Rafu’s Grievous Wounds – the Pulp Fantasy Edition

This is for OSR-ists, or anybody who’s still playing OD&D or similar games. You’re interested in mitigating lethality (as in, burying fewer dead PCs), but you’re like me and dislike tracking negative hit-points?

Have a standard pack of playing cards (54, with jokers) somewhere on the table. When a PC drops to 0 HP, deal the player a random card from the deck, face down. They can’t look at their own card yet.

The idea is that the character is out of the fight for good, but not necessarily dead. They suffered a Grievous Wound. They can’t be revived on the spot, but should their companions carry them back to home camp, the injured & dying character might recover and survive, depending on the exact sort of Grievous Wound they have suffered.

When the party’s out of the dungeon and recovering, you’re finally allowed to reveal your Grievous Wound card…

Ace of Spades: meet the Angel of Death! You fail to recover from this grievous wound, and die. Or maybe you were actually killed on the spot and hauling your corpse back home was just a futile (if compassionate) effort.

Ace of Hearts: that which doesn’t kill you makes you stronger! After recovering from a near-death experience, you find that – besides suffering no lasting ill-effect – you are now tougher because of it: permanently increase your Constitution score by 1. But you can only benefit from this card once in a lifetime: otherwise, it’s the same as an Ace of Clubs/Diamonds.

Ace of Clubs or Diamonds: you got lucky! The wound wasn’t actually that bad, and in the end you recover fully, with no lasting consequences.

Suit of Spades, 2 through 10: you survive the wound, but have suffered lasting damage to your muscles or bones (lost a limb, perhaps). Permanently reduce your Strength score by half the card value (1-5). Should this reduce your Strength to zero, then you’re as good as dead: you’re forced to retire from adventuring, and might not be able to get back on your feet again.

Suit of Hearts, 2 through 10: you survive the wound, but will never recover fully. Permanently reduce your Constitution score by half the card value (1-5). Should this reduce your Constitution to zero, then your recovery was just apparent, but you’re going to get worse and die before you can adventure again, maybe because you caught an otherwise minor illness which proved fatal in such a weakened state.

Suit of Clubs, 2 through 10: you survive the wound, but have suffered lasting damage to your muscles or nerves, perhaps lost an eye or even a leg. Permanently reduce your Dexterity score by half the card value (1-5). Should this reduce your Dexterity to zero, then you’re as good as dead: you’re forced to retire from adventuring, and might not be able to get back on your feet again.

Suit of Diamonds, 2 through 10: your body heals the wound just fine, and you survive, but… Either it was a blow to the head, or the shock, fear and mental trauma was too much to bear: you’ll never be the same person again. Permanently reduce your Intelligence (if an even-numbered card) or Wisdom (if an odd-numbered card) by half the card value. This may result in forgetting things you used to know, such as languages, how to cast spells, how to read and write – as befits a survivor of severe trauma. Should either Ability score drop to zero, you can never function as a self-sufficient individual again.

Face cards, Black: you eventually recover from the injury, but it leaves gruesome, horrifying scars or a permanent deformity. Your disfigurement is impossible to conceal and repulsive to most intelligent beings: friendly humanoids are disgusted, while hostile monsters believe you weak and vulnerable, less of a threat. Permanently reduce your Charisma score by 1-3 points (for a J, Q and K respectively).

Face cards, Red: you recover from your injury fully, and it doesn’t hamper you anymore, but it left you with some visible, cosmetic scar. Such a scar makes you appear more rugged and experienced, charming and dangerous, more of a badass. Permanently increase your Charisma score by 1-3 points (for a J, Q and K respectively).

The Joker: what was it that near-killed you, exactly? Whatever it was, you now laugh in it’s face! If it was a failed Saving Throw which brought you to the brink of death, you gain a permanent +1 bonus to the appropriate category of Saving Throw, and develop immunity to the specific hazard which befell you this time: if it was a rattlesnake bite, for example, you’re now immune to rattlesnake poison and save at +1 vs. poison from any other source; if it was an Inflict Serious Wounds spell, you’re now immune to that spell and you save at +1 vs. all other spells; etc. If you suffered the Grievous Wound from a mere blade or claw, you instead permanently increase your maximum Hit Points by 1d3, having become inured to pain and more reckless.

Additionally, surviving such a close brush with death is quite the formative experience, and yields significant bonus XPs for the player character. When you survive a Grievous Wound…

• …for the 1st time, gain 400 × your current level bonus XPs.
• …for the 2nd time, gain 200 × your current level bonus XPs.
• …for the 3rd time, gain 100 × your current level bonus XPs.
• …for the 4th time, gain 50 × your current level bonus XPs.
• …every subsequent time, gain 25 × your current level bonus XPs.

