Violence! In the Baronial Capital!

The Baronial Agents 

They do not control a monopoly on violence, and are popularly described as simply the largest and best-equipped gang in the city. The Agents patrol the city in pairs, and have broad authority to interpret the Baroness' legal codes, and to enforce her justice at their disgression. They can deputise citizens of the city into militias, and they receive combat training, but most of their skillset is in police work and troubleshooting. When serious fighting or anarchy breaks out, Agent patrols can call on organised units called Pacification Squads, made up of twelve heavily armed fighters, and always be accompanied by a veteran captain and a rifle team. Rifle teams carry enormous, long-barrelled firearms loaded with specialist expanding ammunition capable of decapitating a human with a single shot. They take two people to operate and are fitted with range-finding optics, which are so rare and poorly understood that they are thought to house spirits.

The 52 Girls

One of the oldest gangs in the city. The 52 Girls allow membership only to Girl- and Thou-Bravos, a practice that the other Bravo gangs consider archaic and religiously conservative. They make greater-than-normal use of plate and other heavy armour, and famously carry telescoping batons and large steel clubs in addition to their cross knives, which their fighters tend to use as off-hand parrying weapons. Their armour is painted in dark, opalescent purples and matte whites, and their masks are often crafted to resemble the heads of insects. They use cleavers and other butchers' knives to dismember those who challenge their champions to death-duels and lose. There is a rumour that they eat the bodies but this is not true - usually they dissolve them in acid to prevent proper burial and potential resurrection. 

The Baron's Men

A gang whose members are mostly the children of rich merchant families and other scions of the often-idle upper-middle classes. They reject the authority of the Baroness, and consider the legitimate head of the Capital to be the man who died so that she could take up her position. They wear black armour and masks, paint the blades of their knives black, and are fond of brightly coloured chemical flares and smoke bombs imported from the White City. They are also famous for fighting in bonded pairs of lovers. Their politics are not taken seriously by the powers that be, and are not seriously pursued by the gang itself.

The Revelry

The Capital does not have a true working class, because it doesn't have factories or heavy industry, but there are many itinerant day-labourers, stevedores, haulers, and other unskilled workers living within its walls. The Revelry are drawn mostly from their ranks. They don't wear masks, and instead paint their faces bright, bloody red when 'in colours.' They also have one of the most sophisticated and complex hunting languages (instantly recognisable to other Bravos), and are famous for making no other sound when fighting. They have many poets in their ranks. Their armour is painted in many, clashing colours, and in it is said popular myth says that this is because they steal the individual pieces from defeated enemies (not actually true, but a great image that they lean into). They were the first to wear the harlequin half cloaks that have become broadly synonymous with the Bravo knife-fighting style. The Revelry fight under the influence of painkillers and dissociatives. 

The Three Word Gangs

The Three Word Gangs are an artefact of the academies, and are associated with but separate from the larger and more embedded Bravo gangs. A Three Word Gang is typically composed of 5 or 6 undergraduates, studying together, often living together, and caught up in the great romance of the pursuit of knowledge. They are considered eccentric and dangerous, because their studies bring them into contact with entities, and most Bravos would rather face the knives of their enemies than feel their organs cook and their vision darken under their terrible psychic assaults. Useful allies and bad enemies. 

• MACHINES ARE DIGGING (cryptography students)
• PEOPLE EQUAL SHIT (students of practical geometry and engineering, especially ballistics)
• ANGELS ARE DEMONS (gnostic heretics, tolerated for their youth, history students)

Sword Charms

A sword charm is a small, painted, wooden icon that can be fastened to a weapon with cord or thin chain. They used to be produced exclusively by the church and were considered holy artefacts, until the academies began making their own and undercutting the church monopoly about sixty years ago. This was popularly felt to be a blow to the authority of the religious leaders, and has been blamed (among many other things) for the relative secularism of the Baronial population. 

