Worldbuilding through Saving Throws

I don't think I'm the first person to make this observation (as an OSR blogger, I almost never am), but it occurred to me today how useful the saving throw names are for communicating the kinds of challenges your character will face in the game. 

Death. Wands. Paralysis. Breath Attacks. Spells.

By looking at your character sheet, you have a glimpse into a life of adventure: struggling against the zaps and enchantments of evil sorcerers, the fiery breath of dragons, and the mummy's curse of instant death. 

And when you change them, you change the feeling of the game. The texture and tone. Look, here's the saving throws from Dolmenwood.

Doom. Ray. Hold. Blast. Spell.

Are these the same? Well, yes, in a practical way - you can see how these map directly to the original ones from OSE. But they also are telling you something different. You can dodge Blasts--not just dragon breath. Use this mechanic to avoid all sorts of area attacks. 

For what it's worth, I rather preferred the recasting of the saving throws that Brian Yaksha used for their Dolmenwood-adjacent Wildwood Manuscript:

Enchantment. Substance. Geas. Dragon Spume (my fave). Ensorcellment.

My colleague Mars at Save vs. Worms recently said "Save vs." is one of the most useful phrases to come out of old-school games. How right she is! It's like the implications of the cleric being able to turn undead. These are the things you're up against in this game. These are the tools you have to avoid them.

When making your beloved retroclone on your blog, naming your saving throws is a tool that you can use to say what your game and your world is all about.

The Copy and Paste Manifesto

I have gone on record as saying that making a megadungeon is fun and easy. I wrote a book about it. 

But I have good news. It's even easier than I made it out to be. 

I want to introduce to you an ethos for your gaming called...

The Copy and Paste Manifesto

In the introduction to That Hideous Strength, C.S. Lewis acknowledges science-fiction writer Olaf Stapledon and his work: "Mr. Stapledon is so rich in invention that he can well afford to lend, and I admire his invention (though not his philosophy) so much that I should feel no shame to borrow."

I have liked this quote ever since I read it and have borrowed it frequently. Indeed, anytime I ever steal and riff on other people's work, I usually quote it in whole or in part. I think it is enormously self-satisfying for me to have stolen the caveat of "Hey, I'm stealing this from someone else."

You might also have heard the frequently misattributed quote: “Good artists copy, great artists steal.”

I am here to tell you that this is absolutely how you should go about running your games.

Loving the manifesto

There is no one perfect dungeon. When you run The Yellow Book of Brechewold, you think the elven ship sublevel is a little too much science fiction for your fantasy and you cut it. (Cut, Copy, Pate Manifesto doesn't have the same ring, but cutting is part of this.) 

There is no one perfect campaign. When you run Dolmenwood, you want to start the players in Brandonsford (from Black Wyrm of Brandsonford) to give the players some immediate fairy tale hooks and quests from those NPCs. You take Brandsonford and place it into hex 1205. 

There is no one perfect megadungeon. There is only the assemblage of dungeons hand-stitched together.  You take two dungeons from Silent Titans, Sersa Victory's Lost Caves of the Worm Witch, and the Nexus of the Ix (from Knock! #3). You connect them together thematically and with a map. 

There is no one perfect game. You run OSE but you borrow the lockpicking mechanics from Errant, the starting equipment packages from Cairn, and the XP procedures from a blog post you read once. 

There is so much good content out there. The Copy and Paste Manifesto tells you to use all of it. Create the perfect game for you by combining all of your preferences together and cut the stuff you don't like. 

No more bemoaning that you're never going to get a game book to the table. "When do I have time to run yet another adventure? Who will possibly play this new system with me?" No, shut up. That's not why you buy books. You buy from them to steal from them. 

Living the manifesto

When I playtested His Majesty the Worm, my megadungeon was a vast array of content copied and pasted together. (That's why I've never shown it to anybody.) 

I want you to do what I did. Here's how:

Step 1: Get some maps

These can be maps you make, a map you randomly generate through something like watabou, a map from a professional cartographer, or any combination thereof. 

Step 2: Number the rooms

Number the rooms in three-number codes (like His Majesty the Worm recommends). Level 1 has rooms 101, 102, 103, etc. Level 2 has rooms 201, 202, etc.

Step 3: Start your dungeon reference sheet

Use a Google Doc. Label your different dungeons as Header 1. Label your rooms as Header 2. Make your header styles look nice. 

