This is more a diary entry than a blog post, but man, I have been dealing with some pretty major depression for the last few weeks. Reflecting back on it, part of it might have to do with the kind of work I’ve been doing over the summer, but I think I’m just… listless at the moment.
A part of this listlessness is probably coming from my reflection on the games I’m running and want to run in the future. I’m trying to find a graceful close to my Monday UVG game (the second edition just came out) and I want to devote more time to working on my homebrewed ruleset. I’d also like to get around to homebrewing some beer and putting more practice into playing my bass, not to mention hacking away at the massive pile of books I want to read. I have all this stuff I want to do, and time to actually do it, and then I get hit with this… lethargy. And then I get mad at myself because I’m feeling this way and I spend all my energy ripping into myself, which leaves me exhausted, which means I still don’t get to the stuff I want to do.
I don’t know, man.
So, this article is going to be a little laid back and a little less organized; like a hangout session as opposed to a writing assignment.
Nanomatic Somatics
One of the justifications for magic in my worldbuilding has been that the world was terraformed with nanomachines. Basically, they recreated the planet as programmed, a couple of molecules at a time. However, when the shattering Boar Spear occurred, the processes maintaining their evolution stopped and they began to develop in different ways. No organic material on the planet exists without these nanites. It’s one of the reasons that a wizard can cast Charm Person in the first place: the nanites that affect the parts of the brain that predispose individuals to like the wizard are already past the blood-brain barrier and have been since the target was born.
I was driving home one night and I wanted to listen to a particular song, and I said, “Hey Siri, play Sabrina by the Stray Birds.” And as I was driving I started thinking about talking to computers and the verbal somatic component of spells in OSR games. The first ones that come to mind are the rules in Old School Essentials, where “all spell casters need to be able to move their hands and speak in order to bring a spell’s effects into being” and “as a result, it is not possible to cast spells when bound, gagged, or in an area of magical silence.” And I thought, what if that’s a significant part of the spellcasting in the world?
After the catastrophic planet-wide event that forced the remaining humans underground and then back to the surface with different cultures and religions, another thing that goes out the window is universal language. Part of being a wizard in the world is the rediscovery of the ancient language that summons the ancient force spirits into the world. Wizards go into dungeons to find more words to bend the nanomachines to their whims. It’s kind of Blame! with the Net Terminal Genes, though anyone can find the words if they look hard enough. You might have to go to a university to find the right pronunciation, though. Also, this is why even people who aren’t “wizards” can cast some magic; wizards are just the ones who are obsessed enough to be able to lean on that power fully. Maybe doing some work for the Obscured Goddess will earn you a couple of choice phrases in convincing the nanomachines to levitate gold off the ground or make it start raining. I was also thinking about this video about how the environment affects magic and also thought about how certain nanomachines might have mechanically evolved to be better at certain things in certain places. For instance, in a radiator core for an ancient hab unit, it’s easier to cast “frost spells,” because the nanites there were optimized before the fall of civilization to regulate extreme temperature. You might even be able to go so far as to incorporate a Dungeon Crawl Classics style of “magic corruption,” whereby casting certain spells enough times, the nanites that exist in your bloodstream start adjusting themselves to your choices, and all of a sudden its fifteen degrees colder sitting next to you by the campfire. A wizard might even want to encourage some strange variant of nanite to live inside them, though I doubt they would express the intention as such.
Basically, Draconic is pre-collapse English. Just something I was thinking about.
The Man with the Yellow Hat
I like the broad strokes of the world I’ve built (especially the Goddesses), but the more and more UVG I’ve run (and the closer and closer the Monday Caravan has gotten to the Black City), the more I want to hack off the gonzo weirdness and make a western. I’ve complained enough about Luka Rejec to last a lifetime and honestly, his system and world are fine, but one of the big problems is that I’ve been trying to force a square peg in a round hole for the last three years. Ultimately, this is a “me” problem. I need to sit down and do the work to make the art I want to make, not just complain that others aren’t. Only a moron goes to an art museum and complains that the art doesn’t appeal to him; make your own art, find your own people.
