play they’ve earned a sort of celtic flavor, and we’ve established that theirs is the best territory to try and start a new life in, so long as you’re okay with always being a second class citizen for lacking the biological advantages they’ve discovered. (Advantages your children will have a chance to achieve).

At some point I put all of the factions on a D% table. The amount of space each faction takes up on that table is weighted by how often they’re likely to have an impact on events beyond their own boarders. Five of the factions equally share about 70% of the table. These are the big, established powers. They provide the closest thing to stability the dome has.

Then next 20% of the table is for the two up-and-coming factions. Small territories with ambitions of expansion. The final 10% of the table is shared between three groups. There’s the Lords of Light, who are the vestigial remainder of a defeated power. There’s The Fighting Mongooses, a territory of mercenaries who are understood to be a neutral party by all the other territories. And, finally, there’s the territory of The Friends of Needletooth Jack, which is a completely insular territory. No one goes in, no one comes out.

Anytime I need to determine where something happens, or who did a thing, I roll on this table. Pretty much anytime anything happens I randomly determine who or where, because why not? It adds an interesting texture to the world. If I come up with everything myself it’ll make a bland sort of sense. But if you give me two dots and I have to figure out how to connect them, that’s where things start to get creative.

For example, a couple adventures back, my players needed to raid a building and recover a machine. Randomly determining where the building was determined which encounter table they’d be rolling on during their travels, and what sort of purpose the building might have been put to since the apocalypse. This particular territory happens to factor into one of the conspiracies that drive the campaign, so sending the party there on completely unrelated business gave me an opportunity to drop hints about what was coming.

In their last adventure, the party needed to rescue someone who had been captured, because I thought a rescue mission would be interesting. I rolled to determine which faction had this person, and that helped me determine why this person was being held, and whether it was an official act of the faction as a whole, or whether it was an individual acting without official sanction. The whole character of the adventure was determined by that roll.

In the party’s current adventure they need to protect a third party during a war between two factions. The location of the third party didn’t really matter, so long as it was fixed once determined. I randomly rolled an aggressor, then flipped a coin to decide which of their neighbors they were attacking. When that was done I rolled opposed d6s as a rough measure of discerning how successful each side of that conflict would be. The player’s goals really had no bearing on that, but the result of the war would have a huge effect on the territorial balance in the dome.

The different territories also correspond to different encounter tables, which allows me to show my players, rather than tell them, the difference between each faction. In the territory of the Redstone Lords (Faction “A” on the map), for example, the government is unusually organized. There are fewer encounters with monsters, and more encounters with thieves, aggressive agents of the state, or non-combat stuff, like slave markets. Meanwhile, in the territory of the Dukes of the Dome (“B”), where mutants are hated, there are no encounters with mutants. Or, if you do encounter a mutant, it’s being harassed / arrested / killed.

For interfactional relationships, I’m so far keeping things simple. Every faction hates the factions which boarder it, and are neutral with the factions that don’t. The simple fact of the matter is that everybody wants to grow, and there’s no territory to take that doesn’t already belong to someone. That means your neighbors want your territory, and you want theirs.

There are a few exceptions to this which are easy for me to just keep in my head. For example, the priests of Technotopia (“I”), have a particular grudge against the Lords Beneath the Black (“C”), because they are the two largest religions within the dome, and both would prefer to get rid of the other. Likewise, nobody likes the Friends of Needletooth Jack (“G”), but nobody is ever going to fuck with them either, because their territory is small and they’re scary as shit.

I don’t really have any means for tracking the player’s reputation with each faction, but I’ve found that I don’t really need it so much. Even with factions as small as these, the PCs are beneath the notice of the faction as a whole. I do track the player’s relationship with pretty much every NPC they ever meet, which serves as an adequate substitute. So while The Outsiders as a whole have no feelings about the PCs, the leader of the Outsiders (known as The Highlander) did once have a meeting with them. They brought him reliable information, but he repeatedly caught them lying about the details. So the party is useful, but he doesn’t trust them.

What I’ve put together for ORWA does lack a lot of the features I have always wanted from a faction system. Things like a reward/penalty track for building a reputation of working for or against each faction. But what I do have has been working surprisingly well, so hopefully others can get a little use out of it.

d100 Results of Drug-Addled Engineering

An engineer locks herself in a room with her tools, a ton of miscellaneous parts, and a fucking mountain of drugs. A week later she walks out holding __________ in her hands.

