"Help Flood Victims By Watching Them Die"

Well that's what Patrick said.

The OSR Hurricane Hurricane Relief Bundle is live and full of stuff you should own anyway:

Deep Carbon Observatory, the strangest and most depressing OSR adventure from the multi-award-winning Veins of the Earth team

Dark of Hot Springs Island--gorgeously laid out open hexcrawl with competing factions, brilliant information design and gobs of creativity.

Slumbering Ursine Dunes, Mystery Isles of the Eld and a bunch more trippy stuff from Hydra--I've played in some of these and they're a blast

I Am Zombie Field Manual--this book is gorgeous, the art is embarrassingly good. The bundle is worth it for this alone, by Vampire creator Mark Rein-Hagen.

One of the best, weirdest OSR zines (Vacant Ritual Assembly)...
....and wayyyyy more stuff.

Help people who are losing their homes and get some amazing new game stuff to play with.

Expires 9/13 midday.

Reddit sez:

"Holy wow. This is the best bundle I have ever seen."

"Great googly moogly."

"Picked it up for Ursine Dunes, Deep Carbon, Hot Spring Island, Misty Isles of Eld, and of course Schoolgirl Sidekicks."

"This is an amazing bundle, probably the best I've ever seen."

...so get on it.
-
-
-

Retropost Saturday: Scoring Your Setting Supplement

We've seen some good setting stuff recently: Hot Springs Island, Yoon-Suin, Veins of the Earth, Hubris--stuff that does what a setting book should. 

Big question is: What is that? I laid out what I want from a city supplement--before I wrote Vornheim-- here:

What do I want when I buy a city off somebody? I want them to do work for me. Not necessarily work I couldn't have done myself, I just want them to have put in the hours to put a little love into things I myself was too busy with other things to do.

So, scoring your city supplement:

Size

-You get one point for each thing described. An NPC, a building, an item, a unique local custom, a bar game, a legal system, etc. For example: you can say "there's a church" and you get a point.

Clarity at High Speed

-You lose that point if you tell me anything about it that could just as well have been randomized or made up on the spot by anybody with a brain, like: "the church doors are eleven feet high and made of oak."

I can make up generic details myself, I don't need professional game designers for that. More importantly, doing that clutters up the graphic design on the page when I'm in the middle of the game trying to figure out what's going on with your church. This may seem harsh, but the whole point of using someone else's setting is that you have to do less work and if I have to prep and highlight all over the page or rewrite it then it suddenly becomes more trouble than just writing my own thing.

-You lose a point if you explain the function of a thing when I already know what it does. Like if you say "the Cathedral of Chuckles is the center of the worship of the Great God Chuckles" you're wasting your space and my time.

Notice that from these rules the effect is: if you include a church and do nothing but give me generic details about it and describe what a church is, then you've actually lost a point and so you are better off leaving the church out entirely if that's all you're going to do.

Map

-You gain 0 points for putting the thing on a map or otherwise locating it, unless where it's located has some especially distinctive effect on the game or setting, in which case it gets you one point. Telling me the crypt is in the northeast quadrant of the city doesn't get you a point unless that means the graveyard is built on top of the all-girl juggling school. Again, if you're giving me a detail it needs to be a detail that couldn't just as well have been randomized.

-0 points if there's a map that's keyed with only numbers or letters referring to paragraphs spread out across the supplement. Five points if it's keyed with the names of places and/or some sort of distinctive shape telling you what something is just by looking at it. Twenty points if the spread with the map manages to both locate a place and encapsulate most of the important things I need to know about each location.

Character

-You gain a point for adding a descriptive detail that affects the style of the thing. That is: creates some sort of shift in the idea of the thing by its mere presence. For example: telling me the church is shaped like perfect sphere, or an antler, or is made entirely of leather, or is a monolithic grey streaked with long dark stains from centuries of rust and rain. Ideally, You get this point even if it I don't like it--like you say the church is made of burlap and magic lutes.