A sword charm is something like an entity, but simplified to the point of non-sentience. They possess language-processes that function in complicated series, but that never cohere into anything capable of systematic thought. This makes them relatively cheap to build and purchase, but dangerous to operate - it is your own mind that completes the 'circuit' that allows the charm to function, and this process can be traumatic. Users will find their thinking drastically slowed, their coordination shot, their limbs weak, and their sense of self tapped. 

Many duelists consider the benefits to outweigh the disadvantages.

A sword charm can be amateur, professional, or masterwork, and has a single quality. You can attach as many sword charms as you wish - all penalties are additive. Despite the name, a charm can be attached to any melee weapon. 

An amateur charm drain d6 stats, a professional d4, and a masterwork d3. This drain only effects you while you are wielding the weapon - when you sheathe it, you get the stats back. At the start of combat assign one of your core stats to each number, roll as many d6s as you are losing stats, and subtract as indicated.

Qualities can be whatever you want. The charm is a bloodthirsty almost-mind and has a powerful urge to hurt things, so get creative. Some boring options: 

• Doubles your STR bonus when calculating damage.
• Changes STR to DEX bonus when calculating damage.
• Grants the bonuses of a +1 weapon.
• Increase crit range by 1.
• Increases number of dice rolled on a crit by one.
• Adds one point of psychic, fire, or electricity damage to your hits.
• Forces those wounded by it to check morale.
• Heals you for a single point of hp whenever it kills something. 

Cursed or defective charms steal stats permanently. If you want to fuck around with multiple charms, you should be prepared to lose a character to bad rolls on the stat drain (intentional). Weapons with innate magical properties of their own will not play nicely with sword charms (at a minimum the charms won't work, and there may be other consequences).

Like this.

DESTROYER

This is a post with an odd pedigree. I originally dreamt up this ruleset when I was 16 or 17, during one of Melbourne's summers, and it has a hallucinatory and incoherent quality which I associate with that time in my life. It has been dormant since then, but recently reemerged while I was listening to some of the music that originally put the gears in motion. Amazing how music can do that.

Without further ado (except to give some CWs for teenage death in the style of The Hunger Games or Battle Royale, and for police violence): DESTROYER

-

You are a high school baseball team. It is summer, the concrete cracks in the heat, the air is heavy and still and shrill with cicadas. Blue skies and tiny white clouds and green grass and trees that bend down tired in the hot air.

Your captain is a perfect being - the way that saints or teenage crushes are perfect. They deign not to destroy you, and tolerate your presence with infinite kindness and magnanimity. All of you are in love with them, and all of you keep this secret from one another (many of you keep it secret from yourselves). The captain is genderless, beautiful, tactful, intelligent, and always makes the right decisions. 

There are no parents anywhere. 

One day, armed police arrive at the pitch where you all practice together. They refuse to explain, but they draw weapons and abduct/arrest the captain. One of you, hotheaded, angry and incredulous, tries to stop them, and is beaten badly. They drive away. 

None of you know what to do. Two more cops arrive and tell you to forget about the whole thing - anger flares into open hostility, they warn you that they will kill you if you give them a reason to.

The essence of the game is a point crawl, with each point representing a pitched battle against the cops who are trying to stop you finding out what happened to the captain.

Battles are more like xcom games than dnd, you have a 'squad' of soldiers, and so do the enemy, and you take it in turns to move and act. The point of difference is that your 'squad' are a teenage baseball team, and your enemies are armed police. 

The basic idea is that, if you get caught in the open, you will be shot and killed easily. You can't go up against the cops in a straight fight. Your players will need to seek cover and stick to it like glue to have any chance of surviving.

YOUR TEAM

What you have: baseball bats (4 of them), baseballs (6 of them), baseball mitts (6 of them), helmets (2 of them). There are 12 members of your team, and if they get killed they stay dead, no reinforcements.

On your turn your players can move + action, or sprint and slide home into cover. An action is a pitch (of a baseball), a throw (of equipment or similar), or an attack. 