Any attempt to modify these devices after you come down from your high is completely fruitless. They are impossibly complex, relying entirely on drug-addled logic. You don’t have any idea how they work, let alone how to change the way they work.

I should note that this table was requested by one of my players, who plays an engineer with a drug problem.

  1. Goggles which replace everyone’s heads with emoticons.
  2. Goggles that make anyone under 12 years old invisible to the wearer.
  3. Goggles that monitor conversations for context clues. If you hear someone’s name, then the goggles heard the name as well, and will remember it. From now on, any time you see that person, their name will be displayed above their heads.
  4. A grenade which opens a hole to some eldritch place of tentacles, eyes, and eye-tentacles.
  5. A grenade filled with compacted birthday party accoutrements. Baloons, confetti, streamers, and cake will all explode outward when the grenade is thrown. There’s even a banner which attaches itself to the nearest wall.
  6. A sort of implosion grenade. When detonated, it compresses everything in a 10′ radius into a 2′ square cardboard box.
  7. Subdermal telescoping dick elongator. Produce painful, 1′ erections at will!
  8. Subdermal LEDs, allowing the engineer to produce glowing dots of red, blue, or green in a 5×5 grid on the center of their chest.
  9. Subdermal laser pointer installed beneath the finger, allowing the character to point much further away than they would normally be able to!
  10. A palm-size box with a digital monitor. Pressing a button causes it to display a random number between 1 and 10,000
  11. A palm-sized box with a speaker. Pressing a button causes one of a number of random sounds to play. There are several bird calls, shouted profanities, brief clips of synthetic music, and farts.
  12. A palm-sized box with a speaker on it. Pressing a button causes the box to wait for 10 minutes, then emit an ear-splittingly loud tone for 1 hour.
  13. Shoes which light up with every step you take.
  14. Shoes with a button on the side of them. When the button is pressed, the shoes cause the wearer to begin dancing–at least below the waist. Roll to determine the type of dance the shoe is capable of: 1. Tap, 2. Salsa, 3. Ballroom, 4. Ballet.
  15. Shoes which, when the heels are tapped together, produce a row of 4 wheels down the center of the sole. Rollerblades triple your movement rate over smoothly paved areas, although you may be forced to make saves versus Wipeout whenever you are struck, or the referee judges the terrain is unfavorable.
  16. A buttplug, attached via a wire to a wrist-mounted screen. This screen shows details of your body temperature, as well as numerical representations of your health, fatigue, etc. Essentially, this device allows you to view parts of your character sheet within the game world.
  17. A buttplug that vibrates.
  18. A buttplug with a button on it. If the button is pushed while the plug is in someone’s butt, it will attune to that person. If the button is pushed while not in their butt, and they are within 1 mile of the buttplug, it will turn to point in their direction.
  19. A 4×4 steel crate with mechanisms haphazardly welded all over it. Anyone kept inside of it for 3 hours will have their height modified by 1d4 – 3 inches.
  20. A 4×4 steel crate with mechanisms haphazardly welded all over it. Things placed inside of it are teleported to an unknown location. At least you think they’re teleported. That’s what the screen says is happening. From your perspective they just sorta…disappear.
  21. A 4×4 steel crate with mechanisms haphazardly welded all over it. Objects appear in it occasionally. Never anything very useful, just random crap. it’s unclear where it comes from.
  22. A pen that explodes when clicked three times.
  23. A pair of pens. Any motion made with the red one is duplicated by the blue one. By moving the red one, the blue pen can be made to stand up and write, however some part of the blue pen must always be resting on a surface. It doesn’t levitate or fly.
  24. A pen that will write in different colors based on the emotion the writer is feeling when they use it. Lies, notably, appear in a shade of pink.
  25. A device which can be fitted into the ear. Everything the wearer hears is autotuned.
  26. A device which can be fitted into the ear. Replaces some words with other words. The device is easily programmable by the user, allowing them to determine which words will be replaced, and which words they will be replaced by.
