The Archons

In the steppes to the south of the Barony there are legends of ancient maker-devils who fought against the star people in terrible, catastrophic wars that far predate human history. These strange, pale figures are venerated in festivals of appeasement on nights when the stars are obscured by the weather - rare on the steppe, and a bad omen to the nomad smiths. In that dark obscurity the smiths and their retainers paint their bodies white, and stalk the nomad encampments, screaming and crying, and savagely beating with clubs those that they find outside their tents beneath open sky. 

On those strange nights it is not uncommon for the nomads to find a percentage of their herds of cattle and horses butchered in horrible ways - dismembered, drained of blood, charred black, or flayed. The dogs that usually guard them, who hold status as family in the clans, spend these nights in the tents with their human kin, so none can say what terrible forms the steppe devils take.

Baronials travelling in the southern regions have, on these dark, windy nights, reported strange fires burning at the horizon, and things in the distance that look like towers, or the masts of ships, glinting white like bone in the twilight and gloaming.

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Archons

An Archon's remote-body is a sealed, spherical container that strides over the steppe atop three long, many-jointed stilt legs. The entire thing stands about 15 feet tall, and is built from star metal, and so nearly impervious to damage. NPC nomads, and especially smiths, will refuse to acknowledge that they exist, and have a good chance of trying to kill you if they think you might be trying to track one down - they might attack you outright, or try to poison you or something. They will also do this if you present incontrovertible evidence that it does exist, or let them know that you intend to find such evidence.

Archons usually lie completely still beneath the surface of bogs or muddy water, rising up out of the muck to perform their inscrutable business and hiding themselves before the stars can once again be seen in the sky. This business seems to centre around the vivisection of living creatures - cattle in the hundreds, but also people, when they can find them alone and unprotected on the steppe. 

When they hunt they make weird trumpeting bellows, and kill or paralyse their prey with flashes of arcfire and whining steel flechettes. 

Archon Remote Body

HD6, Star Weapon x2 (roll on the nomad table re-rolling armour results; Archon weapons never run out of ammunition), Manipulator Tendrils, armour: star metal (as plate +2, additionally subtract 5 damage from any physical damage that connects), speed: as horse, disposition: excitable hunter, switching to fixated vivisectionist once suitable prey has been subdued. 

Tripod: If you can entangle the legs of a Remote Body, it will fall to the ground and be unable to move for about 10 minutes as it struggles to right itself again. Rope won't do it, the Body is too strong, but an iron chain would work fine. 

Manipulator Tendrils. These short, sensitive, star metal tentacles protrude from the bottom of the spherical 'body' for about 2 feet - the tripod must lower itself to use them. They split into finer and finer ends, and are extremely dextrous and precise. On a hit, they can try to pull you apart (d8 tearing damage) or dose you with a potent paralytic (CON save or paralysed for 1 hour). If the Remote Body paralyses something in this way they will not pursue new targets and instead retreat from combat to commence with the dissection. 

True Body. If you reduce the Remote Body to 0, the shell cracks open and the Archon's True Body forces its way out. 

Archon True Body

Looks like a large meat pudding the colour of liver, with twenty or so radially arranged tentacles and ten large ink-black eyes, also arranged radially. The whole is about the biomass of an adult human. It has HD2, is unarmored, can pull itself slowly and torturously along the ground with its tentacles, and cannot speak, although it is quite intelligent. It will be holding a third Star Weapon, which is always a pistol, and a Feeder Device.

Feeder Device. This is a long steel needle that the True Body can use to extract the blood from a corpse. This is how it feeds, and it must drain an entire corpse every five days or it will die. The True Body can also take the form of anything whose blood it has drunk - the form only lasts for a day, after which the True Body must consume more of the same corpse's blood to maintain their shape. An adult corpse has five 'charges' of blood that can be used in this way. The transformation is not quite perfect, although it is convincing. If you know someone well, you will begin to notice that something is off about them after about ten minutes. In the final two hours of the transformation, the form visibly degrades - the eyes turn inky black, and the skin grows slightly too red. This degeneration can, naturally, be staved off with more blood. 

Warwick Goble, for H. G. Wells' War of the Worlds

Modron Calculator (Beholder the Second)

The Beholder bandwagon has born compelling fruit. Very compelling fruit. I have enjoyed thinking about what a Beholder-type thing is; why it's such a compelling monster, what its role in a bestiary is, etc. etc.

In this mode:

Modron Calculator

Modrons are strange creatures with unclear motivations. They are infamous for their practice of price-gouging desperate adventurers in the deepest underground, although no one has even seen them spending the vast sums of money that they acquire this way. You also never see them come or go - they're just there suddenly, in the corner of a previously empty dungeon room, holding whatever it is that you so desperately need in the moment. Trying to fight them is famously unwise, although desperate adventurers do try it occasionally. A Modron is pretty easy to overpower: HD2 commoner with steel skin (armour as plate) and steel fists (as warhammers), and they carry extremely valuable loot. If threatened they will, in order: run, and vanish if you lose sight of them; beg for their lives; offer you money (but never their wares) to leave them be; fight to the death, spitting curses upon all living things. 

Calculators are the reason why it is a really bad idea to try to kill a Modron, and why vanishingly few adventurers live to do so twice.  

Like other Modrons, a Calculator will simply appear inside a dungeon room you thought was empty. You will only ever see one if you have tried to kill or rob a Modron. Calculators are large and square, a bit like a reactor control console from the 60s, and they walk around on four stumpy iron legs. Think one of the goofier star wars droids, scaled up, and made from cast iron. They click and whir as they move, but the don't speak. When you enter the room, a Calculator will approach the guilty adventurer of adventurers and present them with a Contract of Indefinite Servitude - this slides out of a little slot in the front of the boxy body, as though from a printer. A Calculator can also talk by printing off text from this slot - they write like Daleks speak, and often demands things like COMPLIANCE!

If all guilty parties sign this contract, the Calculator will let you be. The Modrons will send you demands now and then (usually they ask for large sums of money, but they also occasionally want specific items left in specific places, or people killed in various ways, or specific children stolen and delivered to them), and your life will go on as before. If you ever fail to come through or otherwise reneg on the deal, more Calculators will come, and begin systematically pruning the world of everything and everyone that you love. It is a bad thing to be in debt to the Modrons. 