To pitch, you have to have a baseball. You can pitch to someone with a mitt, to someone with a bat, or at an enemy. Someone with a mitt will catch the ball, someone with a bat can hit the ball, and an enemy struck by a pitched baseball will have their focus broken.

If you pitch to someone with a bat, and they hit the ball, it is now travelling fast enough that it can be used to knock out an enemy. Pitching and batting like this are a single action, taken by the pitcher. 

To pitch, bat, or catch, you will need to pop out of cover, which gives an enemy overwatching you a chance to shoot you.

If you're holding a bat you can use it for batting, as above, or for attacking, by moving towards an enemy and swinging on them. If successful, this will knock them out. You can also use a bat to kill an unconscious enemy. 

You can throw bats, mitts, and helmets to one another. 

A helmet gives you a flat 1 in 6 chance to survive being shot. 

What this hopefully means in play: you play your team by trying to manoeuvre into positions where you can take shots (a two part process, made up of a pitch and a bat) at the cops, without exposing your players to danger. When there aren't many cops and their cahnces are low this shouldn't be too difficult. When there are lots of them and they have more and better tools, the difficulty ramps up quickly.

Emphasis on leapfrogging movement, positioning, setting up trick shots/distractions/ambushes, and conserving and sharing/moving around limited resources. 

THE COPS

NB: All firearms and grenades are biocoded. You can't use anything you pick up from downed cops. 

Cops can move, focus, or shoot (past a certain point, they can also throw various kinds of grenades), and can do any two of these things per turn. They will usually try to move to flank any cover you are using, and must focus before they can shoot. If they focus + shoot on one of your players in the open, that player is killed. They cannot shoot against a player in cover, but they can focus on them, readying a shot. If that player moves out of cover, or pops up to take an action (a pitch, bat, or catch), they can be fired on, with odds of success dependant on the level of the cop:

• Cop: 2 in 6 to kill.
• SWAT: 3 in 6 kill.
• Army: 4 in 6 to kill.
• MiB: 5 in 6 to kill. 

Cops don't have grenades. SWAT have flashbangs and teargas. Army and MiBs have frag grenades. Grenades of all kinds follow the same logic as baseballs in that they can be caught, pitched, batted away, used to knock out enemies, etc. If none of these things happen on the turn that they are thrown, they detonate. Flashbangs non-fatally incapacitate your player for the rest of the battle, teargas forces them to move, frag grenades kill everyone in a wide radius who doesn't have interposing cover.

You are moving to The Station House > The Military Compound > The Underground Lab. 

It becomes obvious as you progress that the captain is something inhuman, and the focus of military research attention. Cops turn into SWAT teams, turn into Army regulars, turn into Air Force Base Deniable Assets (MiBs) who are basically Pyramid Head in a suit, and who can't be killed with anything short of a frag grenade (which is something that will need to be thrown at you with intent to kill before you can make any use it). 

A cop who is knocked out has a 1 in 6 chance of regaining consciousness each turn. 

YOUR TEAM CONT.

Your team is made up of 12 individuals with stats in: Running, Pitching, Catching, Batting, and Keeping it Together. Each of these can be untrained, trained, or reliable. Untrained means success 4 times in 6, trained is 5 times in 6, reliable means always succeeds (for running, it simply defines how far you can move). You roll to Keep it Together whenever you see someone die, and if you fail you lose your mind and act irrational for d6 turns.

Most players will have one thing they are reliable in, and one thing they are untrained in. 

You have three Star Players on your team, a Star Pitcher, a Star Slugger, and a Star Runner. They have no unreliable stats, in addition to the following:

• Your Star Pitcher is reliable in Pitching and Catching, and can knock someone out with a pitch directly, instead of needing to pitch to a batter to set this up. Reliable, affable, consistent. 
• Your Star Slugger is reliable in Batting, and can kill someone (instead of simply knocking them out) by batting a baseball into their head. They also always succeed with bat attacks, and can kill people (MiBs included) with their bat, without first knocking them out. Teenage delinquent, hardcase, pyscho energy. 
• Your Star Runner can run twice as fast as your other players. Flashy, cocky, fast talking, charismatic. 