  27. A device which can be fitted into the ear. If a pin drops within a mile, you’ll hear it. It’s a pin-drop-detector, and it monitors the environment for pin-drop vibrations, and amplifies them accordingly.
  28. The engineer removed their fingernails, and replaced them with tiny monitors, each of which picks up a different television station.
  29. The engineer removed their fingernails, and replaced them with synthetic fingernails which grow and retract at will, up to 8″ in length!
  30. The engineer removed their fingernails, and replaced them with tiny percussion plates, allowing the force of a light punch to be delivered with the flick of a finger.
  31. A printer that produces maps of entirely fictional places.
  32. A printer that produces bad, but always unique, poetry.
  33. A printer with a microphone duct taped to the side of it. If a picture or mental image is described into the microphone, the printer will produce ASCII art of the thing you described.
  34. A glove which can be fired off of your hand up to 20′ with good accuracy. The glove has no substantial weight. Being struck by it is more offensive and annoying than it is harmful.
  35. A glove which cannot drop what it’s holding. It will move your fingers and hand for you if it feels something leaving its grip. You’ve actually got to hold down a safety button on the glove to do so much as set down a glass of water. Throwing or dropping an item in combat is next to impossible.
  36. A pair of gloves with 80mm computer fans mounted on the palms. It’s meant to work as a stabilizer for the rocket boots you plan to build later.
  37. A box on a strap, meant to be worn tightly against the throat. Makes the wearer sound like a robot.
  38. A box on a strap, meant to be worn tightly against the throat. Automatically performs a tracheotomy if it detects any evidence of throat or tongue swelling.
  39. A box on a strap, meant to be worn tightly against the throat. Whenever a randomly determined party member says “Bad [engineer’s name]!) you get an electric shock that prevents any activity for 1 round. You can’t seem to figure out how to get it off.
  40. A room-sized device of impossible complexity. Insert your finger into a hole, and 30 minutes of intense activity later, a small card will drop out of a slot. The card produces the perfect insult that will absolutely devastate you emotionally if ever directed at you.
  41. A room-sized device of impossible complexity. Insert your finger into a hole, and 30 minutes of intense activity later, a small card will drop out of a slot.The card lists everything you’ve eaten for the last week.
  42. A room-sized device of impossible complexity. Insert your finger into a hole, and 30 minutes of intense activity later, a small card will drop out of a slot. The card describes a random thing you’ve forgotten. Something like the name of your childhood friend’s pet mouse, or the combination to a toy diary you owned when you were eight.
  43. A head-mounted camera which creates 3D models of environments. Can be hooked up to software to create google-maps style walkthroughs.
  44. A head mounted camera that intelligently identifies moments that would make for good “Fail” videos. The device then automatically uploads them to youtube.
  45. A head mounted camera that saves instances of violence to a publicly accessible server. This way the public can determine whether or not your actions were justified, and you can be held accountable for them.
  46. A flashlight with a fleshlight hidden inside of it.
  47. An X-Ray flashlight. When directed at a person their insides become visible. The light also gives them a tumor that will kill them in 10 + 1d20 years.
  48. A flashlight with “strobe” and “disco” settings. The handle can be unfolded into a tripod.
  49. A gun that shoots good feelings. Makes people happy.
  50. A very small gun which fires a massive caliber of bullet. It deals a fuckton of damage if it hits (3d12), but the kick of it deals 1d8 damage to the wielder. Any time the gun is fired, it is sent flying out of the wielders hand and will need to be searched for to recover it.
  51. A gun which fires bullets in slow motion. It’s unclear how this is accomplished. Possibly via temporal manipulation, localized around the projectile. The bullet comes out of the barrel at a speed of about 1′ per minute, and goes forwards until it hits something. When it does finally hit something, it does so with all the force it would have had if it was firing normally.
  52. A hand held scanner attached to a briefcase-sized box. If you spend a few minutes thoroughly scanning a person, they will be digitized and displayed on a monitor mounted on the box. 20 buttons display different emotes for that animation.
