Lores

Games are an exchange of questions and answers. "Can I do this?" "How are you trying to do that?" The GM adjudicates the reality of the world based on this exchange. "Sure, you can climb a tree, no problem" versus "You're trying to climb the tree before GORTHMAK THE UNDECEIVER catches you. Uhhh, roll a d20 and try and beat your Dexterity."

One of the most essential questions of "Can my character..." is "Can my character know this?"

• Have I heard of Medusa before?
• What does my wizard know about dragons?
• I feel that, like, as a fighter I'd probably know about wars and tactics and stuff.

OSR games do not have a de facto resolution system for what a character knows (as opposed to, say, making a Knowledge Local test in D&D 3E). This is a feature not a bug. However, if you would like some guidance for adjudicating what a character knows, you can use this system. Bolt it onto the game of your choice. 

by John Howe

What do I know?

Character knowledge follows similar rules to what characters can see. There are essentially two levels of knowledge.

• Obvious knowledge (level 1): Stuff everybody knows and sets the general expectations of the encounter. Giving players a lot of information makes sure that both players and the GM are on the same page and lets players make intelligent choices.
• Obscure knowledge (level 2): Some specialist subjects would only be known to certain people. Obscure knowledge might include the habits of mythical creatures, the likes and dislikes of specific people within an organization, or the metaphysics of the planes of reality. In these cases, the GM should only give information to a player who has bid lore (see below). If a player bids lore and the GM accepts the question, the GM should give as much information on the subject as they know—keep talking and riffing until you run out of material. 

Bid lore

“They are wrought of ithildin that mirrors only starlight and moonlight, and sleeps until it is touched by one who speaks words now long forgotten in Middle-earth. It is long since I heard them, and I thought deeply before I could recall them to my mind.” – The Fellowship of the Ring, J.R.R. Tolkien 

Lore represents things that your character knows that you, as the player, might not. This might include a vulnerability of a particular monster, taboos or habits of a foreign people, or the special properties of a particular plant variety. 

When you bid lore, you are essentially asking “Would my character know this?” 

When a player bids lore, a GM has three potential responses:

• “Yes, you know about this.” The GM then gives a detailed answer. If the GM says "Yes," the GM will answer your question as thoroughly as they can.
• “No, you wouldn’t know about this with that lore.” 
• “I don’t accept this lore bid.” The GM then tells the player why the lore bid question wasn’t fair game. The player may rephrase or re-frame the question and try again. 

You may bid lore a number of times per dungeon turn equal to your Intelligence modifier (minimum 1). 

Lore bid questions are discrete 

The name of the lore your bid must be part of the question that you ask. 

You cannot ask, “Have I ever seen anything like this?” The question is too broad.

You may ask, “Since I know Dragon Lore, are any of the monsters on the bas relief dragons?"

Lore bid answers are thorough

The GM cannot say, “You’re not sure, but you think they might be related to dragons.” If an answer is this vague, the player does not need to spend a lore bid. GMs should simply tell them this hint. 

The GM may say, “You know that these are dragons because you’ve seen their iconography before. As an expert in Dragon Lore, though, you recognize that these are fire drakes. These dragons are flightless and live in rivers of lava under the earth. They are famous for their uncontrolled rages.”

Lore bid questions aren’t a replacement for clever thinking

You cannot ask, “How do you defeat a dragon?” This question is too broad and too subjective. 

You may ask, “Do I know if a drake has any special vulnerabilities?” 

List of Lores

Each character begins the game with 1 + Intelligence modifier lores. 

You gain new lores by studying under loremasters. These loremasters might require coin or quests to teach you what they know. Studying under a loremaster should be considered a long action (taking a season).

The list of lores you give your player should be campaign specific. Here's just a sample one to get you started.