You also have 2 Youngbloods on your team, who are untrained in everything. If they manage to kill someone they are 'blooded', and upgrade their stats to normal (randomise which stat stays untrained, and which become reliable). If a Youngblood is killed by the cops, all your players gain a permanent, one step increase in Keeping it Together, and the other Youngblood is immediately 'blooded'. 

Rivals, Lovers, Best Friends

These are teenagers. Each member of your team has a Rival, a Lover, and a Best Friend on the team. Because they are teenagers, none of these things need to be reciprocated to function. 

• If a member of your team watches a Rival do something successfully, they have a +1 on their next attempt to do that thing. 
• If a member of your team can see their Best Friend fail to Keep it Together, and they have not yet acted themselves, they can sacrifice their own turn to turn this failure into a success.
• A Lover functions identically to a Best Friend. In addition: if a member of your team sees their Lover get killed, they will immediately charge the nearest enemy and attack them with the intent to kill. They are no longer under your control, and will continue to act this way for the entire mission. They will take three shots to kill, and count as carrying a bat for the purposes of attacking someone, even if they don't have one. If they are shot even once during this rampage, they will die at the end of the mission. A team member can always declare that their Lover is the Captain, and forgo this choice. 

It should be very apparent that I don't know or claim to know anything about baseball. 

Very Rough Appendix N:

• Tomorrow When The War Began
• Battle Royale
• FLCL
• Shade's Children
• The Hunger Games
• XCOM
• Silent Hill 3
• The mood this was all composed in.
• Your soundtrack should probably be whatever you were listening to at that age that made you feel like your chest was coming open. The captain looks like the person you were in love with in highschool.

Barony Visual References

I wanted to put together a repository some of the visual referencing I've been using in my blog posts, collected over the last few months, so that it's all in one place.

GENERAL FASHION/MATERIAL CULTURE/COOKING MACHINE REFERENCES

Typical Baronial jewellery rig.

Soldier of the White City, with standard issue steel face mask. 

Soldier of the White City in their mass-produced steel armour. 

Baronial youth. 

Cooking Machine.

Cooking Machine.

Cooking Machine.

Cooking Machine (I sometimes draw these on receipt roll at work). 

Cooking Machine.

Cooking Machine (on aluminium).

Typical Baronial choker jewellery + harness. At this size usually cut glass. 

White City military and civilian harnessing.

More White City citizen silhouettes. 

More White City citizen silhouettes. 

More White City citizen silhouettes. 

More White City citizen silhouettes. 

More White City citizen silhouettes. 

More White City citizen silhouettes. 

More White City citizen silhouettes (too much ball cap in this one). 

More Baronial silhouettes. 

More Baronial silhouettes (half-cape and anchoring brooches). 

More Baronial silhouettes (half-cape and anchoring brooches). 

More Baronial silhouettes (typical jacket cut and brooch detailing). 

CLASSES AND MONSTERS

Bravo with death's head mask and cross knife. 

Rapier duelist.

Law Eater.

Chaos Eater.

Saber duelist.

Bravo (harlequin half-cape, cross knife, no mask).

Ogre-ish young man.

A Beholder for your Setting - Lantern Heads

An elegant monster for a more civilised age.

This is something like a formal exercise, inspired by Arnold K's Terophidian and some chat with Semiurge on Phlox's server.

The Beholder is a (maybe the?) dnd bestiary mainstay; iconic, recognisable, deadly, with pleasingly baroque rules and a bizarre-but-coherent personality. In terms of monster design, the Beholder is obviously something to aspire to. 

A tall order obviously, but also a fun thing to take on!

Lantern Head

Lantern Heads are strange beings, not native to the Barony. They are occasionally imported as curiosities, but their origins are obscure. 