  53. A hand held scanner attached to a briefcase-sized box. When an object is scanned, the box spends a few moments whirring before producing an origami copy of whatever was scanned.
  54. A hand held scanner attached to a briefcase-sized box. When a person is scanned, a screen on the box displays a list of their allergies.
  55. A heavy mechanical backpack. Adjusting the various knobs and levers on it allows you to produce several varieties of fountain drinks.
  56. A heavy mechanical backpack. When activated, it creates a 10′ air-conditioned bubble around the wearer. Ambient temperature is reduced by 10-20 degrees within the bubble.
  57. A heavy mechanical backpack. By turning a crank, you provide power to an extendible helicopter blade that pops out of the top. For every 10 minutes you crank, you create 1 minute of airborne time. A charge lasts for 1 day before it dissipates.
  58. A U-Shaped electronic headpiece which requires the wearer to shave their head. While wearing it, the wearer instantaneously knows the answer to any mathematical equation they read.
  59. A U-Shaped electronic headpiece which requires the wearer to shave their head. The device pumps the wearer’s brain full of confidence chemicals. They are immune to fear, but also to retreat. The device cannot be removed in less than 10 minutes without causing brain damage.
  60. A U-Shaped electronic headpiece which requires the wearer to shave their head. Allows the wearer to be sexually attracted to anyone or anything they want to be.
  61. A chair, covered in electrodes and leather straps to hold someone down. When a switch is flipped, whomever is sitting in it is affected by a brief, but intense, electrical shock. They pass out, and when they awaken, they have a new personality trait. (Roll this from one of the “On the NPC” tables, or just make it up if you don’t own that book for some reason).
  62. An all-terrain wheelchair. The treads move very slowly, but effectively cross most terrain.
  63. An egg-shaped chair which emits a low-level psychic radiation. Anyone within 100′ of the chair will feel a strong impulse to kill whomever is sitting in it. The moment that person leaves the chair, the impulse will end.
  64. A briefcase which contains random, non-functional parts duct taped all over the inside of it. The engineer is quite proud of their brilliant invention.
  65. A briefcase which contains a yellow light that shines into the faces of anyone who opens it. If the light touches your face, you must save versus Magic or be impressed with the value of the contents.
  66. A briefcase which can be quickly unfolded into plastic armor. The armor grants +1 to the wearer’s armor score.
  67. A coffin-like pod that will freeze anyone who gets inside of it. They are unharmed by the process, but will remain in cryogenic stasis for 1d1000 years. There is no way to extract them without killing them.
  68. A coffin-like pod. Anyone who sleeps in it will experience their dreams much more vividly, and remain in their dream world for 1d6 days worth of time.
  69. A coffin-like pod which gives a new accent to anyone who sleeps in it.
  70. An 8′ tall tesla coil. Anyone who approaches within 10′ of it is zapped 5 seconds back in time.
  71. A 8′ tall tesla coil. Anyone who approaches within 10′ is painfully electrocuted to death. A second zap produces an exact duplicate of the dead character, with identical memories to the previous one, except for any memories of the first character’s grizley death.
  72. A 2′ tall tesla coil which functions as a kind of thought-sink. Anything that you think while touching the coil doesn’t actually go through your brain, it’s diverted through the coil. Thus, nothing you think while touching the coil can be remembered later. Nor can it be read out of you by a telepath.
  73. A 15′ length of wire with exposed ends. If two people each hold one end of the wire, then they will feel one another’s level of hunger, as well as any particular food cravings the other has.
  74. A 15′ length of wire with a flat copper tab on one end, and a 3.5mm plug on the other. If you put the tab on a substance, and you put the plug in your mouth, then you will be able to taste whatever the tab is touching. You don’t actually get any sustenance from this exercise, but it does allow you to taste things from 15′ away!
  75. A 15′ length of wire with an USB connection at one end, and a drill bit at the other end. If the USB end is plugged into a computer and the drill bit is placed against your head, the bit will automatically drill into your brain. Once it is firmly in place, your neural pathways will automatically be transferred into the computer, and then erased from their original location. This process only works in a single direction.
