d100 Carousing

Players in my Thursday Whitehack game are going carousing every damn time they get back to Fester, the coastal city of the ghouls. A dinky little d20 table won’t cut it anymore.

For those unfamiliar - characters choosing to carouse spend a randomly determined amount of money, gaining XP equal to the money spent. If the number rolled is higher than their current level, they have to roll on the Consequence Table.

If you spend more money than you have, you end up in debt to someone you’d rather not be indebted too - and you get to roll a Consequence, if you didn’t already.

Villages : d4x100 GP.
Towns: d6x100GP.
City: d12x100GP.
Wild Cities: d20x100.

Membership in an exclusive society or club increases the multiplier to x200, but only counts in that specific area or cultural group.

† represents Drinking Buddies. Only one group can be benefited from per Carousing session.

You know in an ideal world you’d be able to do a big d20 table for every city and expand it out as needed, adding the specific details that make each city feel unique. Big generic tables are useful but they’re never gonna be as good.

Man-Suits of the Flatboat People

When a child has stopped growing, those who wish to live as men must be initiated. First they must find a Shaman ¹ and beg from them the use of a team of flesh-boring beetles. They may be rejected and try again elsewhere. Those consistently rejected, or who do not wish to try, live forever as children or become women, subject to their own inductions.

With the team of beetles stored in a gourd or clay-lined hide, they may gather as many of their mothers, sisters and siblings as are willing to aid them. This band sets out as a hunting party to seek an Old Man of the Forest [3HD, AC as Leather, 1d6+1 Damage] of the right size. Such beings can smell men coming, and always flee before them. The Old Man of the Forest must be captured alive, with as few injuries as possible. Bound and held prostrate, the prospective man must decapitate the Old Man in a single strike. If this fails, any in the hunting party are allowed to try and finish the job, earning the right to be a man if successful. ²

With the head removed, the flesh-boring beetles must be introduced to the neck, chewing their way through the organs and viscera of the skin, hollowing it out. The man in the making must guide them with a stick that they do not chew a hole in the skin and escape, as well as retrieving them once their work is done.

With the skin is hollowed out, the man must don their suit for the first time, abandoning their child-name and dubbing themselves anew. They must then travel home in the raw suit, before being sealed away in their new home to have the matters of Manhood taught to them whilst the skin is bathed in smoke and the skin is stretched and cut to be fit for use. After five days, they will never be seen outside their homes without their Man-Suit. Only their wives, husbands and children will see them naked, as they were when a child.

The Man-Suit protects against spiritual warfare - hexes and curses struggle to take root in such poor soil that they may never bear their poison fruit. It offers some protection against physical threats too, although many wear hides from the crocodiles of the river to protect their borrowed skins.

AC as Leather.
Worn by a member of the Flatboat People, it is as a second skin - allowing additional armour to be worn too.
When a man of the Floatboat People is wearing his Man-Suit, he saves vs Spells as if 4 levels higher.

When Entering a Polity…

Whenever the PCs enter the domain of a lord, government, municipal council etc etc, roll 1d10. If this is under the average level of the PCs, they are summoned to court.

Or, you know, just roll Reaction and go with your gut.

Split Initiative

I’ve been doing a thing for a while in OSR Thinking Adventures style games I’ve been calling split initiative which I almost certainly read somewhere else and stole but here we are. Those of you using the Wolves rules have seen this before.

Basically at the beginning of each round of combat (or general dangerous time) each character rolls to get over/under some value. Those passing the check go before the monsters (or danger or whatever) and those failing go after. Simple as.

This adds a bunch of chaos - in the Wednesday game today this lead to all the high-level PCs going last, allowing a bunch of Level 1 characters to be killed by carrion crawlers. The easiest form of the check is just a d20 under Dexterity, although Wolves does d10 under AC - reinforcing the Armour-as-Class thing those rules are doing. If you wanted to decouple this from stats it could be as simple as “roll 4+ to go first” on a d6, giving an even 50/50.

Mentorship Applications Open

MENTORSHIP APPLICATIONS ARE NOW CLOSED

I am now open to submissions for round 5 of the mentorship scheme I’ve been running. This is done free of charge to give back to the wider TTRPG scene. Submissions sent before September 17th 2023 will be considered - anything sent after this is not eligible for this round.

As outlined in the retrospectives (see below) the mentorship consists of regular calls to discuss techniques as well as taking a critical look at other works in the TTRPG space.

The mentorship prioritises marginalised people, although everyone is welcome to apply.

Those who have applied for previous rounds, please send a new application (or re-send the old if nothing has changed).