The essence of a Lantern Head is (of course) its 'lantern', which looks like a tiny pinpoint of bright white light, suspended at the centre of a tough transparent sphere. The sphere is actually a biological skin, filled with absolutely clear fluid, and capable of moving itself around (slowly) by undulating and rolling like an ungainly plastic bag full of water. The light at the centre shines outwards, and is exactly analogous to the thing's sensory apprehension. If the light from the lantern falls on you, the Lantern Head can perceive you - if the light doesn't fall on you, it can't. Lantern heads can't touch, smell, taste, or hear - their entire capacity for perception is visual (and psychic, read below). 

Any dead thing (with a more or less intact nervous system) that falls under the light of the lantern is animated by the Lantern Head's will. This is not at all like an angel's resurrection - the bodies have no motive power or will of their own, and collapse immediately if they pass out of the light. Lantern heads often have animated corpses carry them around (the classical image is of a dead body holding the lantern high above its head, the better to shine down on everything around it), and have been known to get creative with stitching corpses together into more interesting or useful forms. They will also hoard the corpses of humans and animals to protect themselves if they feel under threat.

The nervous system thing is important - a Lantern Head can make an arm flop around, or a severed head snap, but won't be able to animate a skeleton. It has no way of preserving its bodies, and as they decompose they become less and less useful as thralls. 

Lantern Heads are also capable of reproducing - but only asexually - by 'infecting' light sources. Any light source that falls under the light of the Lantern Head will, over the course of five minutes, become infected this way - once the process is complete it will begin giving off the same strange white light. The Lantern Head can 'see' and animate corpses from this new source - it is in every way a physical extension of the original Lantern Head. 

Lantern Heads know their own light, and seek to destroy the light of other Lantern Heads, which they perceive as threats. The light of older Lantern Heads is 'stronger', and will 'colonise' other sources of light preferentially to that of younger creatures.

If a living being is caught in the light of the Lantern Head, they will hear music like chimes in their head, and their organs will begin cooking inside them. If this is you, you take 1 psychic damage the first turn, 2 the next turn, 4 the next turn, etc. You are also incapable of speaking while in the light - when you try, you make a sound like chimes. Lantern Heads are perfectly capable of reproducing in your torches or lanterns. 

A Lantern Head dies immediately if it is ever exposed to sunlight - likewise, any Lantern Head light or light source is immediately 'killed' by sunlight, and loses its special properties. 

A Lantern Head left to its own devices will attempt to amass lenses, mirrors, and powerful lanterns. It has a poor understanding of human society, so it will usually not be very good at this. A Lantern Head that is nicely ensconced underground will generally send up parties of thralls at night, carrying infected torches, to search for optical machinery.

Of special interest are focusing lenses, coloured glass, and powerful lanterns - lighthouses in particular. The dead thralls bring them down underground and store them, or use them to build elaborate light machines at the design of the Lantern Head. Mirrors, glass walls, focusing lenses, flaring torches, chemical lanterns: any Lantern Head warren of any size will be filled with these contraptions, that the Lantern Head seems to take enormous pleasure shining itself through them. 

In addition to the usual effects of exposure, the light of a Lantern Head is modified in the following ways, when shone through coloured mediums:

• Red Light: test CHAR or spend your turn attacking the nearest living thing. -1 on the save for each consecutive turn of exposure. 
• Blue Light: test CHAR or self-mutilate for [weapon you are carrying] damage. This is not an attack, don't roll to hit. -1 on the save for each consecutive turn of exposure. 
• Green Light: test CHAR or take a permanent -1 to CHAR. -1 on the save for each consecutive turn of exposure. 
• Yellow Light: as Red and Green (only test CHAR once, but apply both effects). 
• Cyan Light: as Blue and Green (only test CHAR once, but apply both effects). 
• Magenta Light: as Red and Blue (only test CHAR once, but apply both effects).  

