Lose Some: Competition in Role-Playing Games

I'd like to thank the stalwarts and luminaries who I have consulted in making this post. I have played in domain games with each of them, and hoped to mitigate the narrow bound of one writer's subjective experience. Thank you to Bamzolino of the GLoG discord server, Primeumaton of The Madman's Menagerie, Josie of Occultronics, Wes of Pangur Ban Collective, and Mergo-Kan of A Sense of Immersion.

A PC in the default pose. From TSR's Birthright

The standard advice for adventure games is to prohibit or carefully limit player characters acting against each other. In your standard D&D games, the PCs are assumed to be largely working towards the same goals, acting as a team. Fighting between PCs is often a source of real-life discord.

In some non-standard D&D games, player characters are expected to act against each other. I've played in and run several domain-play games, where players take on the role of princes and principalities, and challenge each other in the realm of war, ideology, and competition. I've come to realize that the changes required in player mindset is easy to underestimate. Players still feel angry or hurt when the competition comes, even if it is the explicit premise of the game. Sometimes it feels like they're throwing elbows, and the feeling of going against other players is drastically different from the feeling of contending with NPC foes. I've thought a lot about why this is, the best practices for players, and how games can better fit the competitive style.

PVP Brain

I call the affliction of unreasonableness, tension, and acerbity that comes from this kind of competition "PVP Brain". Even someone who signs up for a game of intrigue and violence might keep their normal roleplaying mindset. They may not internalize that their character is probably going to lose a lot more often than they're used to if they play more common adventure games. 

If you're accustomed to winning most violent encounters, treating most others as setbacks in which you regroup and go win the rematch, and consider the remainder, in which you get fucking murdered, as the worst possible failure. But in competitive games, you lose half the time. You build something up and might lose it. If your PC dies in a normal adventure game, the collective enterprise of the party chugs on and you join it with a new character. If your PC dies in a competitive game, maybe your killer is sitting in your throne deciding which of your retainers with funny voices and charming personalities get to live and die, and maybe the grain of your fields is going into their silos rather than yours.

When PVP Brain sets in, the DM is often one of the first casualties. Players become more likely to request as many mechanical bonuses as possible, come up with every possible mechanical obstacle for their foes, argue the fairness of the application of all of this, and generally behave worse than they ever would in a cooperative adventure game. They may start angle-shooting outrageously. Things which are normally treated like "flavor" or "fluff", any piece of the narrative that players have control over, may be suborned to the self-glorifying power of PVP brain.

On average, every player in even a mildly competitive game is losing way more often and way more keenly than even a moderately lethal OSR adventure game. It's hard to know how that feels if you're not accustomed to it, and agreeing to play in such a game is often not enough.

This is most keen in domain games where you have a single PC like in most adventure games. I've played in games where each player is a rotating cast unto themselves, like a royal dynasty. I've also played games where each player represents the entire domain unto themselves-- playing as France rather than its prime minister, for instance. Games with distributed characters or entities for players to control are less susceptible to PVP Brain if players keep in mind that the death of a beloved character is often closer to HP damage than the scary failure state it is in adventure games. Losing members of your dynastic can be something that is inevitable, to be avoided as much as possible but not to be flinched from, and not to be considered as a sign that you necessarily did anything wrong.

(Some say that in their adventure games combat is a failure state, but we're being for real here.)

Consider the incentives your domain system offer. Many reward consistently turtling up, building up your holdings, and risking as little as possible because advancement can be done on ones' own while competition is risky and destructive.

Art by Reneford. From the Realm.

Because of instincts and norms players may have developed in adventure games, many are hesitant to instigate conflict. They may enjoy making the sort of character who is wild and dangerous, but often their eyes are bigger than they're stomach. They have to go to someone who's just enjoying the game their own way, say "I'm being the bad guy at you," and somehow not flinch when the targeted PC (not even necessarily the player) says "Hey quit it, that's a dick move," Let's assume your players have an inborn real-life instinct to be susceptible to reasonable requests not to fuck with people. It's a rare player who knows ahead of time how much to dim that instinct for in-game chatter, at least once you age out of the innocent sociopathy of high school.

