Mister Monster's Workshop

Category: ports

  • The people who live anywhere

    The people who live anywhere

    I turned out to devote most of this week to session prep for a session that never happened – too many players had to cancel. Still, it let me get into doing some actual research for creating Nunnehi NPCs, which was kind of interesting.

    Nunnehi, for those not nerdy enough to know, are the World of Darkness faerie-folk native to the Americas. I’ve never really gotten into them, despite being a big Changeling: the Dreaming fan – the Kithain always felt plentiful enough to fill any number of campaigns. But given that I’m now running a sometime Werewolf campaign where one of the characters is an Uktena and the other character is a Fianna of American-Indian descent, it felt like they ought to show up.

    Which means first scouring Wikipedia for articles on Apache culture and history, since I figured my particular Nunnehi NPCs were residents of an Apache reservation, and then trying to broaden it to some other tribes who are connected to individual Nunnehi Families (like Inuits for the Inuas, Cherokee for the Nanehi, etc). This may take me a while, but I think I’m starting to get at least some kind of foggy grasp of what sort of folklore the Nunnehi come from.

    Things to pay especial attention to next might include traditional foodstuffs – those always tend to set the tone, and might give me more of a sense for the natural habitat my game takes place in, besides (I really do need to get a better feel for junipers and cacti). And apparently there is a series of thrillers by some dude named Tony Hillerman who features a lot of Navajo characters, and that might give me a better sense of their modern, everyday lives than a lot of theory.

  • Let’s make – ze magic!

    Let’s make – ze magic!

    So… what did I randomly end up working on this week? Because the only certain thing is, it wasn’t what I was meant to be working on!

    Yeah, it was my Mage: the Ascension port. I wrote up some more definite Paradox Effects to have a grab bag of them ready.

    Mage is one of those games that are definitely crying out for different rules. Not necessarily simpler rules, not necessarily more complex rules – just anything other than the mess it’s saddled with, which manages to be at once overly convoluted and vague and directionless. It is, accordingly, one I’ve put a lot of work into, and I’m by no means finished yet.

    The heart of the system, though, is the spellcasting rules, which rely on two separate moves, like so:

    WORKING MAGICK

    When you cast a quick spell, describe the Effect you’re after and how you will use your Spheres and Paradigm to achieve it. Then roll +Arete. 7-9, choose 2 options below. 10+, choose 3.

    • The Effect lasts until the end of the scene.
    • The Effect does precisely what you intended, no more and no less.
    • The Effect affects something other than yourself.
    • The Effect doesn’t deplete your mystical will (-1 ongoing to all Arete rolls until you get a chance to rest).
    • You don’t need to mark Quintessence.

    When you perform an elaborate ritual, describe the Effect you’re after and how you will use your Spheres and Paradigm to achieve it. Then roll +Arete. 7-9, choose 2 options below. 10+, choose 3.

    • The Effect lasts for as long as you need it to.
    • No hard-to-replace resource is lost, destroyed, or used up.
    • The ritual doesn’t take a long time.
    • You don’t need to mark Quintessence.
    • The Effect is especially strong, adding +1 to the mechanical effects (i.e., it does Damage-2 instead of Damage-1, clears 2 wound boxes instead of 1, gives +2 ongoing instead of +1 ongoing, etc).

    Take -1 ongoing to rolls to create a magickal Effect for each Effect you currently have active. Note that an Effect only have to be maintained if it either affects a living being (who inherently exert spiritual pressure to return to their natural form) or if its continuation is considered impossible under Consensual Reality. Thus, witch-light hovering in mid-air must be maintained, but if you use a spell to set a piece of wood on fire, the wood will keep burning on its own once ignited.