I’ve had the outlines for character creation in my system for a long time, but I wanted to add two more. First, one of the last steps of character creation is that every player character rolls on a d66 table to generate a hat. Players roll three times: first for the style of brim and crease, second for color, and finally third for detail. I have feathers, flowers, bands, quality, and other weird things, like playing cards or paint or weird hats.
I was inspired a lot by the trinkets in games like Mothership and Black Powder, Black Magic, and too many other games to count, that give a player a little hint of their past in the form of an item. Giving players this hat hopefully sets different OSR characters apart, especially in high-lethality systems (as it can be used in any OSR system to give it a Western flair). It can also be used to distinguish important NPCs (“A gang of desperados rides into town, their leader is wearing a tan cutter crease hat with a snakeskin band.”). Finally, the game Frontier Scum has a variant of the OSR “Shields Shall be Splintered” rule that if a character gets hit by an attack, they can choose to ignore the damage if they lose their hat, with a luck roll after the combat is over to see if the hat survived. I saw this during Questing Beast’s review of the game and immediately fell in love with the mechanic. I’m not sure if characters should lose the ability if their original hat is lost, or if they can just pick one up off the ground after combat, or if they can only take the hat from a “named enemy” (“After I kill Rattlesnake Dan, I scoop his hat off the ground and put it on my head. ‘Rot in hell, bastard,’ I spit.”).
The second thing I want to add is that everyone starts with a revolver, a six-shooter. I’m considering it a “Medium Ranged Weapon” but I’m not sure if I want to break free of the 3.5E distinguishers for weapons or not. For now, the rule is this: at the beginning of combat, everyone places a d6 in front of them, on 6. As they make attacks, they advance the die down until they reach 1. After they reach 1, the next attack they make is their last until they spend a round to reload. At any point in the combat, they can spend a turn to reload and put the die back at 6. It’s not a unique or new mechanic, but it’s a way of tracking ammo, especially if I’m really stringent about people using six-shooters and that’s it.
Also, everyone starts with cold-weather gear. Fuck it, winter Western is the norm. I talked about how one of the inspirations was “sawanobori” in a past blog article and the idea that just as everyone had to escape underground, all life takes place within the canyons that emerged after people started leaving the vaults, where the surface is inhospitable. I was seriously inspired by this piece for a game called Legacy: Life Among the Ruins. Personally, I wasn’t the biggest fan of the system and there are a lot of post-apocalyptic games out there, but hey, your mileage may vary.
Western Games at the Tabletop
There don’t seem to be a lot of Western tabletop RPGs. Speaking of “your mileage may vary,” it probably has to do with the historical element of the setting/genre. One of the things I want to do is divorce the Western from the American West. There are a couple of good movies and books that seem to do that, like Logan and No Country for Old Men. Seems like the least “problematic” way of solving a lot of the worrying that goes on around the genre. Of course, there are a lot of reasons why people don’t like Westerns, so that doesn’t fix all of them, but the easiest way is to just stamp a big “For My Entertainment Only” stamp on the front of the box and call it a day. There are cowboys and six guns, but the world is like the Mongolian steppe and Russia in winter with everyone prospecting ancient dangers and archetechnology.
I’ve been playing an unhealthy amount of Disco Elysium recently, a game whose setting was not only created for a tabletop system but also manages to do this “Extremely Alternative History,” where nothing is like the world we live in, yet it’s extremely like the world we live in. They use “fantastic realist setting” in this article, describing it as “AD&D meets ’70s cop-show… with swords, guns and motor-cars.” There are shadows of the modern world, obviously, disco and drugs and communism, but the creators were willing to create things that were entirely new. The more I think about both their world and my own, the more I want to emulate the process. But I guess that’s always been my problem; I’m too distracted by the newest thing I see, and I struggle to stick to a self-imposed deadline, especially for my hobby over my job. I also wear my inspirations on my sleeve. But maybe that’s okay (the sleeves, not the deadlines).
I like Westerns, and I’m willing to fight for them.
The Boys with the Cast; Casting Boys, If You Will
A couple of budd(ies?) of mine have reached a large number of episodes at the Wrong Room podcast. One of them is about to announce a project he’s been working on for years, something I plan on writing about here. I recommend you give it a listen here and see if it’s to your taste. Some episodes are less gaming-oriented, but the one about the Ur-Game is phenomenal.
I hope this was an enjoyable read.