The Farceliche: new monster for OSE and Troika!

 

Drone Warfare in TTRPGs

I'm surprised with how relevant and devastating drone warfare is recently, that we haven't seen more tabletop RPGs doing models or even fantasy abstractions of it. The drone is an advancement beyond both soldiers and artillery that battlefields are still adapting to.

The Horror 

To even a casual viewer, the drone is horrifying on a battlefield. Soldiers often resort to staying stock-still - not because that is any escape, but probably because there is really nothing they can do. I am not sure how this compares to the awfulness of small arms combat or artillery, but it sure seems like a new and strange man-made horror and you have to question whether you want it in your games in the first place. It's a bit too real, too hopeless. What do you do if your players are decimated by exploding suicidal flying machines? What if your players just routinely barrage their foes with fleets of indefatigable airborne suicide bombers from afar? Where is the challenge either way?

 

Watch the video of many last moments at your discretion:

 

 

That said, there are games that already cater to this terrifying spectacle, and ways to adapt them to better portray this.

Sci-Fi RPG Instances 

• Shadowrun: Drones have been present ever since the first edition way back in the 80s, when the modern drones we see today were but a glimmer in the eye of defense contractors. This version called them "remotes" which had surveillance and combat functions, depending on the version. I played that version and practically no one ever took a drone. A later version of Shadowrun featured a rigger with drones as a quickstart character. I do not know if this was a particularly powerful loadout, someone more familiar with modern shadowrun would have to tell me.
• Eclipse Phase: In the games we played there were a lot of drones, but mercifully only as enemy surveillance. I do not know how we would have handled an onslaught of explosive drones. Like shadowrun, it certainly could happen in this setting, probably complicated - morally and effectively - by how sentient you make the drone.

Fantasy Metaphor

Imagine a magic-user who could summon drones of the modern age with a wave of their hand. Cue groans from the table and rolling of eyes. The gun-mage is a cute meme but grating to players who came for fantasy, moreso the drone mage. When we play fantasy we abstract the terrors of the modern world into lightly disguised magical contrivances. Look for things that are disposable, controllable, long-ranged, and lethal.

• Familiars: these can go as far as they like, and have a telepathic connection to their master. Magic-users often use their beloved airborne familiars for reconnaissance but not as suicide bombs, mercifully. Your gaming group may differ but as awful as some of mine have been they never did that.
• Summons: disappear after the spell ends and can travel long distances before it does, and can be quite lethal. They fit the bill for the most part but are not directly controllable once they are out of sight.

 An ideal fantasy drone would be disposable and lethal like a summon but directly linked to the owner's senses like a familiar. I am not sure if any such thing exists in the game, could be wrong.

 

Drone show of a witch or wizard, Durham festival

 

 

Providing a Modicum of Challenge

There must be some countermeasure. Aside from directly shooting at them, troops on either side resort to things like netting to tangle rotors, cages to distance equipment from the explosion, and electromagnetic devices to deactivate them. These are direct translations in sci-fi games but fantasy games are limited to dispels and jury-rigged nets and cages. One things a fantasy game with endemic drone enemies could do is create a class or school of magic that is dedicated to magical drone warfare, both offense and defense. Would it be interesting to play? Who knows.

Detect Tarps

Picture Unrelated

 

After my last game players came to me to complain about the difficulty of the tarps they encountered. Oddly, their main problem was not the lethality, it was how they were "anachronistic" and didn't make sense in a fantasy game. Some even said they were unengaging and pointless, a vicious blow to any DM's ego. In the spirit of OSR, I decided to give everyone else a lecture instead of addressing my own flaws.

So here are the best ways to run tarps in your game: 

Cleverly Camouflaged Tarps

 

Thieves already have a chance to detect tarps, but we all know it is pretty low. I thought to really hide the tarps in one room and make them very difficult to find, penalizing the percentage chance. When they failed, I announced gleefully that they ran straight into a concealed tarp, but none of the players seemed excited at all.

 

Provocative Open Tarps

 

If players find hidden tarps unengaging, the obvious solution  is not to hide them. Put them right out in the open and let the players try to ignore them. Just try it! This is obviously a much better solution as my players interacted with it right away by walking around it.

Role Playing Tarp

Another strategy is to make your tarp appealing to players who like to roleplay everything to the hilt. As pretty much every recent race revision shows, the best way to do this is to add a usable hole to it. Here, the tarp has a gaping hole ready for your most ardent "bard" type player.

Also, a tarp with a hole in it and an NPC are basically the same thing, topologically. Science! 

Incentives

As every good game designer knows, the solution to bad design is to patch it up with incentives. The worse it is, the more you have to bribe or manipulate players to play it. 