Step 4: Grab dungeons

Go into your ever-growing folder of RPG supplements, adventures, and dungeons and begin opening the PDFs. 

Step 5: Copy and paste

Grab the content that's the best and start copying it into your Google Doc. Find themes that make it all work together. Cut out stuff that you think doesn't fit your style. Level 1 might be mostly from the same source, but shifted around to fit your new map and create connections to Level 2. You decide to put an NPC from Level 3 into Level 1, to create a throughline between the entrance and a deeper section of the dungeon. 

Step 6. Repeat, infinitely

Buy more games. Add more sections to your world. Let your players travel from Dolmenwood to the Valley of the Flowers. When they fall asleep, they wake up in Zyan. 

Copy, paste, mash up, remix, and make the perfect game for you and your table.

While I have you: The Knock! #5 campaign is almost complete

One of the main places to copy and paste from is Knock!. Whenever I start a new campaign, I always reread all of my old issues. There are so many good ideas, so many stealable rules, so many cool tables, so many neat gimmicks. It always gets my brain going and makes me excited.

As of this writing, there are less than two days left on the Kickstarter campaign. Make sure you don't miss out! 

Banish your FOMO by grabbing your copy! 

Knock! #5 - one week to go!

I assume the Venn diagram of "people who read my blog" and "people who have already backed the Knock! Kickstarter" is a perfect circle, but if not, I wanted to say (shout! scream!) that the campaign for Knock! #5 campaign is one week from completion!

What is Knock!?

If you have taken a strange road to get here, Knock! is one of the most well-known publications in the OSR space. Since 2021, it has collected and curated important ideas from the scene's game designers, theorists, and fans. It bills itself as: 

An Adventure Gaming Bric-a-Brac. A Compendium of Miscellanea for Old-School RPGs. For OSR weirdos and curious D&D heads alike.

Blogs are the bedrock of the OSR community. They are the place where its ideas are invented, traded, and iterated on. Knock! is inspired by (and inspires!) this creative energy. Recognizing the importance of blogs to this game-design space, the magazine has brought the "canon" of OSR theory into print, allowing for a wider audience.  

It's latest issue, Knock! #5, is currently fundraising on Kickstarter. There is one week left until the end of the campaign!

The book funded in a wink (merci!). It's already laid out. It's currently being copyedited. Soon, the only thing that will be left to do is collect your pledge and ship you the book. So don't miss out! 

What's in this issue?

This issue contains a diverse group of contributors and contributions: a mix of OSR mainstays and new blood, a blend of old favourites and hitherto unpublished essays. Each page is a sigil that’s trapped some strange idea or gameable spark. This issue contains: 

• Monsters! (The hydra knight sprouts riotous limbs each time they’re hit! Scary!)
• Essays! (Ever wonder why kobolds are sometimes depicted as lizards and sometimes as dog people?)
• New rules! (Put some strange weather in your dungeon.)
• Random tables! (100s of names and quirks for your next familiar.)
• Magic items! (What will you get from the dungeon vending machine?)
• New classes! (Ever wanted to absorb a monster’s powers by eating them? Now you can!)
• Adventures! (What happens when a goblin gets a hold of a ray gun?)

There’s even a short section in the back where we indulge in a bit of navel gazing, thinking about the state of the scene itself.

The book is 212 pages (A5 format: 5.9’ x 8.25’, slightly bigger than digest size) in beautiful full colour, printed on quality paper (coated 130 gr, with a cover on coated 300 gr).

Hey what's up with shipping?

The shipping is two tiered - France and The Rest of the World - for a simple reason: it is being shipped by Le Poste from France, where the Layout Lord Olivier lives. That is the system that Le Poste uses. The rates are Le Poste's rates. They aren't something the Mushmen have set. 

Let me assure you: shipping prices are my enemy too! But the world is falling down around my ears, and I cannot improve global commerce by myself. So let us drink and read funny RPG books and eek out what little joy we can in the world we have left. 

Don't split the party

Unique to this campaign, there's a pledge tier that gets you every single issue of Knock! magazine, 1-5. That's over a thousand pages of rules ideas, game design essays, random tables both serious and silly, adventures, character classes, monsters, and multifarious goblins. 