Adventure Fuel And Completeness

-You gain points for adding distinctive features to things that create playable depth --information, "adventure seeds", mini-challenges--to a thing you've created, according to the following scheme:

-One point for a detail that basically says "There's an adventure you could go on outside the setting" (no matter how lame). i.e. "It is rumored that the priest has a map to the location of a sunken wreck full of treasure." (Assuming the description of the actual wreck and map are not provided in your setting.)

-One point if the adventure being pointed to isn't lame.

-Two points for a detail that points the PCs towards an adventure outside the setting and implies that some person or institution in the setting will be pleased, displeased or in some way affected by completion of the task, and if that person or institution has any identifiable and persisitent personality or role in the setting. i.e. "It is rumored that the priest carries the map because he hopes, one day, to recover the dog collar belonging to his dead puppy, Randolph, who died on that voyage."

-Three points for a detail that could send the PCs out of the setting but which will, if they succeed or fail, create a substantial change in the setting. i.e. "Legend has it that returning the collar to Charneldyne will cause all the madmen in the city to become sane."

-Four points if it sends the PCs out of the setting but also requires or implies that in order to complete the task they must do something substantive within the setting. "The ruined galleon is a mile beneath the waves. It is said there are only a handful of devices and substances that allow one to reach such depths, and a scant few in the city who know how to use them--and they all have been imprisoned by the Baron for either necromancy, lechery, or fraud."

-Five points if the task can be performed entirely within the setting. "The wreck is actually located deep beneath the surface of the Baron's moat."

(Or, to put it another way, the easier you make it for me to run the city just like a dungeon, the happier I am.)

(I'm all for "leavng space for the DM to invent things" but I don't need you to provide that--I know I can create space wherever I want. I'm subcontracting you.)

-Six points if a detail could be of general use to many, most, or all of the PCs activities within the setting. "The priest, like all the clergy in the city, is unknowingly subject to a ancient curse from the Sea Gog, Nykkto, whereby his intimates are doomed to die by drowning."

Style

Five points for each part of the basic premise of the city that is actually interesting. i.e. "The City of Charneldyne is a bustling metropolis at the heart of the orcish empire" would get 0 points, whereas ""The City of Charneldyne is a bustling metropolis at the heart of the orcish empire and is built entirely from the bones of slain foes" will get 5 points.

Subjectivity

Twenty points if the setting as a whole is actually interesting. Like Viriconium.

Neither gain nor lose points either way if it's just basically a medieval place.

You lose twenty points if it goes out of its way to be uninteresting, like Stamford, Connecticut.

Value

Divide the number of points by the cost in U.S dollars of the setting.
-
-
-

Terror-Inquisitor, Baby Tom Waits, and Urbane Exponent of Ceasing To Exist

This is me, along with occasional co-authors and co-conspirators James Edward Raggi IV and Patrick Stuart being interviewed for the Just One More Fix podcast.

It was a good interview and we got to say a lot of stuff, loudly.

I'm hoarse because I'd been screaming all through the Ennies and then again after I had to scream over everyone at the party after.
-
-
-

The Nature of Crime

Successful crime is about being undetected. Being undetected is about taking advantage of things you know that other people don’t.

Therefore anything the criminal knows about that other people don’t is a good canvas for crime--anything known and grasped by the general public is a bad canvas for crime. Therefore any subject you, the Host, know better than the average citizen is a place ripe with opportunity for criminal exploitation. Dick Francis knows more about horse racing than you—so he wrote like forty books about crime and horse-racing.

I know a professional autograph hound. Here’s what he does: he looks on the internet for restaurants where celebrities hang out, he tells parking attendants and waiters there he’ll pay them for a tip if they see a celebrity—they call, he rolls up, he tries to get an autograph. If he does: he sells it online for more than he paid the waiter.

There are 100 crime stories in there, easy. In one, maybe a stalker claims to be an autograph hound? In another, maybe a murderer pretends to be a celebrity to catch an autograph hound? In another, maybe the apparently-suspicious waiter isn’t really the murderer, he just didn’t want to admit he snuck off to call the hound? In another maybe it’s just the best way to figure out where a dead celebrity was before they died was to ask the hound where the autograph came from?