    The main power of magick is to change or explore the fiction. If you use magick to create a hole in the ground, then now there’s a hole in the ground; if you use magick to read someone’s mind, the GM tells you what they’re thinking about. Magick rewards creative thinking and clever approaches, not brute force. However, if it really comes down to the nitty-gritty, a magickal Effect can do the following things if the caster can explain how:

    • Create a Damage-1 (Damage-2 for Forces) weapon for its duration.
    • Clear 1 wound box.
    • Give a weapon Damage+1 (Damage+2 for Forces) for its duration.
    • Give a weapon the AP tag for its duration.
    • Grant someone Armour+1 for its duration.
    • Grant +1 ongoing to specific actions for its duration.

    PARADOX

    When you work magic carelessly, Paradox can result. Mark Paradox for each condition that is true:

    • The Arete roll failed.
    • The Effect was vulgar, i.e. obviously magical; couldn’t have been reasonably mistaken for coincidence, a trick of perception, cutting-edge technology, etc. Effects that could be plausibly explained away are called coincidental. This condition never applies in the Umbra or in a sanctum dedicated to your Paradigm. Note that repeated uses within a short period of time can make a coincidental Effect become vulgar; one strange coincidence might be accepted, whereas several in short order can itself be seen as a sign of supernatural power.
    • The Effect was vulgar and at least one Sleeper who is not a sincere believer in your Paradigm observed the Effect take place.

    A character has 15 Paradox boxes divided into Paradox rows of three Paradox boxes each (or 20 boxes in rows of four if the character has Background: Familiar). When the GM makes a Paradox Move, the severity of the move depends on how many rows are fully filled in.

    Paradox is the Consensus punishing you for your temerity in defying it, so to banish it again you must show that you can play by the rules even when it’s inconvenient. Thus, every time you fail an Attribute (not Arete) roll, you clear 1 Paradox box.

    Arete, for comparison, starts at +0 and can rise as high as +2 at the end of a long campaign, but you also take +1 to any Arete rolls that fits your Avatar Essence, and another +1 for any attempt to cast a Rote you have previously memorised. Combined with the way you’ll often have to choose to take penalties to Arete, and the way that Paradox builds up over time, it makes magic something that starts out very powerful as a mage steps fresh into the scene, but gets increasingly iffy as a situation drags on – which feels like how it should be.

    All in all, this system is working out reasonably well in playtests so far, and gives me plenty of opportunities to both make my players feel powerful and to mess with them – both of which are things that I, needless to say, especially enjoy…

  • Nothing new to add, so here, have some mages

    Nothing new to add, so here, have some mages

    This hasn’t been a very productive week by any means. I didn’t manage to do any actual work on any actual project – instead, I seem to have spent most of it inventing NPCs for my Mage: the Ascension game. Which I guess needed doing at some point, but still, my inspiration remains fickle and unreliable.

    All that said, here’s what I’ve come up with for the Traditions in the San Francisco area:

    • Cassie Moran – aging rock goddess and Cultist of Ecstasy. She uses her precognition and clairvoyance to play the entire underground music scene like an instrument, trying to build it up to a force for enlightenment, rebellion, and all-around grooviness. Anything she does is probably motivated by its sixth-level consequences.
    • Jonathan White Eagle – life coach to the wealthy and Dreamspeaker. Is gruff and set in his ways, all the more so since he worries that his attempts to make rich people connect to their spiritual side is diluting his own ancestral ways. He’s the last Dreamspeaker in the area, and looking to take on an apprentice.
    • Jeremy Linton – geeky pencil-neck and Virtual Adept. He messes around with nano-machine clouds and is enthusiastic about the idea of turning the Earth into “computronium” that will rearrange itself to the will of any human. Well, any human who’s good with computers, at least, but who cares about those other meat-headed jocks?
    • Rosa “Rush” Martinez – tough biker chick and Virtual Adept. A “neo-nomad” who thinks that permanent residence is just something The Man has invented to keep track of you better. Part of a cabal with Jeremy and Ranjit, and tends to handle the rough stuff for them.
    • Ranjit Morrow – a self-proclaimed “Doctor of Mesmerism” and Son of Ether. Practices hypnotic suggestion to manipulate “archetypes of the collective unconscious” and draw forth “unresolved defense mechanisms from failed stages of development.” Likes to stroke his beard wisely at people and puff his pipe. Tends to hang out with Jeremy and Rosa and handle all that nasty “people skills” stuff for them.
    • Rowan Flynn – a “warrior bard,” a Cultist of Ecstasy who would probably have been happier as a Verbena. An erstwhile apprentice of Cassie’s, but seems to be having some conflict with her now. She can heal people through harp music, incense, and touches, or work herself into a berserker frenzy where she can feel no pain. Has some anger management issues.
    • Aloysius Crane – a masochist and piercing enthusiast and Cultist of Ecastasy. Looks absolutely terrifying but is extremely soft-spoken and mild-mannered if you get to talking with him. He considers submission to pain to be the path to true enlightenment. He mostly backs up Cassie in whatever she does.