If you haven't yet taken the deep dive, I really think this is the best bang for your buck. I don't use any product more than my issues of Knock!. Whenever I start a new RPG game, I go there first for inspiration. I return again, and again, and again.

Reflections on my first Kickstarter campaign

It is strange and thrilling and humbling to be editing a magazine that I loved from the second I picked up the first issue. 

Something that has struck me as I have joined the Mushmen is that this is quite literally a cottage industry. From the outside, there was such a level of polish to everything the Mushmen did, it was easy to imagine that there was a large company behind the craft. But no, it was just two guys (now three!). 

I really respect the Mushmen's ethos in not having weirdo physical add-ons. They add a level of complexity (and failure) to Kickstarters that isn't necessary and contributes to a weird culture in the crowdfunding space. 

But! I also respect their ability to just add value to each campaign. For example, in this campaign, we're adding a searchable index of all Knock! articles, past and present. This will help you track down that article you were thinking of and let you put your hand on the issue and page number. This is free!

Also, if you're missing a back issue that you want to add to your order? At the end of this campaign, you'll receive a 10% discount code usable for your next order on our website, themerrymushmen.com.  

I'll probably have more to say about participating in my first crowdfunding campaign later, but I definitely learned a lot. My biggest takeaway is probably "I can do this." 

Call to action

OK but seriously. I am holding your head in my hands so gently right now and staring into your eyes and saying so sincerely: You don't want to miss this.

More than just trapping a blog post in amber, Knock! is a community of contributors who revel in the spirit of weird ideas, quick iteration, and messy creativity. It contains everything I love about the RPG space. And it's good. There's so much good stuff in here!

Interested? Head over to the campaign page before May 21st and get the new issue at a discounted rate! For those newly curious about the OSR scene and those who have vociferous opinions about what that mysterious acronym actually means, Knock! represents a fun addition to your gaming bookshelf.

Come join us!

Embedding Lore in your Classes

A while back, I wrote about the tensions between wanting no homework and settings with rich lore (and some potential solutions). Today, I'll write about another solution: embedding your lore into your classes.

Brief summary of the problem I'm trying to solve

There is fun to be had when everybody at the table deeply understands the setting and the lore. Getting mastery of these elements requires solo prep time and can be pretty boring; contradictory to the purpose of roleplaying, which is getting together with your friends to have fun.

People have come up with different solutions to this problem. One often cited one is collaborative worldbuilding. You and your friends come up with the lore together, thus moving it from solo and boring back into the core premise.

Creativity is fun. But it's not the fun of discovery.

Discovery requires prep. The more you want to have the feeling of exploration at the table, the more your prep must adhere to blorb principles.

Embed Lore Everywhere

The point of my Dark Souls-esque Worldbuilding post (referenced above) is that you can embed lore into unlikely places, like your equipment lists. 

To build on that, you can embed lore everywhere. In this way, you feed the lore of your setting to your players like feeding your dog a pill wrapped in a piece of bologna. 

Embed Lore in your Classes

One strong way to embed lore is to put it into your classes. 

Players love reading classes. They love imagining characters. They love seeing powers and abilities. 

If your game comes with a setting and isn't a generic game, this is a huge opportunity for you. And not having weird ass classes is a missed opportunity.

A fighter is boring. Even something like a druid or a bard is boring at this point.

A sword-lord just sounds cooler. And gives you an opportunity to talk about how sword-lords fit into the social structures of your setting. 

The Ichabod class from Spiceomancy is probably my favorite example of a weird class. Goddamn, it's so cool.

+++

Sidebar

One of D&D's weirdest features at this point is its half embedded setting and half generic. Half of the game begs you to think about your warlock's patron, revoke your paladin's powers for breaking their oath, consider the organization of druids. The other asks you to consider each class as a bundle of mechanics with no representation: do you want to make a clumsy oaf who blunders their way into success? Just use monk stats, it doesn't mean anything. The tension in the contrast between these two points is a huge weakness in the game. 

+++

GLoG classes are cool and easy to make. People like making them because its pretty easy to think about a class's essential gimmick as four chunks of mechanics. 

One of the things I noticed about GLoG classes is that people are embedding some essential setting elements in the template A of a class. I think this is great (this is what gave me the idea for this post). For example, for a Princess class, you might add a template ability called Noble that says "You're a member of the nobility. Everyone treats you with respect. Also, you're worth more alive than dead. You'll be ransomed instead of killed, if possible."