If you don't sign the contract, the Calculator will instead try to kill you there and then in the dungeon, and there will be no additional fallout - the powers that be will consider the affair honourably settled. The next time you fight a Calculator there will be two of them. The third time there will be four, etc. etc.

At the front of the Calculator, next to the slot that the contracts come out of, is a large circular aperture, usually covered by an iron iris. When the Calculator decides to kill you, this iris opens, and the weird boxy body begins to emit a high pitched whine. Tissue begins to smoke, blacken, and die beneath the invisible rays emitted. 

Calculator 

HD 6, heavy stomp (-2 to hit, d12 bludgeoning), Wounder Zone, armour: as plate but see also Iron Body, speed: half human (but can chase you by simply appearing in empty rooms, like a slasher villain), disposition: actively murderous, but bound by procedure. 

Matrix: roll 4 d4. These numbers are the Calculator's matrix. Once per turn, the Calculator may choose to 'spend' numbers in their matrix to modify their attack or damage rolls. If they spend a single dice this way, the number on the dice is subtracted from the roll. If they spend doubles, the number is instead added. If they spend triples, the number is multiplied. Any dice spent this way are immediately rerolled and re-added to the matrix. 

Procedural Reinforcement: Every time the Calculator kills someone, the Matrix increases in size (by a single die), and the dice themselves are upgraded one 'size' (from d4 to d6, and so on). This resets each combat. 

Wounder Zone: The Calculator's main form of attack. The Wounder Zone is a 50ft cone that emits from the front of the Calculator. You may choose your facing and reposition this zone each turn. Those that fall beneath it are subjected to mathematics damage, with a CHAR save for half, which can be added to or multiplied by the Matrix as usual. To set the amount of damage, the Calculator must 'load' one of the dice from its Matrix, which can no longer be used for any other purpose. The Calculator may swap this dice out with another from the matrix at the start of its turn. 

Iron Body: Calculators take a maximum of 1 damage per physical attack (full damage from energy sources like fire or electricity). If you pour an waterskin's worth of liquid into them, they take d6 damage and their Wounder Zone is disabled for a single turn. A Calculator can never be moved against its will. 

Like this but big and scary and with the temperament of a Big Daddy from Bioshock. 

Extremely honoured friends of the Modrons will rarely be given a Crown of the Calculator. This black iron box fits neatly over the head like a big square helmet, and once attached it cannot be removed without also removing the head. It includes a little hatch that can be slid open for feeding. At its front is an aperture and iris as described above. You can no longer see if the aperture is closed. The Friend so honoured can still talk as normal, but it sounds like they are speaking from inside an iron pot. 

The wearer of the crown gains a Wounder Zone and Matrix (with Procedural Reinforcement that resets each combat) exactly as described above, except that the Matrix starts with 2 d2 in it. The Wounder Zone is always active if the aperture is open, but you can choose not to 'load' it with any dice so that it doesn't do any damage. It will still fry insects and small plants like a bug-zapper or a microwave. 

Difference and Repetition and Magic

 

There have been many interesting discussions around magic floating around the OSR spaces recently - a good opportunity to have a think about what it is, and what it means.

I had a lot of trouble figuring out how magic worked in Barony, and went back and forth on things a few times. I landed on a few simple tenets, the most important being that magic is language.

This follows on from the nature of God, Chaos, and Law in this setting, so a brief bit of explication there to start with.

In the creation myth, God is the one that divides the earth into Law and Chaos, creates humans to serve and worship it, and send its angels back in time (from something it calls the Material Heaven) to bring about its own instantiation in the future.

What is most important here is not the time travel stuff - it's the division into Law and Chaos. Before God, everything was Chaos. Then God comes (from somewhere), invents (or is, in some deep sense) language, and creates Law through a process of division. The division is done via explanation, modelling, classification - naming. Chaos is simply everything that exists. It will exist without its description, without qualification, without explication. It is this process of division and abstraction that creates Law, and Law is very radically artificial. In a sense, nothing is added to the world when it is described for the first time. In another sense everything is added, or, maybe more accurately, the world comes to exist in a certain way in this process.

The church in the Barony has come to associate Law with stable and productive living conditions for humans, and Chaos with things like the molten core at the centre of the planet, the madness of the eternal storms and boiling lakes of the extreme north, illness and disease and poison and boiling chemical plumes - all that is inimical to the human body and mind. This is a misunderstanding, a naturalistic fallacy. 

It is the radical artificiality and contingency of language that makes conscious expression and the exertion of the will a possibility. Without the ordering structures of language things simply are. Once cognition and abstraction are introduced, projection and simulation become possible.

What does all of this have to do with magic? Well, magic in the Barony is produced via this process of abstraction - by intervening in the immanence of pure being experienced by all things using the profoundly weird/alien/holy technology that is linguistic description. An 'entity', which is a type of disembodied mind or will capable of producing feats that we would deem magical, is the result of a particular, and particularly ambitious, attempt to develop a new form of abstraction - a new way of seeing, or categorising, or describing things, which is a labour that very, very few people are interested in or capable of.

In the Barony, the people who do this are saints and artists. They are not priests or academics, who are the ones who develop a system, post-facto, to deal with, speak to, and collaborate with already existing entities. The saints and artists are they ones creating new systems of abstraction ex nihilo, and dealing with the consequences of that, which can be very dire. To take a straight forward example: you build yourself, through a mixture of training and intuition, a system to see one very particular thing in the world in extreme, lucid, clarity, stripping it of every preconception that has attached to it, or from as many as you are personally capable of (a saint might say that this was seeing the world as God sees it, an artist might call it seeing the world as it really is) - maybe this is hope, maybe love, maybe the flows of capital, may the way fog folds over itself in the morning in a certain valley in autumn, maybe the way sunlight hits the surface of the sea, maybe cruelty, maybe the specific cruelty of your age and city, maybe the cruelty that the mind can do to itself, maybe the cruelty of a military who starves a civilian population, maybe the hatred of the civilians so starved. You get so good at seeing this thing in its specificity that you start to need new words and concepts to begin to talk about it with yourself. These new words and concepts are a pattern language, made from a combination of words, images, repetitions, insistences, mental loops, and untranslatable states of being - the pattern language is what the 'mind' of the entity is built from, and why entities aren't really people in any meaningful way - no more than you would be if your entire brain was built around trying to describe sunlight on water, and had an entire sometimes-linguistic-sometimes-imagist vocabulary and syntax dedicated only to this. 