I am trying out the idea of Tarp Points, or TP. These are awarded for interacting with and commenting on tarps. The real kicker is they give powerful tarp-related bonuses randomized with a tarp related tarot deck or TARPTAROT (which I will sell). It should be impossible for the party to ignore my lovingly designed tarps, because that would be a sub-optimal play strategy.

 I have also cleverly integrated it with OSR principles by calling these incentives a ruling. I got this idea from a blog post called "Against Incentive" which I shall read one day.

So that was my solution to this common problem. Hope this helps! 

Review of Bakto's Terrifying Cuisine

What It Is

Your party finds themselves in the kitchen dungeon of Bakto, a picky eater for a demon. Satisfy his culinary demands or die trying. This is a small hardback book written for The Vanilla Game or OSRs, and easily adapted for anything else. Here is one of the monster stats. It should look very familiar. If you can't work with this, I don't know what to tell you:

Bakto's was written by Giuliano Roverato, Gustavo Nassar, and Rodrigo Melchior, with art by Sam Mameli. Lovingly inspired by Iron Chef and other frantic cooking shows; the party scours the dungeon for ingredients, encountering wild situations, engaging NPCs, deadly foes, and powerful magic items all the way. I found it has a lot of replay value as the ingredient randomization and time limit make it different every time you run it.

Get it at Spear Witch, itch.io, and DrivethruRPG. As far as I can tell, the only way to get the physical book is through Spear Witch, so do yourself a favor and get it there. If you do itch.io you get a coupon for the physical book, I gather. That's kind of second-best stuff though, and you are better than that.

What It Isn't

One misconception I had going in is that this was a scavenger hunt. Turns out, Bakto was apparently not prancing around the dungeon like a demonic Easter bunny beforehand, hiding just the right things for your players to find. Maybe they were never supposed to succeed. Try to concretely find the abstract flavors he demands like "Drama" or "Nuclear" and you will fail. As you should, fool.

To survive, the party has to shoehorn dungeon debris and monster giblets into some passable mockery of bespoke cuisine, and do their damnedest to cater to his flavors. This is how my game went - my players grabbed what they could and somehow made it work. Barely!

The Time Limit

There is a time limit, which means the party can only explore some of the rooms. Think of the mad shopping cart dash through the grocery store in cooking contests - they can't get to every aisle, can't get everything they wanted. Probably don't know where to find them in the first place! It is small, but every party you run through it could viably experience a different dungeon. You and your party can be surprised even if they already ran this, and the latter part of the book gives some solid ideas for changing things up on repeat runs: teams, secret ingredients, etc.

The Tone

Due to the art and theme, you can forgive people for thinking this is light in tone. It's definitely gonzo, but it is a very deadly adventure with great risks and rewards. Think of the lore lurking behind the bright palette of Adventure Time or the deceptive depth of most Troika! adventures. There are rooms that defy the visual tone, my favorite of which can easily lead to transforming and stranding the party, or worse.

Just some light-hearted whimsy, as long as you don't look too close.

This leads into one of my only concerns about this adventure; curiosity can really kill the cat here. Several rooms I am sure I would lose character after character to as a player. If you run this game you will need to calibrate how many cues and chances you give the party to notice something is amiss. Read it beforehand and you will know which rooms I mean. Definitely memorable though, and not as light-hearted as the tone suggests.

My Bakto Session

 

My Bakto was transparently based on Aku from Samurai Jack. The author says he was based off the 1st edition AD&D DMG cover, and I can see that. Once you picture Aku in your head though it is hard to get that impression out. I doubt I am the only one. I had him really brag about the rubedite cookware he had, pulling from the real life memory of one of my foodie friends always boasting about his goddamn copper pans.

 

Brothers from another mother (maybe, I don't want to think about that.)

My party found out about the allergy from an NPC but were deceived about its nature. This lead to a great moment where they expected Bakto to die upon eating their dish, were baffled when he didn't, started to feel horror that they now had to go through with the contest they thought they would fail, then did not, barely.

 

They only got into actual combat once, on a random encounter. I can see less fortunate parties finding themselves in great danger, especially at the low levels suggested.

 

It was a fantastic game overall, everyone loved it and I begrudgingly admit they may have enjoyed it more than the foray into B4: The Lost City they were amidst (I run B4 a lot). 

 

I now keep this game in my bag, not on my shelf. Loaded and ready for the slightest window of opportunity to play it.

 

How to Enjoy

I ran this as a one-shot and feel like this is its best use. Spreading it out over more than one session might squander the beautiful anxiety from the time limit. As a one-shot, it would also make a great palate cleanser when switching game masters or settings. The best thing I did was to make sure the party would occasionally hear Bakto's booming voice announcing the dread passage of time, describing exactly how he would cook and eat each of them, etc. Normal stuff.

