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.

Temple of Four (Location)

 After reading this goblinpunch post, I was inspired to make a dungeon with many secret areas. This has been a long-time fancy of mine, so I decided to combine that fancy with another, the desire to make a dungeon with a "four elements" theme that I didn't find boring as hell. They're often too one-note, you know?

Thesaurus of Alchemy

Click on the picture above, or the link >>> here <<< for the dungeon. For your titilation, here are some excerpts out of context:

Eating the wet organ within serves as a second dose.

... inspecting them for signs of green chalk and replacing any body parts, items, etc. with mechanical alternatives...

... you can't see if you're stupid, and if you're really really thick you can't even feel it

... each one with colorful streamers pasted onto its pudgy abdomen.

Air blasts from floor vents, totally negating gravity.

... leaving white lime-streaks wherever it slithereth.

... a 1-in-6 chance that the octopus either attacks or investigates the party...

... so many bottles of piss ("for experiments").

... and if someone reads it the talisman explodes...

Empty

... its contents ruined by hunger-maddened scrawls.

The skink is likewise trapped...

... is horrifically cursed. It cannot be removed except if a Remove Curse spell is cast while the wearer's blood courses with deadly venom, and it slowly transforms the wearer into a snake. This process takes seven years, but...

Our Journey Now (GLoGtober)

 Romance for GLoGtober 2024.

Howard Pyle

When I think about romance in adventure games, I immediately consult Udan Adan's Romance Plots in RPGs, which provides a great framework for creating "romance-ready" NPCs. They're pretty broadly useful, since using simple character tropes to evince depth can come up in romances, intrigues, persuasions, or other common PC activities. If the GLoGtober season calls on me to write on romance, it really behooves me to simply expand on the list provided at the end of that post, as I'm sure to have want of that at some point.

17. Workaholic Tyrant: Possesses rare executive abilities and runs their powerful organization well, but utterly neglects their interior life. Has no sense of themselves outside of the commands they issue and the hours they work. At risk of succeeding their soul out of their body.

18. Exploited Loyal: Servant of an unjust master. Often transmutes unworthy orders into humane ones. Beneficent and capable, they have no idea how little they are valued or how close their master is to expending them.

19. Widower: Nominally single, but as of yet incapable of moving past the notion that they must not love again. Warm, mature, and just a hair too committed. 

20. Devotee: Someone for whom emotional unavailability is the sign of a compact. They think that love is a distraction from what they, in fact, can only get from love. They are a perfect romantic, focused on the wrong object.

21. Wary Heir: Expect to come into their power soon, and excited to use it. Dynamic, altruistic, capably navigating between the Scylla and Charybdis of responsibility to their parent and opportunity to do something new. Gives mixed signals because they fear others will try to manipulate them to get at their birthright.

22. Monster: Fascinated by the world, but barred from normal participation in it. Possesses inhuman capabilities, but must constantly bend them toward preserving their own freedom. Engaging, earnest, hurt.

23. Bright Addict: Confident and self-directed, with a good head on their shoulders. Constantly drained by some singular exception, a chemical, relationship, or glamour that they cannot resist. Bravely insists on forging ahead with a relationship despite constantly being led to undercut it. Require an outside perspective.

24. Client: Someone at everyone's disposal. Perhaps a servant, or an envoy who is not at their own liberty. Utterly starved for personal connection, but lacks the legal or social means to protect themselves from abuse or misuse. Consequently, their amore resists their mutual feelings out of apprehension of taking advantage of the client.

25. Compelled Paramour: Either by curse or mundane wager, someone bound to act against their nature. This compulsion made be odious, or simply a clear indication that they aren't being straight-up. If it's possible to act against the compulsion, they hold back out of fear that no one would love the "real" them.

26. Dragon: Grim, habitual, stubborn, and out of touch. In many stories, an unstylish villain. Is it really so surprising that they yearn for one good thing, something they can safely treat well, and know love instead of just fear? I promise this will be romantic if they're a stony-faced malefactor.

27. Perceptive Wit: Discerning and practical, but unable to keep their mouth shut. Wants to be well-liked, but wants blowhards to be punctured just a little bit more. Just slightly too reasonable to believe anyone would fall in love with them, and ready to help all their friends find a decent mate before they realize that they want an honest equal for themselves too.

And just for ease, these + the original descriptions in one random generator:

d20 Finds in Death's Apartment (GLoGtober)

 "Death and Divinity" for GLoGtober 2024

💀

d20 Finds

1. chess set, but all the black pawns are knights and the black king has a skull instead of a crown
2. hand mirror. Shows all the bad things likely to happen if you survive an incipient brush with death
3. the oldest dog in the world
4. very, very long checklist
5. hostage kit: whistle, vial of acid, cuff-slipping gloves, razor-edged shoes
6. pot cigarettes, a gift from the Devil. Take a puff and make a save vs. death!
7. Magnus, his godson (Magic-User 3). Waiting around to see if his godfather remembers it's his birthday
8. cross, for sale, barely used
9. box of old needles, each containing the life of otherwise immortal personages. Can't deduce how to get em out of there
10. a posthumous Van Gogh painting of a lady in the shade of a tree
11. old record, "Swansong", worth its weight in platinum
12. weights set, but all bones
13. a canary in a cage
14. Death's address book. Highlights include Dracula, Acererak, and God
15. several half-drunk bottles of very poisoned wine
16. jar of bird blood. Attracts ghosts
17. anti-gun. Brings things to life. Six shots.
18. bag of hand bones. Functions as a wand of finger of death, with five charges. The bag lightens with each casting
19. portrait of the master of the house with an artist friend
20. many, many candles, your own burned down nearly to the end.