People who think like this are often sensitive to the extent that they are in real danger. They will create a single entity in their lifetime, as a byproduct of these efforts. Others might then make use of it, but they will never be able to relate to it in a sophisticated way.

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In slightly more prosaic terms, if you are a Baronial adventurer and something is firing a beam of killing light at you, it is far more likely to be some sort of laser gun than magic. Or perhaps you have come across something from the elder world, a scrambled, ancient, muddied, and unstable time, when there were various beings who could just do things like that.

Magic in the sense described above is always concerned with vision, description, abstraction, projection, willpower, domination, surrender, lucidity, criticality. Your entity being able to scramble someone's brain or see through walls is not the aim (unless you are an academic, and so used to making pragmatic use of these things) - it is the byproduct.

It should go without saying that neither artists nor saints are reliably good, bad, noble, ignoble, kind, callous, or any other descriptor. These processes say nothing at all about the character of a person - they are a techne and a practice, and they have results but do not spring from goodness or badness. God (in this setting) is not moral in any way that a human would make sense of; it is simply the fountainhead of a particularly potent species of sense-making. 

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This gets back to the original thrust of this weird little post. I imagine (although I have been wrong about things like this before) that most people have had the experience of being in someone else's power. This doesn't have to be terrible; it can be pleasurable, erotic, the byproduct of professional respect, any number of things. There are people who can put you in their power with something as innocuous as a particular look, or a specific phrase, or the way that they angle their face or body towards you. If this person wishes you harm, you are in serious trouble. If they really know you (know the contents of your soul, your fears and desires, what you cannot abide and what you would sacrifice to attain, your true name), then you better hope that they mean you no harm.

At Your Order! - Feature Complete

These few posts have coalesced into a pdf, which now has full rules and a couple of new tables for play. I think it's feature complete, and I am looking forward to running a game.

You can find it HERE.

This is probably not quite enough of a thing to put up somewhere for £5, but it might be getting close? I will have to think about it.

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Appendix N:

• Studio Ghibli's take on Flying Fortresses.
• Mortal Engines. And how!
• Gravity's Rainbow weirdly enough, especially the descriptions of British civilians at work during wartime. 
• Snowpiercer et al. 
• Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow (a film I remember with great fondness - a pre Marvelslop romp).
• The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen.
• Alien. Only the first one. 
• Hornblower. 

Beloved Episteller from Phlox's Discord server made an extremely cool little uniform generator for this game. I demand you partake! 

Your officers can also look like this :)

At Your Order! - More Rules

UPDATE: this has now been released here. 

I realised the other night that AYO! (lol) as originally written has developed a roughly week-long turn structure. This won't do at all; what's the point of running a real time game if you abstract player decisions out into turns?

The following is designed to get things back on track.

Procedures Redux

IN NORMAL OPERATIONS

• When you staff an officer and crew to a room, a countdown starts (usually in days). At the end of the countdown, you make any relevant checks, and calculate the effects. You may order crew between officers around as you wish, but the checks at the end of the countdown will always make use of the lowest crew number from the entire period.
• If an officer breaks off their task, progress on the countdown is lost and must be started again from 0. An officer with Command in a functional bridge can be flexibly 'subbed in' to any officer's work, while that officer goes and does something else. This keeps the countdown going, and the original officer can return without interruption to the task.

IN EMERGENCIES

• Emergencies 'freeze' real time, and take place over a series of rounds. Batteries fire once per round, boarding parties fight over rooms once per round, emergency response teams try to extinguish fires once per round, etc. Each player can task crew as they wish per round.
• There are only four things you can task officers and crew on in emergencies: manning batteries, emergency support (firefighting etc.), anti boarding operations, and boarding operations.
• You can call a state of emergency at any time, which will stop all other work. You can pre-prepare emergency stations for your officers and crew, and give them specific emergency codes (CODE RED, CODE YELLOW etc), or you can manually distribute them as you wish, per emergency. This state of affairs remains until the emergency is over and regular work resumes. Emergencies restart all countdowns from stopped work, as usual.

Rooms Redux

All rooms need a minimum crew that they can function with, and a maximum crew that they can be loaded with (this is functionally how reliable you can make a room using manpower).

When you make your Vehicle, you also need to map out your rooms on a grid. Don't worry about relative sizes, some rooms are way bigger than others but the grid is just an abstraction of the routes through your Vehicle. This will become relevant if anything breaks into the ship or you are boarded, and combat check must be made in individual rooms.

Quick note on fighting and boarding. Make an opposed combat check per room, using whatever forces are actually present in the room. The loser must lose 2d10 souls and retreat to another, adjacent room. If there are hostile enemies in that room as well, then the loser immediately loses an additional 2d10 people. This is the home team advantage - a defender can retreat into their vehicle, and attacker who loses their combat rolls will be depleted VERY quickly. If for whatever reason the defender cannot retreat, they are wiped out to a man. The winner stays where they are. If you have uncontested control of a room you can choose to move out of it to an adjacent room (potentially provoking another combat contest), or sabotage the room you are in, rendering it inoperable.

Torpedoes and some other things actually annihilate rooms instead of just rendering them inoperable. This can break your ship apart if a room that connects two larger chunks of Vehicle is destroyed this way.

Rough Room Crew Numbers

• Metabolic Engine. Minimum 5 crew for functioning. No maximum. 
• Bridge. Minimum 5 crew for functioning. No maximum. 
• Crew Quarters. No crew needed to function.
• Hangar. Minimum 10 crew for functioning. No maximum. 
• Mess and Kitchens. Minimum 10 crew for functioning. Maximum of 50 crew. 
• Greenhouses. Minimum 10 crew for functioning. Maximum of 70 crew. 
• Gun Batteries. Minimum 10 crew for functioning. Maximum of 40 crew. 
• Signalling. Minimum 10 crew for functioning. Maximum of 50 crew. 
• Observation. Minimum 10 crew for functioning. Maximum of 50 crew. 
• Surgery. Minimum 10 crew for functioning. Maximum of 30 crew. 
• Brig. Minimum 5 crew for functioning, + 1 per prisoner held. No maximum. 
• Armoury. No crew needed to function.
• Library. No crew needed to function.
• Theatre. Minimum 10 crew for functioning. Maximum of 50 crew. 
• Marine Barracks. No crew needed to function. Marines always count as equipped by an armoury, even if the Vehicle is not equipped with one. To get the armoury bonus, every member of an attack party must have the bonus (ie, if the Vehicle doesn't have an armoury, you will only roll with advantage if your entire combat team is made up of marines).