For this reason, the campaign and the system should probably have markers to signify that conflict is a normal state of play, and encouraging players to instigate it. I've seen games where you are mechanically rewarded for starting— and even for losing— wars, games where there's an explicitly normal non-villainous form of raiding you can undertake, games where many players' domain holdings are mingled with others' lands and their population is already raring to use that as an excuse to conquer a bit more.

Generally, these incentives aren't enough! Almost every player I know does everything in their power to avoid aggression. I say get experimental! Make it so your yearly taxes come exclusively from raiding, and specify whose peasants are getting the short end of the stick. Make it so you don't actually declare war, it automatically comes as a fait accompli when multiple players double down on trying to influence an area. Make it so there's fewer domains than there are players, and control is a game of musical chairs. Ooh, ooh, make it so when two domains are close, one will gradually become the subsidiary of the other, and the rulers must jockey to see who comes out on top. Make it so players must choose between types of conflict rather than between conflict and cooperation. Cooperation is often so strong anyway. The more the game creates conflict, I believe the less people can apply their mismatched previously learned mindsets, and the less PVP brain can harsh the vibe.

(One of my beta readers reminded me that their home group is incredibly competitive, and that they have no issue being induced to freak up and wreck each other. My advice won't strictly apply to such natural talents.)

My greatest success so far for a competitive game was a Trojan War-style scenario. It was explicitly framed as a game where the red team was going to end the game defeating and sacking the home of the blue team. Much of the game was commanding soldiers, and when rival PCs met, their fights were resolved in a single opposed die roll. Beating the enemy by any reasonable margin killed them. The first time one PC killed another, the player apologized anyway! When the city was captured, the bloodthirsty commander of the victorious army gave them theretofore unhoped-for merciful terms. Even when the game is about killing each other and war, players will try to make things easy on each other. It probably helped that the players were divided into teams, so they got to have friends to cooperate with who were okay with them aggressing against others (on the rival team).

You certainly don't need to stamp that out as a DM, but you should keep in mind that there's no way to push them overboard towards being obliged to be more competitive than they want to. PVP Brain, and other things I want to cover later, can make players hyper-aggressive, but not in the way you might want. I suggest that it comes from the wound of the wrong mindset applied to competitive games, and is not simply the correct mindset for a very competitive game.

The Terms of Battle

In adventure games, PCs are often capable of extreme and total war against their NPC enemies. They will break truces, violate every norm, and use lethal forces as a first resort. They are wolves in a world that is usually incredibly hostile, and this kind of behavior often makes sense for the goals of play.

In competitive domain games, it's more normal for players to want to engage with the norms of their setting that limit conflict. They don't like executing another player's little guy (unless the PVP brain has set in), and want to keep hostages or captives. They hate (hate!) torture, and consider needless cruelty of that kind to be beyond the pale. They want to fight with honor.

This is great! Most competitive games benefit from conflicts that are usually less than total conflicts of extermination. But there is a barrier between the player and character that must be considered. The player is a modern human who has probably grown up in a stew of ideas about equality, punishment, and justice that may mismatch them with the society presented. If it's normal for the victor in a war to burn the loser's villages while the loser watches helplessly in a castle, they may balk to do it and be incensed if it's done to them, and treat it as not only the act of an enemy but a demon.

Players are not always on the same page about what is a limited conflict and where an escalation is happening, and because they don't know that they're not on the same page it can get frustrating. The worst thing that can happen is when one player thinks they're establishing a boundary for the game's social contract or engaging with a safety tool (the sort of thing you should never lie about) and the other player thinks they're negotiating in-game (and rubbing their hands together thinking about how much they love lying.)

Often, players are accustomed to the norms of capture from the perspective of prisoners. They ruthlessly and immediately try to break free from every orc jail they find themselves in, and often the DM is trying to abet them because imprisonment is often awkward and feels bad for the campaign's goals. When the players are suddenly in the role of the captor, they may have to deal with what it feels like to deal with a defiant and squirming prisoner. In many places and times, the common response to prisoners who tried to escape was to execute them. In some places, noble prisoners were asked to take an oath not to try to escape, and that oath was taken seriously.