These abilities might be called "Ribbon abilities" in 5E. They don't have a lot of crunch, but they're fun to have. 

You might ask: Shouldn't roleplaying and GM fiat just add these? (Yes, and...) Are these abilities really necessary? (Yes! They're the difference between a monk being someone who studies the Way of the Iron Palm versus a lucky oaf flavored with monk character abilities.)

And, crucially, they're a really good opportunity to hide nuggets of lore into the actual text of your game in a way that's fun to consume and easy to remember.

Here's an example of what I mean from CanFormerIncelsBePunk:

Joesky Tax:  False Shepherd

Here's an example class to further show how you might go about this:

When the signs were right - the daystar burned in the sky, the lambs gave forth bloody young, the olive trees bloomed in winter, the dead sang hymns of welcome - everyone knew the Shepherd was soon at hand. The Wheel of Fortune spun out many would-be Shepherds in those days, doling out many miracles in anticipation of his coming. 

There was a Conclave. All the would-be Shepherds gathered and discussed among themselves who amongst them would be most worthy. All then beheld the True Shepherd, and knew him, and rejoiced. 

You were one of the False Shepherds. Perhaps you even believed in yourself, at that time. But now there's no doubt. Yet, you still have your miracles.

Start with: hair shirt, shepherd's crook, and a musical instrument (pan pipes, a lyre, or a horn)

A - Penance of Humility, Gesture of the Wheel 

B - Signs and Wonders

C - Prophecy

D - Minor Sainthood

Penance of Humility

You were ordered to renounce the world by the true Shepherd. You are forbidden from carrying money as penance for your false claim. 

When you beg for charity, make a reaction roll; on favorable result, you get food, shelter, and reasonable aid.

Gain +1 to all reaction rolls; people remember how you served the land when you falsely proclaimed.

Gesture of the Wheel

The Wheel of Fortune weaves as it will, but you are at a confluence of threads--important to fate.

Once per session for each False Shepherd template you have, you may reroll any dice.

Signs and Wonders

Once per session for each False Shepherd template you have, you may invoke a Sign and Wonder. Once a Sign and Wonder has been used, you cannot use the same one again until you go to a conclave and confess.

1. Gesture of Command

You can issue a one-word command to anything the Creator made (except for humans, who have free will). Nature will obey implicitly: trees will fruit, rain will fall, embers will kindle into a blaze. Creatures like angels and demons and undead are allowed a save. If the command lasts more than a single round, the target gets a new save at the beginning of each of its rounds.

2. Song of Reincarnation

Used at funerals. A dead body will sing the praises of the Creator, then the Wheel will accept their soul. They will enter the cycle of reincarnation. This deals 2d6 damage to a corporeal undead.

3. Miracle of the Moving Moon

The Wheel turns. You may select a different time of day, different position of the heavens, and different time of year. For the next day, the world exists in this new time. The flow of time is restored at the dawning of the next day.

4. Gesture of Learning

You are given a memory of a past life. Ask a question of the GM. 50% that your past life knows a relevant and true answer.

5. Miracle of the Maker

A natural feature, such as a standing stone, old pine tree, or hillside will be spontaneously carved into the shape of a religious icon. This effect is permanent. Sleeping at this site heals an additional +1 hp.

6. Miracle of the Burning Building

When you use this Sign, remove one worldly impediment from one target:

• The need of food for one day
• Pain from fire or cold
• Exhaustion from toil in the sun
• The drowning of waters

This miracle will only benefit those who have never taken an innocent life.

7. Gesture of the Thunderbolt

The Creator will throw a thunderbolt at your behest. 2d6 damage to anyone visible to the open sky, the target can save for half.

Prophecy 

You have one prophecy inside you. This is what the Wheel wove you for. 

You can feel the prophecy in the back of your throat. When you choose to let it out, it's as if someone else is speaking through your mouth. Something everyone intuitively understands is true.

A prophecy has this format:

This will come to pass: ________________________ (anything you want to happen)
When ________________________ (condition spoken by the GM)

You will say the first part of the prophecy, and the GM will stipulate the second. For your section, you can say anything that you want to happen in your game world: the king will be reborn, the evil empire will fall, the broken sword will be remade. The GM also has free range to impose difficult conditions that are necessary to achieve this. 