    And for the worthy opposition in the Technocracy, without names as of yet but called by the names the Traditions give them:

    • “The Nice Doctor”, NWO: A middle-aged man with long, wild-grown grey hair, usually wearing shabby clothes, cracked glasses, and untied sneakers. Despite looking like a crazy hobo, he’s a frequent visitor of city hall where he “consults” on details of policy being written, and a popular guest lecturer at USF within a surprising number of social sciences. His go-to apparatus is an innocent-looking device about the size and shape of a pen, which can emit high-frequency sonic waves that renders people instantly pliable to hypnotic suggestion. People who threaten to rock the boat in a serious way might be meet him, and the person who walks away from such meetings frequently has very different views than the person who came to it.
    • “The Woman in Grey”, NWO: a prim, plain woman in her forties, always dressed in a grey business suit and with her hair in a bun. She is most commonly seen taking part in investigations of major crimes and threats to national security, with the other detectives and agents involved being under the impression that she’s from one of any number of alphabet-soup agencies, or possibly one that’s too secret to even have a name. Either way, her cases tend to get solved promptly and without her taking credit, but almost always in some way that demonstrates the reliability of public investigators and the absolute need to keep giving them any and all powers they ask for. If you have done something illegal in your life – anything – then she most likely doesn’t care, but she absolutely knows about it, and has a meticulously prepared dossier to present you with should she ever need to apply some pressure.
    • “The Blank”, NWO: the Traditionalists are only mostly sure that this is a single person, and only because a number of people who seemed to have very different physical appearances have been noted as having suspiciously similar magical Resonances. Either way, the Blank kills people who the Technocracy regards as irredeemably disruptive to the Consensus; Marauders, Nephandi, terrorists, serial killers, the occasional non-human supernatural. When no one needs to be bumped off, the Blank is believed to be managing security at the San Francisco construct, but hell knows.
    • “Ol’ Henry”, Void Engineer: not technically part of the NWO amalgam made up of the Nice Doctor, the Woman in Grey, and the Blank, but sort of loosely attached to it, Henry is a Void Engineer who’s been grounded for extreme uncooperativeness and set to track down and dispose of the hobgoblins, rogue spirits, or sundry creepy-crawlies that San Francisco has more than its share of. He looks like a scruffy man in a faded jumpsuit, with a pair of high-tech bracelets with a tremendous array of built-in weapons. The Paradox building up from his use of vulgar Effects (the Umbra is so much more forgiving of such things, and he’s too stubborn to change his ways) has caused him to develop some peculiarities, like nictitating membranes and odd subdermal tumours that sometimes seems to move across his body. He has been known to grudgingly team up with Traditionalists to take down his prey; he has no particular love for Reality Deviants, but then, he seems to have no particular love for anyone or anything.
    • “Mr. Slick”, Syndicate: young, trendy, confident, and oilier than a can of anchovies. He firmly believes that what people want, really want, is the coolest and most expensive toys, and he’s got the personal collection of overdesigned bleeding-edge gadgets to prove it. He is also heavily into youth outreach, trying to mold the next generation into proper go-getters by showing them the benefits of a completely materialistic lifestyle; this has led him to both sponsor the Trinity Burning gang and to take promising young students from underprivileged backgrounds under his wing.
    • “Numbercrunch”, Syndicate: a strange, autistic teenage girl who rarely ventures out of her den of a thousand monitors beneath the construct. When she does go out for a field investigation, she wears a hood and headphones to prevent sensory overload. Her Empowering came when she read “The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People” and then spent the next forty-eight hours writing a new edition with another forty-two habits. She goes through media output and statistical data and predicting the future over the entire area, making the Syndicate amalgam very hard to take by surprise.
    • “The Slav”, supposedly Syndicate but actually Nephandus: a surly, hirsute Russian who looks more like a janitor than the master of middle management that he is. He does consulting work for a number of R&D divisions, where he snarls at engineers until their output skyrockets. He also heads up the a reclusive team that produces experimental weapons for field testing. Unknown to his colleagues, the Slav is actually in league with Pentex, who supplies him with Bane-powered fetishes that slowly corrupt the mages who use them. In his youth, he was a fervent believer in the American Dream and the promises of capitalism, having been raised on horror stories of his grandparents’ time in the Soviet Union. However, he Fell upon realising just how amoral the Syndicate truly was and now works to make capitalism every bit as bad as its worst critics claim it is; a human race that can turn any and every economic system into a nightmare, he believes, deserves to suffer.
  • R.E.S.P.E.C.T., find out what it means to me

