Your Game Needs More SMGs, Patches, and Graffiti

This is a scrap of setting that might be useful in the future.

There was a Great War. Who the antagonist was, or who was at fault, or who the leaders were are all lost, and all the Great Colleges have small departments of harried historians who argue what they think are facts from the past, one they cannot even begin to explain. 

But the detritus of this Great War remains. 

Imagine if one day all the gasoline on earth simply evaporated. And every effort to refine oil to make gasoline was of no avail, it would simply turn into vapor and escape the atmosphere. Every car on the highway simply rolled to a gentle stop. There would be frustration, a focus on fixing things, a mad rush for electric cars, but eventually, people would move on. Imagine living in that world a couple generations after that. You’re somewhat aware of what these big rusting lines of shells were supposed to be, but what do you make of a car air freshener? Or a tire iron? Or a tire? Or a drive-in movie theater? Or a car wash? Or a race track? Or these long trails of no longer maintained asphalt?

The Great War might have been between two forces of equally equipped nations, maybe even a civil war, that fractured into more and more different factions. Like if during WWI the French army actually succeeded in mutinying against the government, and the German Army went “yeah us too”, and those mutinies had mutinies, and some squads and companies just left and became bandits or joined the other side, until whatever killed all the technology happened and the conflict was over because all of the tech that ran the weapons was gone, along with any idea of why anyone was fighting in the first place. Like a society ruled by the guillotine until the day people realized they could just stop feeding the guillotine.

Detritus remains, never in the way it was originally used. You might see a small urchin child wearing a black ballistic helmet too big for him, but you’re just as likely to see them used as decoration or soup pots. A laser rifle has the optic lenses pulled out to make a wind chime that scatters the light in a beautiful way. Almost everyone carries a Ka-Bar style combat knife. Books of ciphers and return calls have the codes ripped out to be used as journals. For every husk of a tank dotted in the fields and towns, maybe one in a thousand has a working turret with enough charge for a couple of shots. Every one in ten thousand has enough in the charge battery for a cross country journey. But there are thousands for you to try, abandoned, shoot-through throughout the land. You throw CDs. 

The war used lasers and batteries, but there’s something missing to make it work, a compound or element no longer found in nature. Maybe it disappeared naturally, or maybe some doomsday device removed all traces from the world. Batteries still hold their charge, but can’t be charged again. Tearing apart the devices to reverse engineer them reveals nothing (so far).

That’s what it’s like for the people who live in the Long Rim: they understand what a knife is, and they understand they’re putting helmets to a different use, but explaining mass combat of thousands of men maneuvering in tanks with cannons and close quarter laser rifle combat in massive cities where millions of people used to live? That’s out of the scope for most of these people living nowadays. 

The only exception to the rule is submachine guns. These ancient factions were worried that some kind of EMP device or some other catastrophic event would destroy their laser weapons. That they needed to have backups in case everything went dark. They were right. In abandoned outposts and underground armories all over this Long Rim, there are bunkers with rows and rows and rows of short black carbines. They’re calibered in something in between .22 and 9mm: something not big enough to kill with one shot (unless unlucky) but not something so small that recoil isn’t an issue. They were old fashioned, almost antiques to these Great War factions. They’re space age to the locals, who are still enjoying horses and bows. Everyone knows where you can find some guns, ammo is a little more scarce, with most commonly bought ammo usually reloaded with a different style of chemical compound. Never used bullets are almost a currency unto themself, but are somewhat hard to find outside of cracking an old armory.

As for patches and jackets to put them on, I’m sure there were enough left after the war. Like, a gang of bikers all using a logician company patch as their sigil, or someone wearing a vest made up of the same patch, over and over and over, or a historian collecting patches and putting them in tiny boxes for his research. People sewing bootleg patches, and new custom made patches, ways to identify and individualize. 

Just a little writing to keep the blog moving.

Make Up Words to Make Your Players Cry

So I had an idea for adding a bit of exotic flair to your games in foreign lands. 

First, write out about 12 different two-letter words. Try saying these words in different combinations to get a mouthfeel for your new fantasy language. You could also think of some larger words and then break them down into basic phonemes.

Whenever you need a strange, foreign-sounding word, first roll a d6: that’s how many phonemic parts the word has. If you need help, assign each part of the word to a d12 and roll those as well.

Then, roll a d6:

  1. The word sounds as its spelled, no wonkiness or strangeness. 
  2. The word is has a different emphasis on the syllables for this language: roll a 1d4 (beginning, middle, end, all of them) and figure out which part of the word is pronounced strangely. 
  3. The word means both the thing and the opposite thing: a wound and a not wound, healed, or a sword and a not sword, tool. Lost in Translation ensues. 
  4. The word, if not pronounced correctly, is a slur. A player who mispronounces gets a charisma disadvantage or attacked, whatever’s funnier. 
  5. The word, if composed of four or more language units, is actually two words, that together make this word. Especially fun if you already have some words in play. 
  6. The word has another word that’s somewhat interchangeable with it (dirk, knife, dagger). Whenever the player says the word, roll a second word that the NPC might respond with it. 

If you’re like me, you can keep track of your fantasy words using a spreadsheet, and reward your players when they remember to use them, like how’d you reward them for remembering the NPC’s real name instead of the made of almost names they actually use. 

I’m going to start churning these out more regularly.

