Do your recently rescued villagers need ideas for what to do for the wanderers that just saved their lives? Is there a holiday coming up, and a patron is looking to be kind to their pet fighters? One, for shame, Two here is a rollable table. Depending on how magical your setting is these are more or less impressive, but none should be too overpowered or useful/
(Merry Santicorn, Anne of DIY&Dragons !)
The gifts below are all worth 50sp, assuming a silver is enough for a bed and meal for one night. There is also enough for every adventurer in the party, obviously!
Gifts for the Adventurers in your life - Secret Santicorn 2024
Troika, Jojo & Superpowers - RPG Blog Carnival
Troika is a game that has long interested me. I find the art enthralling, the prose absolutely excellent, and the mechanics both lite and crunchy in interesting places. (Like some of the best peanut butter) Troika is a skill-based system but NOT like you might be thinking. It isn’t descended from the Chaosium lines like Call of Cthulhu or Elfquest, it comes from its own whole hereditary family that I think is called the Fighting Fantasy books? I’m not 100% certain on that but the point is its unique, and the main bulk of your characters are their Advanced Skills. Spells in this system are treated much like skills in that they’re Roll-Under and have set effects when cast successfully, but what if they were even more like the normal Advanced Skills; Broadly applicable, vaguely applied, and designed to encourage their creative use?
I recently put out a game jam entry called The Second Sun. Its really bad, but an idea I had was to use Spells as Skills. This game is based on the Rat System SRD so the skills aren’t actually the same as Troika, but for the sake of this blog post you can assume they work like Advanced Skills in Troika!
The reason I wanted to make spells into skills is to shift the narrative surrounding them. I love the way magic is treated in the OSR, as this mercurial chaotic force that cannot be tamed! For Second Sun, though, (which is mostly inspired by Adventure Time and other gonzo settings soaked to the bone in magic) I wanted the magic to feel more friendly and accessible. Is that silly? Yes, for sure, but that’s the goal. Using Magic at will with no serious negative consequences changes it from a loaded gun into a screwdriver. I think the GLOG does chaotic magic the best, tied with DCC, and casting a spell in these games feels like a child raising a pistol up shakily. Things are very very likely to go wrong. Adventure Time treats magic more lackadaisically, easy to learn in an afternoon and very reliable. I wanted that sort of feeling, so I said players can just name a spell and keep it as a skill.
This puts the magic firmly in a thiefy sort of Climb Sheer Surfaces space. Can I climb the tarrasque? I want players to be creative and feel very safe doing so, and I also want most characters to be a little magical. Finn is definitely a fighter, but he learns magic all the time!
I like the idea that a character sheet will have Climb, Plumbing, and Mornhorn’s Sonorous Yap in the same list of skills. What an odd sort of person! It sets the tone just right for this game. The world is weird and problems aren’t necessarily gonna be designed around making loud sounds but if you’re clever you can make it useful! Of course, the fun has to be moderated a little bit by the Referee in a system that relies on making compromises and negotiating the powers of a spell every time it's used.
So why not just use spell slots? 5e is a system that has a huge amount of magic, but its all cleanly codified. It feels more like pulling out the Hideous Laughter shaped key for the Hideous Laughter shaped keyhole, and less like spells can be uniquely applied to all sorts of situations. They can of course, but the way something is presented to the players shapes the way it will be thought of and used. I want the system to funnel players, ref included, into the thought processes I envision. That’s game design baby! Baby’s first game design, maybe, but I am a baby and be nice to me please.
So, on paper, all a wizard would have to do in Second Sun to cast fireball is to have some kind of spell that could conceivably form one. I like this because it leaves the door open for all sorts of avenues. Shape Flame, Summon Jim the Ifrit, literally just the word FIRE in all caps could all be argued to be capable of lobbing a lump of flame around the place. This makes spells more like superpowered innate abilities that can do whatever the writer (Players and Referee) need it to do, which makes a lot of sense. I’ve always been inspired by anime powers especially narrow little abilities that get used in unusual circumstances to awe and shock. My very first roleplaying game experience was a homebrewed Jojo’s Bizarre Adventure system, and the ingenuity on display was always the hook that kept me in those adventures.
I think the major risk with a system like this is that every character will covet powers like this, and it will be the major focus of a campaign, but honestly? I love things shaking out like that! Getting a wizard player hooked on finding more magic during character creation sounds like a success to me. Wizards are greedy, myopic things that center their worlds around their personal power, so giving them lots of little pocket-knives that can do a lot makes sense to me.
The Sunken Cathedral
I needed a dungeon for my session Friday. After reading The Monstrome I decided I NEEDED to feature a Giant Worm session one. Otherwise, this is a very simplistic little building to rescue a captive villager from. A little tension from the vulnerable state of the goblins and the two big monsters barely being contained and you have an exciting first session! (Hopefully)
If you’d like a pocketfold pdf of this dungeon, you can find it on my itch.io here! It isnt very polished since I made it in a feverish state on the only publishing software I have access to (Google Docs *shudders*) but it’ll help me run it. Otherwise, the dungeon is below. Enjoy!