Scope

I am working with writers to develop adventures and sourcebooks for use with games. I am focused on helping you take a set of ideas and developing that out into a first draft - both in terms of generating quality ideas, but also techniques to help with the writing process. Manuscripts in the early stages of writing are also considered, although projects which have already had a round of crowd-funding are not eligible.

I also help with finding resources for self-publishing, or for finding a publisher. Engagements last for a variable amount of time, although there will be regular check-ins to ensure we’re making good progress and that the mentorship is still right for all parties.

If wanted, all communications can be held with a third party present - just indicate this during the application process.

Retrospectives

Below are links to the retrospectives: written by the mentees and myself.

Mentorship #1
Mentorship #4
Where the mentee was unable to provide their retrospective I’ve elected to not share my half either.

Applying

Before applying, please ask yourself if you can commit to an hour-long call a week and spending a few additional hours working on the material discussed in those calls. Ultimately the mentorship can only help you equal to the work you are able to put in. Be sure to read through the retrospectives to get an understanding of the format and process.

To apply, please send an email to lukegearing.games@gmail.com.

In the subject line, please put your “[Your Name] - Mentorship Application”

In the body, please introduce yourself with any links to prior work (not required, just useful to have). If you consider yourself marginalised, please mention this here (no details are required).

Then provide a pitch of your project as well as a summary of where you are with it and any issues you’ve been having.

Finally, if you have any thoughts around self-publishing or being published, that would be useful to know.

Thank you for taking the time to read this and for considering applying.

Traveller Animals for the Jungles

Needed an animal encounter table for a job the Travellers are taking in a jungle. The planet is being colonised and has a reputation for the hyper-predatory nature of the wildlife.

4+ on 1D to encounter, rolled twice per day.

The names are given by the colonists, although multiple terms are often used.

2 “Ghoul”

Intermittent quadrupeds with over-long claws on their ‘arms’. These are used to hew flesh from bone, scraping what gobbets are left after others have eaten their fill. If one of their number is injured, they stalk the offending party. Lightly furred, they shy away from the sun.

3 “Mosscrab”

Huge claws for cracking bone and armour alike. Low to the ground, the size of small pigs. Their soft hides often bear symbiotic plant-life which gives them a degree of camouflage. Usually encountered in trios - one of which appears to be the child. If the child is killed, the ‘parents’ attempt to drag the body away and bury it.

4 “Treetongue”

Soft-bodied lengths of muscle which secrete bone-dissolving enzymes, Treetongues descend upon the carcasses left by the others, consuming the skeletal remains. They are also attracted to metals, although it seems to act as a slow poison - slow enough to give them time to thoroughly destroy engines and other complex machines.

5 “Big Fucking Mantis”

The size of a horse with a tough chitin-clad body and scything arms. Noted to be very cannibalistic. Moves eerily quietly apart from their ‘Tiger Dance’ - performed when the gas giant looms large in the sky.

6 “Harpoon Slime”

A rolling bulk of cut-resistant slime which fires bony spines at animal life. The fallen leaves and ground-plants it consumes give it a pseudo-camouflage. The more spines are embedded in prey, the faster it moves - otherwise inching through the jungle floor. Leaves useful paths through the undergrowth.

7 “Stone Giraffe”

A tall, slender-limbed being wrapped in bone-plated armour. Highly resistant to small-arms fire, it has been seen killing and eating animals unable to flee it’s long, loping stride. Otherwise it grazes upon the tall jungle canopy.

8 “Centipede-Lizard”

Eight powerful limbs propel this reptilian behemoth through the trees, dextrously clambering over all obstacles in pursuit of prey. Rending teeth and a powerful jaw enable it to quickly tear apart those it catches - although long basking periods in rare clearings give much of the other life respite. The scales are nearly paper-thin, giving no protection - theorised to allow for easier basking.

9 “Wasp”

Hiding in burrows of softer trees, Wasps jump from hiding to deploy their stingers. The poison in the sting causes humans to rapidly undergo powerful seizures before death - often from cardiac arrest causes by stress. Sufficient sedatives and induced coma has been successful, but requires fast action. Thankfully, the stingers struggle to penetrate anything thicker than light clothing.

11 “???”

No surviving reports from the colonists yet exist. Something like a giant starfish with a shovel-scoop mouth which it uses to dig covered pits wherein it waits for prey, easily carving off limbs with its excavator-mouth.

12 “Nightmares”

Packs of vicious killers which kill large swathes of wildlife before gorging themselves on the devastation, resting for long periods of time. Each is the size of a hairless wolf, propelled by four short powerful limbs. Their mouths are filled with tiny, razor-sharp teeth at the end of long necks which they use to whip prey back and forth, cutting them to shreds. Their hairless bodies are a dull grey-green due to symbiotic algae which feeds on the gore in which they are often covered.