    R.E.S.P.E.C.T., find out what it means to me

    This week’s roleplaying session was cancelled, I’m sorry to say – one player not being able to make it I can roll with, but when we’re down to half strength I have to admit that the stars are just not right. At least prepping Werewolf got me going on some alterations I’ve been meaning to make for a while now.

    For one thing, I’ve scrapped the Bonds system, which is meant to help the players start out with some pre-defined relationships to each other. Sounds good in theory, but in practice all the players I’ve ever subjected it to have hated it. As a result, I’ve been drifting away from it in my later ports. It’s only in the Werewolf port because it was my first and I was still cribbing a lot of stuff from Dungeon World and Apocalypse World.

    Still, I really do want some kind of mechanic that encourages players to act out the meeting-between-cultures aspect of the game. I feel like a major part of any World of Darkness game is people with very different viewpoints coming together and realising that they all have something to offer, and that’s really cool. And it feels especially vital to Werewolf, where the backstory has a ton of disasters and tragedies caused by one faction deciding that it was just plain right about everything.

    So here’s my new attempt: whenever a player in some way pays tribute to their Tribe’s distinctive nature (whether by words or deeds), and the other players are down with it, that player holds Respect. Respect can be spent to give bonuses to other players’ actions. Essentially, proudly representing your heritage and being open to learning from each other allows you to function better as a team.

    I’m not sure if it needs some more support. What I mean with “pay tribute to their Tribe’s nature,” I mean things like being a scheming bastard for a Shadow Lord or a street-smart survivor for a Bone Gnawer – acting out the archetype, basically. I guess that might be pretty easy for a long-time World of Darkness freak like me but a bit harder for someone I’m trying to introduce to the setting? Dunno. I’ve made the mistake of over-explaining things before, though, so I’ll leave it like this for now.

  • First free download is up!

    First free download is up!

    This week, I can report a milestone in this site’s existence: I have put my first PDF up for download. It’s my Powered by the Apocalypse port of Mummy: the Resurrection. I added the fourth level of every Hekau and wrote up some obambo wraiths, so now I’m declaring it to be finished. I might add more later – there are always the need for more NPCs, and there are of course fifth, sixth, seventh and eighth levels of Hekau that I haven’t converted – but for now, anyone who wants it can go over to the download page (link to the upper right) and help themselves.

