Das Boot

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!

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. 

Prestige Class - Pilot-in-Dreaming

Bad things happened in the Old Capital. This is generally known. The men and women who witnessed it, whatever it was, were wiped from history, and the Barony is, in many ways, still recovering from the aftershocks two hundred years later.

Very rarely, the desperate looters and explorers who have travelled into the cursed ruins report seeing people there. These are usually dismissed as tall tales - who (or what) could possibly survive in that blasted and annihilated place? Nonetheless, the Baroness has given strict instructions to her operatives that any who seek congress with these shades are to be killed. 

Aleksandra Waliszewska

PILOT-IN-DREAMING

You cannot normally gain templates in Pilot-in-Dreaming, nor can you start your adventuring career as one - they might make a good replacement character, but will only be encountered in the ruins of the Old Capital. Unlike other prestige classes, you start with an A template and level up as normal. 

Starting Proficiencies: courtly etiquette from another time (something like a Texan gentleman, true for all genders).

Starting Gear: skinsuit (light armour, can be worn inside a Warbody), +1 knife in a ceramic chest sheathe, 3 suicide pills (tasteless, take effect in ten seconds). 

A Pilot-in-Dreaming never has to eat or sleep. The have suppressed emotional responses, and never take fear damage. 

Rules for Warbodies are here. 

A - Pilot, Dreaming
B - Under the Skin
C - Black Gulfs of Time
D - An End

Pilot: you know how to use a Warbody, how to feed them, how to recognise when they are hungry, etc. If you are wearing your skinsuit, you don't need barrier cream to enter one safely. You also never take damage from improper use of a Warbody. When piloting a Warbody you can use your templates as though it were your own body, and receive +1 to all rolls to hit. 

Dreaming: Something was done to you, in the last terrible days before the ruin of your city and people. You have something living inside your head, a second mind, docile, lobotomised, thoughtless, dreaming. You have no memories at all that aren't the silence of the black city, the desperate combat against the things that survive there. When you die you instead WAKE UP from the awful dreaming of your death. You snap awake, screaming, exactly as you were ten seconds before the killing blow was struck. To an outside observer this looks like a weird visual and mental distortion: you die and you are as you were and then you are not dead and you are as you were. When this happens you gain a permanent point of fatigue and lose d3 WIS. Anyone who sees it happen takes d6 fear damage. You can never travel to the dreamlands. 

Under the Skin: You have no memories, but sometimes you can feel something happen that feels like you - something that you recognise in your dim way. Once, on receiving this template, you can choose to embrace this thing or reject it. If you embrace it, you gain 2 WIS permanently, now need to sleep like a normal human, and lose 2 points of permanent exhaustion sustained from Dreaming. If you reject it, you instead gain 2 STR and 2 CON, which are shared by any Warbody that you pilot. 

Black Gulfs of Time: How many times have you woken up in this body? What have they done to the thing in your mind? If it could speak to you, would it speak in words? You get a single use of Dreaming per week that carries no side effects (although those witnessing it will still take fear damage). If your derived WIS modifier is ever negative, you may ignore that many permanent points of exhaustion sustained from Dreaming. You also get a corresponding bonus to any damage you inflict while piloting in a Warbody. You can remember how to direct Exterminator Orbs. 

An End: Your human face becomes impossible to recognise. The first time that you enter a Warbody after gaining An End, its (usually impassive, beatific) face becomes your face. You may leave it as normal, but must subtract d6 from your max HP to do so. Your face remains unrecognisable, and the Warbody's face remains your face. The Warbody that wears your face can now eat meat to sustain itself. If you die inside the Warbody that wears you face, you do not WAKE UP. If you die in your human body, you WAKE UP as a feral NPC under the control of the DM, who attacks everything around you. You still WAKE UP in this state, and will be impossible to kill; hopefully your friends can come up with something creative to dispose of you. The Warbody that wears your face will henceforth try to kill anyone else who enters into it, crushing and digesting them for d8 per turn that they are inside it. 

Aleksandra Waliszewska

D6 Roadfreaks

Lightning quick post after some riffing in the GLOG Discord. Roadfreak is a Vayra term I think?