I find as a player that squirming after my little guy has been captured is usually just prolonging a spiral of loss. It's best to negotiate terms or let my little guy just lose. Ultimately, players usually capture each others' PCs because they don't want to execute them, but squirming too much is challenging that notion. At worst the captor player feels like their mercy is being taken advantage of, and that they "should" execute prisoners far more readily, starting with the problem character. This dynamic doesn't come up often for PCs in adventure games, and often is not considered beforehand. Be forewarned! Prisoners in these games are establishing a soft iterated prisoners' dilemma, where defecting might kill them and future prisoners.

The man 

Establishing norms around prisoners and their attempts to escape behoove such PCs, but interestingly you may find that "establishing norms" is much weaker than one might naively assume in competitive domain games. Even if the DM prepares a list of cultural norms around conflict, the player is still just a player in a game. They may object if their main PC's cousin is executed for violating a truce in a neighboring city even if the norm is well-ingrained. Their cousin had a funny hat and was almost level 2, you dick!

In many times and places, rulers are endlessly trying to maintain their reputation as honest exemplars of their society's norms. They may be deceptive and disloyal, but to be known as deceptive and disloyal by all your rival powers was often a major problem. Players will not care about that nearly as much. They may keep it in mind, but behind every rival lordling who violates the culture's norms is another player that they already have feelings about. In each PC are two people, and the one who's a modern person trying to have fun wins a lot of slack for the one who's violating the customs of a culture that isn't even real.

This means that players can and will trash their own reputation to get ahead, and they will not necessarily face much punishment from other players. To pick up the slack, if you're setting up a domain campaign, you should therefore consider if acquiring a tyrannical reputation is going to provoke friction from NPCs, especially the NPCs who are under such a person. You probably don't want to make consequences so heavy as to straightjacket the choice to follow the customs of the country, but games are hardly hurt if the ruler PCs constantly have to deal with unruly vassals in the best of times, and offending their sensibilities will create interesting problems.

Unceasing Rage

Competition between players often feels more viscerally engaging than contending with NPCs. Your opponent may be as dedicated to winning and as wily as you are, and they are not obliged to foreshadow threats or abide by the other ways that DMs stay "fair." But keep in mind that when the conflict ends, even if they despoiled your city or quartered your heirs, you as a player don't want to commit to make them your enemy for the rest of the game. Campaigns are long, and the sweet tension of losing a conflict will untense after a time. It's generally more interesting if old foes may one day work together than if not, even if that potential is never realized.

Certainly you want to avoid a situation where your enemy has learned that you're going to spend all your time hurting them, even after they win a war or force a decisive concession. Think about what that game will be like! Sure it makes sense for you to want to hurt an enemy who hurt you, but eventually the game should move on into other diplomatic territory. It kind of sucks, at least in the games I have experienced, to pull down someone with you because they hit you once. It's like that cruel EDH player who focuses down the person who did 2 damage to them in the early game, or worse yet carries forth vendettas from previous matches. I think players often do this out of a sense that they're demonstrating good game theory, proving how damaging it is to mess with their little guys, but the main thing they're encouraging is for them to be driven fully out of the game so their opponent can at last have some peace and quiet. Often the opponent will be loathe to do this because it feels bad to drive another player out of the game. This is a nice notion, and you should not reward it with a game of chicken.

People can get truly angry. They can get tilted, so out-of-game mad that it creates awkward and unfun situations for everyone involved. I have tried to give tips for player mindset and game design to prevent this, but it has happened in almost every domain game I've played. The tension spills over from roleplaying through PVP brain to genuine rage. When this happens, do not try to solve it in-game. Address it directly, whether you see it in yourself or if it's a wider situation. Whatever approach someone is taking, it isn't working and needs to be adjusted. Sometimes someone learns through anger that competitive RPGs aren't for them. More often, they just need to step back and adjust. We can all help each other in such moments.