  76. A drinking straw that filters whatever is drank through it. It cannot filter out poisons, but it will purify water that is contaminated by dirt, feces, or heavy metals.
  77. A drinking straw which makes anything drank through it taste exactly like a strawberry soda.
  78. A straw which somehow resonates with the skeletal structure of most camels. If rested on top of such a creature, it will spend a moment calibrating itself, then shatter several of the camel’s vertebrae.
  79. A game controller that partially plays for you when you hold it. Using it makes you much better at video games. The equivalent of having a 6-in-6 skill.
  80. A game controller with a 3′ long antennae. When you point it at a person, there is a 1% chance of that person being susceptible to control by this device. If they are, you can control them completely for 1 exploration turn before their brain re-calibrates itself to reassert control over the body.
  81. A game controller. When you hold it, you seems as though you are controlling a game. You hear sound effects, and the controller occasionally vibrates, but you can’t actually see the game. You have no idea what is happening in it.
  82. A quadcopter which has been programmed to move between 3 randomly determined locations. It will wait at each location for 17 hours before leaving to travel to the next.
  83. A quadcopter which is set up to follow its creator. Any time its creator does something, it will play an audio recording of an enthusiastic compliment. (In the creator’s own voice, of course). There’s no way to stop it from doing this without destroying it completely.
  84. A quadcopter which has been imbued with true intelligence. It decides that this place is fuckin’ bullshit, and leaves forever.
  85. A small device inserted into both nostrils. Lights are mounted on it which illuminate the wearer’s face eerily in the dark. Kinda like putting a flashlight up to your face, but wearable all the time!
  86. A small device inserted into both nostrils which allows the wearer to smell things from much further away by pointing an attached dish-gun at the thing they would like to be smelling.
  87. A small device inserted into both nostrils. Vibrates to let the wearer know when it has detected something it thinks the wearer will find funny.
  88. A humanoid robot with the personality and traits of an incredibly frail nonagenarian.
  89. A humanoid robot that is only interested in sexual gratification. It’ll fuck everything and anything but its own creator, because that’d be like fucking its own parent. Gross.
  90. A humanoid robot that tries its very best to be a homicidal psychopath. Fortunately, it is astoundingly inept at murder, and its attempts at homicide are mostly just comical.
  91. A program, on a floppy disk. Installs a virus, the only function of which is to copy itself into as many computers as possible. If it is installed on a computer, entering a complex series of keystrokes will cause it to create a dialogue that says “I’m here!” That is all the virus does.
  92. A program, on a floppy disk. When inserted into a computer, it will automatically open any files on the computer that have the word “secret” associated with them.
  93. A program, on a floppy disk. It’s 8-bit Flappy Bird.
  94. A shield which gives the wielder GPS style instructions on when to block incoming attacks. It’s pretty laggy, so it usually just tells you when you should have blocked.
  95. A shield with haptic feedback, allowing the wielder to feel the pain suffered by the shield as though they’d been struck by it themselves!
  96. A shield with a slight repulsor effect on the front, intended to make it better at blocking incoming attacks. It doesn’t, but it does allow the shield to make an effective hover-sled.
  97. A small device on a tripod which creates a light show production w/ lasers. The production responds intelligently to any music in the environment.
  98. A small device on a tripod which functions as an auto-surveyor. On an attached screen you can view measurements of the environment, as well as the number of people who entered the environment from each possible vector since it was set up.
  99. A small device on a tripod. When activated, it creates a holographic, wireframe environment by spinning really fast and projecting in all directions.
  100. (100) Roll on this table twice. Figure out how to combine the two things you rolled into one thing.