    I’m quite proud of this port, since Mummy is a game that always needed a lot more love than it got. I didn’t just need to create a bunch of rule systems, I needed to come up with an intended playstyle and setting from the rather anemic hints that exist in the official books. In the end, I tried to make it a game about sinister plots foiled and strongholds of evil infiltrated, since that seemed to be what the spells and rituals in the source material encouraged: the impression I get was of mummies as a sort of secret agents, James Bond with mystical amulets and alchemical potions instead of high-tech gadgets. And I spent a lot of time researching Cairo, Egypt, and Islam, not to get the details right (because let’s face it, I probably got most of them wrong) but to get some sort of feel for it all, some idea of how the Middle Eastern parts of the World of Darkness look and sound like.

    It’s not perfect, of course. Like I’ve talked about before, there were areas where I just had to give up, where the problems I saw with the game were inherent in the setting and I couldn’t fix them without rewriting the whole thing from scratch. For one thing, if I created my own game inspired by Mummy – and I might some day – I would dial down the way that things in the Shadowlands are impossible to manipulate because they are reflections of material things, and instead make it more like a zombie apocalypse setting or a survival horror game: everything is broken down and unhelpful, but most of it can be salvaged, repurposed or repaired, if you just work long and hard enough at it. “Maybe, if you’re persistent and lucky” is a lot more interesting to tell the players than, “no, that’s impossible.”

    Still, it’s the first officially finished project of the game-design kick I’ve been on for the last couple of years. Hopefully there’ll be many more to come.

  • The ghost of the ferry

    The ghost of the ferry

    This week, our dauntless mummies crossed the River Nile and approached the spectre fortress, where they were promptly ambushed. Nothing much else happened, it was a fairly slow session – partly because I’ve been to tired, demoralised and tooth-achey this week to really do much preparation.

    At least the players liked the wraith NPC I created on the spot, Sabriyah the anal-retentive ferrywoman. Having some quick categories to mash together is really helpful for making NPCs. For wraiths, I have one list of traits based on cause of death, and one list of traits based on their main supernatural powers, so for a ferrywoman I lumped together death by drowning (meaning her cause of death was Happenstance) and the main abilities of Usury and Argos (meaning she can transfer spiritual energy between people, all the better to collect her fee, and travel instantly between spots, suitable for if the ferry capsises).

    Physically, that meant that Sabriyah had pitch-black unblinking eyes, a slack and bloated face, and an overly precise way of talking… which instantly gave me an impression of someone who seemed deeply autistic, who fussed over every detail while having very little grasp of the big picture. I decided that, having died from being insufficiently mindful of safety while out on a boat, she had emerged into the Underworld hyper-focused on always minding her Ps and Qs. She’d been sitting in her boathouse down by the Nile for years when the players found her, waiting for instructions from a Hierarchy that no longer existed in any meaningful way, because she couldn’t bring herself to act improperly. Tragic, romantic, and a bit creepy – precisely the right mix for a wraith.

    I doubt I’ll get to use her for much in the future, but it’s nice to know that I can still improvise, at least with the right tools.

  • Injuries are a pain

    Injuries are a pain

    I had reason to fiddle with my Blue Rose port this week. It’s one I’m particularly fond of, since it’s more experimental than the others – and a lot more divorced from the original rules, for that matter. Blue Rose, in both its editions, is really just D&D “but without, you know, the problematic stuff.” This is not to say that that’s without its appeal – hey, I may not be refined enough to be acceptable to the woke, but I’m not crude enough to be acceptable to the lowbrow roll-around-in-sewage crowd either! I have my own craving for prettiness and cuddliness. So sometimes I enjoy slaying monsters but in a nice, genteel, socially acceptable sort of way.

    That said, there is a considerable mismatch between the rules and the stated intent of the game. If it’s all about teh feelz, then there shouldn’t be hundreds of pages of combat rules. D&D has hundreds of pages of combat rules because it really is mostly about making other living creatures go SPLAT (and keeping them from SPLATing you first). If you want to create a game of noble brightness, cute talking animals and refined tea parties, you shouldn’t take the D&D rules and then add a few stern instructions about not using them too much. You should make a game that is about the thing you mean for the game to be about.