In addition to these earthly colours, a Lantern Head will search for rare uncolour-tinted mediums through which to shine itself:

• Ulfire: test CHAR or suddenly understand the chime-language of the Lantern Head. It will tell you of its plan (see below) - how you react is up to you. -1 on the save for each consecutive turn of exposure. 
• Jale: test CHAR or become infected with a newborn Lantern Head. Lose 1 CON each day - when you die, the baby Lantern Head will hatch inside your heart. Surgery might save you, if you know someone capable of such things. -1 on the save for each consecutive turn of exposure. 

If you extinguish all sources of a Lantern Head's light, it dies. The originary lantern has 1 hp, is unarmoured, and is extinguished when killed. 

The Plan of the Lantern Heads

The only long term goal of a Lantern Head is to somehow build a projector powerful enough to shoot itself out into the vastness of the black infinity beyond the night sky, and (finally, after so many millennia) rejoin the others like it. 

Dungeon Depth

Barony uses some bespoke morale rules, currently written up as follows:

PC Morale

• Separate from hireling and enemy morale, which should be rolled as normal.

• In the Dungeon, you gain 1 fear every time a hit does 3 or more HP damage. In the Underground, this goes up to d2. In Chaos, d3. If you are crit, these numbers are 2, d2+2, d3+3 instead. There are also specific monsters and attacks that will deal fear damage, as detailed in their stat blocks.

• If your fear damage ever equals your WIS, you must save WIS or CHAR, with a penalty equal to any fear damage over your WIS. If you fail, your morale breaks and you run, or drop your weapons, or scream, or cower. At minimum you lose your turn and then heal d6 fear.

• If this brings you back under your WIS you can act again as normal on your next turn. If it doesn’t, the same thing happens next turn, until your fear is brought below your WIS.

• If you decide to save WIS and you pass, you heal d6 fear damage without your morale breaking. You can consume a dose of sedatives to roll this save with advantage. In a fight you are swallowing it instead of smoking it - a free action, and unpleasant, but effective. 

• If you decide to save CHAR and you pass, you don't heal the fear damage but you no longer need to check fear (and no longer take fear damage) for [CHAR-10] rounds. You can consume a dose of stimulants to roll this save with advantage. In a fight you are swallowing it instead of smoking it - a free action, and unpleasant, but effective. 

• Resting for lunch heals d6 fear. Getting a good night's sleep heals 2d6.

• There are no systemic permanent insanities— that's what curses (and specific stuff on the monster’s stat block) are for.

I like PCs panicking and dithering, and I like the oppressive dread of the dungeon growing into a kind of madness. In my mind, PC adventurers are rough people, hardened and tempered, difficult to shake. But the wrongness at the centre of the earth gets to everyone. On the surface you are in command of your faculties, but the further in you go the more your mind starts to crack under the strain. 

The rules above refer to The Dungeon, The Underworld, and Chaos, as three separate layers with increasingly serious effects on PC morale. Hirelings and most normal people would flatly refuse to enter the Underworld, let alone Chaos. This nice, formal breakdown comes from the three separate layers of the dungeon I'm slowly writing up for the Barony release, Magda's Needle (scroll to the end of this post). I realised this morning that the system can easily be made more generalist and broadly useable. 

Instead of three apparently diegetic layers of horror, each dungeon layer has a an abstract depth associated with it. I would probably keep these between 1 (for most dungeons close to the surface) and 5 (for the churning chaos at the centre/hell/the nightmare plane/the endless oubliette/whatever your worst place is). This is an abstract measure of wrongness and terror, not an actual measuring of the physical depth from the surface, although the two very often go hand in hand. 

I feel like I've buried the lead a little here. Fear damage is simply 1d[depth] for a hit over 2, and 1d[depth]+[depth] for a crit.

An adventurer will always feel it when they have descended down a depth level. It's something like your skin crawling, a premonition of physical vulnerability, and bad depression hitting you at the same time, and it gets really bad the further you push in. They all have names for it, and will usually joke about it together in an attempt to dispel its power. Seasoned adventurers know well the value of song, humour, trust, and kindness in the dark places of the earth. 