The game system can be of aid by making major conflicts as short and decisive as possible. The longer things drag on, the more needling and incremental advantage players try to eke out, the harder it is to win or lose with grace. The one thing players hate more than having lost is the process of losing. Perversely, players tend to be tenacious, and will defiantly fight to the last man when it doesn't really make sense, prolonging the part that sucks the most for them, often because they're working from the adventure game mindset where fighting to the last is usually rewarded, and giving up is sometimes seen as frustration with the game.

Therefore, the DM should consider when the outcome of events should be presented as a done deal. I know a DM whose domain game has been very successful with this. Wars, in their many battles and advances and vagaries, are resolved with a big die roll, and the victor makes their stipulations and the loser, who is informed they've already lost and surrendered, has to deal with them. Obviously there is tension between this approach and the normal high degree of latitude given to PCs, so you should be as clear as possible what parts of your game might enforce such truncated outcomes, and remind people the first few times they might come up. Playing in this same game, I was defending my city-state against a large navy and one of the players was surprised when I reminded them that if I win, I may have captured their city-state on the opposite side of the peninsula. To that player, the conflict felt like a major sea battle on my turf. The DM did well in reminding them that a lot can happen in a military campaign, and the toss of the dice represented way more than they may have been thinking of.

Let the outcome come quickly. Be clear what is at stake.

I tried to find the source for this but no one posted it with credit.

I note that players are generally mild about their victories. Even when PVP Brain makes them go hard after a rival PC, they tend to be very merciful with any populace they conquer along the way. If you are trying to make a game where cities are despoiled and countrysides burned, you will need to put work in. I might set these up as choices with clear mechanical benefits, just so the player doesn't feel like a heel for doing something normative for victors to do in your setting. Make clear that if you sack a city, it will reduce their willingness and ability to act against you, and that if you don't, it will be a test of your soldiers' loyalty, so you aren't risking nothing by being magnanimous.

In domain games, PCs should probably be risking catastrophic loss from time to time. The game should be ready for this to occur. When the PC ruling family is deposed, are they out of the game? Are they set back so far that they'll never rival anyone else again? Probably that's not the sort of outcome you want to go for. If PCs can be deposed, there should be interesting things that non-ruler PCs can do, and it shouldn't feel like a consolation prize. Non-ruler PCs should be intensely valuable allies, and you should consider gating as little as possible behind formal rulership of a domain. Otherwise, consider some way for players who fall behind to catch up. Make development hit diminishing returns, or let nimble, unencumbered PCs get to take advantage of opportunities their ruler PC colleagues can't.

Beware also the thorny problem of conquest. Domain games often sell the fantasy that if you play well enough, maybe you can conquer vast lands and have many people under you. Defeated lordlings may bend the knee, but player characters are an order of magnitude more spiteful on average. In many ways this is the same problem as PCs taking each other captive, only worse because the loser is given some power and leeway with which to spit in their new liege's face. My brother calls this the "Spiteful Vassal Problem". The D&D setting Birthright has special blood magic related to rulership, and if a vassal breaks their oath of fealty their liege can immediately tell. A construction like that puts the balance towards PCs being able to conquer each other, leaving the option to go back on oaths of loyalty but with complication. Decide as a DM if you want to tell stories together where PC domains can gainfully conquer each other or if it's a fool's errand, and arrange the game to make it happen.

Coda

My most important piece of advice for competitive games, for DMs and players alike, is to accept that other players will make decisions you don't like. In a cooperative adventure game, you may not even notice. In a competitive game, when your ally betrays you for what you think is a stupid reason, it can be hard to keep your cool.

You have to honor the decision anyway. The game does not work if you get mad because players do something you wouldn't do. People will be suboptimal and they will be erratic and things from outside the game will affect what they do. What's more, they have access to information that you don't. They have had different conversations and different plans than you, and secrets abound in competitive games that you won't be privy to.

It's hard to understand why everyone is doing what they're doing, so just try to make it fun. Make it fun to fight you. Make it fun to beat you. Take big swings. Check in with people. Ensure that your in-character and out-of-character thoughts are distinct, because you'll find in competitive games that your character is lying about things which are definitely not okay to lie about between friends and fellow-players.