1. Eloise Celeriac, gambler. Wants your money but not a thief, just very good at all the mundane forms of gambling. Scrupulously honest, sometimes to her own detriment. If ignored will cause a major upset in town by cleaning out one of the bigwigs and get herself in potentially deadly trouble.
2. Dangerous Grandee. Old dude with a winning smile. Will offer to sell you fake information about coming dangers. If ignored will shadow you and steal your shit (whatever he can get) at the first opportunity. Flees preferentially, but also carries a loaded Big Iron.
3. Bastille Charmant, labourer. Actually out of work because he is a compulsive liar and it makes it impossible for him to keep down work or form real relationships. Miserable about this, but doesn’t know how to change. Wants you to hire him to do almost anything, as he is literally starving and deeply lonely. If ignored his luck will change in the next village and he will find true love.
4. Selen Carver, a violent sociopath who is trying to rawdog morality from first principles. She is smart enough to know that you can’t just kill people, but wants to live true to herself regardless. Wants you to show her bad people (or evidence of your own badness) so that she can cut loose a bit. If ignored she will slip up and be killed by the law.
5. Bright Lucy, young swashbuckler. One bad eye. Pretty good with a rapier for a 15 year old. Desperately wants to be an adventurer. Will join you as a hireling for free. She’s young! She wants to see the world! Doesn’t care at all about money. If you teach her a level in fighter, she will consider you family (it would be really irresponsible though). If ignored, you will see her again in five years, calling herself 'Cutter' and leading a feared mercenary band.
6. Zounds, mapmaker. Grumpy and stingy young woman. Wants to sell you a map of the dungeon for truly ridiculous amounts of money, but says (more or less correctly) that you can’t put a price on preparedness. If ignored you’ll find her getting eaten by gnolls the next dungeon on.

Two Rooms, Two Monsters - Chem Pit Burial

Me and Loch recently put together a d666 for genning up monsters. In the flurry of activity that followed, I also ended up chatting briefly with Weird Writer about one and two monster dungeons. This was the inevitable result - it's good sometimes to write up a small dungeon quickly, just to flex the muscles. 

If you would do as I do, write up a quick dungeon with d2 monsters in it, and d4+1 rooms. 

Without further ado:

Chem Pit Burial

No one knows when or how the tradition of chemical burial began. The tombs seem to appear at random across the centuries, emerging in preexisting mourning traditions like an ideational cancer. The pits themselves are in fixed locations, scattered mostly over the southern steppe country (though there are exceptions), and the large ones have hundreds of pits and mausoleums dug into them radially, from a thousand different periods and civilisations. All lead down into the centre of the earth, and all of them are profoundly poisonous to humans. Many are additionally encrusted with strange extremophiles and other chthonic life. The location at the lip of hell is the only thing that the tombs have in common.

This one is unusually small, and very old. Geological activity has cracked the heavy stone ceiling - like many of the truly ancient steppe tombs, it was never constructed with a door. The black, jagged opening reeks of sulphur. 

1. The Tomb

A circular stone room, about 20 ft in diameter, with a circular shaft in its centre. The stone ceiling is only 5ft high, and most humans will be rolling to hit at disadvantage in here. It reeks strongly of ammonia, sulphur, petrol - smell is useless in here. It is dark, except for what light comes in at the narrow crack in the ceiling. It is also unstable - any kind of explosion has a 2 in 6 chance of collapsing the tomb and burying those inside. 

The walls are richly painted with bright red and yellow pigments. The images depict strange, multi-limbed humanoids who seem to be engaged in iconic relations and struggles with one another: debates, wherein one is victorious and the other defeated; combats with the same result; flirtations and seductions; the composition of histories and plays. All of these mosaics show the victor or composer figure illumined with rays of light that come from below. 

It is clear that the floor was once painted too, and a quick study will show that the image was once something like a geometrical labyrinth, but the design has been ruined by tracks that look like mould and crude oil, black and viscous.

The tomb is host to a fruiting corpse, which usually rests against the wall at the furthest point from the light that comes in from the crack in the ceiling. 