Notes and variants

• These rules are better suited to those games where Hit Points are deemed to be an abstract measure of defensive ability, with HP loss not usually representing an actual, bleeding wound (but rather the defender tiring down, losing ground, damage to armor and weapons, pain and disturbance, annoying but nonthreatening scratches and bruises, morale drop, etc.). If you already described, say, a PC having their left arm numbed, or bleeding profusely from the abdomen, after being successfully hit for HP damage, then Grievous Wounds as presented here would be made redundant.
• Grievous Wound rules don’t apply to careful murder of the defenseless — i.e., a combatant taking special care to ensure that the fallen stay down. If they stop and slaughter you on the field while you’re helpless at 0 HP (a non-combat action to deliver a careful coup-de-grace), you’re just dead.
• Divination magic or the skills of a healer (here representing diagnosis) could be used to peek at the card in advance; for example, to assess whether a dying comrade is worth hauling back to safety at all or is beyond hope already.
• Specialized spells could be introduced that allow for changing one’s Grievous Wound card(s) — presumably after peeking at it.
• It’s on each DM to decide whether to also apply Grievous Wound rules when a character’s slain by poison, insta-death spells, etc., or only for actual HP damage. Personally I’d use it for very fast-acting, save-or-die-instantly poisons, but not for poisons that are slow enough to allow for treatment.
• If you want to penalize PCs for being defeated too frequently, rather than give out an XP bonus, you can inflict an XP penalty. Or the bonus could only apply to the first five Wounds in a character’s life, while for the 6th and subsequent you start giving out a penalty, reading the table in reverse (-25×level, then -50×level, and so on).
• As a variant, players could be allowed to gamble with Wound cards (at the meta-game level) in the hope of gaining one of the beneficial wounds. Here’s how I would do it:
  • You must be a 2nd level character or higher to gamble with Wounds.
  • If you choose to gamble (it’s never mandatory), draw additional Grievous Wounds cards equal to your character level.
  • When cards are revealed, choose one (and only one) to discard.
  • All of the remaining cards apply! They can represent separate injuries, or you can combine them into one, but all of their effects are applied separately (if, for example, you drew a Nine of Clubs and a Queen of Hearts, maybe it means you lost an eye but look very cool with an eye-patch).
  • Note that, under these rules, gambling is virtually an insurance against being killed by the Ace of Spades, but tends to erode Ability scores very fast (which can be just as deadly).
• Notice that out of 54 cards there are only 9 desiderable outcomes (a 1-in-6 chance), vis-a-vis 42 damaging ones and 1 insta-killer.

Commentary

My readers already know that I’m prone to occasional fits of dungeon-nostalgia, in various flavors. These rules came to my mind while musing about a setup for a low-level, high-stakes campaign of mostly randomly-generated dungeon crawling… which occurred to me soon after reading about the somewhat hilarious (mis-)adventures of the Fellowship of the Bling, brought to my attention by Paul T. via Story-Games.com. Most notably, they sprung from an off-hand comment by Eero Tuovinen in that very same thread, something about rolling to confirm death or survival of fallen combatants, campaign-wargame style ("down at 0, with 50% chance of dead") — and from my desire to elaborate profusely on that very simple but quite attractive rule.

Reportage da Knutepunkt

Ancora un mio articolo nella rubrica Mondo Larp di Andrea Castellani:

Knutepunkt 2013: una scorpacciata di cibo per la mente

Tree of Worlds #2: “Hub Worlds”, and introducing the Tree itself

The tree as a metaphorical image of the cosmos sports quite an impressive tradition: from the Yggdrasil of Norse mythology, to the tree-like Yosher scheme for arranging Sephirot in the Kabbalah, to give just a couple outstanding examples. And that’s why I chose Tree of Worlds as a working title or, maybe more correctly, why “tree” as an ingredient inspired me to tackle an Everway remake.

But I also want a “Tree of Worlds” to be an actual thing in the game. From now on, when I speak about the Tree I mean a graphic like this:

This is going to be the focal point for long-term play, the central artifact of a “campaign”. Beginning as a mere blank page, the Tree is at once a journal of the stories and events we as a group enacted in play, and a summary of the state of the whole universe (or, rather, the sum of all worlds already known to us, the players). The arrows, especially, are meant to be drawn in pencil, and to be constantly updated – between sessions – as a consequence of the latest fictional events.

First, the player-characters are walking the Spheres, thus discovering and exploring new worlds, which we add to the Tree as we get to know them. Second, such characters are exceptional – both in being “heroic” and merely because of being outsiders – which means they affect the worlds they travel through and, most especially, the relationships between worlds (in fact, there would be no contact between Spheres if not for Spherewalkers, right?).