End Note: Author's Discussion 

I generally refuse to read anything about the author explaining their game before I play it, and you should too. If you already played it or just don't care what I think you can read the author's story about its development here.

Hit Points as Doom Timer

 

I'm going to poop out what is sure to be a wildly unpopular idea. We all know the ancient discourse about how hit points (HP) in D&D alternate between physical or "meat" points and luck/fate.

In this hack we focus on HP purely as fate or luck, a timer set between the character and their ultimate doom. We achieve this by simply disallowing healing. Every hit is either just flesh wounds or near misses until the last one. Healing, natural or otherwise, is purely a narrative conceit. Levels would still add HP if anyone manages to eke out a level under this method. It would in fact be the only way.

The draw to this method is that getting to the end of your HP means you are probably nearing the end of your story too, so make it count. Does only the player know, or is the character also aware of their upcoming demise?

I think you will find that the longer you play, the more you will realize that the death of a character is often the best part of their story. Too many players are robbed of the best experience in role-playing by intrusive systems that prolong their lifespans unnaturally. Do you really want to hear about that party of super heroes knocking God on its ass, or the scrappy adventurer who tried to grapple a Grell under the light of a dropped and guttering torch? Look deep in your heart, you know the truth.

Naturally this makes Clerics and healing potions useless. C'est la vie. Leave them out, or make healing potions exceptionally rare. 

Enjoy, if you dare. 

The Vacation Game

A brief play report of my kid's dungeon, made without any of my input and played during a beach vacation.

If you're dead tired of dads talking about their 7-year old wunderkind role-players, turn back now. You're looking at two of those little drawing tablets; above is the map, below is health and inventory.

 

There's a bit of "video game brain" polluting the free kriegspiel nature of this. For the inventory he drew Zelda hearts and filled them in when I took damage. We had a hard time when healing, because he would just cross off the row and draw them again. The long bar is magic, which he kind of gave up on tracking because it was annoying, as MP systems tend to be.

 

The top row shows a monster and its two minions. I had to guess which key and door would open the way to it. If I guessed wrong it was instant death and I respawned. There was actually a pause the first time I died, because he wasn't sure what to do if I screwed up. Then the respawn, which felt like a bit of a plot armor thing. So, more video game brain but funny.

 

Above is part of stage 2 that I got a picture of. It's more sophisticated. There are hallways, doors, chests, secret doors (the supine Ss), etc. I managed not to die here and got a stick, which I could use with my dagger to make a spear. I did, and killed the thing in the central room.

There is a VIP $2 at the top. He wanted me to give him two dollars and I would get a good item. I passed, he was disappointed.

A long hallway with some prison cells. I searched them and there was nothing in them, which made me proud. People, there doesn't have to always be something there.

Adjoining hallway, two slimes at the far right, a mystery potion in the room below (two triangles on top of each other)

The maze before the boss monster room above. There is a key in the maze that opens the chest, which had a staff I needed to defeat the monster. The staff was fueled by the potions I found - a nice touch as they were frequent finds. I tried to talk to the boss and see if we couldn't find some common ground, but it just attacked. The strategy was to use the staff to zap it down out of the air then hit it when it was on the ground. Neither by themselves worked. Again, very Zelda but fun for a TTRPG.

Went out for night kites and pizza on the boardwalk after.

 

Grid Cells and Hex Maps

 

Image by Ermal Tahiri from Pixabay

In RPGs, dungeon maps are usually square grids and outdoor maps are usually in hexes. There are certainly good reasons for it. Dungeons and other artificial structures, are usually built square. Outdoors, the directional flexibility of the hex make it ideal for plotting out chunks of travel. Some of it is most certainly tradition from early Avalon Hill games and the Outdoor Survival supplement from 70s D&D.

So you have two main tesselations for mapping in RPGs, competing away in your game books.

Does anyone ask what the brain thinks? Our poor ignored little brains?

Grid Cells

For that, we look to neuroscience. A while back, a group of researchers (Hafting et al, 2005) filmed a rat with an electrode in its entorhinal cortex - an area of the brain important for navigation and closely connected to the memory-laden hippocampus.

 

In the video below, a dot is added at the position of the rat every time the cell spikes. As the rat explores, more and more firings are recorded, finally converging into a roughly hexagonal grid. You have to squint a bit to see it, but it is there towards the end. 

 

Spoiler:

You'll note this fits a hex grid well, if a bit distorted. It doesn't fit squares all that well unless you tilt them 45 degrees, and even then it is off.

Is this proof that the hex is superior for mapping, because it already has a presentation in the navigation system of the brain? Probably not. But, it's something to think about.