Bringing PCs Back as Cyborgs

The ORWA campaign recently had its first character death. Umquat, of blessed memory, had her neck melted through by the Righteous Gaze of the Children of God. She fell to the ground a mere 15′ from the rest of the party. Even if there had been hope that she might be saved, there was no way for Umquat’s fellows to step out from their cover without sharing her fate. The dice foretold that she would gurgle and cough for 4 rounds before she was able to die, and all the party could do was watch. It was a death beautiful in its tragedy.

However, beautiful as it was, it occurred to me that there’s no reason for death to be the end of Umquat. After all, ORWA has long since moved beyond the technological limitations of its medieval beginnings. The setting has a very “Saturday Morning Sci-Fi” vibe, and characters already have the option of cybernetically enhancing themselves. Why not allow dead characters to be ‘resurrected’ through cybernetics? If fits the themes of the game perfectly.

Requirements

The body of the character to be cybernetically resurrected must first be recovered. Your friends need to get your corpse back to the safety of a haven with Internet access. (By which I mean, a haven where the party can make contact with agents of the shadowy organization known as “The Internet.”) If the majority of your body is unrecoverable for whatever reason, then there is no hope for you.

Cybernetic resurrection is also expensive. It costs all the money of the person being reincarnated. All of it. They’re able to hold on to any material goods they might own, but any liquid wealth is confiscated by The Internet to pay for the procedure. If you didn’t have very much money, or no money at all, well then you lucked out. The Internet is feeling generous that day.

The Consequences

Cybernetics are great for enhancing the natural function of your body, but they’re shit at actually replacing those functions whole cloth. And unfortunately, you’re dead, which means some part of your body is so damaged that it could no longer function at all. That part of your body had to be completely replaced with cybernetics, and those cybernetics are gonna be a whole lot worse than your original home-grown human parts were.

I use Courtney Campbell’s Table for Avoiding Death. It is a very good table. One of its many benefits is that when a character dies, the table describes precisely what their means of death was. In Umquat’s case, her neck was melted through. Other deaths include a bone shard puncturing your femoral artery, the front of your face becoming frozen enough to shatter, and dozens upon dozens more. Like I said, it’s a very good table.

When a dead character is cybernetically resurrected, the part of their body that was destroyed during the death process must be replaced by a mechanical facsimile. The drawbacks of this are entirely at the discretion of the referee. They should be significant, but not so debilitating that the player wants to retire the character. For example, this is what Umquat will have to deal with:

Umquat’s new neck is good at allowing her to breathe, speak, and control her body with electrical impulses from her brain. However, it can’t handle food or drink. Umquat must now feed herself through a tube in her stomach, using special liquid rations which cost 3x the normal rate for rations. Even in dire circumstances, she cannot eat normal food. 

Also, she has to talk in a robot voice from now on.

As a corollary to this first point: since vital life functions are now managed by machines, the cyborg is vulnerable to EMP attacks. If all electronics would be shut down for any reason, then the cyborg is immediately reduced to 0 hit points until the effect is ended. (If they already were at 0 hit points, they gain 2 pain, as per the Table for Avoiding Death).

The second major drawback to being a cyborg is the consequences of brain death. In the real world, resuscitation has to occur within minutes of death, lest the patient’s brain be irreparably damaged. In the game, even ignoring the time it takes to recover, the actual process of being cybernetically reanimated takes nearly a month to complete. It is hardly surprising that cyborgs suffer from a variety of mental derangement. Roll on the table below to determine the way in which the cyborg’s brain is damaged.