    So when I sat down to port Blue Rose, I made personality and disposition central to the rules. More specifically, I took the mostly-irrelevant-except-as-a-roleplaying-aid Tarot motif of the original game and put it first. Every character has three Traits: one card of the Major Arcana that represents their overall goals and ideals, one card of the Minor Arcana that represents their greatest virtue, and one reversed card of the Minor Arcana that represents their greatest personal failing. When you roll to do anything, you try to involve your Traits, and each one you can invoke gives you a bonus. It’s working out pretty well so far.

    Which brings me to the damage system. Damage systems are almost invariably the hardest part for me in making a game, because they’re so hard to keep from being fun-spoilers. The risk of getting hurt has to be omnipresent, because that’s always going to be a stake in any sort of action scene (and even Blue Rose should have action scenes). But if characters get hurt too easily, and particularly if it takes too long for them to heal up, then they can end up sidelining players for absolute ages. No fun.

    Part of the problem is of course that in real life, injury is incredibly serious. Even a strained muscle is going to cramp your style for days. A serious injury, like you can easily get in mortal combat? That’s going to leave you bedridden for months. A game where there is easy access to magical healing can get around that, but of course a game like that is high fantasy almost per definition; a world where someone can unbreak your leg with a wave of their hand is a world that is very, very far away from our own.

    I almost invariably start out making the injury rules too punishing, and then have to scale them back (while grumbling about how I am having to compromise my artistic vision just because those darn players can’t keep themselves out of harm’s way…). In this case, the way I handled injury in the game was by making players “lock” their Traits to indicate emotional distress. A locked Trait still gives a bonus when it’s invoked, but it also gives a penalty to any roll where it’s not invoked. The idea being that the more stress a character is under, the more she defaults to her fundamental convictions and has trouble seeing how anything that is unrelated to them could be important.

    So far so good. Now, the rules for healing has been rewritten to the following:

    When you give yourself time to heal, roll +Conviction. If you are in some way aided by an NPC who has Touch on you, take +1 forward to the roll. 6-, you unlocked a Trait, but your introspection allows something new to sneak up on you; the Narrator makes a move. 7-9, you unlock up to two Traits. If an NPC aided in your recovery, they put Touch on you. 10+, the same, and if you want you may also either clear Corruption or remove one person’s Touch on you (which can be the NPC who aided in your recovery, if any).

    Note: While give yourself time to heal is a fairly passive move and can seem difficult to apply Traits to, the Narrator should encourage the player to describe what she is ruminating on over her convalescence, and what lessons she has learned from the pain. As long as her description is broadly in line with a Trait, it should apply. Thus, it should actually be fairly easy to at least roll with +2 for recovering.

    Examples: Bandaging your own wounds, having a drink with your friends, enjoying some me time.

    That means that even if the roll fails, you still unlock at least one Trait, and you can potentially unlock more with a success. Hopefully that’ll make players a little sturdier and less likely to spend all their time neurotic and sulking – it’s still suppose to be a nice game, after all…

  • Gear Porn

    Gear Porn

    I ended up spending this week working on the Dark Heresy port, particularly on the gear section.

    I have to admit, I’m not really a fan of gear in roleplaying games. It just feels anal-retentive to have to list every fiddly little implement your character carries around, and to have creative ideas that you can’t implement because you just didn’t bring the right tool. I’m more about the skills and inherent properties, the things that are always true about your character. But of course this is Warhammer 40,000, and running Warhammer 40,000 without drooling over the badass toys is just making a complete mockery of the whole thing.

    I did try to streamline it a bit, though. I assigned every weapon, armour and doodad a Req value between 1 and 10, and then assigned every Career a starting amount of Req. In between every mission, your Req refills and you can spend it on requisitioning new equipment. And the effects of different items have been simplified to the point where it’s hopefully easier to remember – a lot of things just give a +1 bonus to some particular move.

    I note, not for the first time, that it’s very unclear who this port is even for. I mean, I’m pretty sure that anyone who likes Powered by the Apocalypse games is going to think it misses the point entirely by having so many over-specific rules, and anyone who likes Dark Heresy the way it is is of course not going to see the point of my converting it to an entirely different format. I guess in the end, it’s just for me, to make it possible to at some point run games in the Warhammer 40,000 universe that don’t feel quite so painful.

