Getting Hit

Getting whacked in the chest with a mace is going to fucking smart even if you’re wearing a breastplate, and attacks constantly whiffing because a PC or NPC has a magic number attached to their statblock is boring as shit. Armour class feels even more like a weird relic of the hobby’s milsim roots in 5e than it does in OD&D. Titles like Into The Odd have tried to remedy this by making armour a soak value, turning HP into a pool of abstract luck / stamina, and making every attack a guaranteed hit. As it turns out this is also really boring. Both systems rely heavily on the referee narrating the stakes instead of involving the players. This garnered a universally negative reaction at my table, so I went back and thought about how to make defending against attacks more enjoyable for my players.

In the end, I kept it really simple - Players roll to attack, and they also roll to defend. So far, it’s worked out great. Instead of rolling to hit for NPCs, I’ll announce an NPC action like the following: “The orc lunges towards you, swinging his rusty blade!”, and then prompt the player to contest the attack. No farting around with the action economy - players can always contest an attack, unless they’re downed or incapacitated. This is straightforwardly just more fun and interesting than the GM rolling to beat a target number, and gives the players more moment-to-moment involvement.

As with a few other books and systems, I’ve split these moves up very roughly into Dodging, Blocking and Parrying, which play out as follows:

DODGE: Roll DEX, penalty in heavy armour, permits flanking attacker on success
BLOCK: Roll STR, requires weapon or shield unless attacker is unarmed, shields confer bonus
PARRY: Roll STR or DEX depending on weapon type, critical success allows immediate follow-up with attack.

There are caveats: This is currently only for NPC attacks, players who attack still roll against a difficulty score assigned to the NPC, as feedback from the table was that they generally enjoy rolling to hit. I may in future go back and revise this, possibly separating out attack and defense scores. ‘Difficulty’ feels somewhat more intuitive than AC, even if their purpose is similar, but this means that PCs and NPCs are asymmetrical and thus this doesn’t really work for more ‘wargamey’ play. It’s also potentially less fun for the referee, but at the end of the day, accommodating a fun time for players is way more important than ‘design rigour’.

Ideas for future iteration:

Do away with NPC difficulty and just have all attacks be contestable regardless of who’s controlling. This could open up options for more wargame-style play, but the stuff I run is mainly pointcrawls and dungeons, so isn’t a priority just now.
Further bonuses depending on equipment - rapiers get parry bonus, naked dude covered in grease dodges better than knight in platemail etc
GURPS-style separate save values for blocking, dodging and parrying (terrible idea, do not do this)
~~Fuck everything and RETVRN to OD&D~~
Swap HP for wounds (my beloved)

December 11, 2023

ANNOUNCING: REBAR

The city of Raima is all you’ve known. It’s all anybody has ever known. An endless, enveloping sprawl of hard-angled concrete bathed in dull phosphorescent light, built upon itself in countless strata. Raima was not built for you or others like you, its intended occupants having vanished eons ago.

You are cybernetic drifters, vat-grown outcasts, gene-spliced mercenaries and robotic itinerants, looking to eke out an existence in the half-light and dark corners of a vast, strange and inhospitable city. Will you delve into the Old Beneath in search of technological relics? Will you search for a place to call home? Will you vie with or throw your lot in with one of Raima’s many formidable factions? Will you seek the mythical Surface above?

Welcome to REBAR, a roleplaying game set in the post-human far future, in an infinite, brutalist city.

WHAT IS REBAR?

REBAR is a roleplaying game / setting I’m currently writing heavily influenced by the works of Tsutomu Nihei, Jeff Vandermeer’s Borne novels, video games by Heart Machine and many other points of inspiration, intended to help facilitate pen and paper role-playing in a distant, post-human future, amongst the ruins of an all-enveloping city. It’s using Chris McDowall’s Into The Odd and Yochai Gal’s Cairn as a base, and adds a few new wrinkles such as Troika!-inspired character backgrounds, combat proficiency / chance to miss, and swapping Willpower for Perception as the third character stat.

Currently the book is still deep in development and isn’t ready for playtesting yet as I’m still working out things like damage values, faction play, exploration, ‘dungeon’ generation and a bunch of other stuff I’m hoping to include. As always, I’m hoping this will be a useful starting point for people to run their games in, as I’ve seen at least a few people asking about the best RPG to use for a BLAME!-style campaign.

I’m hoping to finish the initial manuscript for REBAR in the first half of 2023, and have it mostly ready to go by late 2023 / early 2024. I’m working with the ever-wonderful Jarett Crader of Mothership infamy and previously Exalted Funeral under his new label Space Penguin Ink, which is gearing up to publish a bunch of incredible RPG books this year and beyond.

I’m hoping I can share more on REBAR soon, for now - for now, here’s some words.

