SRD

Behold:

On the face of it, there is nothing here. Flat, boring encounters with the basic, obvious enemies. Previously, I’ve written about adding extra dimensions to the encounter table. I don’t think I was right.

Instead use Surprise, Reaction and Distance - often overlooked, but essential to the variability and interest of encounters.

Surprise
On a roll of 5-6, a party is surprised. Roll for each party unaware of the other.

Reaction

Distance
If either party is surprised, an encounter occurs at 10-60’ - otherwise 20-120’.

Applying this procedure, a ‘flat’ encounter becomes something very different.

40 bandits, unaware of you - out at 60ft. Hide, encounter, call out? They seem jovial.
2 orcs, watching you closely without your knowledge. They’re uncertain - what does that mean?
12 ants, 120’ away and forming a phalanx.

Of course, using more ‘interesting’ monsters is no bad thing. I think the focus around it comes partially from a desire to sell products as novel, as well as to demonstrate the unique taste and talent of the GM/designer. Applying SRD to these encounters also gives great results - but demonstrates the ability to use anything as a point of interest. There’s a subtle distinction between something interesting in-itself and something interesting due to it’s position and relation.

This isn’t something I came up with, but it’s something easily neglected with an outsized impact on play.

I’ve made an automated thing to do this for you

28.16 Dead Godling

The trees on Hlesey grow perversely thick, forming corded walls of bark and wood. Fleshy leaves droop, eager to stroke exposed heads. Without a map, entrance deeper into the isle is impossible, the passages hidden as if by cunning cultivation. The beaches are lifeless.

Armed with a map, a single winding corridor of wood leads to a decaying garden. Rotted flower heads, swollen to the size of watermelons, lie upon the floor, contorting the too-delicate stems. Thorned plants coil and grip one another, locked in battle. Stone paths are barely visible.

For every Turn spent exploring the gardens, consult the following chart for an encounter. The geography is nonsensical - the area should be easily searchable in 30 minutes, but somehow loops back upon itself.

A warty structure of black and green glass sits at the centre of the garden. A 20’ lifeless zone surrounds it, the barren earth worn by wind. In front of the structure, on the stone patio, a corpse. Something like a rigid, upright squid, hacked apart with three blows. It has not rotted, and it’s black-green ichor contains flecks of gold. Behind it, an open passage into the structure. Touching the ichor is fatal, causing flesh to lose coherency - those passing a Reflex Save are able to cut off the body part touching the ichor before they are lost forever.

Within, light warps and becomes burnt umber, emerging like blood from the glass no matter the time of day. It illuminates low furniture built of strange geometries. Amongst these, pedestals display the hoard of a divine pretender (Magic User IV):

• 329 Atlantean Coins, worth 20sp each. Designs feature formulae and bearded figures, unlabelled.
• A stockpile of vellum scrolls, all written in Atlantean. They detail how to find Atlantis, and warn of the sorcery of Dread Lemuria. Worth 50000sp, to one who could pay. They are more likely to kill you for it.
• A Fragment of Chaos, frozen in glacier-heart ice.
• The gnarled, bitter horn of a 8HD demon.
• A tiny fragment of the Outer Dark in a velvet-lined jar.
• 3 Salamander Hearts in cooking oil.
• 3 Fingers-worth of Cloud Giant ash.
• A charm made of Golden Arrowheads.
• 3 Wisdom Teeth (&T)
• A Mirror of Negation (&T)
• Hugo (&T)
• 6 applications of The Sculptors Medium (&T)
• 1 application of the Reviled Ointment (&T)
• 30 draughts of the Batrachians Prize (&T)
• 3 ink-bottles of Inviolability (&T)
• A Seeking Dark (&T)
• Tooth of Hunger (&T)

The Unmade
Unable to live or die, the failed apotheosis of failed divinity forced. Half-dissolved humans, animals and plants, often fused into amalgams of miserable flesh. If any is slain in combat, they reform in 1d6 Rounds. They will not enter the structure at the centre of the island - but will lay in ambush nearby. There are 269 on the island.

1HD (Supernatural HP) / AC as Unarmoured / Damage 1d6

This is just a snippet from the upcoming update to Wolves Upon the Coast Grand Campaign.

No Rules No Rulings

When running Wolves Upon the Coast, a situation arose - the players wanted to train the griffon chicks they had adopted (stolen). There is nothing in rules for this. In most retro-clones and ‘comprehensive’ adventure game systems, you could use some of the existing attributes as a “fallback” - usually falling on Intelligence or Wisdom in my experience, although Charisma would be a possible candidate here.