I love the sweet tension of good competitive play. It can be done without gall and vinegar, but it requires a deliberate mindset shift if you are accustomed to other forms of RPGs. Realizing how you think is the seed of changing how you think.

May your reign last a thousand years, if you can keep it.

Interview: Archon's Court on Owe My Soul to the Company Store

Friend of the blog Archon's Court recently published his excellent Mothership module, Owe My Soul to the Company Store, as a zine on Itch. I thought it would be interesting to conduct a short interview with the luminary/wunderkind on the process of making such a thing. This is not a review or anything, just a conversation I thought was interesting.

art by Locheil

What is Owe My Soul to the Company Store and what was your goal in writing it?

Owe My Soul to the Company Store is an adventure for Mothership, set on a failing colony staffed, in part, with human minds loaded into insectoid "labor bodies". My goal was to take a kind of adventure I really enjoy running - a faction-heavy city sandbox - and see if I could manage to write one for public consumption.

You’ve written other zines before. Has the process of this one been significantly different?

Absolutely - this is the first one of my zines to be an adventure (instead of a system), the first one to use someone else's third party license, and so on, but the main difference was that this is the most heavily edited of them. My earlier two were written like a blogpost - I made something up, wrote it down, and shipped it. Owe My Soul was fully restructured and rewritten twice, along with all manner of additions and cuts in between those.

Did you know you were going to be editing that heavily beforehand? How did that impact the writing process?

I knew I was going to edit this one more heavily (I hired an editor, after all!) but I wasn't expecting to run through it as many times as I did. I didn't have a good structure - earlier versions of the zine used the Wants->Has->Obstacles framing for NPCs (or, in one attempt, just described them in prose), but that required too much GM improvisation when you're juggling up to 16 people at a time. Same thing with the colony itself - playtesting showed that even though the adventure isn't about clearing rooms, I needed to have the rooms to provide context to player action. 

If I was writing something with a commonly-set structure, like a dungeoncrawl, it wouldn't've needed as much sawing - the zine contents stayed just about the same the whole way through, it was just the way they were presented.

Sam Sorensen is a proven editing hand. How did you communicate with him to figure out the best way to lay out information on the page?

The first thing I did, before I started writing, was outline how I wanted to spend space - a page of 5.5"x8.5" fits, to the best of my knowledge, about 500 words if you just pack it with text. So, I blocked it out in 500 word pieces - one page for each character+map, a two-page spread for the introduction, and so on.

It fits together as well as it does because I was stringent about that inventory, and because "layout" and "editing" were nonlinear - when I got completed pages back from him they usually came with recommendations for cuts or additions to make or use space as the layout revealed it. 

The zone descriptions at the top of each map page, the author's footnotes, some of the rooms, and a couple minor NPCs were added during layout in order to fit holes in the structure. If I had just written a manuscript, handed it to him, and said "make this be laid out", some of the pages would've been half-empty! 

a work-in-progress illustration by Locheil

What’s the process of playtesting like?

I'm an advocate for immediate playtesting. Write out the parts of your adventure that you need, just like you were writing your GM notes, and then get to the table. Whenever you need to improvise some piece of information - you need a particular NPC to exist as a response to the PCs, you need to figure out the security of some building or another that they try to break into, whatever, write it down. You probably won't add all of them into the final text verbatim, but you've kind of "proven" that they're useful because you needed them.

In Owe My Soul's case, "Jacket" Morse, one of the minor NPCs, exists because I needed somebody to torment the players a couple sessions into the playtest campaign, and later realized that he should stick around.

Did you run all the playtests?

Unfortunately so. I think it's a useful tool to have your game run by someone else, but the eyes of an editor also test to make sure the adventure "actually makes any sense", and without the organizational difficulty.

The premise of the adventure, where humans are forked into these labor bodies, is great for the “working class horror” of Mothership. What’s your initial process for turning ideas in adventures?

