d10 Monster Weaknesses

Drawing from Arnold K's post about shitty dragons and some of his posts on G+ about making weakness as integral a part of monster design as strength.

1. Monster is afraid of something. This could be something stupid, like cats or bards or children. It could also be something that humans are afraid of, like darkness or heights or talking to people.
2. Monster is very old. If it breathes it's wheezy and asthmatic, if it has bones they're fragile, if it has memories they're unreliable. If it's an ooze then maybe it's tough and rubbery, like old Blu-Tack.
3. Monster is lonely and depressed. It desperately wants friends, but it also still wants all the other things that monsters usually want. Which is probably why it doesn't have any friends.
4. Monster is vain. It won't kill anyone who is actively bolstering its self-esteem. You can distract it with flattery, gifts, or easily-refuted objections to its favourite line of intellectual argument.
5. Monster has creepy obsession with one specific person, who thus exerts a measure of control over them.
6. Monster has awkward deformity, like teeth where they shouldn't be or a useless extra head.
7. Monster collects something. This could be something stupid, like cats or bards or children. It could also be something that humans collect, like paintings or teddy bears or Magic cards.
8. Monster is lazy. It's overweight, has unhealthy eating habits, doesn't stir from its lair before midday and has a hard time really committing to any project. If killing you looks hard enough it might just not bother.
9. Monster is hiding from other, scarier monster. It might owe them money or just be lower down on the food chain.
10. Monster is just incredibly dumb. This is probably funnier if it thinks that it is incredibly smart.

These fall into a few distinct categories. Physical peculiarites (age, deformity), character flaws (laziness, vanity, stupidity), conflicting goal systems (avoiding something, collecting something, stalking someone). The last is probably the most useful of the three. The tension between wanting to do X and wanting to do Y seems likely to lead to some interesting emergent behaviour.

Anyway you should ignore all this because I have just discovered that Googling the phrase "awful taxidermy" is a better summation of the ethos of this blog than any words could ever be. This blog is about awful taxidermy now.

SUBLIGHT Skills

So the reason why SUBLIGHT is even a thing is that Jez Gordon ran a marathon session at Ettincon of a Star Wars game from the 80s and something about it got stuck in my brain. I liked that everyone had a job both on and off the ship, I liked that there was teamwork, I liked rolling huge handfuls of dice. I didn't like then having to count the huge handfuls of dice. Here is a hacked-together, drastically simplified version of such a ruleset.

Skills should be self-explanatory. If you're not sure what category to use just pick the one you like. A couple fiddly points - any kind of action stunt like jumping between cars or climbing a tower should probably come under Fight, and I'm thinking of having some low-level mysterious psychic powers to give the Heal person more to do.

Talk - do stuff with people
Drive - do stuff with vehicles
Fight - do stuff with weapons
Heal - do stuff with organic systems
Fix - do stuff with inorganic systems

Everything is d6s. You get six d6s to distribute among these skills, and that's what you roll when you're using the skill. You're allowed to have no points in things. So Mal from Firefly might be like

Talk 2d6
Drive 1d6
Fight 3d6
Heal 0d6
Fix 0d6

and then if he wants to attack Jayne he rolls 3d6. Pick a target number from 2 (super easy) to 6 (super hard). Jayne's guard is up so let's say that's 5 (hard). To win, Mal has to roll 5 or above at least once. If he rolls 4 5 6, that's two successes, so he wins twice. If he rolls 1 2 3 he fails and Jayne gets to shoot him.

The simplest way to manage hit points is that each player starts off with three Wounds and whenever someone rolls a success against you, you lose one. So if Mal rolls 4 5 6 he hits Jayne twice and Jayne has one Wound left. If he loses that he starts to bleed out and Simon has to roll Heal to stabilize him. There's no initiative - the person who says they attack first is the person that gets to attack first.

You can also use your turn to Help people. Say how you're helping them and then give them your dice from whatever skill you're using. The only restriction is you can't give them more dice than they already have in that skill. So Kaylee can help Mal fly the ship by dicking about with the engine to make it run smoother, but even though she has like 5d6 in Fix she can't give him more than one because Mal is not that good at flying ships. Mal would then get to roll 2d6 and still probably be shot by Reavers.

Your players start with a spaceship. Talk is captaining and comms. Drive is piloting. Fight is manning the guns. Heal is life-support and shipboard ecology. Fix is engine room. Each player also gets to pick a category on the Stuff table, below, and roll on it. They can't pick something they have no dice in.