BACKGROUND - Chemical Drifter

You are a roaming sellsword carrying ramshackle armour and equipment. A steady microdose of hallucinogenic substances pumped directly into your cerebrocomputer enhances senses out beyond the physical and allows faint perception of the Datasphere. Your speech and movement is lyrical and delicate.

THREAT - Drones

Shambling, distended sleeve-corpses, pseudoflesh rotten and sloughing. Crude machinery and bladed steel are welded to their bones by unknown hands. Most faculties have been lost aside from base survival routines and a capacity for violence. Will attempt to drag any downed victims off, presumably to be broken down or modified. _{1d4HP | 9 INSTINCT} _{1-2: Sleeping | 3-5: Alert, exploring | 6: Dragging off a victim}

THREAT - Sentinel

An emotionless porcelain humanoid face atop a 9 foot tall suit of ornate plasteel armour fused with synthetic muscle. Piloted by a tiny, shrivelled biological humanoid encased in an amniotic sac embedded in the armour’s chest. They carry a long, angular glaive (1d6) for defense, and a lightrifle (1d6) for long-range engagement. Once their tower has identified a target, they will pursue tirelessly and kill remorselessly. A sentinel cut off from their tower will wander in search of a new host, their behaviour erratic. _{2d6HP | 10 INSTINCT} _{1: Wandering aimlessly | 2: Singing in lamentation | 3: Searching for a tower | 4: Dormant | 5: Violent frenzy | 6: Pursuing target}

FACTION - Sons of Helios

An army of Vat-Grafts, parthenogenically birthed from the blood of their father-god Helios, the self-proclaimed final human. Ornamental uniforms of gold and white mask any identity or individuality in their ranks, the Capsuleers swear unflinching fealty to Helios and his campaign of violent conquest, believing the entire city to be theirs by birthright. They view other Grafts as lesser, of impure stock, and other peoples of Raima as their property. As such, they are uniformly disdainful and often hostile of those outside their ranks.

Values: Conquest, purity, violence

FACTION - Rustbearers

Sleeves and biomachines that worship rust, and view decay as a virtue. They believe that as the creations of humans, the peoples of Raima should likewise perish in a grand and total return to nature. They often symbolically decorate themselves in rust, moss, ivy, fungus and bones. Guided by a small inner circle of scholars and philosophers, they are locked in a bitter and intractable ideological struggle with the Constructivists.

Values: Nature, decay, primitivism

March 15, 2023

What I’ve Been Up To

I realise I’ve kind of abandoned this blog for a wee while now. I’ve had a lot more energy to work on things as of recent, and as such have spent very little time soapboxing or pontificating. Things I’ve been working on are as follows:

Where Abundance Lies

Back from the grave and my main project for now, in which I’ve been learning how to code in Godot, with the aim of eventually completing an immersive sim in the same vein as STALKER. It’s a pretty massive undertaking. Link to devlog here

Carrion For Gulls

A module for Liminal Horror exploring an abandoned cargo ship adrift at sea. I had to abandon this for now, as it ended up succumbing to scenario bloat and general lack of direction. I’d like to restart this at some point, but I want to concentrate on other stuff for now, and come back to it when I can give the attention it deserves.

Decree

Grand campaign setting expressing my love for planetary romance sci-fi, science fantasy, post-anthropocene type shit. More or less a superset of the stuff I’m doing for Where Abundance Lies. I mistakenly tried to write a System(tm) for this, which was a dumb idea, and I’m probably going to just use Alight as a base instead. Going to rewrite it as a series of hexcrawls on different planets.

Venison // Hard Lads

Earlier this year, I took part in Violence Jam, a month+ long game jam where myself and a bunch of exceptionally cool and talented folks wrote material for Luke Gearing’s Violence roleplaying system - an extremely lean and brutal rule system designed to simulate the deadliness of actual gunfights. I ended up writing two entries for the jam: Venison, my main entry, a folk horror themed setting depicting 18th century poachers hunting for cursed meat in an enormous hostile estate. And Hard Lads, in which I had a go at tweaking some base rules in order to simulate a pissed-up fistfight in a shit British town.

I pushed myself to work a lot harder than my usual glacial pace to get Venison in on time, and while there’s a whole bunch of stuff I would have loved to include, namely NPCs and actual written locations, I’m still shocked by how much I was able to actually get onto paper. This was also when I discovered that, shockingly, Google Docs is actually totally fine for basic layout. I would love to revisit Venison at some point, and put out a more complete version that fully nails the English folk horror vibe I wanted to convey.

As for Hard Lads, I joked about doing Binley Megadungeon for it at some point. I think that shit pun represents exactly the level of thought I want to put into it. I also discovered that I’d unintentionally shared a title with a very similarly themed project by prolific Quake mapper Robert Yang. Such is life.