Stapling more ideas to it! The starting point of Owe My Soul wasn't the labor bodies, it was a prompt on a community Discord - "a city that should never have been built" - and the image of a couple Commercial Security agents standing around a crowded spaceport. 

From there, almost everything was stolen - being forked for work is a common trope in transhuman SF, the complex is on Callisto because a friend of mine happened to have recently said "no one ever does anything with Callisto", the sealed ACHILLES laboratory is based off of an article I read about WW1 chemical weapons development labs, on and on and on. 

This doesn't get you an adventure, but it gets you a premise - once you have a premise, you find a structure, and you write out the premise according to that structure. Some premises work well as dungeoncrawls, others as regional hexcrawls, others as mysteries, and so on.

Well, I guess most of the OSR premises are one premise - "here's a map with things and people in it".

I'm looking through the PDF now, and-- to phrase this as a question-- Isn't Locheil such a powerhouse artist?

Absolutely! The whole color scheme and visual v i b e of the zine branches off of a couple early pieces of his. I'd be overjoyed to work with him again, but he's in the Ph.D. mines.

One part of the zine that stands out to me is the little lines of text at the bottom of some pages. They're usually supplemental information or reflections on the page's content. How did you come up with those?

They're a common Mothership affectation - you can see them in A Pound of Flesh and Gradient Descent, for instance, fulfilling about the same purpose. A lot of the text in Owe My Soul's was actually scrap - bits of lore and tone-building text that was removed earlier for brevity's sake but got to live again when I had space to use.

Once you write something you can, probably, always find a use for it someday - even as I wound the zine up I still benefited from snatching bits of text from the first draft and the year-and-a-half old blogpost that set out the premise.

Any lessons that this has taught you about design?

Sometimes being "game"-y isn't that bad. The clearest and most useful NPC presentation for this project, the one I ended up with after all those edits, spends about half its word count on explicit quests and rewards - since it's easier to use those to figure out what the character wants than to do the reverse and write quests based on desires.

What’s in the future for Archon’s Court?

Next year I'll be back to grinding at some of my long-term blogpost series - post some regional hexcrawls for my megastructure setting, if I'm lucky. In 2026 I bet I'll run another Kickstarter, but as of now I don't know what it'll actually... be.

Cursed Objects and Double-Edged Swords

 It's been too long.

These don't follow that outline for cursed objects I wrote once, mostly because I started writing these in the back of a car on vacation and brevity saves me from too many bumps in the road rendering one idea illegible.

Do you believe in the power of a curse?

d10 Cursed Items

Good cursed items are tricky. I like the idea that they're punishing, no mere double-edged sword, but you want the punishment to itself be a fun problem to deal with. I am considering the practicalities of a campaign where cursed items can only be suffered by those who gain them by ignominious or transgressive means.

1. A blade that Slays By Its Own Will. Razor, quick, you've drawn it and struck someone down in the time it takes to say so. The blade loves to use this power to bring sorrow to its wielder but can only suborn their sword arm, so it can be wrestled with. It resists being simply discarded by holding tight.

2. Drawing blood with the Barbocephalus Axe turns you into Varent, a 4 HD half-demon barbarian from a time and place otherwise. You have to play him until he sets the axe down, and he respects only violence. As he figures out what banishes him, he becomes wary to avoid parting with the axe-- this place is much nicer than his own.

3. Ever-Burning Candle. Enables +1 day's worth of downtime activity per day, imparting frantic vigor. Won't go out until it kills you 1d4+3 months from now.

4. Consume one of the Organs of Wicked Albus to instantly memorize a spell of level equal to the number of Organs you've eaten, and also see a vision of one of Albus's most horrible deeds. They are gritty and bitter, but addictive to the tongue and stomach. Once you've had one, save or you won't be able to memorize spells in the normal way for a week. After five are consumed, save each week or turn into the mage Albus. There are nine-- the brain, the lungs, the stomach, the liver, the spleen, the eyes, the larynx, the intestines, and the tongue.

5. The Nine Lives Amulet has 1d9 charges. When you would make a save vs death or die due to damage, instead consume a charge. Thereafter, you must save vs spells or impulsively drink potions, leap into portals, and take other hellcat risks.