The Sunken Cathedral
In the middle of the swamp lies a temple, buried half below the mire. Its town is long since eaten by time, but the martyr bones ground into the foundation protected this old wooden structure from the rot and mildew surrounding it.
This place is dedicated to St. Drevina whose domains are Hunters, Pregnancy and Artistry. Saintess will not allow disease or malady to infect her unborn and thus the mud and water do not spill in through doorways or broken windows while consecrated.
The current inhabitants are the Bent-Tooth Clan, currently resting while they travel to their warlord further north from here. They are extremely superstitious goblins and have an offering to appease the Saintess while they recuperate here.
d12 What’s in this goblin’s pockets?
1. Coarse fabric doll with real teeth
2. Surprisingly well made cloak (1g)
3. Bone club carved into a phallus (10s)
4. 1d4 Fat covered sugar cubes
5. Greasy potion of Waterbreathing
6. Survival shovel, masterwork (5g)
7. Dried and salted donkey, 2 rations
8. A letter in goblin, a family anecdote
9. A glass eye coated in layers of paper
10. An heirloom dagger +1, +3 vs snakes
11. A silk scarf with a face drawn on (1g)
12. An extremely cool stick
Hirelings Reprise - RPG Blog Carnival
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| You aren't the big one |
Hirelings often operate in their own guilds. There is excellent business to be had in stripping foolish children of their stolen goods supporting new adventurers through lean times and fat equally. Hirelings have often been instrumental in the goings-on in the adventuring community, but what does the wider world think of them?
Social Classless/Levelless
The decision to become a hireling is a puzzling one. Adventuring makes a sort of sense, in that they are often so full of hubris and selfishness even a king would blush, but becoming a handservant to an adventurer? Many parents would balk and mourn their loss if a child announced a future in the Hireling game. There are plenty of practical reasons to join a guild, though, to be fair!
- easy access to dungeon loot
- protection from monsters while looting (optimistic)
- networking in adventuring guilds, which can get you access to wizards and clerics who could resurrect a dead aunt or fireball your ex-manager or other such gifts usually reserved for player characters.
- Fast retirement (if you're clever)
- Very VERY high promotion potential (possession by a player in case of PC death)
All that said, there's a lot of reasons to avoid the job too. Sure, people look sideways at adventurers, but they often have Power. You, a hireling, do not.
Know it or not, the folk who employ you are paying for you to be expendable. Some groups like to be coy about it but make no mistake they will sell your life for theirs to the reaper the first chance they get. Oh, they mourned and buried their last crop of suckers? FAT FUCKIN CHANCE! They probably just tossed them and are looking to save face. Not that they'd lose face anyway, because the thing you have to relinquish if you're committed to the job is your life's inherent value.
When you're a shopkeeper, travelers that freelance as the guard and as dungeon delvers are suckers to be scammed at best and serious liabilities about to ruin your town at worst. You're THOSE guys' lackey. You are regarded as an object, a piece of equipment made to carry other equipment. If you are well loved by the party, you may be treated like cattle but think about how YOU would treat an ass as someone who does not own the one in front of you
The wider world forgets your name, and you will be quickly sealed inside the suicidal and foolhardy adventuring networks should you choose this path. You can maybe get away with one or two delves to make ends meet in desperation, but it is expected and advised you bury that part of your employment history deep.
The average person will scoff at the way you have thrown your safety and family aside, clerics and priests from back home will assume you are rife with sin, taverns will blame you for any brawls that break out, the very worst of adventuring stereotypes will be applied to you tenfold! You are worse than a pariah, you are a parasite supping on a parasite. If you choose to make this your regular work, you are foolish and overconfident, though filled with a self-loathing and "humility" that normal adventuring types do not possess. Does this make you better or worse?
Adventurers long ago demanded Hirelings organize themselves, as they are the ones holding the check and they are utterly obsessed with orderly lists of objects to purchase (Especially 3rd and a half generation adventurers). Hirelings complied, and since then the profession has become obsessed with competition, reputation and renown. This is equal parts competing to join the most successful and safe Adventuring Parties while also pining after the social life they had before they took up the job.
These collections of Hirelings are organized as guilds, with membership requiring a payment of dues and an adherence to Guild Law. For GMs, this is just a cute way to organize like-minded or similarly useful Hirelings but could also serve as a jumping off point for faction and domain play. I would imagine them as being extremely niche and unlikely to ever impact actual politics or amount to anything city-shaping. It's like entering faction play with tribes of goblins, constantly squabbling and in-fighting and preventing each other from ever getting the power and notoriety with normal people that they crave. Of course, Hirelings often try to leverage their guild status and rank in wider society to try and buy back some of that life they have since abandoned. This doesn't work, often comedically.
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