Next up

I’m going to continue on with Where Abundance lies. I’m having a hell of a time, and getting a lot further than I expected coding game logic, and I’m extremely motivated by trying to make a videogame that takes as many design lessons as possible from the little bubble of post-OSR roleplaying I’ve found myself in, i.e. rejecting core loop theory as principal design pattern and leaning hard into minimally-guided, emergent play. Decree will probably be my backburner project for if I get tired of videogame stuff. Other than that, I’m just excited about finally hitting a creative stride now that I have the spare time and energy to plough back into doing what I love.

October 20, 2022

NOTE: *I ended up writing the barest minimum of scenario and a whole bunch of system for this, which was the opposite of what I intended, so I’m throwing this out there unfinished. Most notably, the equipment section is unwritten. It’s a rather kludgy hack of Yochai Gal’s Cairn with some major influence from Sean McCoy’s null.HACK.

Hopefully there’s one or two things here to pick at for anybody wanting to run OSR-ish games with a Nihei-influenced vibe. In the meantime I’m going to keep hacking away at a far future mythic sci-fi setting for OSR play.*

Tomb City Orphans

The concrete hallways and chambers down here are dark and deathly silent. Every echoing step you take rings your presence. You wonder where everyone went - this place used to teem with people, but after you awoke, they’re all gone.

You can’t stay here. Soon enough you’ll run out of power altogether and you’ll be at the mercy of the things that thrive in absolute darkness. The few of you who are left will need to venture out through the long tunnels into the unknown. Maybe somewhere in the depths you can find others like you. Maybe The Surface is more than just rumour.

It’s not much to go on, but right now it’s the closest thing to hope that you have. Time to go.

The Basics

Tomb City Orphans is a roleplaying scenario set in a distant future of underground ruins of crumbling concrete, where humankind has long since disappeared. Players each take on the role of a lost inhabitant of this place, usually robotic in nature. It assumes basic knowledge of how to run and play in an RPG and a reasonable degree of trust between participants. It uses a D20 roll-under system for task resolution and is a hack of Cairn’s rules.

Character Creation

Choose a background:

REPLICANT

Human-like but designed by humans, you cannot escape your own uncanny valley, but live nonetheless.

SLEEVE

Shards of stray consciousness jammed haphazardly into frame. A collage of a lost soul, full of memories of uncertain provenance and body that is not your own.

AUTOMATON

Function and logic, both ill-at-ease with and reverent of your more human-passing companions. Most at home when provided a clear purpose and task.

VIRUS

Polymorphic, self-modifying code that imitated humanlike personality traits, you now find yourself having developed a consciousness as a means to survive.

Stats:

Roll 3d6 three times and assign the scores to Strength (STR), Dexterity (DEX) and Perception (PER)

Roll 1d6 for Hit Points (HP)

Skills:

Select three skills from the below table. If the skill is applicable to a task or action for which the outcome is uncertain, the referee may let the player roll at advantage.

Equipment

…

Weapons

Attacking using a weapon requires a player to successfully roll on one of their stats. This is defined per-weapon, but as a general rule, melee weapons such as swords, axes or glaives require a STR roll, ranged weapons such as pistols, shotguns or SMGs require DEX, and long-range weapons such as rifles and railguns require PER.

Armour

Armour acts as an extra layer of HP, and is always deducted first if a character is hit. However, critical hits ignore armour. When a character’s armour is reduced to zero, the armour breaks.

Combat

When attacking, take note of the stat your weapon uses and attempt to roll under your score. If you succeed, you deal 1HP damage. If the result is 4 or below, you deal 1d6HP critical damage.

All normal weapons deal 1HP damage, explosives, exotic and super-heavy weaponry always deal critical damage on hit.

If attacking unarmed, roll for STR. Your opponent must succeed a STR save or take 1HP damage.

When a PC is dealt critical damage, they should roll on the below table and subtract the score from their stats as appropriate.

	DAMAGE	EFFECT
1	Arm severed	-1d6 STR
2	Direct hit to body	knocked prone
3	Cranium shattered	-2d6 PER
4	Neuroptics disrupted	-1d6 PER
5	Somamotors glitched	-1d6 DEX
6	Leg severed	-1d6 STR, immobilised
7	Side of torso blown off	-2d6 STR, -1d6 DEX, knocked prone
8	Internal battery rupture	-2d6 STR, -2D6 DEX, knocked prone, explosive
9	Processor array destroyed	instant death
10	Black box destroyed	cannot be recovered after death

Death

If HP, STR, DEX or PER are reduced to zero, a character becomes broken, and cannot perform any actions by themselves until repaired. If any two stats are reduced to zero, they die. However if intact, a dead PC’s black box can be recovered and transplanted into a new body-frame. During this process, the character’s personality and memories remain intact, but new stats for HP, STR, DEX and PER must be rolled.

Repair

During downtime, any character can attempt to field-repair another character that has been broken. The outcome of this is always uncertain. If the action succeeds, the repairer can re-roll the broken stat. If the action fails, the repairer instead rolls 1d4 for that stat.

April 3, 2022