6. The Cruel Dart imparts a curse on touch-- that you shall not create new life. No children, no fire, no wind, no songs, no orders.

7. Like a matte ruby, the Rubedo seed is always sought-after. Shake it around your waterskin, and the water is turned to weak merlot. Swallow it, and all you taste shall be as the finest wine. Swallow it, and ever after all you taste shall be as the finest wine. 

8. Some sages keep a Two-Tailed Coin in their money boxes. Their killers are ill-fated, for those who carry the coin, easily overlooked in a purse, see beautiful lights and light-tempered beauties in the depths of every body of water. They must save or be tempted down into the warm embrace of the depths, getting +1 for each reason they provide for why they must pass by. They can never repeat reasons, even on later saves.

9. A simple one-- the fine velvet Slippers of a Vampire seem perfect for those who seek to sneak without echo, but they don't only avoid holy ground. If they pass over unhallowed undergrounds-- grim graves or doomy donjons-- they step the wearers through the very dirt into the very deepest section.

10. A Compact Henway. Reverses your stats and handedness. Can't be set down once strapped on except in a mirror.

d8 Double-Edged Swords

1. A Cool Sword with a blade at either end. Crits on a 19 or 20, deals damage to you on a 1.

2. Some wizards who are bad enough dudes sign the Contract of Fire. Your spells = Fireball, and scrolls, wands, or other items you cast from = that thing, but of Fireball.

3. A flappy, flaking Viper Skull Cap. All your attacks crit. Your HP = 1.

4. Bralon's Favor, a simple kerchief. Your retainers don't test Morale/Loyalty like normal. Instead, flip a coin. On a heads, they fight to the death. On a tails, they beat a fighting retreat, taking potshots as able. Be careful; your DM will not modulate these results to fit the context better, so making a Morale flip after falling into a pit full of bones may be bloody.

5. When mending your clothes in the morning with a Golden Thimble and Silver Thread, choose a type of save. You always pass that save that day, but fail all others.

6. Some weapons are Everyone's Problem. This straightsword in a quickdraw sheath has a blazing yellow eye in the tang which radiates a Ruin-Cloud Nimbus, dealing 1 damage each round to all in 10', including the wielder.

7. Death's Palm, a pistol that's shaped like a hand and replaces your hand. It can only do one thing-- fire bullets of magically conjured purple flame-- but it does it well.

8. Weightless Robes, barry Argent and Azure. When worn and for an hour after, your weight = 0. You float like a slightly deflated balloon. Be careful not to jump when outside, lest you float off into the sun.

Under the Floorboards

 "I fell through the floor, and there I was..." for GLoGtober 2024.

Alan Lee

If you look at floorplans of centuries-old palaces and temples and castles, there's all these gridded webs that seem like they must be pure support, not normal rooms. What's going on in there? I have fair guesses, but it's hard to investigate online.

That structure in the middle of the courtyard. Who is she?

wtf?

I'm sure this is clear and obvious to many people, but it's the sort of thing that's hard to google.

Peripheral structures, supports, and architectural necessities can create interesting spaces in otherwise mundane areas, just because they were not designed for people to enter or scale them. They're natural obstacles, fine hiding places, and when destroyed might trigger a suitably impressive chain reaction.

Prince With a Thousand: City Infiltration Procedure (GLoGtober 2024)

Alan Lee

This is a procedure for that early Assassin's Creed-ass situation where you must carefully navigate a city controlled by an antagonistic force, one where thousands of people live and provide cover for your activities on accident, while guards are on the lookout for you in particular.

 Every public place is potentially hostile. A patrol of guards is less like a normal combat encounter and more like a trap or puzzle-- how do you avoid a confrontation that mobilizes the city against you. If their notice is brought down on you, how do you escape and hide?