In the centre of the room is a 10ft wide circular shaft that drops 10ft downwards. Its walls and floor are painted a uniform, bloody red. Arrayed around its edges are 4 clay urns of curious design. If opened or smashed, each contains:

1. 4d6 Ancient, painted clay coins each worth 100s to a collector. They are submerged in about 20cm of thick black petroleum, which is infected with a random disease.
2. A beautifully made bronze kris knife. Functional as a light slashing weapon, and also worth 1000s to a collector. 
3. Two full dog skeletons. A search will reveal that the neck vertebrae have been crushed.
4. Corpse dust that chokes the room. Not good to breathe. If this happens more than once, save CON each instance past the first, or lose 1 CON permanently.
5. Acid, kept from dissolving the jar with a thin layer of black glass. If you smashed the urn, take d6 acid damage, with a DEX save for half.
6. A small amulet made from the brightly coloured material that accretes at the mouth of the chem pit. It has been carved into the likeness of a smiling human face, and has a hole winnowed into it; it was probably once attached to a leather thong. It is intensely poisonous, and will deadly poison any liquid it is placed inside, dissolving slightly each time (10 uses).

In the bottom of this smaller, interior shaft, near the centre, is the chem pit itself: a jagged, natural opening whose mouth is clogged in luridly bright growths and strange flora.  

2. The Chem Pit

Descends around 15 ft before the walls grow too close together for a human to fit. Covered in brightly coloured growths and clusters of small plants that look like anemones. 

The walls are poisonous - for each turn that you spend touching them with bare skin, save CON or take d6 damage. 

Once you are fully inside the Pit, every turn you spend breathing the gasses that seep up from below gives you +1 CHAR and -1 INT and WIS. This lasts 24 hours, at which point you must save WIS - on a failure, the change is permanent.

Any character who has gained at least 1 point of CHAR this way can perceive the prehuman shadow that lurks in the pit.

BESTIARY

Fruiting Corpse

HD6, bronze kris d6 x4, armour: unarmored, but takes half damage from all sources except fire and explosives, speed: creeps along at half walking speed, disposition: friendly, garrulous, gurgling, but incapable of communication or understanding.

The Corpse is a coagulated mass of burial shroud, biological matter, mould, and a distributed, alien nervous system that has grown from spores that drifted up long ago from the deep hot biosphere at the centre of the planet. It still believes itself to be the original inhabitant of the tomb, one of the incalculably ancient, four-armed humans, and considers death in this place to be a great honour; an honour it will attempt to bestow upon all who enter. 

Drops its four kris knives if slain, each worth 1000s to a collector. 

Prehuman Shadow

HD2, maddening shout, possession, unarmoured but immune to physical damage (may be dispersed by light, see shadow body below), speed: five times human speed in shadows, disposition: skittish, defensive, voyeuristic, murderous. 

Maddening Shout: can SCREAM each turn if it does nothing else - this does d6 fear damage to those who hear it, and deafens them on a failed CON save. It will only do this if it thinks it has been discovered. 

Possession: if in contact with a corpse, it can spend a turn inhabiting the body, after which it can use it as its own. It can also do this with living bodies, but must succeed on a contested CHAR check (it rolls at -1 as it is completely insane and has no real willpower). The Shadow will be ejected from whatever it is piloting if the body touches Holy Water, or if a lantern or other strong light source is shone into the eyes at point blank range.

Shadow Body: The Shadow is invisible to those who have not gained at least one point of CHAR in the pit. It cannot move into light, and will always try to avoid being 'surrounded' by light by retreating down into the chem pit. If strong light (a lantern or torch will work fine) on it directly, or if you splash it with Holy Water, it takes d8 damage, and will flee from you.

This is the mind of the corpse above. It was supposed to journey down into the centre of the earth after death but its fear of the unknown stopped it from descending millennia ago. It is now quite insane, and usually barely conscious, but interlopers in the tomb above will rouse it. With a body of its own it will be able to descend in confidence. It is terrified of the Fruiting Corpse - it knows that corpse is its body, but it also feels the new mind inside, which it senses is a bad copy of itself, and fears as you would fear a Twin Peaks doppelgänger. 

If the players can kill the Fruiting Corpse, they can offer its body to the Shadow, who will possess it and use it to descend into the earth. If one of the players is possessed instead, the Shadow will try to crawl them down into the pit forever. It doesn't mind breaking a few limbs/ribs/skulls to squeeze them through.