    Of course, disliking pain might also be missing the whole point of Warhammer 40,000…

  • Dark Heresy powerup

    Dark Heresy powerup

    Well, tying back to my thoughts from the last Dark Heresy game, me and the player talked about it after today’s session and it was agreed that the higher starting Characteristics would be a good idea, for many of the reasons I mentioned in that post. We’ll see next time how that works out, but I feel like it’s the right move.

    I did manage to write a bit on the Corruption rules this week in preparation for this session, too, so here is where they stand:

    CORRUPTION AND MUTATION

    Humanity is eternally under spiritual siege, the dark lore of Chaos threatening every second to find its way into each human’s soul. When it finds a vector, whether through unclean teachings or the direct touch of Warp entities, it threatens to remake the victim of the revelation into its twisted image. Whenever you encounter blasphemy or supernatural horrors, you gain some amount of Corruption Points. Whenever your Corruption Points equal or exceed 10, reduce them by the largest possible multiple of 10 (i.e., from 17 to 7, or from 23 to 3) and roll to battle for your very soul. This may cause you to advance your Damnation Track, which looks as follows:

    [ ] Choose a Malignancy.

    [ ] Choose a Malignancy.

    [ ] Choose a Malignancy.

    [ ] Choose a Malignancy.

    [ ] Choose a Mutation.

    [ ] Choose a Malignancy.

    [ ] Choose a Malignancy.

    [ ] Choose a Mutation.

    [ ] Choose a Malignancy.

    [ ] You permanently transform into a deranged Chaos Spawn under the GM’s control. Make a new character.

    Malignancies and Mutations are both permanent. Purity, once lost, is never regained.