Lastly, you should obviously name your Recon Vehicles! 

Ghibli!

Das Boot

UPDATE: this has now been released here. 

Yesterday I put up a skeleton set of rules for a long-form, real time, vehicle and crew campaign.

I was pretty happy with it, but thought that it had some holes, and additionally some elements that weren't quite performing to spec. This post is a few additions, tweaks, and changes to get things more streamlined and *ahem* shipshape.

First a statement of intention. At Your Order! was envisioned in two main modes. The first is the running of the ship over long periods of irl time. I wanted this to include non-urgent but also non-trivial decision making about where and how to task your crew. I also wanted it to feel vaguely cosy (a word that has been recently mangled in usage, but which will serve us well enough), the way that large groups of professionals doings their jobs to a high standard can feel. There are moments of peace in the greenhouses. The theatre is open on weekends - the show is a secret and rumours abound. Recon vehicles are dispatched and the brave men and women aboard exchange 'good lucks' and tired smiles. Coffee for long watches. The sky slowly, slowly growing brighter as you travel westwards, always westwards, over the days and weeks. The excitement when messenger gliders are spotted on the horizon. Tense moments watching recon vehicles, or worse, other Vehicles, lumber into visual range. The held tension in the batteries as gunnery crews wait for their orders and mouth silent prayers. Cigarettes and bitching and music and tired flirting at mess. Complicated people, jammed into close proximity, trying to keep everything as pleasant as the circumstances allow.

The other mode is immediate, brutal danger to life and limb. These slow and human build-ups, punctuated by terrifyingly lethal and intense ship to ship battles where whole broadsides reduce Vehicles to limping piles of twisted metal in seconds. Combat is fast-paced (indeed, it's instantaneous against the slow movement on the world map) and highly, highly deadly. I think that the humane elements are thrown into a type of relief in the contrast.

This is the vibe that I'm going for. To achieve said vibe:

• The running of the Vehicles needs to be complexified. Currently the only things that you're worried about are supply, ammunition, and morale, and basically everything is geared around morale bonuses. This isn't awful (the campaign structure gives heavy morale maluses the further West you go, and even small dips in morale are going to have intense flow on effects on crew efficiency), but I do think it's a little simplistic.
• To this end, I would like to add maintenance and spare parts to the list of things a captain needs to be thinking about. Once a week, every non-storage room has a 1 in 20 chance for a technical malfunction. Its function for that week is interrupted, and an officer with Engineering will need to make a check and spend d3 spare parts to get it working again for the next week.
• The captain may instead choose to task an officer with Engineering on weekly maintenance. To perform this task, the officer will need to be staffed with 5 crew per room being serviced. In this case, you still roll for malfunctions, but a malfunction simply consumes a single spare part, and does not stop the functioning of its room. 
• Spare parts can be brought into storage at the beginning of a run, like ammunition and supply, and each storage space can hold up to 10 of them. Like supply and ammunition, you may be able to scavenge or trade for more out in the world.
• Each week will also have a roll on a random thing happening table, and a weather table. These can be all sorts of things, but will impact your resources, your morale, and may in rare cases mean combat (probably being boarded by terrible things, pirates, cannibals, etc.)
• Combat can be sprung on you in real time, since the game runs in real time. If think it would be rad if captains had written-up 'standing combat orders' for their Vehicle to follow if the irl player is not contactable within a given time period (prob 24 hours).
• Players are encouraged to give over the command of Recon Vehicles to sub commanders with their own missions and agendas. I think Recon Vehicles should probably be deisgned like miniature Vehicles at campaign start to facilitate this. I think giving them 3 storage and 3 solar gliders is probably sufficient. You need to outfit them using your requisition, and crew them with one of your officers, but hopefully the flexibility makes up for it. Once they leave visual range you're relying on glider comms. Hope nothing bad happens out there lol.
• Fishing room. Like a greenhouse, but can only be used in the sea, or on the coast. A flying vehicle might reduce altitude over the sea to facilitate this.
• I'd like to further 'cosy-fy' farming, libraries, theatres, fishing, mess, brewing, etc. etc., but I will need to do some thinking on how this can be done. Very possibly the answer is 'trust your player to make it so in the theatre of the mind'. 
• I don't know how clear it was in the first post, but the idea for crewing is that you must put together a roster each week with officers tasked and given crew to manage. This is what gives the capacity to make checks, and what gives you the numbers you're trying to beat. Officers and crew can't be re-tasked over the week, otherwise players can just move 100 crew around to tasks as they roll for them. Rationalise this by saying that the logistical and organisational work is not in place for this kind of scratch work. The exception is combat missions, which can always be undertaken by anyone game - these are discreet events and rolls that happen 'outside' the usual real time play space of the game. 

Zero Points

Zero Points are sort of endless energy in very small packages. They are the tech base of the setting, but they need to be farmed. They fall very slowly from the sky, in increasing numbers as you travel west, and when they get to the earth they fall through it and become unreachable.

The hex map is divided vertically into 10 'bands', numbered 1 through 10, with 10 being the closest to the final city and 1 being right next to the solar barrier at the edge of the world.

Each week, roll 1 d10 for each band, and then subtract that band's number. this is how many zero points are falling in that band that week. Each point will slowly drift for d6+4 days, but this info is secret from players. While drifting, a point can be seen at visual range, and easily collected with a solar glider or similar. Randomise the hex and day of the week that each appears (or just choose if this is a faff). Remember that Vehicles will only see Zero Points inside their visual range. 

A Zero Point can be exchanged for a single point of renown when you return home after having completed your missions. They can also be installed into special rooms and kit built with salvaged old technology. Beam projectors are one example of this tech, and there are strange and ancient combat vehicles, reanimators, cloning vats, instantaneous comms, and other wonders salvageable from the ruins of the past. A Zero Point used this way cannot be exchanged for renown on return. 