As Above So Below (actually a pretty good film for the first two thirds)

Drug Satchels

Every human PC in Barony has a drug pouch in addition to whatever else they are carrying - you start with one, and if you lose it you can get it replaced cheaply. This is an entirely separate inventory that you get for free on top of your usual slots, and it contains smoking paraphernalia (in the Barony this is almost always a pipe of some kind) and doses of drugs.

You can choose to have a waterproof drug pouch, which has room for 5 doses in addition to the pipe, or a non-proofed one that has room for 10 doses. Additional doses must be carried in your inventory as normal, with 10 amounting to a single inventory slot. 

You don't get a drug pouch if you are a White Ape, Dog, Cat, or Terror Bird, although you can have one custom-made. Even if you do get one made, you can't smoke a pipe without hands.

Drugs with adventuring uses (repeated from an earlier post, included here for ease of reference):

• Stimulants. Can be consumed to roll with advantage on a CHAR check to ignore the effects of panic. Also used for various class features.  
• Sedatives. Can be consumed to roll with advantage on a WIS check to mitigate the effects of panic. Also used for various class features.  
• Prophylactics. Prevents infection by disease for one hour. 
• Curatives. Curatives give you a high fever, but will improve your condition one step up the disease track each day until you are cured. You will be semi-conscious for the duration. Every disease has a point after which Curatives become less effective. 
• Painkillers. You may ignore the effects of pain for one hour. This does not grant you HP, but might help you walk on a broken leg, for example. 

Drugs with fluffier social uses, and exotic stuff from the White City, can be found here. 

Hatesteel Blades

I have been informed that my last post put me in debt to Joesky, so have another, ya filthy animals.

Hatesteel Blades 

(thank you Josie for the name)

Infamously razor sharp, brittle, expensive, and difficult to use. A blade for a bored aristocrat, or for someone who makes their entire living using sharp swords well. 'Hatesteel' comes from the fact that most normal people fucking hate the person carrying one. 

A Hatesteel Blade looks like a giant utility/Stanley knife, with a very long handle. It is a +1 weapon, and can be manipulated by the wielder to serve different combat roles. It starts with 5 charges, referred to below as 'blades'.

At the cost of an action, you may choose to extend or retract your Hatesteel Blade to any length between 3 and 1. 3 blades of length is equivalent to a slashing heavy sword +1, 2 is a slashing medium sword +1, 1 is a slashing light sword +1. Your fumble range increases by the number of blades you have extended, and if you fumble, you break off one of the blades, and reduce your remaining total by one. This also shortens the weapon you are holding by one step, medium > light etc.

If you crit while it's a medium weapon, you roll 3 damage dice instead of 2. If you crit while it's a heavy weapon, you lop off a random limb (which takes most things out of the fight):

1. random hand
2. random arm at the elbow
3. random arm at the shoulder
4. random leg below the knee
5. random leg at the thigh
6. head

A wielder with fighter levels may choose to attempt to snap a blade off inside their target. Make an attack at -2, and if the attack hits, spend one of your charges and reduce the length of your blade by one. The target will take d6 damage each turn that they move or attack, which lasts until they spend a full turn doing nothing but pulling the fucking thing out of themselves (which will trigger the damage).  

Once you break your last blade, the weapon becomes useless.

You can buy refills (5 more charges) from specialist merchants - these aren't quite as ruinously expensive as the blade itself, but they aren't far off. 

Expect fighters of mettle to comment on your lack of it. 

I am Asuka Langley

Tonal Specificity

NOT CONTENT a collection of thoughts following a discussion around tone and procedures of play, with The Bad Doctor (of the truly excellent Was it Likely blog) on Discord.