Wolves has no such attribute* - and as such, I was forced to come up with something. I think this is notable outside of the normal mantra of “rulings not rules” as this isn’t a reusable solution which becomes part of the ‘house rules’ - this is a bespoke, one-off thing for this exact situation. The exact specifics don’t matter so much as the process of evaluation and development on-the-fly, using the techniques of player consensus to get agreement before actually putting it into practice. Additionally, we can consider non-attribute elements such as prior training (as indicated by starting equipment) and general conduct. This isn’t unique to operating in this way, but is always worth pointing out.

(As it happens, I did a simple d20 roll - 1 or 2 representing disaster, 19 or 20 representing incredible progress. The players were able to dial these in - giving more freedom increasing the risk of disaster and the chances of success. Additionally, they were able to suggest ways to mitigate some of the risk. This gave them real ownership of the roll and it’s results. This only made it funnier when one of the griffons became a good boy and the other one ate two dogs.)

*It only has Strength, Constitution and Dexterity.

Vernacular Games

Nails to whiteboards. Against design, against discussion, towards play.

No Play, No Discussion

Discuss results. Do not discuss plans.

This is not play-testing - this is the experience of play shaping work, thought and approach. There is no goal when you play. Make things to support play as need is identified in play. Do not assume what is or is not required.

This is the essence and totality of Vernacular Games.

This is not a denigration - if you take it as such, sit with that and consider if you should, perhaps, approach things vernacularly.

I am allowed to be bored of your favourite approaches. I am allowed to consider perfection abhorrent and consuming. Even if I wanted to, I cannot stop you doing things.

17.17 Desecrated Monastery

From Wolves Upon the Coast Grand Campaign

Within the woods an L-shaped ruin which has not been allowed to fall. Stones, cracked, filled with roots and seeking tendrils - ivy choked. Beneath the heavy cloak of green a monastery stands, yellow and black flowers blooming on the roof and tower. Nailed to the front door is a skeleton, a sunflower blooming from the left eye-socket. Ivy tumbles out of its mouth.

Within, pollen swirls year round - motes clustered and visible to the naked eye. The coat of vegetation reduces light to a distant glow. Between mouldering heaps of debris, many somethings crawl - disembodied tongues, turned to leather over the years. If presented the opportunity, they will seek a new mouth, piling in one after the other. First, the jaw breaks - the tongue is the strongest muscle, pound for pound - and then the victim suffocates, the tongues crawling and seeking.
Those spending more than a minute inside must make a Physique save - the pollen is a soporific. Those failing stumble, crushed by the need to sleep. A fine cloth mask is enough to stop the pollen’s effect. Those succeeding are drowsy, but otherwise unaffected.

Stepping through the ruin, the devastation is total - the building should have collapsed. Huge amounts of damage to the walls is obvious. All furniture is ruined, and no religious icons are left unspoiled.

Around the bend of the structure, the devastation intensifies - huge gouges are carved out of the stone. Atop an altar, a body, naked, still robed in flesh - untouched by time. They have been covered in brands of the cross. A circlet of gold set with rubies rests upon their brow, carved in Ghom. It reads:

“THE HAND TURNS TO STRIKE ITSELF
IT CAN ONLY BE SAID WE HAVE WAITED
WHILST ALBANN IS CAST IN A NET OF ROADS
AND CROSSES. THE FIRST TAKEN, THE LAST
AND THE MARTYR OF ONTHLOUG HENCEFORTH.”

It is worth 3000sp. If removed, the eyes of the body open, as does the mouth - revealing eight tongues. Muscle and bone audibly warp, the figure tripling in size as it stands, the eight tongues hanging ever longer. The arms and legs elongate yet further as it runs upon all fours, a dire mimicry of a hound at hunt. Its left eye burns with a dire yellow light. It will pursue until all who have touched the crown are dead, then returning to the ruin. It will not leave Moerheb Weald in this hunt, but will patrol the forest thereafter.

HD 8* / AC as Chain / Damage 1d6+1+Special
Any strike with a rolled result of 16+ indicates a successful grapple with a tongue. All strikes against entangled targets are automatically successful. A tongue takes 4 damage to sever - damage dealt to tongues does not count against the creature. Tongues regrow over days.
*Supernatural HP.

Using Markdown and Pandoc to Make RPG Documents for Free

This is a rough guide. If you do some googling you can get a lot more detailed information about any of the steps or components - this is focused on getting you started making stuff.

The output isn’t going to look good like a layout designer has done it. It will be readable, usable and can be very easy to use with various accessibility tools. Some example output when you turn stuff into a pdf.