Whatever your little world is, there’s a crime story in there. You know where the security tape goes at 7-11 at night? You know how a book goes from a warehouse to a book store? You know where the teachers go to smoke? You have secret knowledge—you can start to build a crime.

-

-

-

Notes on the Occult

There are three things about the occult:

First, it’s about symbolism—but in an unusual way. The symbol does not just indicate the thing, it affects the thing. A regular symbol is like: the eagle represents America. If hurting the eagle hurt America, then you’d be moving toward the occult.

Second, while the system of symbols is (this is the literally meaning of the name) hidden—it is often hidden in plain sight. This is perhaps most purely expressed in the sentence from Twin Peaks “The owls are not what they seem”. The occult indicates a series of hidden connections between seemingly mundane things—it doesn’t just involve esoteric words and phrases, it uses ordinary words and phrases as if they had a significance we don’t give them.

It is, in this way, simply a parallel alternative to scientific explanations. Science claims that a pencil lead and a diamond have a secret connection (they are both carbon), the occult merely claims a different correspondence: this triangular window over here has a hidden connection to that man’s eye over there. Once the system of connections is understood, the whole world looks different: the investigator is living in a world full of levers to push and knobs to twist. 

Third, the system of symbols is old. It has been hidden (occulted) for a long time. In order to charge, say, an inverted triangle with occult flavor you don’t have to immediately give it a sinister meaning—just give it a meaning that goes back to ancient Babylon.

-

-

-

Demon City Reference Images

These are some of the photos I took to reference while painting pictures for Demon City

Those Concealed From The Light

Demons of the Third Order (Those Concealed From The Light)

The Sathariel, Those Who Go Unseen, The Shadow Demons come in threes and in the night. Their work is to obscure and make that which is true not known. The eat only records and memories. They appears as dark shapes, disturbingly articulated.

They are summoned to conceal crimes and will advise ignorance in all things. They go oozing through the dark, stealing records, erasing files, their claws dripping with the blood of witnesses.

Their true names have three syllables or three letters, like Abnegate, Ar’ath’an and Gat. They can only be summoned by three working in concert for three nights, sacrificing three victims during the third New Moon of the year while another planet is in trine to Pluto (120 degrees from it).

Calm: 7

Agility: 6

Toughness: 7

Perception: 6

Appeal: 0

Cash: 0

Knowledge: 6

Calm Check: 7

Special Abilities:

Demonic: Demons don’t need to breathe or digest, don’t age, and are immune to poison, etc. and cannot be mentally controlled with psionic abilities. Animals will avoid demons in any form. Technological contrivances like firearms and explosives can hurt but never kill shadow demons, except those noted below.

Sixth Sense: All demons are supersensitive to danger, hostile emotions and signs of past trauma or the supernatural.

Shadowed Skin: Unless they are attacking at the moment, these demons require a Perception Check vs an intensity of 8 to see at night. 6 during the day.

Amnesiac Touch: Demons of Shadow cause selective amnesia with a touch. A target who fails a Calm check vs a 9 will forget a given word forever and if they took damage from the demon’s claws--they also forget the entire concept the word represents. In a pitched battle, they will use this ability to disorient a victim, making them forget their weapon, position or the demon itself.

Regeneration: The flesh of Those Who Go Unseen forgets all harm. Any harm done to them will be completely healed in one round unless they are brought below 0 health. 

Weaknesses:

The holy symbols of any faith causes a demon to make a Calm check or flee until they are out of sight. The intensity of the calm check is equal to the degree of fervor of whoever is wielding it (1-9). In the case of an incidentally encountered symbol (a glimpsed church steeple, for instance) the intensity is 2.

Touching a holy symbol, including holy water, does damage to a demon as an ordinary physical attack.

Speaking the true name of demon causes it great pain, and the creature must make a Calm Check against the speaker’s Calm each round to avoid obeying the attacker.

Creatures whose primary sense is hearing or smell rather than sight can detect the Sathariel normally.

Lithium-based flares and lights (though not ones merely using lithium batteries) expose Demons of the Third Order—their skin glows for 10 minute after exposure. Their flame also does damage that will not heal.

-

-

-