I’m interested in “mechanizing” or quantifying this upkeep somewhat, so that the actions of the player-characters during each session of play translate into a finite number of changes to the Tree, depending on their magnitude. But more on this later, in some future installment.

Hub Worlds

The first thing we need to mark on the Tree, at the beginning of a campaign, is a central bubble representing our Hub World – which is: a place suitable as a base of operations for spherewalkers, by virtue of containing an unusually high number of Gates.

The city of Everway, introduced in the original game-set, is of course a perfectly suitable Hub World: it’s both the prototype and the source for the concept. For my tastes, though, the city of Everway as detailed there is quite overwritten: the amount of information given, 1990s style, is apparently meant to support complex adventures set within Everway itself, or to be used as building blocks for writing long and detailed character backgrounds — neither of which is going to be a huge point of interest for me. My guess is that using by-the-book Everway as your Hub World is only going to be the best choice if you’re a group of old-hands at Everway, thus already familiar with that city, or if the majority of you likes to learn about a setting by reading. In my case, though, it would probably degenerate into me lecturing my fellow players about the setting, which I think would be a *bad* idea.

In the (more likely) case that your friends are not already well-read about the city of Everway, I suggest creating a Hub World of your own as a group brainstorming session. It doesn’t need be very detailed! You can probably complete the task within a hour, and then proceed to make characters.

You can start from a bunch of Vision Cards, or any other source of inspiration, such as referencing some historical real-world civilization. You just need to envision something. Then ask this core question and try to answer it as a group: how has the presence of so many Gates and so many Spherewalkers changed this society? As with all such matters, by giving the first and most obvious answers to cross your mind, you’re bound to surprise each other. If you want, you can get more detailed by answering some additional questions, such as:

• How frequent are Spherewalkers within the local populace? (it’s 1% in the City of Everway)
• Are native Spherewalkers identified as a separate social group, maybe as a caste or as members of a special trade?
• How does one learn they’re a Spherewalker? Is this known from birth, or is there a training one undergoes, or a test, etc.
• How do natives feel toward non-native Spherewalkers?
• How does sphere-walking feature into the local economy?
• Are there any “neighboring” worlds, sphere-walking to and from which is especially common (these can be marked on the Tree already)? Maybe regular trade or diplomatic relationships through these particular Gates? How frequent are such travels?
• What does the typical Gate look like here (if it makes sense to speak of a “typical” Gate)?
• Is the access to Gates somehow regulated (are Gates guarded, etc.)?
• How scattered or concentrated are these Gates?
• How easy or hard to find can Gates be in this Realm?
• Do local Spherewalkers believe they know of all the existing Gates in this realm, or do they look forward to discovering more?
• How are Gates and Spherewalkers politically relevant?
• How much does the general populace actually know about Gates and sphere-walking?

Whatever you do, though, I suggest you don’t decide on the exact number of Gates in your Hub World and, especially, that you don’t compile a comprehensive list of destinations such as the one found in the Everway Player’s Guide. I think it’s excessively limiting and ultimately counter-productive to do so, in that it greatly reduces your opportunities for creating adventures rather than expand them. In fact, if you do use Everway as your Hub World, I advise you to disregard that list of Realms and only use it as suggestions of possible worlds (excellent suggestions, I add), but never as the ultimate index of available destinations from there — lest you get mired down in the logistics of getting from point A to point B, making your adventures needlessly complicated.

La casetta di marzapane

I designed a game last week for a Game-Chef-like contest here in Italy. It's in Italian, understandably enough. Here it is, for those who can read Italian and want to check it out. Though, as my early playtesters advised me, it probably makes for a better experience if you don't read all of the text before playing (i.e., just read the first page).

An open design self-challenge: Tree of Worlds, my Everway remake

The Shortest Month Longest Game Design Challenge includes a couple ingredients which inspired me (namely, “Tree” and “Fool”)… Not to create a wholly original game, though, but rather a remake: a remake of Jonathan Tweet’s Everway – which is something I actually had floating at the periphery of my mind since a while, but never in a major way.
My project doesn't comply with all of the requirements of the challenge, and I'm way past deadline anyway. I would like to make this into a leisurely, long-time project instead, and into a chance to experiment with a new (to me) design-to-writing relationship: similar to some OSR blogging practices, I will write down all of my ideas for this work-in-progress game/remake as blog posts, in no particular order. In a weird perversion of the name and spirit of the inspiring challenge, maybe it will take me a year or more to have a full “game” posted this way, but who cares?
As soon as I design even a small a fragment of the game I will post it here, not waiting for “the big picture” to coalesce — expect changes of mind, re-designs and do-overs, and especially so as I will eventually get some playtesting/playstorming done. Individual pieces, though, will have at least some usability for people who are already familiar with Everway, or so I hope.