You’ll need to install 3 items of software and do some very light console work - this is much easier than it sounds, and the guide will give you a step-by-step.

The guide assumes you’re using Windows. If you don’t, things should work the same, but you might need to do some extra research.

As a fun extra - this blogpost was written in markdown. Blot is not the only bloghost that uses markdown, but I really like it.

Software

You’ll want to install a text editor. Notepad works fine, but is playing on ‘hardmode’. I recommend Ghostwriter because it’s flexible and can do a lot of the heavy lifting for us.

You can get it for Windows and Linux here.

Many Mac users use Sublime Text although that’s not free. I used Notepad++ when I used to be on Windows if you don’t like the look of Ghostwriter.

Next you’ll want to grab Pandoc. Pandoc is where the magic happens - it is able to convert documents between a huge number of different file types without any extra work on your end.

You can get it for all platforms here.

Finally, to ensure you have all the components Pandoc needs, you’ll want to install MiKTeX. This lets you render PDFs and the like, and make them look good.

You can get it here.

Okay that’s everything. Breathe out.

Write Something!

Open up Ghostwriter and play with the settings. You can change your Font and Themes to get it looking the way you want. This has no impact on the end result, so feel free to make it Papyrus with black-and-pink colouring.

The sidebar of Ghostwriter has a cheat-sheet of all the Markdown syntax. Instead of pressing Crtl-i to turn on italics, you wrap the text you want to be in italics in a *.

Here’s that sentence but how it appears in my editor!

The same applies for bold.

Some elements only need to go before the text you want to style - like

headers

smaller headers

you get the picture

• and
• bullet
• points

Links and images look more intimating, but they’re fine once you get used to them. The big trick to remember is how you reference images - you can reference things which are online (via a URL) or stored on your computer - make sure you get the path right! These are only used when the markdown file is converted - the image is the saved into your output.

And here’s all of that as an image for good measure

Now to get really weird visually, you can use the Preview button in the bottom right to get a preview of how your markdown will render (mostly - more on that later). You’ll notice it duplicates your Font and Theme - this is slightly deceptive, and I wish it didn’t do that!

The preview itself

Please Read This Part

The only thing that is really important with markdown is to make sure you doublespace if you want a newline without leaving a full paragraph space. Ghostwriter puts some little dots when you do this to make it extra obvious - if you don’t, the text is treated as a single contiguous line. As a demonstration:

Line A is here, and foolishly neglected the doublespace. Line B is here, and is wise and has a double space.
Line C is separate despite the only difference being the double space.

Line D is separate because of the double newline. Note that Line C doesn’t have a double space. If you added one, it wouldn’t hurt.

Line E proves this.

See?

Tables

Tables get their own sub-heading because they come up a lot and are a little less elegant than anything else. You effectively construct a table out | and - characters. This can take a lot of time - a lot of people use this instead.

If you want to be awful like me instead, you build them like this:

Awful.

Which, when ‘rendered’ (turned into an output file) looks like this:

Nice!

Output

Save your hard work - either as a .txt or a .md, it doesn’t much matter.

Okay now the part that looks scary but isn’t.

Press Windows + R - this brings up the run menu. Type in cmd and hit enter. This black box is your console or terminal or whatever you want to call it.

Now you have to change directory (folder) to where you saved you .md or .txt. To change your directory you use the cd command. To make this easier, you want to move one directory at a time - the computer can only ‘see’ folders inside your current folder. For me, this was just

cd Documents

but might be longer for you. If you go wrong, type

cd ..

to go ‘up’ a directory. You can’t break anything by moving around folders, so don’t worry.

Once you’re in the directory with your .md or .txt file, it’s time for the big one - typing out the command.

Dark magic? I don’t think so.

One by one, type the following in:

pandoc yourfile.md -s -o outputfile.pdf
pandoc yourfile.md -s -o outputfile.html
pandoc yourfile.md -s -o outputfile.epub

You can and should change the name of outputfile to whatever you like.

You can do these in any order - you might get a lot of prompts asking you to install additional packages the first time you do this, but that’s okay - just hit ‘Install’ and wait.

Look upon your works and despair - you just did computer stuff you big nerd.

If anyone has any issues with aspects of this guide please let me know via Twitter DM. I do ask you restart your computer and try again before contacting me as Pandoc can be temperamental when first installed.

At some point in the future I’ll write up my little list of useful LaTeX you can drop straight into markdown to make slightly nicer PDFs but I’m done for now. These are very powerful tools and you can do a lot more with them but this is the basics.

Links

Markdown Guide
Pandoc Guide