Alchemy

Anatomy

Armor

Artifact

Bard Tales

Brendylian City-states

Beast

Beyseth Republic

Buildings

Blood

Bone

Chakras

Constellations

City

Death

Disease

Drax Protectorate

Elemental Planes

Engineering

Forge

Herb

Heraldry

Man

Mana

Metal

Poison

Ritual

Rune

Shennite Empire

Spells

Stone

Tek-Lan Empire

Undead

Vale

Verdan Council

Verdan Exodus

War Strategy

Web of Life

Weapon

Wilderness

Wood

Xur Dominion

Name this Alchemical Book

My next project for HIS MAJESTY THE WORM is the alchemical system. It will be a product roughly equivalent to the Sorcery is a Sword Without a Hilt.

I have not and will not name this project. 

You will. 

Download the cover to see how it works. Click on the different Zodiac signs to generate different names.

How did you make this?

I tried a lot of different ways to create this effect and found a lot of dead ends, so I might as well write down what worked. I used the Adobe Creative Suite.

1. In InDesign, create several different layers. In my case, the base layer has the white background and the instructional text. For convenience, name the different layers something recognizable. 
2. Create buttons (Object -> Interactive -> Create buttons) out of boxes or text objects. In my case, I used invisible rectangles around the Zodiac symbols. 
3. On each layer, add different colored backgrounds and text. Essentially, create the different layouts you want for your different final projects.  
4. Turn off the visibility of all the layers except your base layer. This will set the default visible layers for your final product. 
5. Export to Interactive PDF. Ensure that the "Create Acrobat Layers" box is checked.
6. In your PDF, go to View- > Show/Hide -> Navigation Panes -> Layers to view the different layers. Select a layer that you want to display when a button is clicked. 
7. Go to Tools -> Content -> Select Object to select the individual buttons you created. Double click on a button.
8. In the Actions tab, select "Set layer visibility" and click Add. This makes the button Show/Hide the exact configuration of layers as you currently have it set. (For example, if you have Layer 1 visible and Layers 2-12 hidden when you set this action, the end user will only see Layer 1 when they click the button.)
9. Repeat steps 6-8, setting different buttons to different layer configurations. 
10. Save and voila. 

Cross-Section Castle Character Creation

(or CCCC for short)

Do you remember Stephen Biesty's Cross-sections books? I had them as a kid. I think there's something very compelling about pictures you can get lost in - ones that demand your attention. RPGs should have more of them. 

Anyway, I made a d66 table of level 0 characters for you to use for games like DCC, LotFP, GLoG, or whatever using one of the pictures from the Cross-Section Castle book. 

Click for larger picture

Enjoy!

Dungeon Seeds - Out Now on Itch and Drivethrug

 Oh hey. I did a thing. 

Clicka on da pic to see it.

In His Majesty the Worm, characters adventure through a mythic underworld underneath the city at the center of the Wide World. As a gamemaster, creating a mythic underworld can seem daunting, but it’s really just a series of small, discrete tasks. It’s less making one huge megadungeon and more creating several, smaller dungeons and creating an appropriate flow between them.

Dungeon Seeds contains a procedure for laying out interconnected dungeons, as well as inspirational dungeon seeds to use as prompts. Because His Majesty the Worm is not a premade setting, the descriptions of the seeds are just suggestions—meant to be evocative. For each seed, we’ve included a map from Dyson Logos. You can use this map or make one of your own using the procedures in this book.

This book contains:

• A procedure for laying out a Jaquaysed megadungeon layout
• Twenty-one inspirational dungeon ideas with maps
• Dungeon checklist that encourages meaningful exploration
• Procedures for making maps, keying rooms, and making random encounter tables
• Thorough walkthrough of making a dungeon level

You can see the supplement's spiel by clicking on the link. Since this is my blog and you're here reading this, I'll actually take the time to go more into the nitty gritty.

His Majesty the Worm Progress and Itchfunding

As you know, I'm writing an RPG called His Majesty the Worm. Well, actually I wrote it a few years ago. The text is done. It needs an editor. It is sitting in a Word document.

Getting the game out of the Word document and into people's brains and onto their gaming tables feels way harder than writing the game. Writing is easy and fun. Playtesting is fun. (It has play right in the name!) Publishing is hard. 

One big problem is that publishing requires money. You need to hire artists, graphic designers, layout, editors, etc. This is why Kickstarter's exist. 