    MALIGNANCIES

    • Wasted Frame. The flesh wither on your bones. Permanently reduce your Strength by 1.
    • Poor Health. Your breathing is laboured and your blood flows sluggishly. Permanently reduce your Toughness by 1.
    • Palsy. You suffer from constant tics and tremors. Permanently reduce your Agility by 1.
    • Dark-Hearted. You are filled unholy spite that you can never entirely hide from others. Permanently reduce your Fellowship by 1.
    • Morbid. Your critical thinking is constantly distracted by macabre fantasies. Permanently reduce your Intelligence by 1.
    • Malign Sight. Unclean voices whisper in your ears and nightmare visions dance in the corner of your eyes. Permanently reduce your Perception by 1.
    • Skin Affliction. You become plagued by boils, scabs and weeping sores. You are immediately noticeable and memorable. If you have or acquire the Unremarkable talent, it cancels out this Malignancy, making you recognisable to anyone who’s ever had a good look at you but not immediately noticeable in a crowd – you look terrible, but no more so than any dozen other diseased beggars. Without that talent, people stare at you in horror wherever you go and there is probably not as wretched a visage in the entire star system.
    • Night Eyes. Bright light hurts your eyes, forcing you to squint. This does not confer any sort of ability to see in the dark, so unless you have access to that from some other source, your vision is always impaired from either too much light or too little. Your visual acuity at the best of times is roughly equivalent to what it would be in darkness lit by a single candle, with all what that implies for your ability to spot things and discover people sneaking up on you.
    • Witch-Mark. You gain a cosmetic but highly obvious physical mutation, such as a small tentacle growing from your elbow or a third eye in the back of your neck. You must conceal the mutation at all cost or risk being executed for being a mutant.
    • Night Terrors. Like the Horrific Nightmares Disorder.
    • Strange Addiction. Like the Addiction Disorder, but instead of a normal drug, you are addicted to some strange substance, like rose petals or widows’ tears.
    • Ashen Taste. Food and drink tastes foul to you, and you can’t bring yourself to ingest more than absolutely necessary. As a result, you are perpetually weak with hunger. Whenever you achieve a result of 10-14 on a roll to refuse to fall, take -2 ongoing to further rolls to refuse to fall instead of -1 ongoing.
    • Irrational Nausea. Something entirely innocent causes you to feel sick at the sight of it. When you face your anathema, roll +Toughness. 9-, you become violently ill and must spend the next scene doing little more than puking your guts out. 10-14, you master your treacherous belly, but take -1 ongoing while you remain in the presence of the anathema. 15+, you manage to push down your bile. For a weakness, choose one of:
      • Flowers in bloom
      • Human laughter
      • Fresh food
      • Prayer books and holy items
      • Bare skin (other than faces and hands)
    • Blackouts. You suffer regular blackouts. As a GM move, the GM can declare that the consequences of something you have no recollection of doing suddenly catch up with you.
    • Hatred. You develop an irrational hatred for some group of people. This is not the sort of holy fury that the Imperium approves of; not only do you have no socially acceptable reason to hate the group, but instead of being strengthened by your hatred you loathe them so much that you can barely function when one of them is around. You take -1 ongoing to all Fellowship and Willpower rolls at such times. Choose one of the groups below:
      • Soldiers and warriors.
      • Priests and the deeply religious.
      • Scholars and bureaucrats.
      • Lawkeeper and authority figures.
      • Common labourers and the poor.
      • Tech-priests and technomancers.
      • Criminals and outlaws.
    • Bloodlust. When the battle frenzy is upon you, mere victory is not enough; you must see the light die in the foe’s eyes. If enemies flee from you, you must chase them by whatever available means is most efficient, even if that might catch you in a trap or if it pulls you away from your true objectives.
    • Distrustful. You cannot bring yourself to trust a stranger, and it makes interaction with them problematic. When making a Fellowship roll that involves strangers, treat any result of 10+ as a result of 10-14.
    • Self-Scarification. Like the Self-Mortification Disorder, except instead of wholesome religious flagellation your self-harm takes the form of carving elaborate occult symbols into your flesh with a blade.
    • Vivisector. You are driven to cut up living creatures and study their insides. While PETA has been disbanded for many thousands of years, this behaviour draws its share of ire. As a move, the GM can proclaim that you sliced up something you really shouldn’t, whether someone’s pet, a valuable prisoner, or a creature with a big, angry mate.

    As you can see, the Mutations are still missing, but since by these rules no one can get a Mutation before taking a whole lot of Malignancies, I still have some time to work on converting those.

    No work done on the GM Moves, though. I really do need to sit down with one. I feel like I’m getting better at bringing the grimdark (this session included stifling bureaucracy in the face of humanitarian crisis, misanthropic religious fanaticism, and a band of renegade plague victims, so I think I did okay), but I still don’t feel like I’ve done a very good job of codifying it.

  • Mummy fatigue

    Mummy fatigue

    Another session of Mummy went down reasonably successfully. The players interrogated the evil sorcerer they captured last time and gave me a chance to try to roleplay a Nephandus. It’s not an easy thing, because Nephandi are supposed to be inherently and irredeemably bad, but they’re not supposed to be cartoonish about it; they genuinely believe that the absolute best thing they can do with their lives is try to damn the entire world. I did my best to express a philosophy along the lines of, “existence is a cruel lie, and that means cruelty and lies are what everything is all about, and therefore the only thing a person of integrity can do is be as cruel and deceitful as possible.” Which… feels sort of apropos for the teenage angst-fest that is the World of Darkness, to be honest.

    I don’t know, though, I keep pounding my head against the nature of the Underworld. It just feels like you can’t be true to the stated rules of the setting without running a boring game. Everything about the Underworld is meant to make you feel helpless and like you can’t make a difference, but roleplaying is all about making meaningful choices. I’ve tried to come up with a solution, but honestly, I’m starting to think that there isn’t one – that what I really should do is just write my own game that tries to do what Mummy tries to do, but to do it properly.

    So all right, then. Perhaps I should call this port finished, at least in the sense of “it ain’t gonna get any better than this.” I should start looking at my original games again anyway…