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.

Prison Planet Review

Prison Planet is an adventure for Classic Traveller, first published in 1982 and credited to Erik Wilson, Dave Emigh, John Harshman, Chris Purcell and Rose Geier.

Something very striking about the early Traveller adventures is the total lack of uniformity. Many are nearly totally unrecognisable to the modern concept of an adventure whilst others prefigure some of the forms that became dominant later on - such as Adventure 09: Nomads of the World Ocean, released 1983 and being heavily plotted with many highly characterised NPCs. Adventure 08: Prison Planet is definitely the former.

The premise is extremely simple - the player characters, for whatever reason, have been sent to space-prison to mine radioactive ore. The simplicity of this is great - it can be introduced mid-campaign as a consequence for player actions, or a killer way to open a campaign. The rest of the book is dedicated to delivering the premise of a prison complex, detailing almost everything you need to run the prison and any attempts to escape it. There’s a map of the facility, most of which is underground due to the air being tainted - requiring a filter mask to move around outside. You’re also provided with a comprehensive breakdown of the prisoners and guards present - quickly revealing a significant disparity in numbers. One thing the module consistently does well is set up these clues and routes to escape without excitedly pointing at them - leaving it up to you (the referee) as much as the players to discover these wrinkles. Another of these is present on the map - a huge tank of spaceship fuel is kept right next to the laser-turret which guards the facility. There’s a number of these tantalising nuggets spread around - doubtless me and my players missed several. This stance towards the players and readers is extremely refreshing: throughout, the simple facts of the situation are presented without elaboration or knowing winks and nudges - with one glaring exception, discussed below.

Much of the actual play of the module is driven by a pair of tables, which specify Events and Encounters which occur to each work-group of PCs on a weekly basis. To add to the feel of a long-term incarceration, the speed of play ‘zooms out’ to a weekly procedure wherein a couple of major occurrences happen, either globally or to that specific group. In play, this set up a push-and-pull between the proactive, player-led action and the reactive play of the Events and Encounters. Most of these require a little work to introduce organically, but once done a few times you quickly get to feel for it. I pre-rolled these before each session so I knew what was coming week-to-week. This speed up play and gave me more time to blend the events and encounters into the game.

One of the entries on the Event table - Incident - is one of the few missteps in the module. Rather than being a conventional, generic Event, the Incidents are a track of specified vignettes which happen sequentially - adding a degree of planned narrative. Th earlier entries are very heavy-handed tutorialising which felt extremely unnecessary, hammering home basic ideas like hiding contraband or bribing guards. The bulk are fine, and introduce some interesting aspects which could’ve been handled using the Events and Rumours before culminating in an escape-attempt-on-a-plate. This is disappointing considering the wonderful lack of interest in seeing PCs escape presented elsewhere in the module. In play I scrapped this listing of Incidents and instead used it as a ‘faction turn’ for the gang in the PCs cellblock demanding things from them.

The NPCs are a highlight of the work being done for you by this module: 60 prisoners and 18 guards. All of these individuals have been assigned work areas and cellblocks, although indexing them as such would’ve been very useful. There’s a few prisoners with little going on, although almost all have at least one interesting wrinkle or alliance which makes them compelling in play without being difficult to use. Many of them having access to some rumours adds an easy way to track their knowledge, although using numbers to refer to each rumour means a look-up is required. Having a PDF open multiple times makes this easier; if I was running this in-person, I would definitely have printed out a copy of the Rumour pages. The Rumours once again have an interesting stance: specifically called out as being contradictory and occasionally false, there is no guide to which are true or false. This reasserts the module as disinterested in success or failure - only a statement of fact.

Once the players escape the prison facility itself, they have to tangle with the terrible conditions on the planet: unbreathable air, killing heat, and the occasional carnivorous animal stalking them in the wilderness. The Referee is given a hexmap of the planet (each hex being 540 kilometres) and a set of encounter tables for each type of terrain. Given each hex takes between 5 and 20 days to traverse, this seems like it would be a desperate experience for any escapees. I’m speaking hypothetically here as my players stole an ATV from the prison after setting the nuclear reactor on-site to explode, destroying the entire facility. In an ATV, it’s a mere 3 day drive to the only known settlement on-planet, Circle City. Whilst this originally would have required some exploration, the encounter dice favoured them: they met a band of geologists and claimed their navigational computer was broken.