The idea of doing a Kickstarter gives me anxiety. I still might. But please know that it gives me anxiety.

To even get to a Kickstarter, though, you need enough cool looking stuff to justify someone backing you. My solution to this problem was Itchfunding. Chunk the supplementary material from the game (stuff that you didn't need to understand the rules to benefit from) and publish them as pay-what-you-will. 

My goals are twofold:

• Find people who would like to play my game and tell them that it exists
• Get money to pay collaborators

How is it working, you ask? 

So far so good! Dungeon Seeds is my third published His Majesty the Worm supplement. Each one has netted 2-3 pieces of new art. Dungeon Seeds is unique in two ways. First, it has a fixed price instead of being PWYW. Second, if you sign up for my mailing list the game is completely free. 

The mailing list speaks to the first goal above. If I can tell people who actually want to play my game that I've launched a Kickstarter/released a new supplement/whatever, that's gold. It's way different than plugging your own games on Reddit threads/Facebook groups/Twitter.

Dungeon Seeds Development

Honestly, I didn't plan to write this supplement. 

I had already written the GM's chapter for His Majesty the Worm. It has good advice in it.

I have been playtesting His Majesty for about five years now. It is an OSR-adjacent game/post OSR game. I have used the assembled wisdom of the OSR scene and blogosphere to run my playtests. 

But I realized that this is a dungeon crawling game and that this assembled wisdom was a core part of the game experience. It's not enough to just say, "Hey, go and read every blog post I've ever read so you know how to run this game." There were some essential assumptions that need to be communicated to potential GMs.

Dungeon Seeds is my attempt to tell GMs how I make and run dungeons while playing my game. It captures my experience as well as the general good advice of people who have been thinking about dungeons for forty years. 

I hope it is helpful. I hope you like it.

Two Non-Sentient Species of the Homo Genus

One of the facts about reality that I find weirdest is that 1) homo sapiens sapiens are the only members of the homo genus, and 2) this has only been true for a relatively short amount of time. 

Also, despite being pretty gung ho about Star Trek forehead ridge aliens or elves/dwarves/etc., the idea of seeing something that looks human but isn't triggers my fight or flight response. I get upset. 

In that spirit, here are two upsetting creatures to place into your games. Natural philosophers characterize them as being human-adjacent, but in no way are they homo sapiens. This is because they are not sapient. 

From The Sword of Glass by Sylviane Corgiat

Gigas

Gigas are quadrupedal non-sapient humanoids. They run sorta like people who participate in pony play. They cannot easily stand on their back legs so you measure them to their shoulder. On average, they reach about 19 hands high. 

Despite their size, gigas are quite skittish. They flee from most perceived threats, although the males can be territorial during mating season. When threatened, they can be enormously dangerous. They have muscle mass like an orangutan. Their bite carries poisonous bacteria. 

Gigas are herbivorous and subsist mostly on grasses. Herds of gigas roam in temperate plains biomes. 

Gigas have been domesticated by gnolls, who train them to act as warhorses. 

Nginikin

From Basileus by Andrew Whyte

Nginikin are non-sapient humanoids the size of action figures. They fill the same ecological niche as rats. They infest ships and are inadvertently introduced to new ecologies, which they proceed to devastate. Everybody hates them. 

Nginikin are omnivorous. Like goats, they can eat almost everything. They reproduce extraordinarily quickly and are frequently seen as symbols of fertility. As such, they are the primary ingredients for a variety of aphrodisiacs and fertility potions. 

Most upsettingly, they have the capacity for mimicry. Though about as intelligent as rabbits, they can recreate the sounds of human language. Many people are tortured by the squeaks of "Howre uu dooin" coming from their crawlspaces. 

Generic Fantasy Mad Libs

The Manse is one of the most prolific posters in the blogosphere. They churn out content at a pace that leaves me in gap-mouthed awe. I wish I could be half as generative. 

Recently, they posted about the expectations of Generic Fantasy Settings. Dan from Throne of Salt took the words out of my mouth and said that he wanted a Mad Libs version. 