Exterminator Orbs

An elegant weapon for a more civilised age. D6 of them appear at the burning horizon each week, and then always travel directly east. Small Orbs travel at a rate of 2 hexes per day, large orbs at 1/day - randomise the hex and day they appear. As explained in the last post, anything caught in the same hex as a small orb, or within a range of 1 hex from a large orb, is annihilated.

Sample Weekly Encounter Table for Tracked Vehicles - I will eventually do a d20 (or d100?! I am not good at tables lol) for each of flying, land, and sea vehicles. 

1. Infestation. Rust Leeches have been discovered feeding on the mechanical subsystems. D3 rooms suffer mechanical failure, and you must lead a combat mission against the vermin to eliminate them. On a successful check you clear the infestation without casualties, on a failure you lose d6 crew. 
2. Artefact of Hate. This ancient technological monolith imposes -3 morale to everything within 1 hex of it. It can be destroyed easily enough with a single round of battery fire, but can also be taken back to the last city in one piece for 3 renown. Its effects persist while it is in your hold, and it takes up 3 storage spaces. In addition, each week that you have it on board you must restrain 2d6 crew in the brig (reroll this number each week, and free the last batch). If you don't have a brig, you instead lose 2d6 crew to vicious fights and suicides.
3. Cannibals. Your vessel is attacked at night by cannibal raiders. They kill and start to eat d6 of your crew before you can muster an effective defense. Lead a combat mission against them to drive them from the ship - on a success you lose an additional d6 crew, but successfully drive them away. One a failure you instead lose 2d6 crew, and there is a 1 in 2 chance that the cannibals will attack again in d4 days.
4. Chlorine Fog. Your visual range is 0 for d4 days. Gliders cannot fly in the dense, poisonous air, and Metabolic and Recon Vehicles must 'baton down' against the toxins. If your vehicle includes an observation deck you instead have a visual range of a single hex; your crew make use of crude periscopes. 
5. Terrible Dreams. Your crew are all having the same dream: of the burning edge of the world, of fire and madness, of the screaming of the people who lived before, of two suns, one beneath the earth and one in the sky, both huge, pressing terribly at the thin, fragile zone where life is possible. You suffer -2 morale for d6 days if you have a Therapist officer on board; if you don't this is -4.
6. Behemoth. One of the terrible insectoid Behemoths of the poisoned world erupts from the earth and charges you, intent on tearing your Vehicle to pieces. You get a single round of battery fire against it before it smashes into you. If you can deal d4+1 'rooms' worth of damage (this roll determines it size), you kill it before it reaches you. Otherwise it destroys d6 rooms, with one of these annihilated, before you can destroy it. You kill it in either instance, and if you bring back the remains to the final city you will gain 1 renown. If it was a Behemoth with five 'rooms' worth of hp, you instead gain 2 renown. 
7. Ancient Redoubt. This immobile fortification was abandoned decades ago. In contains 10 supply and 50 ammunition in 6 underground storage rooms, and 10 standard batteries above the ground. If manned it would make a fearsome strong point. In addition, roll on the Ancient Tech table. 
8. Engine Flux. The Metabolic Engine needs to be powered down for d4 days for safety reasons. An officer may check Engineering to make this roll 1. If you do not wish to power down you may instead lose d10 crew and take a permanent -2 to morale. 
9. Targeting Array. You discover one of the command bunkers of the ancients, still intact. It is infested with terrors and slow mutants - you may choose to lead a combat mission to eliminate them. On a success you lose d6 crew and take the site. On a failure, you lose 2d10 crew and fail to secure it. You may choose to roll again if you wish. Once the site has been cleared, you may use it to input the coordinates of any hex on the world map. One hour after you input the coordinates, anything on the hex is destroyed by tungsten KEMs dropped from geostationary high orbit. The satellites still have d4 payloads in them, but this number is hidden to the player, and the array gives them no confirmation of firing.
10. Locusts. A horde of chlorine-eating insects each the size of a horse that covers the ground in a migrating swarm. You must 'baton down' for d3 days as they wash over your vehicle like a sea. You have no visibility, though you can still move if you wish. You cannot launch of receive gliders or recon vehicles. Each day you are beneath the swarm, you must fight d3 simultaneous (ie the same officer may not run more than one of them) combat missions, as the locusts force their way through bulkheads and weak points and madly scramble through the interiors. One each success lose d3 crew, on each failure lose d6 crew and destroy a random room. If all your combat missions are successful, gain +2 morale for the week. 

Still to come:

• Full encounter tables.
• Ancient tech table!
• ... more fluff? A cosy greenhouse plot minigame?!
• Tell me in the comments or on Discord if I am missing something obvious 8)

More Ghibli, of course. 

At Your Order!

UPDATE: this has now been released here. 

This post lit a fire in my brain.

I have always wanted to play a real-time logistics and operations game - having communications, resupply, troop movements, etc., play out on a real-time time scale of weeks is a deeply satisfying idea for me.

I have also always wanted to play a game of a very specific type: you control the crew of a large (possibly military, certainly tasked) vehicle, moving on a long duration mission independently and cut off from support, braving dangers, but also overseeing the living of the crew with cozy bits of gardening, maintenance, morale upkeep, downtime, etc. while lumbering from point to point and engaging in uncommon and highly abstracted ground combat missions, and very rare, extremely deadly, ship-to-ship combat without whoever else is out here.

Like I said, very specific! Anyway, the two images together have grown into the following, which I am provisionally calling At Your Order. It forms a rough companion to DESTROYER, in that both are games I fantasised endlessly as a teenager about one day making, finding expression in the gorgeously robust and flexible format that is TTRPGs.

Without further ado:

Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind, 1984

At Your Order!

You are a freshly-commissioned captain from the last human city. Your command is one of the great and terrible Metabolic Vehicles, iron behemoths with crews of hundreds which ply the ruined, poisonous wastelands, chlorine seas, and endless killing storms of the upper air in search of supplies, resources, ancient technology, and Zero Points - the strange motes of light that drift slowly down to earth from the upper air, that emit energy without consuming fuel, and that power the majority of last city's life support tech.

Zero Points fall from the sky in the west, close to the killing sun - the further west you go, the more of them there are. There is no day/night cycle anymore - the east and the last city are in perpetual night, kept alive by the energy of the zero points, and the west is permanently bathed in burning, maddening sunlight. Most of the 'useable territory' for the Metabolic Vehicles is a soft twilight zone between the two. There is a final western limit called the burning horizon, a solid wall of white fire, and many crew's stories about what might lie beyond it.  