By achieving template C, your prophecy will be spoken. If you die before you have a chance to utter it, it will issue forth from your corpse. 

Minor Sainthood

You gain 1 MD and learn one magic spell from the Elementalist spell list. You can cast this spell intuitively as a miracle. Your MD is a d4.

You no longer need to confess your sins to re-invoke a certain Sign and Wonder.

If and when you die, your body will be uncorrupted and never rot. Your spirit will ascend to Heaven. The site of your grave will become a holy site, and your miracle will manifest here upon occasion. 

By the way: Knock! #5 is now crowdfunding

While I have you, I wanted to mention that Knock #5 is currently on Kickstarter! Knock! is that hoary and honored old mainstay of OSR theorycraft and gameability: a bric-a-brac of adventure gaming for the true grognard connoisseur and curious D&D-heads alike.

We have surpassed 1158% of our funding goals! If you haven't backed yet, do so now! You don't want to miss this addition to your adventure gaming shelf. 

Library Heretical - Third-Party Supplementary Materials for HIS MAJESTY THE WORM

I really do believe that indie games live and die by their third-party support. 

Mothership is probably the best in the business with this right now (although lots of cool games have super active, super productive communities(. Really an inspiration!

Shortly after my new-school game with old-school sensibilities game, His Majesty the Worm, was published, I asked Sean McCoy of Mothership for advice on this. He suggested I run a game jam. So I did! The Worm Jam was a success! People made all sorts of stuff: dungeons, NPC generators, fishing minigames! And since then, new third-party material has continued to flow in. 

I have a dedicated space for all published third-party materials called the Library Heretical.

Lots of interesting stuff here (much of it free) - check it out!

Submitting to the Library Heretical

His Majesty the Worm was designed to be accessible and easily hackable. As such, we've chosen simple language to communicate that you can create derivative or supplemental content. 

I would love for the community to make content for His Majesty the Worm. Make dungeons. Make extra rules. Make alternative rules. Make monsters. Make art. Make random generators. 

You can publish your content for free or sell it (without us taking a cut). You can read the text that guides this spirit of innovation here. 

To help get you started making stuff, I put together this Creator's Kit. It contains the InDesign design files, fonts, and styles that were used to make the core game. Use them to make your submissions have the same look and feel!  

Last but not least, the Worm Discord is very creative space - people are putting together lots of neat stuff there!

By the way: Knock! #5 is now crowdfunding

While I have you, I wanted to mention that Knock #5 is currently on Kickstarter! Knock! is that hoary and honored old mainstay of OSR theorycraft and gameability: a bric-a-brac of adventure gaming for the true grognard connoisseur and curious D&D-heads alike.

We have surpassed 1158% of our funding goals! If you haven't backed yet, do so now! You don't want to miss this addition to your adventure gaming shelf. 

The Memory of the Meatgrinder

My colleague, Warren at ICastLight, posited that we can embed short-term memory into tables like your encounter table to create a more dynamic or interesting engine for exploration.

Example of an encounter table with "RAM"

So, in his example, each time you roll a "dungeon event", you put a checkmark next to the box. Once it's been rolled three times, there's a cave in. 

It occurred to me that the Meatgrinder in His Majesty the Worm already has some in-built short-term memory just by virtue of the random encounter being card based instead of dice based. In the normal flow of game, unless there's a combat (in which case a reshuffle is very likely), you won't get the same random encounter on the Meatgrinder in an evening because the card that triggered it is in the discard pile.

By default, His Majesty the Worm plays with the inherent short-term memory of cards only a little. This post imagines some subsystems that could exploit that feature more.

The Creeping Dark

Here's a variant rule proposed by the folks on the Worm Discord server: When a Meatgrinder (random encounter) event is ticked off, it is replaced with "Torches gutter." The longer you spend in the Underworld, the more the darkness closes in around you. Soon, you won't be able to take a step without your candles going out.

Ranger's Wisdom

Riffing on Warren's idea of a single event having a clock, a ranger might have a class feature that adds a checkbox to monster encounters. The first time they encounter a monster, they don't - they discover its spore. Then, the party has a heads up that a monster of that type is lurking on this floor of the dungeon.