In theory, every antagonistic city should be mapped out with routes between all the landmarks. In practice, I'm personally more likely to realize partway through a session that I'd like to use this procedure, and would like to be able to adapt it on the fly. So, here is a route type table:

d6 Route Types

1. Empty Streets. No native opportunity for stealth.

2.  Checkpoint. Guaranteed static encounter.

3. Cramped Alleys. May be underground or interior passages.

4. Vertical Intersections. Bridges, different levels, roofs. etc. 50% of encounters having no good way to reach you right away.

5. No Man's Land. Residents move in small groups. Many oppose the ruling powers.

6. Busy Boulevards. Won't be noticed until you draw attention to yourself.

Encounters
Encounters should occur at a comparable rate to dungeon encounters. To me that's a 1-in-6 chance per route and location, but I might increase that if I didn't design the rest of the city to be likewise dangerous. It makes sense to curate an encounter table for each antagonistic city. Again, think of these encounters as being like traps-- with signs the players can pick up on, triggers, and effects.

Sample Encounters

• Pair of wandering guards with halberds, lanterns, and horns.
• Dark riders, literally able to pick up the PCs' smell. Normal people don't get near them.
• Bullying bravos. Harass people rather than earnestly search out enemies. Seeming like a victim might be safest.
• Squad of counter-insurgents. Not necessarily seeking the PCs, but locking down the area to arrest other enemies.
• Spies-- something's off about these civilians.
• Aerial observation. Large, clumsy, perceptive forces overhead.
• Politicized animals. Their eyes are spies for Sauron.
• VIP and entourage.
• Elephant-sized mount, essentially a clumsy and fearful APC.
• Collaborators. Bureaucrats, but knowledgeable of the city and how you may abuse it.
• Inspectors. Papers please!
• Cordoned-off perimeter. Line of soldiers, no bypass without proof of rank.
• Overseers. May conscript passers-by for a day's labor.

Like you would do for a standard hazard or trap, let players describe how they (if needed, detect, then) avoid encounters. Good ideas don't need to roll here, but try to vary the exact disposition of encounters so that their tactics must always be sensitive to the particular situation. Characters with powers of stealth may be able to roll those even after a plan fails to pan out. That's like their saving throw, to continue the comparison to bypassing a trap.

Penalties for Notice

In antagonistic cities, the enemy force is aware of the PCs and opposed to them. If guards notice who they are, they might have only a few seconds for a hail-mary, then the situation turns deadly. They have the option of running it as a combat, but this is a bad idea in an enemy city. Let more reinforcements arrive, let escape routes get cut off, let chaos ensue. 

It would be wiser for the PCs to flee. In that case, let them make a save to avoid damage or other effects as their enemies pursue them through the streets. If they survive, then they've made it away. The amount of long-term heat they draw is based on how important they are as enemies. If the antagonistic city is just opposed to them as thieves, upstarts, or unpersons as a matter of course, they might be able to get away with hiding in an alley for ten minutes, then carrying on. If the party is prophesied to slay the tyrant occupying the antagonistic city, they'll have to navigate to another sector of the city, deal with increased chances of encounters, and possibly get tracked back to their hideout.

Example
For your consideration, here is an encounter table for the city of Nevermore.

d6 Encounters
1. Pair of Wandering Guards with halberds, lanterns, and horns. Notice: save vs death or take 1d6 damage.

2. Doctore, several Orderlies, and three Judge-Executioners. Curtly seeking signs of plague. Notice: 2d6 damage, save vs wands for half.
3. Riot Court. Torches, yelling, an angry mob but not the cool kind. Notice: save vs breath. On failure, you've been grabbed and dragged off to the Vigilante Jury.
4. Quarantine. Line of guards turn everyone away. Notice: save vs death or take 1d8 damage.
5. Two Plague Birds, man-sized, perched in a vantage point. Notice: save vs death. On failure, 1d4 damage from the King's Plague, +1 for all previous contact with King's Plague. +3 encounter chance on next encounter roll, due to squawking.
6. Suborned Gangsters with brutal blades. Forceful "requisitioners" and peddlers of protection. Notice: 1d4 objects snatched and 1d6 damage, save vs paralysis for half.

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 "A procedure relating to a city" for GLoGtober 2024.