First, design your captain. Your captain needs a name, and appearance and personality, two specialisms in addition to Command, which they get for free, and a personal catch phrase (you will need to come up with a damn good reason why this isn't 'Make it so!'). 

Choose two specialisms from the following list:

• Command (you get this for free)
• Piloting
• Engineering
• Gunnery
• Personal Combat
• Tactical Leadership
• Doctoring
• Emergency Response
• Discipline
• Cheffing
• Gardening
• Entertainment and Hospitality
• Therapy
• Brewing
• Literature/Poetry (pick one)
• Signals

After your captain, you may design three senior officers. These get a name and appearance, and two specialisms from the list.

Then you get five petty officers. These get names, appearances, and a single specialism. 

Then you get 500 brave souls, able-bodied all, to serve you as crew.

Once you have your officers and crew, you need to design your Metabolic Vehicle. You have 20 requisition points with which to do so. Choose one each of the following lists (the numbers in brackets are the cost in requisition):

Chassis:

• Tracked, travels on land only (1)
• Ship, travels on sea only (1)
• Flying, travels over both (5)

Speed:

• Slow, moves 1 hex every two days (0)
• Normal, moves 1 hex per day (1)
• Fast, moves 2 hexes per day (3)

Size:

• Small, 5 rooms (1)
• Medium, 10 rooms (2)
• Large, 15 rooms (3)
• Gargantuan, 20 rooms (5)

Once you have your basic frame, you can populate your rooms. A room can have a passive effect, listed, and may also allow you to make a check with its own effects. A check requires an officer with the relevant skill present, and crew attached to them. Many rooms give both passive effects and active checks. The number of rooms listed in Size are in addition to the following, which all Metabolic Vehicles get access to:

• Metabolic Engine. If this is destroyed, your Vehicle cannot move until it is repaired. If your Vehicle is flying, the destruction of your Metabolic Engine has additional consequences: you must pass a difficult piloting check or be destroyed with all hands. If you pass the difficult check, you successfully perform an emergency crash-landing, and d3 additional rooms are destroyed as by torpedoes.
• Bridge. Anyone attempting a Piloting or Command check must do so from a functional Bridge. If destroyed, neither is possible. If an officer with Command is stationed on a functional Bridge, the entire crew benefits from +1 morale. 
• Crew Quarters. One room per 100 crew. For each increment of 100 crew that do not have quarters (so 1-100, 101 - 200, etc.) your entire crew are at -1 morale.
• Hangar. Allows the safe docking of smaller vehicles. If it is destroyed, a smaller vehicle attempting to dock with your Metabolic Vehicle must make a piloting check or be destroyed.
• Mess and Kitchens. Both a single room. If destroyed, the entire crew are at -1 morale. On a successful Cheffing check, provides + 1 morale for the week. 

In addition, choose from the following list:

• Greenhouses. Produce d6 supply per week, or 4+d6 with a successful Gardening check. (1)
• Gun Batteries. Each battery be fired once per round during vehicle-to-vehicle combat. Gun Batteries are medium range. Specialist guns have additional REQ costs and rules, see below. (1 per battery)
• Signalling. Must be manned by an officer with Signals, and 10 crew, in order to function. Allows instantaneous comms with other craft within 2 hexes. (2)
• Observation. Must be constantly manned by 10 crew. Gives real-time vision up to 5 hexes out. For Flying vehicles this is 6 hexes. Without Observation, this range is 3 hexes. (1)
• Surgery. Can be manned by a maximum of 20 crew. While operational, automatically saves 1 in 5 crew who would otherwise be killed at the end of a vehicle-to-vehicle. Also allows killed officers to be saved with a successful Doctoring check (make a separate check for each officer). (1)
• Brewery. Consumes 1 supply per week, for a flat +1 morale bonus. With a successful brewing check, this is a 1+d2 bonus. (1)
• Brig. Secure facility for holding prisoners, should you wish to. If occupied, will require manning by 10 crew. (1)
• Armoury. A well stocked armoury, with personal weaponry: sabres, rifles, pistols, grenades. A ship with a functional armoury rolls all boarding and combat missions at advantage. If destroyed, an armoury is destroyed as by torpedoes (see below). (2)
• Library. Allows a Literature or Poetry check at the end of a voyage, when you write up the log of your endeavours. This will benefit your Renown (+1 if the check is successful). During the voyage, +1 morale and does not need to be manned. (1)
• Theatre. Allows an officer with Entertainment and Hospitality to attempt a check once per week. Requires 30 crew, but if successful provides a +2 morale bonus. What play did they put on this week? (1)
• Marine Barracks. Quarters and gear for 20 trained marines. They will not work as crew, but are each individually worth 5 basic crew in combat. They will consume rations as normal. (2)

Any rooms not occupied by the above become storage, with 10 empty slots. Mark down the size of your hold in slots. When you set out, you may fill any empty space with supplies or ammunition for free.

Finally, your Metabolic Vehicle always contains the following:

• 20 Solar Gliders. A Solar Glider is a one-person flying craft with an effectively unlimited range. They travel at a rate of 2 hexes per day, and contain storage room for a single slots worth of rations (enough to feed the pilot for a month). They are mostly used to send messages from point to point, and occasionally to scout. Additional Gliders may be purchased and stored in the hanger at a rate of 5 per point of requisition). Solar Gliders launched from a tracked vehicle or ship are launched into the air using a simple torsion sling. You may buy additional gliders at a cost of 5 per req.
• 100 Message Beacons. Can be fired from any gun battery, to a range of up to 5 hexes. Contains a message of any length, and can be marked with a flare that will be visible from up to 5 hexes away. 
• 3 Recon Vehicles. Medium speed vehicles that can hold up to 50 people, with a cargo space of 2. Usually sent out with one or two officers on specific missions. You can choose in what proportion you want them to be tracked vehicles or boats. You may additionally choose for them to be flying (balloons) at the cost of 1 req per vehicle. Additional Recon Vehicles may be purchased for 1 req each. 
• 100 each of red, green, and blue flares. Can be fired up to 5 hexes away, visible in a 5 hex radius, regardless of other factors. 