This class feature may be tied to their level. At level 1, they get one checkbox for one monster encounter. As they level up, more and more encounters have buffers. 

Ranger's Wisdom, card redux

Obviously the last idea wasn't thinking about cards, I just liked it. Here's one that thinks about card tech a bit more.

When the ranger uses the Range action, they can take a look at the top card (or top 3?) of the Meatgrinder. If they pull a random encounter card, they are shown a spore that tells them what the type of monster they will eventually encounter. 

The ranger can spend a Resolve to put the card onto the bottom of the deck instead of the top. They take a careful path around the sphinx. They're not ready to fight it, yet.

Discard as a value

Mechanics can be tied to the number of discarded cards in the major arcana discard pile: the more Meatgrinder events that have happened, the higher the number. It's a clock that counts up throughout the game.

For example, in a zombie horror movie game, whenever you make a loud noise, [discard] zombies show up. At the beginning of the evening, this will be one or two zombies. By the end of the evening, you could have significant hoards descending. 

Because the GM shuffles their discard pile back into their deck when they run out of cards, the game has a natural swing between "easy" and "hard." Also, in such a game, you could have player abilities that oblige the GM to shuffle cards from the discard to the bottom of the deck, or trigger shuffles.

Discard as a clock

You could have significant events happen at certain intervals based on how many cards you have discarded. Once 5 cards are discarded, the lights in the dungeon go out and players have to rely on torches. Once 15 cards are discarded, zombies encounters are upgraded to skeleton encounters. If the GM runs out of cards, the ritual is complete and Zog takes over the multiverse. 

---

Anyway, I think the idea of encoding memory into game procedures with cards to be a rich vein to tap.  These are just a few ideas I had resting on the top of my brain. If this triggers some good ideas for you, why not blog about them?

Worldbuilding through the Rebuking Cleric

As Dan pointed out in his post, the cleric's Turn Undead ability says something about the default setting of D&D: there are undead here. Indeed, for this to be a core class core ability, there has to be a lot of them. Barrows teaming with draugr. Unquiet ghosts lingering near their graves in cemeteries. Abandoned castles ruled by a vampire lord and his brides.

But if we want to have a special theme for our campaign setting, one way we can broadcast that is to change the cleric's Turn Undead ability to focus on our main antagonists. 

Indeed, historically speaking, the sign of the cross was said to ward away almost anything evil, not just undead - devils and demons, werewolves, mermaids, storms, etc. A real swiss army knife. 

So. What does our D&D look like with different Turn Undeads? 

Turn worms

Saint Patrick drove the snakes from Ireland. He did this by turning worms and other crawling crawling things. 

At low levels, clerics can turn venomous snakes and serpents. At high levels, they can turn literal dragons. 

In such a setting, dragons plague the land. They kick dwarves out of their homes and sleep on their piles of gold. They crawl down into wells and poison the water. They bother the Smith of Wootton Major. Clerics go about, rebuking them in the name of Saint Patrick, and driving them continuously towards the wastes (as long as their luck holds).

Turn trolls

When Christianity came to the north of the world, the sign of the cross could drive away the trolls that haunted that land. (Of course, the trolls could smell a priest coming.)

A campaign setting framed in Norse mythology might give clerics the ability to rebuke trolls. In such a setting, clerics are adherents of a foreign religion, driving out the folk ways as much as they drive away trolls. 

Turn fairies

The ringing of church bells is one surefire way to drive away fairies of all sorts - banshees, dapplegrim, red caps, bugbears, hobby lanthorns, etc. 

A cleric in a Celtic themed campaign might drive away fairies instead of undead. These clerics keep the peace between human and fairy settlements, and serve as exorcists for mischief of all kinds - animate furniture? Call the priest. Baby crawling up the wall? Nope, that's a changeling, call the priest. Richard the Miller's Son came back with a wife with a hollow back? NOPE, CALL THE PRIEST. 

Stranger things

You can imagine not just defining a campaign setting through a cleric's mechanics but inverting and subverting them. 

A cleric might Turn Humans in an evil campaign, where they worship the dread lord Sauron. Here, clerics are sorcerers, sending forth their Black Breath to inspire fear. 

A cleric might Turn Apes in a far future campaign. They invoke the light of the Claw of the Conciliator, that most precious of jewels. An ape "destroyed" by the ability might join the cleric instead, offering their service.