Clarice Lispector

Thoughts about Tone

• Proposition: all swords cuts are the same. It doesn't matter what you're cutting - this is obviously not how people live. Rejoinder: yes, all sword cuts are the same. You hit your father with a sword, you roll d6, you hit a nameless goblin with a sword, you roll a d6. The difference between these two acts escapes the simulationist space. 
• The Critical Role answer to this is capital R Roleplay about the angst you feel about your dead father; the simulationist answer to this might be: yes, all people die the same way, the pathos is elsewhere. 
• You could play a game where killing your father was a bespoke act with various tests and rolls associated with it - you could try to model the specific, terrible difficulty of killing your father. The DM could make a series of rulings for this on the spot, or you could make rules around emotional turmoil/uncertainty/trauma etc., and apply them as you thought necessary. What a simulationsist space does is introduce something like radical agency/the possibility for frictionless decision making/limited sociopathy into all character decisions. You are responsible for the decision to swing the sword, not the difficulty in killing your father. You might have the additional responsibility of larping being sad (if you're a CR type of person), but this is a totally separate thing.
• There is a weird double thing going on here: do CRPGs want to believe that they encourage players to get into their characters to the extent that killing your fictional father is a more difficult thing to do than killing a nameless goblin? I think this isn't actually true, and what they do instead is set up a perfect order where things can easily be reduced to known quantities. This isn't the same as the assertion that the characters are necessarily sociopathic - that all OSR characters are professional operators who don't worry about these things. I think it's something closer to the literary refusal of interiority.
• You give dignity to the intensity of emotional trauma/specificity by NOT attempting to describe it. You see this all the time in classical literature, and a lots less past the 20th century, when a lot of writing became obsessed with making itself adequate to the emotional specificity of interiority - the mind mirroring itself, lots of formal strategies for this. In classical literature it's very common for the description of the pain to be simple - 'she struck her father down and she wept,' or 'she didn't eat for four days.' No FORMAL attention to the intensity of feeling. This, I suspect, is because the writer is making some claim about the impossibility of really representing this pain, and allowing the space for the reader to do this work themselves. 
• There is something similar in providing minimal possible structuring framework for highly dramatic activities - even killing goblins in a cave is highly dramatic. Killing your father is a different thing. The wager of the OSR/simulationist system is that you are better at providing genuine pathos than it is (I think).
• Minimalist and stripped gestures have this reticence/space for dignified self-direction coded into them at an aesthetic level - a general rule, and possibly not supportable, but I'm thinking about the perverse thing that happens where the more a given work tries to up the emotional pathos, the harder it is for the emotion to feel earned. 

Shirley Jackson

Digression on Dark Souls

• Dark Souls does this almost all the way through. There is minimal music. The weapons and armour you find are mostly utterly workmanlike, but even more than this your character moves in a completely stripped back way. Most of the time, an attack is a quick, single action - something that feels of a piece with the decision to press the button, but also something that looks roughly relatable, the way someone would conserve action if they were really swinging a sword around. There is, I think importantly, nothing particularly realistic about the combat rhythm in Dark Souls (dodge rolling, huge swords, etc etc), but the design and tone of the game are almost entirely anti-heroic.
• This gives the actual pathos and tragedy at the core of those games so much room to breathe. At no time is anyone telling you how to feel about anything - when they do they are lying to your face. You are given the courtesy of coming to the pathos in your own time, by your own means, and this makes it true and real for each player.
• Weirdly another game that I thought did this was WoW in the classic days, during the initial 0 - 60 run. I've never felt so comfortably, blissfully ignored by the world than I used to in low level WoW - bizarre, considering how that game's explicit goal was to make you feel like an epic high fantasy hero. I suspect some of it was getting in before the outrageous (and frankly stupid) power creep of the expansions, mixed in with the diegetic conceit that you were simply one powerful adventurer among many, and until level 50 or so weren't even that powerful. I have a crystal memory of hitting about level 35, and realising that I could now armour myself like a basic footman from the RTS games. Beautiful game, beautifully designed play experience. 

My boi Oscar

These murderous, ganking fucks