Gold Sickness

Let’s talk about Dwarves. 

Dwarves are vectors of gold: they can smell gold, they desire gold above all things, they go mad without gold, they are afflicted by the Gold Sickness. And it’s not even like they want gold because it’s valuable (even though it is), it’s like they need it to live (maybe they eat gold? Like Gorons eating rocks from the Legend of Zelda?). It’s a psychological thing, it’s Greed with a capital G, it’s a Big Boy Sin. And there’s never enough gold to satisfy a dwarf. Adding a dwarf to the party is a mixed bag because dwarves are like labrador retrievers: they can smell gold out, but if you don’t keep them on a leash, they’re going to steal it all and shove it in their dirty little mouth and chop off your legs with a handaxe. Exactly like labrador retrievers. 

Dwarves come to human lands because there’s not a lot of real estate left for them where they come from in the Underdark. They join adventuring groups because while they can smell gold out they’re not invulnerable to a crossbow bolt through the head.  

There are a couple of different game mechanics you can cobble together: there’s Dungeon Crawl Classic’s Underground Skills (Smaller concentrations, down to a single coin, can still be smelled but require concentration and have scent ranges as low as 40’ for a single coin or gem), there’s Dwarven Greed from the always impressive Torchbearer, and I feel confident that Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay had special dwarven madness as a mechanic for their Dwarfs (following the old ways of grammar laid out by Tolkien himself). You might even find references in the GLOG and in some old level tables for Flail Snails content to dwarves and gold. 

The Gold Sickness is an actual sickness: as dwarves collect more, gold they get more sick. It makes you ill and it breaks out in scaly rashes all over your body and eventually it breaks all your bones and makes you breathe fire. Dwarves are dragons; dragons are just dwarves at the end of the Gold Sickness. That’s also why dwarves hate dragons, it’s like you going to a nursing home and hanging out with extremely old people: there’s a touch of revulsion and fear because there’s nothing that makes you feel your own mortality than hanging around those who are so close to death. Likewise, there’s nothing more revolting to a dwarf than seeing where his gold lust leads him. He can escape the Gold Sickness just as well as you can escape death.

In fact, it’s so off-putting that dwarves that shut down their Greed usually give in to Wrath, starting for themselves their own little black book full of Grudges. Grudges are a way to hold on to yourself: if you remember why you hate a person, that’s tied to a personal offense, an emotional reaction. And that emotional response keeps you from stripping naked and rolling in a pile of coins and becoming gigantic and scaly. Grudges are the way a dwarf remembers who he or she is. That and fire engine red mohawks.

You either die a banker or live to see yourself become a punk rocker. As all things should be. 

Found and Earned

I’m not sure how focused or detailed I want to be with these blog posts, if they should flow from my head or if I should write them beforehand and post them later. But yeah, here goes this: from the ever deceitful heart.

There are two kinds of knowledge (just like they’re a binary amount of binaries, like two kinds of people, I guess), found knowledge and earned knowledge.

Found knowledge comes from the act of research, of reading books and watching videos and drinking coffee with old men, discovering more and more about the world around you through the knowledge that’s lying around. You can find out a lot about the Mongol Empire or the political situation of Shanghai in the 1930s or Japanese Christian persecution from reading books and drinking coffee. It’s a relatively painless way of understanding more of the world.

And then there’s earned knowledge, the knowledge you gain from putting your hand on the stove and burning your palms, or telling a girlfriend you love her too soon. It’s something that is earned; as Mark Twain said, “Good judgment is the result of experience, and experience the result of bad judgment.” And I think if you want to make something, you need a little of both. You need the knowledge of what already exists, and you need the experience of trying to create something that doesn’t.

I’m trying to write a game system, my very own fantasy heartbreaker. I see a place in the OSR community (not that I am a part of the OSR community) for a particular kind of game, like a hole missing in a puzzle. I’m killing my literary father, as Harold Bloom might put it, carving out what I see as a place my own DMing style might live. And the first step of that is recognizing what needs to be stolen and what needs to be built.

There’s something off-putting about the way B/X and old OSR retroclones use miles and feet and yards for travel, especially after reading Slumbering Ursine Dunes and getting my first taste of a proper point crawl. There’s a majesty to the Six Mile Hex, and simply allowing an adventuring party to cut their way across jungles and mountains, but there’s also a clumsiness to it as well.

The Ultra Violet Grasslands continued this fascination for me (and it’s where the blog title was inspired from) and I think it is an amazing book everyone interested in gonzo tabletop gaming should read. But I still feel there’s something missing. There’s a gap between the focus of travel days and the way rations work in UVG and the more modular use of quarter days and individual actions used in a game like Forbidden Lands. There’s a place for more refinement there, and a chance to tie it into more of the game.

Returning to knowledge, a lot of DMs (especially me) read our gamebooks and think that we have an understanding of the way the game is supposed to work. We forget that games are meant to be played, and we forgo the actual earned experience of playing the game. I’ve played UVG, but there are so many more games I need to play before I would feel comfortable leaving the world of found knowledge to enter the world of earned knowledge. However, as the good hymn says, “If you tarry ’til you’re better, you will never come at all.”

Go read Superhorse’s Superblog, he’s actually got rules and things you can bring to a game table, instead of pontificating about how before one can roll a die, one must first create the universe.