Circle City itself feels a bit under-developed, although I wouldn’t be surprised if this was due to a lack of space: 64 pages is commonly accepted as an upper bound for staple-bound books, which Prison Planet runs right up against. These is enough here to riff off of, although I would’ve liked there to be more - especially with some of the possible escape routes involving a trip to the hospital in the city for those too injured (or appearing too injured) for the meagre infirmary of the prison itself. You could definitely use the existing Traveller encounter procedures in Book 3 to run this section. That said, extrapolation from minimal detail is part of the joy of running Traveller - entire worlds invented from a quick string of numbers.

Running this module is an absolute blast, and reading it is deeply interesting: offering a vision of adventure-modules as a collection of physical spaces and tool for running them rather than the modern conception of space-alone (dungeons etc.) or the heavily plotted adventure-path style Trad adventures. There’s definitely improvements that could be made - marking the cameras on the map, details of where the power for the prison comes from - although these mostly are to save the referee work when the players ask. As is often the case with these Traveller adventures, you can use this a few different ways too: the fully-mapped out nature of the prison means you have everything you need to break someone else out of the facility too. This seems to be a guiding principle in these adventures which I’ve not seen elsewhere outside of Mothership.

BONUS: Play Report/Summary

Immediately after arriving, one of the PCs talked back to the warden and got beaten by the guards and assigned to the Danger Zone - the most dangerous part of the mine. They met their cellblock-mates (including the de-facto leader, head of a gang) and started a fight with the biggest, meanest looking prisoner in there. After the guards broke it up, one of the PCs immediately snitched without thinking.

After making such a good impression, they began settling in to prison life. Some of them got assigned to the machine-shop (wherein one PC got degloved and spent the rest of their stay in the infirmary, thanks to a random Event) whilst most toiled in the Danger Zone - where there was the least oversight. One PC, who deliberately wrote provocative letters about wealth-management and cooked books was dragged upstairs by the vice-warden to assist in a coup against the inept incumbent warden. Another worked in the infirmary, and assisted the prison doctor in cutting drugs to sell to the prison population.

The gang leader of their cellblock was spurred to demand a sign from the group that they were “on his side” - the murder of a guard. This took a few sessions to set-up, and involved borrowing money in prison for a bribe, but they eventually killed their man and hid his gun and equipment. Due to some unfortunate rolls, this gun was found by another prisoner they’d met previously, who insisted upon a dragon dwelling within the mine and hungering for souls.

They discovered a few possible escape routes. The first, a cave which led to the surface (they deduced due to the presence of cave-bats) but also contained a giant horrible lizard which tried to eat them. The other was a collapsed elevator shaft which could have been carefully excavated slowly to dig a way out of the mines. The PC in the machine-shop built a way to disrupt the radio-comms after repairing a few broken guard radios, hiding this jammer in their person effects. All of this planning was thrown out of the window when the prison who stole their stashed SMG opened fire on the guards during a random search. The PCs led the population to kill the guards on their floor, stealing their guns and equipment. Then they jammed the comms and piled into the elevator, dressed as guards. From here they took over the prison, set the reactor to explode and escaped in an ATV, leaving nothing but a glowing crater. They did all this in 10 weeks in-game.

Men

1HD, AC as Armour, Damage as Weapon, Morale 7.

1d100 appearing, rolling again and combining results if 90+ is rolled.

Bandits

From the cities burnt, from villages parched, caravans left to dessicate in the heat of the wilderness. Many will wear stones of prayer to their city-gods, now lying in rubble at the feet of the victors.

For every 10 Bandits, a 2HD leader is present, wearing medium armour. If 30+ are present, a 4HD leader in heavy armour is present.

Bandits originating in Urttum ride rangy Landsquids and wear masks of pilfered silk. If more than 30 are present, they fight from a Portage Squid. All have javelins, lances and axes of flint which are at -1 to hit against any armour.