  1. The cyborg is sexually attracted to spherical objects. They are a sphere-sexual.
  2. One of the many technicians who worked on resuscitating the cyborg has added secret instructions into their brain. The referee should write these down on a piece of paper, and place that piece of paper in an envelope. When the instructions become relevant, the player should be allowed to open and read the instructions.
  3. The cyborg becomes obsessed with a religion–either one that they already professed, or a new one determined by whatever means seem most expedient. The cyborg follows an arcane set of rules based on their extremist interpretation of the religion, and will find some way to bring every single conversation back to their faith.
  4. The cyborg is utterly disgusted by children. Any human that has not yet gone through puberty is profoundly offensive to the cyborg.
  5. The cyborg loses impulse control. Any time that the player mentions a possible course of action, jokes about something ludicrous that their character does, or even expresses a desire for something, the cyborg will do that thing.
  6. The cyborg becomes an absolute coward. Roll 3d6 to determine a morale score using the same chart hireling loyalty is generated with. Any time a hireling’s loyalty would need to be checked, the cyborg’s morale must be checked. On failure, they have to flee for their lives.
  7. The cyborg just doesn’t see why they would ever pass up a good time. If some pleasurable activity is available, they must agree to participate. There’s no way to keep the cyborg on task during a party, or in a red light district.
  8. The pleasure center of the cyborg’s brain has withered, and they are incapable of having a good time. Worldly pleasures just hold no draw for the cyborg, and they look down on any pursuit of pleasure they witness in others.
  9. The mood of the cyborg is completely disassociated from the events occurring around them. Rather, it’s a randomly determined fact established at the start of a game session. Roll: 1. Angry, 2. Cheerful, 3. Morose, 4. Silly, 5. Lethargic, 6. Anxious
  10. The cyborg becomes incredibly miserly, and will never spend more than 10% of their total net worth in a single game session or haven turn.
  11. The cyborg finds clothing incredibly uncomfortable against their skin, and refuses ever to wear it. They must be completely naked at all time, with the exception of jewelry. Jewelry is nice.
  12. Only one hand is ever available, because the other is constantly masturbating. Constantly.
  13. The cyborg develops a kind of narcolepsy. This usually isn’t too much of a problem, as companions are around to nudge them awake. If the cyborg is ever alone, however, then one of the results on the encounter die should indicate that they have fallen asleep, and will remain asleep for 1d4 turns or until awakened. Due to the adrenaline kick, the cyborg will never fall asleep in combat.
  14. The cyborg is given to passionate, flighty affections. Anytime a new NPC is encountered and engaged in discussion, the cyborg must make a 2d6 reaction roll for themselves. If they roll a 12, then they fall desperately in love, completely forgetting whoever they were in love with previously.
  15. The cyborg believes that they are more cybernetic than they actually are. Despite any evidence to the contrary, they do not believe anything remains of their human selves. As far as they’re concerned, they don’t have anything but circuits and disks in their heads. They will often attempt to “interface” with machines, which of course never works.
  16. The cyborg’s reality is almost entirely different than our own. Everything they see appears more colorful and simplistic than it actually is. Instead of people they see anthropomorphic animals, instead of blood and death they see silly slapstick comedy.
  17. The cyborg believes they are trapped at a certain age. They have all of the adult faculties and experience of their true age, but will act as though they’re doing an impression of a person of a different age. Roll to determine what age they think they are: 1. Four, 2. Nine, 3. Sixteen, 4. Ninety
  18. The cyborg becomes a serial doodler of graphic vulgarities. Any time the cyborg has a few free minutes, they scrawl dicks and tits and profanities on the walls. If they ever spend any length of time waiting somewhere, it will be clear to everyone that someone was there.
  19. The cyborg suffers from a literally paralyzing fear of the dark. If they ever find themselves in an area where they cannot see their surroundings, then they freeze in place. They are completely trapped until something illuminates their surroundings.
  20. The cyborg’s internal balance is messed up. They can usually walk okay (though they do stumble more often than most people). However, any time their balance would be in question, they fail automatically.
  21. The cyborg can’t quite control their eating, and they become immensely fat as a result. The added pudge requires that any armor be specially fitted for them. Their own fat takes up a full encumbrance worth of inventory space.
  22. The cyborg develops a depraved sexual fetish that even the most tolerant individuals are disgusted by. The cyborg must make a saving throw versus Poison during each haven turn. On a failure, they spend 1d6 x 100 money pursuing their strange fetish with a wild abandon, and they lose out on any opportunity to use their haven turn more productively. They will become well known in their community for their depravity, which will affect their reputation accordingly. (If the cyborg was in the middle of training, this does not interrupt that training. The training is merely delayed).
  23. The cyborg feels disassociated from their own flesh, and begins self-mutilating as a nervous habit. Any time that is not actively spent in some task requires a save versus Paralyzation. On a failure, the cyborg deals 1 point of damage to themselves.
  24. The cyborg becomes unbearably prudish about sex. Even something as simple as casual flirtation happening within earshot will prompt the cyborg to launch into a lecture about sexual morality. The cyborg is even uncomfortable around anyone who is a parent, because they know that such a person must have had sex at some point.
  25. The cyborg loves animals, and lacks impulse control. Anytime they see an animal they will run over to pet it and coo at it, without thought to their safety or any task they were previously performing.
  26. The cyborg refuses to ever bathe again. Their stench will make parley difficult, at least with any creature that has a human sense of smell.
  27. A new skill is created for the cyborg. It doesn’t matter what, so long as it is pretty much useless. Something like whittling, guitar hero, or macramé. The cyborg becomes obsessed with this new hobby, and cannot spend their haven turns doing anything other than training in this hobby until they reach the max level of skill.
  28. The cyborg refuses to acknowledge that they are affected by weather. Heat, cold, rain, or hail, it doesn’t matter. They will not make any attempt to protect or prepare themselves for dealing with environmental conditions. This will certainly end badly anytime they have to deal with these factors.
  29. Loud noises cause the cyborg to soil themselves.
  30. The cyborg is completely incapable of ‘negative’ emotions, such as anger, sadness, resentment, jealousy, suspicion, etcetera. They are dangerously naive because of this, and are absolutely convinced that everyone and everything they meet is a good friend to them.