Let’s begin with a working title: Tree of Worlds.

And here’s a bunch of broad-picture desiderata, in order to set a very general framework:

• I want to make use of the original Everway materials, such as the Fortune Deck and (especially) Vision Cards. In fact, I want to draw my vision for this game, in terms of mood and content, directly from the imagery of the original cards – which have a characteristic vibe of their own. But…
• I believe I need to make possession of such materials optional, not mandatory, in order to make Tree of Worlds play independent from the availability of a rare out-of-print boxed set from the 1990s (please!). The Fortune Deck can be replaced by a standard Tarot deck (I will attempt to make the two interchangeable… or, rather, to make my rules agnostic re: which fortune-telling cards you use). One can make one’s own Vision Cards by combining pictures with questions – whether they’re shaped as cards doesn’t affect game-play significantly.
• While not actually participating in the contest, I have my eyes on the “Flexible Footprint” challenge. I’m envisioning a pretty “traditional” Master of Ceremonies role, nothing groundbreaking here, but with some sort of “troupe style” play. At a minimum, I want the MC role to rotate freely and/or regularly between players. Also, if off-game prep is necessary for play at all (and it probably will), I want to make it as light on the MC as possible: quick, simple, step-by-step, streamlined; and to share it between troupe members whenever feasible.
• I fully expect Tree of Worlds to turn out visibly “crunchier” – that is, more mechanically specified – than the original Everway, wherever I believe this can benefit, and not hinder, gameplay. In a sense, this is just a function of evolving trends in table-top role-playing (so much has changed since the Nineties!), but on the other hand it’s also because I’m taking the broad toolkit which is Everway as the starting point for building something much more specific. It’s by specifying a more narrowly defined experience that I hope to truly make the game my own.

To be continued!

Everway Fortune Deck and the Italian election

A disclaimer: I don't actually believe in cartomancy. It's just a funny game to me.

Last night, everybody was (understandably) upset here in Italy, as ballots where being counted, etc. Because, you know, general election. Widespread fear of a gridlock (opposing sides prevailing in the two chambers, albeit by a narrow margin) dominated conversations.
I was moving a bunch of books around, and found myself toying with my Fortune Deck from Jonathan Tweet's Everway role-playing game boxed set — which as a teenager I routinely used as a "divination" tool. In jest, then, I interrogated the cards about the next Italian government! Here's what I got:

Fate: the Satyr (indulgence vs. moderation)

Virtue: the Dragon (cunning)
Fault: Spring (new growth)

Past: the Creator (nurture)
Present: Fearing Shadows (unnecessary fear)
Future: the King (authority)

An interesting - and very poignant - spread! Starting from the bottom, I read the Present/Future set as meaning that there will be no gridlock and the new government will hold together. How long? I don't know, for a full five years would be rare and unusual in Italy, but I felt confident enough to bet pizza with a friend that it would last longer than a year and a day.
I read the Creator as meaning that the present state of things was deliberately crafted, and is not the result of random events: just some staple, everyday conspiracy business.
The Dragon as a Virtue means that our elected representatives aren't stupid — not all of them, at least. If they're smart enough, they could occasionally take the right decision instead of surely damning all of us. But Spring as a Fault means that the newcomers, being inexperienced in politics, may act to our general disadvantage as often as for our good — that their overall unpredictability could prove more of a liability than anything else.
In the end, there's only a gray hint of hope in our Fate: politically, this is going to be an inconclusive government. The risk is it will slowly dilapidate Italy, wasting resources over near-sighted gains. But this doesn't need happen: with just enough cunning (an ill-fitting substitute for the actual wisdom we want for) they could as well preserve the current - grim but not hopeless - state of things, for somebody else to tackle in the future.

This is weird

Have you ever woken up in the morning having dreamed up a set of game mechanics? Not that what I've got are especially original, or even complete mechanics, but I'm like WTF?! — and now I feel obliged to give them a little more thought, make something out of them. In fact, what I dreamed up are mechanics for a specific part of an RPG, very traditional but with a twist; now I'd need to figure out the rest of the game which should come with them. Like: I've got this rules for driving you to the ground and razing whatever you built and sow salt on it; now of course I need a game structure in which you build things up.
Still, weird.

More thoughts as a pin-board for the mind: it's all about the roll-to-hit fetish, I guess (a fetish I used to swear I got over, go figure!) and how things go CLANG!, and you pile up on dice and then everything goes BOOM! Also, Hokuto no Ken, but not really (could be a very angry Jesus, or King Arthur).

Recensione del Larp Symposium 2012

Un mio articolo ospite della rubrica "Mondo Larp" di Andrea Castellani:
Il Larp Symposium aggiusta la rotta (non è mia la scelta del titolo).