STUFF:

Talk - Contacts

1. Member of criminal syndicate
2. Member of legitimate corporation
3. Member of local government
4. Agent of law enforcement
5. Manager of useful small business
6. Cultural icon e.g. ballet dancer, street artist, priest

Drive - Ship Upgrades

1. Smuggler's hold
2. Cloaking device
3. Solar sail
4. Drill rig
5. Drone bay
6. Magnetic grapple

Fight - Weapons

1. Sniper rifle
2. Shotgun
3. Flechette gun
4. Rocket launcher
5. Chainblade
6. Monomolecular whip

Heal - Body Upgrades

1. Personalized virus that lives in your body
2. G-modified animal
3. Garden of G-modified plants
4. Low-level psychic powers
5. Mutant extra limb or face part
6. Satchel of valuable medicines and drugs

Fix - Machines

1. Pet robot, non-sapient
2. AI assistant, sapient
3. Robot extra limb or face part
4. Thieves' tools
5. Jetpack
6. Satchel of high explosive

Bigger Rations

Ration systems have always kind of shat me off. They're either a pedantic, flavourless mini-game of addition and subtraction or they're totally forgotten about. In order to make rations more interesting I have done the only sensible thing and made them bigger.

These should now work as practical, reasonable loot and also maybe be actual useful tools for once.

You All Spend The Next Week Eating A

1. child-sized sack of dates
2. animal carcass
3. cask of olives in oil
4. rack of fish
5. salted rat king
6. enormous clay pot of pickles
7. crate of fruitcakes
8. cauldron of thick soup
9. bunch of bunches of bananas
10. single, enormously long sausage
11. bale of nutritious but bitter herbs
12. stack of stale pies
13. small tin of brownish lard
14. bundle of gristly bones
15. flock of live chickens
16. wheel of cheese
17. ten-foot stale baguette
18. necklace of dried toads
19. potted pear tree
20. pyramid of pineapples

Look for our next post: 20 Ways to Carry Water That Are Only Slightly Boring

THIS WILL MAKE YOU MIGHTY

The following trials must be completed for a purpose. You can't just be doing this because you're a fan of the 'bulked gainz'. Furthermore, the boon you gain last only as long as your faith in the ritual. If the shaman tells you that this will give you the power to defeat the goblin king, and then the goblin king kicks the shit out of you, you lose all power granted by the trial.

This is a way to gain power without gaining levels. This is a way to get a gaming abstraction without employing a different gaming abstraction. Maybe that's kind of dumb.

FACE THE MOUNTAIN

+1 STR

You must first purify. Wash away your unworthiness in the yellow pools to the west of here. Once cleansed, ascend the peak and find your soulstone. Your soulstone will be just as tall as your first teacher. Its colour is the colour of your heart's blood. You will know it when you see it.

Once you have found your stone you must destroy it with nothing but your fists and your will. Once this is done your spirit will be released and you will gain the strength of stone.

WRESTLE THE SERPENT

+1 DEX

This trial is of simple magic, but it is deadly all the same. Go into the swamp and find its queen, the black adder Sesumeth. You must take from her a fang. The larger the fang the more powerful the magic.

If you gather a fang, and keep your life, go to your sacred pool and mix Sesumeth's venom with gloamroot and janga berries. Boil this tinture and breathe of the fumes. Your visions will grant you the speed of the snake.

ACCEPT THE VOID

+1 WILL

At the lowest point of this valley is a cave. You remember it from when you were a child, as it is the one place you were told to never go. You must go there now. In the cave there is a hole, and in the hole is a void. Make peace with the void.

Climb down the hole and stay there, in the darkness and the silence. You may leave at any time. You may go mad. If neither of these things happen, you will find the wisdom of nothingness.

So, Your PC Wants To Be Mighty

In running these, you've obviously got to make a PC do a whole bunch of checks; fort for snake venom fumes, str to break a boulder, etc, but I'd also be inclined to throw some kind of puzzle in there. Something distinct and personal, like interpreting visions or solving a riddle where the answer is 'my own death'. These are potential permanent stat boosts, so they have to feel kind special.

On that note, the obvious rule is to say that a PC can only perform a ritual like this once. Fuck that though. If someone wants to ascend to godhood by punching every rock in the world that is totally fine in my book, I'd just amp the challenge up every time. First time you wrestle a snake trying to not get bitten. Next time you swim into a pool of snakes and eat the biggest one while hundreds of others poison you horribly. As a poorly thought out aside, I really like the idea that the checks you make don't really correlate to the boost you get. I don't know why I like that idea though, so that's all you get.

Basically, I really want my players to be able to see the paths taken by the evil, fucked up people they fight, and have to consciously decide what they'll sacrifice for a +1 bonus.