So here it is. Use it to further your Goal for Gonzo Principle (GfG Principle). 

The Manse's Generic Fantasy Mad Libs

1. The world is based on the cosmic struggle or balance between [Concept] and [Concept]. 
2. The setting has a technological level and history that is roughly analogous to Earth's [Continent] during the [Time Period].
3. The people of the setting worship [Divinity/Divinities]. These entities [Exist/Don't Exist] and [Adverb] interact with the setting.
4. There are several different intelligent fantasy races. These races are;
   * [Species] who mostly live on the [Biome], and tend to be the most populous race.
   * [Species] who mostly live in the [Biome].
   * [Species] who mostly live in the [Biome].
   * [Species] who mostly live in the [Biome]. They tend to be antagonistic to the other races.
5. The primary power structure of the setting is a [Government Type] which is ruled by a [Title]. This system is one where land, wealth, and social status is gained by [Custom]. The primary inheritor class is [Biological Characteristic]. 
6. The land is protected by [Noun] who protect it from monsters, invasions, and other threats. The most elite of these are [Job Title]. 
7. The majority of the people survive by [Occupation]. The most common types of food cultivated is [Food]. Livestock include [Animal], [Animal], [Animal], and [Animal].
8. The primary vehicle used by people in this setting for transport and warfare are [Animal].
9. The most common threats people encounter when traveling on the roads [Noun] and [Animal]. Most rookie adventurers start off fighting weak monsters like [Adjective][Noun] and [Adjective][Noun]. More rare monsters can be very dangerous. The most infamous, though not necessarily most powerful or common of these monsters is the [Noun].
10. The biggest, baddest monsters in the setting tend to have the habit of [Verbing] princesses. 
11. There are [Adjective] Dungeons which house dangers like [Noun], [Noun], and [Noun]. The primary reason people explore these dungeons is to acquire [Noun]. 
12. Among the things found found in Dungeons, you might also find [Adjective] [Nouns]. The most powerful and sought after are [Adjective][Nouns]. They can do things like [Verb] or [Verb]. 
13. Magic is an [Adjective] force in this universe. Magic is [Adverb]. Those who cultivate magic can use it in the forms of [Noun], [Noun], or [Noun]. 
14. The type of people who use magic are [Adjective] [Occupation]. They are usually [Adjective] but also [Adjective]. They tend to sequester themselves in [Type of Building].
15. Typically, the most common end goals for a wizard is to create a [Noun] or turn [Noun] to [Noun].
16. The most advanced weapon in the setting is a [Weapon]. 
17. The primary currency used by people in the setting are [Adjective] [Nouns] made of [Material], [Material], or [Material].
18. Outside of civilization, there is [Adjective] [Biome]. This is where [Animate Nouns] live, who are known to be [Adjective] who love [Verb].
19. After people die, their souls are ferried to either [Location] or [Location] determined by how [Adjective] they are. Alternatively, they may linger as ghosts who [Verb] until they can [Verb]. 
20. People can come back from the dead if someone uses [Adjective] magic. This is broadly considered evil. Contrastingly, people can come back from the dead if someone uses [Adjective] magic. This is broadly considered good. 
    

Sorcery is a Sword Without a Hilt - Magic from His Majesty the Worm

Pursuant to my last post, I have released Sorcery is a Sword Without a Hilt, the magic system from my forthcoming game HIS MAJESTY THE WORM. It's PWYW, with all proceeds going to fund cool artists for the game. There's no reason whatsoever to not check it out, steal some ideas, and smash them into your own game. Click the picture below to download it. 

Click here to download!

The book contains 40 level-less spells and dozens of magical catastrophes. The spells are flexible, with variable effects depending on how much "juice" the sorcerer gives them. 

Each spell is designed to feel like a weird, useful tool. At the same time, there are no spells that solve the essential problems of dungeon crawling.

Although this is written with His Majesty the Worm in mind, it shouldn't take too much braingrease to adapt the spells into your system of choice, ala Wonder & Wickedness or Vaginas are Magic. There's a conversion guide in the back of the book to help you.