Specialist Gun Batteries

A normal Gun Battery uses a single slots worth of ammunition to fire on an enemy craft. Every shot will usually hit on 3 in 6 (with a +1 if an officer with gunnery is attached to the battery), and every hit will destroy a random room on the enemy craft. Make a d[x] table, where x = the number of rooms on your Metabolic Vehicle. Every time you are hit with a gun battery, roll on the table - that room is destroyed. A hit will always kill 2d10 crew in that room, and has a 3 in 6 chance of additionally killing any officer present. All effects are determined simultaneously, and both craft fire at one another until one engages or decides to stop doing so. 

A Vehicle may have many batteries, and a single turn of fire may destroy your craft. Vehicle combat is lethally dangerous.

Either Vehicle can disengage at the beginning of any turn. A fast vehicle disengages immediately. A Vehicle of medium speed disengages after taking a single turn of enemy fire. A slow Vehicle takes two turns of fire before it gets away. 

In addition to these rules, specialist batteries may have the the following traits. 

• Long Range. In the first round of combat, the effects of this battery are calculated before other batteries. Add to a battery for 1 req. 
• Short Range. In the first round of combat, the effects of this battery are calculated after other batteries. Add to a battery for -1 req, but with a minimum cost of 1. 
• Precise. You may modify the roll that determines which room is hit by a single point, up or down. Add to a battery for 1 req. 
• Fire Starter. I addition to destroying the room, you light it on fire. Add to a battery for 1 req. 
• Rapid Firing. Shoots twice per turn, consuming twice as much ammunition. Hits on a 2 in 6. Add to a battery for 1 req. 
• Torpedo. Hits on a 2 in 6. Instead of destroying a room normally, instead annihilates it with all hands. A torpedo system must be specialised to target ground, water, or air targets, and cannot be used to attack Vehicles of other types. Add to a battery for 2 req.
• Beam. You do not destroy the room, but subject it to some other effect. Strange weapons, and not well understood. Require a Zero Point to power, and cannot usually be bought with requisition.

After all of this, you may NAME YOUR VEHICLE. 

-

Procedures

Movement on the map is done in real time. If you move 1 hex per day, that is calculated by the DM. The same is true for communications, visual range, information you have access to. Read up on this post for details on how this works.

The hex map, forthcoming, is of a blasted, cratered land. It is LARGE. You move from East to West, from nightlands to the territory of the Terrible Light, where the Zero Points fall. They fall randomly, but burn brightly when they do - you will see them if they fall within visual range. It would probably take you a couple of months irl to move from one edge to another.

The map features dangerous weather, sites of ancient ruins and scavenging sites, communities of hostile or friendly survivors, hostile fauna and poisonous flora, etc. etc. 

You will be given 3 missions by your commissioning body, rolled on the following table, and will be expected to carry out all three on your tour. In addition to these, every Zero Point that you capture will give you Renown on your return. There are other ways of earning Renown (writing up your journeys in a popular novel is one of the more prosaic ones, discovering Strange Things out in the waste, slaying Behemoths, etc etc are others). Your goal is to finish your tour, fulfilling all three missions, and returning alive with the most Renown possible. 

Sample missions:

1. Kill this particular captain. Destroy their Metabolic Vehicle is you must, but +1 Renown if you instead kill them in a duel.
2. Bring back this particular artefact. It is thought to be in this particular hex, and guarded by forces unknown. +1 Renown if you can find more than one. 
3. Map this particular area conclusively. +1 Renown if you additionally map the interior of every point of interest it contains. 
4. Plant this particular device on this particular Metabolic Vehicle without the knowledge of its crew.
5. Convince this particular survivor settlement to board your vehicle and join the population of the final city. +1 Renown is this is accomplished peacefully. 
6. Institute regime change in this particular survivor settlement, by whatever means necessary.
7. Hunt and kill the Fabled Behemoth, which was last seen in these coordinates. From hell's heart!
8. Travel to the burning horizon and assess whether trespass is possible.
9. Found a settlement in the bright zone. 
10. Test our new weapon, which we have preinstalled on your Vehicle, on living humans. Report your findings. 
11. Bring back 20 specimens of this strange fauna for our zoo.
12. Burn down this particular section of poison forest with incendiaries.

When you are called on to make a check, you must roll equal or under your target number on a d100. Your target number is the number of crew assigned to the task. To be eligible to make a check at all, you must have an officer with the relevant skill assigned to it - this officer counts as 10 crew for the purposes of the roll. If you have positive morale (doesn't matter how positive), you get an additional +10. If you have negative morale, you get -10 per point of negative morale.

Once per week, and additionally once per vehicle-to-vehicle combat, your captain may use their catch phrase to grant themselves +1 to a check. MAKE IT SO!

Morale

You have a Morale score for your vehicle, which a lot of your rooms and procedures are designed to add onto. Negative Morale will very quickly start to reduce the effectiveness of your crew, so it is important to keep it topped up.

For every ten hexes your vehicles travels out from the final city, you get a flat -1 to morale, which tops out at -10 at the burning border. In addition, you get:

• -1 morale per 10 crew dead this week. 
• -1 morale per officer dead this week. 
• -1 morale if the captains died this month. 

Supply

Each hold-space-worth of supply feeds 100 people per day. Greenhouses can grow you more, and you can forage out in the world if you are willing to take on the dangers of exploration. Most Metabolic Vehicles will cram their holds with supply when they set out from the final city. 

If you ever run out of supply, you lose 2d10 crew (cumulatively) per full week without, and suffer -5 morale per week (also cumulative). 

Boarding and Combat

Officer can lead crew out into the world on combat missions, and can attempt to board enemy ships with the same intent. In PVE combat missions, a successful Tactical Leadership check means that you fulfil your objective, and take d6 casualties. A failed check means that you do not fulfil the objective, and take 2d10 casualties. 

In PVP boarding actions, both sides must put together combat teams, and make opposed checks. The defender gets a flat +10 to this check on top of any other bonuses, and the winner of the opposed check loses d6 people, and the loser 2d10. The attacker can choose to disengage at any time, ending the contest. The defender cannot do so. 

Boarding actions happen in a specific room, and if the craft is also being bombarded, then casualties can be taken on both sites. You may make one opposed check per turn of bombardment, if you're insane enough to board a ship you are also firing at with batteries. 

The Map

There are various procedural components of the world map. The big one is Zero Points, which fall thicker the further west you go. In each range band towards the west, d10 - [closeness to the final city] will fall. They appear in random hexes, stay around for d3 turns, and are visible to everyone within 5 hexes. 