Bandits originating in Shurupak may re-roll failed saves against magic, wearing fragments of their shattered divinity still. It has been generations. For every 10 present, one is a Magic User, with level equal to the number of Magic Users. They use slings and bronze axes.

Barbarians

Those who dwell in tents or beneath the sky or in caves bear the label. They do not speak the tongues of brick and field, and so the label slides from them like blood from a blade. Some know enough to make demands, to sell the people of one city to another. Their warriors are resplendent, draped in the goods of civilisation, a demon heavy with art and weapons, deliberately ignorant of how such items might be made. They live with their animals nearly always.

Or so it is said in the cities.

Soldiers of the cities must test Morale when first encountering Barbarians in combat.

Barbarians from the Urkysh Mountains have bows of horn, with which they add +1 to hit. They also carry long knives of bronze. They add +1 to morale, and have no leaders.

Barbarians from the deep Burnt Lands ride their own, cannibalistic breed of Landsquid. Rumours abound of the interior having huge wild specimens which the barbarians worship. They wield lances of bone set with bronze tips. For every 15 present, a 3HD Tamer-of-Squids is present, accompanied by a pack of 2d6 Landsquid.

Barbarians from the Sea wear horned helms with bright plumes, wielding their bronze axes carefully. Their favourite technique is to hook the ankle with the beak of the axe, tripping the careless whilst another hacks the prone man to death. Each group of 30 is led by a 3HD Captain, with their ship nearby. If 4+ ships are present, they are led by a 6HD Sea People King, wearing looted heavy armour.

Barbarians upon the Razor Coast coat themselves in the black blood of the earth. They set this alight, the flames leaving them unscathed as long as they do not retreat in battle. They wield two-handed swords, made of a single curved piece of wood set with shark teeth on the inner edge. For every 20 present, a 4HD Burnt-Hide is present, held with knotted rope until their battle-frenzy takes them.

Barbarians from the Lycaneum Penisula dwell in huge complexes of clay marked by labyrinthine tunnels and filled with smoke. They wield spears and wide hide shields.

Barbarians from the Chewed Hills ride Giant Locusts. They are lead by Matriarchs, who have a blood-relation to all members of the band. They use lances and bows of bone and swords made from chitin.

Landsquid

2HD, AC as Leather, Damage 1d6, 1d6-2 if debeaked and without war-beak, Morale 2d6.

Across the known world ranges the Landsquid, faithful companion of man. Their undulating gait, powered by their nine tentacles, has moved poets and brought tears to the eyes of warlords. Stories abound of the taming of the first Landsquid, but the truth is lost to history.

In most cultures, the beak is removed in infancy, reducing injuries and making them entirely dependent upon their owners for food - usually a paste of crickets and tubers. Used in battle, the men of the cities fit them with war-beaks of bronze, with which they snap at enemies pinned beneath their bulk.

An injured Landsquid can grow back missing limbs, although they are usually killed and eaten instead.

Portage Squid

9HD, AC as Unarmoured, Damage 2d6, 1d6 if debeaked, Morale 5, 12 if lobotomised.

Swollen with gasses, Portage Squid are harnessed and weighed down with baskets and sacks - the largest able to support howdahs. Wild Portage Squid are smaller, floating higher, their beaks unclipped and able to snip a donkey in half.

Squid-Handlers from the cities know how where to pierce the rubbery flesh to deaden the mind, how to trim the beak that the beast may not eat unaided and how to direct their charges with tall, hooked poles. Some rare few still know how to break a Squid and ride upon the back, controlling it with ropes, the brain unpierced. This art was mostly lost with the destruction of Urttum.

Giant Locust

3HD, AC as Chain, Damage 1d6-1, Morale equal to number present.

The Chewed Hills host this localised plague of skipping nightmares, the night everfilled with their songs of hunger. Those ridden by the barbarians swirl with fantastic designs, each a carrier of some fragment of their history - only the swarm as a whole might form a cohesive tale of shifting game-pieces, heroes dying and reborn as the mounts leap and skip.