Another is Exterminator Orbs. These emerge from the burning horizon at regular intervals, and travel towards the final city in straight lines. They come in small and large, and are visible at a range of 5 hexes. If a small Exterminator Orb crosses your hex, your vehicles is annihilated, and lost with all hands. You suffer this fate if a large Orb passes within a single hex of you. 

The final one is weather. I will come up with a fun system for this at another juncture. 

Subcommand

Of course you may put sub-commanders in control of Recon Vehicles. They take as many crew and officers as you deign to give them, may retrofit their 2 supply space into other rooms at the discretion of the DM (usually this will mean retrofitting a room already existent on your Metabolic Vehicle), and head out into the world.

-

Is that enough of a skeleton for a game? More to come, but I think that's where I'm at with it. 

Take up your sabre, don insignia of rank! Your loyal crew await your command! At your order!

Cannon Fodder, Katsuhiro Otomo, 1995

Hornblower, 2003

The Future (Four Puppets)

The first one came to him at night while he was trying to fall asleep. When it arrived it told him that it was from the future, and that what it wanted to do was help him get there. When he asked where, it said ‘the future’, as though this was obvious; it wanted to help him get to the future. It was not immediately clear how it was speaking to him because its body seemed to be absolutely inert. It appeared next to his bed somehow; he closed his eyes and opened them and it was there, sprawled out on the floor. Its voice came into his head like telepathy. It laughed when he said this and agreed that yes, the way that it spoke was very like telepathy, functionally indistinguishable even. The body was lying on its side on the floorboards, turned away from him, a pale, naked thing, the face and gender invisible, the flesh shining white in the moonlight. He thought that he was dreaming, and this made him unafraid to ask how it planned to bring him into the future. It said ‘by pedagogical means’, which was specific enough that he didn’t know how to respond immediately. He laid there and stared at the pale thing with his mind racing through the possibilities. As he watched he became sure that it was a corpse, something dead that had appeared spontaneously in his tiny bedroom and with which he was now engaged in this strange dialogue. There was no movement at all. A feeling began to rise up inside him; the slow, rising horror of the certainty that comes sometimes in nightmares.

Trying to keep any panic from his voice he asked what is it that you think you can teach me? The answer came back in the same modulated, pleasant tones. 

How to be still, how to be inanimate. How to lie back and surrender all motive force in your limbs and torso, how to stop speaking, how to stop involuntary movements and expressions on your face, how not to respond, to pain or other stimulus, how to be perfectly at rest. This is what you are like in the future.

He says I’d like to go to sleep and it says yes, you should sleep, what I have to teach you will not happen tonight, this is simply our first meeting and my chance to introduce myself. Don’t worry, go to sleep.

-

When he woke up he was horrified to see that the body was still there, still lying in the exact same position, but now covered in bright sunshine instead of moonlight. It was quite a different thing now. He could see that what had looked like naked skin was actually fabric of some kind, and that the human form was only rough— it was like a doll the size of a human adult, stuffed with rags or cotton to swell it out into a series of approximate forms. When he went over to touch it he could see that it was not even fully coherent; pieces of the manikin-thing fell apart as he shifted it, and the stuffing tumbled out, deflating the object, which no longer resembled skin at all. This was how he dispersed the power of the first puppet, which in the end was a weak power, scarcely more real than a nightmare, which was what he mistook the encounter for, willing a forgetting or rationalisation of the body that remained in the bright morning light. 

Its power was in its telepathy/voice, and in its honesty and transparency: it wanted to teach him about the future that he would be taken into. But honesty by itself, without movement, without a face to attach to, without a life against which it can be thrown it into a type of relief; honesty denuded and abstracted this way, into bare enunciation, is not much; certainly nothing to be frightened of. He never even understood that what he had been told that night was exactly correct, because he had no way of contextualising what had happened to him.

-

The second came to him looking like a person, and his encounters with it played out over almost two years. This whole situation was much more ambiguous, because the second puppet never said anything about the future, or about pedagogy, or about immobility, or surrender, and also because it revealed itself through another human and not a random collection of fabric and stuffing. He only realised that he had been visited at all in hindsight, after his third and fourth encounters, when he was already well and truly inside the future, and at liberty to think back on how he had arrived there. But the lessons were much more to the point, and also much more painful, because they came to him naturally as his relationship with this other played itself out over the months and years. 

What he learned was that you could be made still and pliable by something as innocuous as the way that someone changed the intonation in their voice; by someone placing their hand on the base of your spine; by their breathing while they slept; that these things could be enough to induce disembodiment, enough to leave you incapable of movement. The horror of these realisations was always mixed in with a pleasure that he found it difficult to speak about, even with the people closest to him. When the second puppet left what remained were a series of learned behaviours that were no longer attached to any trigger, since they had all been developed in relation to this other who was no longer present. He set about trying to manufacture the triggers artificially, using medications, massage, hypnosis, and also a string of other more or less interchangeable bodies to try to induce those same states— all of this with varying and mostly shallow degrees of success.

His thoughts during these years progressed slowly, very slowly, sharpening and narrowing until eventually they had acquired an extreme and blinding lucidity. They ran like this:

Some people will bring you into the future; they are able to do so. Some people can’t, or won’t, or have forgotten how to; have forgotten what the future looks like, or are afraid of it; are afraid especially of what the future means for you, for your agency, for your body, with its powers of movement, speech, reaction, agency. 

They are afraid of it exactly because of what your body is like in the future.

-

The third one came to him as a set of realities about how he was able to live his life. His body was becoming less animate over time, and he was less and less able to work. Eventually he lost his access to basic necessities like shelter and food. He was laid out first in a room without visitors, and then in some brightly sunlit place. Here he tried hard to become invisible, since he had not yet been able to divest himself of shame. The voice, or the intelligence; the telepathic connection (which he had not heard since his first encounter), said to him: this is the future, this is the future. You are in it, you have arrived.

-

The fourth puppet was one that he built himself. It was made from language.

Bjarne Melgaard

This story will be published later this year if all goes well (don't fret edit-heads, it will be copyedited first). If you enjoyed it you might be interested in my first collection of short fiction (here for UK delivery, here for everywhere else), which I am told by the distributor is close to selling out its first printing.