In Praise of Acquisitiveness

 I want to describe an aspect of some games that I really like, and I want to give a bit of advice about how to play into it. I don't want to make a formal argument for why I think it's good and I certainly don't want to argue it's the exclusively best way to play. If I get emphatic, take it to be part of the spell I'm casting so that you might be as enchanted as I am.

Matt Morrow

In many old-school games, experience points are awarded for gold and other treasures pilfered from the dungeon. I've played with some people who don't really vibe with this. They're not greedy people in real life, and often all to aware of the connection between wealth and the cruelty often deployed to keep it. They're not motivated by in-game rewards, preferring the intrinsic reward of enjoyable conversation, or problem-solving, or other (perhaps even more central) goals of play. 

"What is there to even spend all this gold on?" they say.

Dog, you are so valid. But I really think you're missing out if you aren't aware of how fun it is to go gold-mad, greedy of gain, ready to risk your PC's life for the chance that they might be rich beyond their wildest dreams. What if the mechanical incentive of getting to the next level was matched with the emotional incentive of acquiring that ruby, shining luridly in the torchlight?  What if every financial step towards achieving your goals was as sweet as anything you ever felt? 

In the real world, a windfall feels weighty-- it conjures anxiety over how it is spent or kept, exhilaration at what can be done with it, the sense of total miracle as your most pressing concerns now seem solvable. The right mindset can realize those feelings in your play. 

Personally, in mainline dungeon games I think almost every PC should be on a scale between reasonably acquisitive to unreasonable acquisitive. They don't even need to be greedy. But they should have goals they can address with funds, and should be hungry to do so. Do not be afraid of being rich in this fictional world. Wealth cannot corrupt nearly so easily in the game as it can in real life. Money is power-- it does what you tell it to-- it is your vote in the absolute democracy that is the warring market. 

Food, shelter, clothing, dignity, warmth, friends, games, pets, homes, the starving masses, vengeance, vengeance, blood-thirsting vengeance, finery, honor, scholasticism, patronage, passing on good luck, risk, ruin, political change, proximity to power, fine mounts, the means to seek truth, the means to collect disparate information, to prevent what happened before from happening again, big hats. What do you, the player, care about in this game? Use gold pieces to expand how you can interact with it. What do you, the character, care about in this game? Use gold pieces to expand how you can interact with it. And when you care about what money can do, try to care a little bit about money itself. Let it be a token, then a totem, then a fetish. If you want to level up, you already want power. Seek power in money!

Dungeon masters who use gold-for-XP systems should conversely be ready to allow for means to address broad problems with cash, to see all those thousands of silver pieces spent on constructions, formation of a company, uniforms, swag, and everything else that can be done, responsibly or irresponsibly, by chancers. 

Here I formally poo-poo those who require PCs to spend their gold on training or carousing in order to level up. If there's some way to spend gold for extra XP, that's okay, but the players shouldn't be making a trade-off between normal advancement and extrachartal advancement. If you do that, they're sure to spend at least some of the XP on normal leveling up, which is way less cool than the incorporation, research, and in-world advancement they could be doing with that cash. 

Furthermore, it should never be the job of the DM to separate the PCs from their treasure by contriving stupid taxes and similar means to ensure that money spent has minimal impact. If you want to use financial travails as yet another gameplay obstacle, that's perfectly virtuous. It's just the bass-ackwards problem of giving the PCs too much money and then taking it away that I find unmeritorious.

"But Phlox," you say, "my heart simply does not ache for gold and silver. I see how it can bring me to the thoughtful caterpillar and the prancing springbok, all my heart desires, but I cannot choose to love what I do not."

Gentle reader, I had no idea you felt so keenly, nor that you were so open to a change that must to you seem so alien and distant. To change a heart, you cannot reason with it. You must nourish it with fine words, and give it time.

I wanted the gold, and I sought it;

   I scrabbled and mucked like a slave.

Was it famine or scurvy—I fought it;

   I hurled my youth into a grave.

I wanted the gold, and I got it— 

   Came out with a fortune last fall,— 

Yet somehow life’s not what I thought it,

   And somehow the gold isn’t all.

No! There’s the land. (Have you seen it?)

   It’s the cussedest land that I know,

From the big, dizzy mountains that screen it

   To the deep, deathlike valleys below.

Some say God was tired when He made it;

   Some say it’s a fine land to shun;

Maybe; but there’s some as would trade it

   For no land on earth—and I’m one.

You come to get rich (damned good reason);

   You feel like an exile at first;

You hate it like hell for a season,

   And then you are worse than the worst.

It grips you like some kinds of sinning;

   It twists you from foe to a friend;

It seems it’s been since the beginning;

   It seems it will be to the end.

- Robert Service, The Spell of the Yukon (excerpt)

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Here is a poem by a player in Loch's Ashes to Ashes game:

Dead cities are like chestnuts,

Crack them open! Crack their shells!

Slurp out their golden darics,

And forgotten lores as well!

Send scouts out before you!

Keep the linkboys close behind!

Spring the bolts and jump the pits,

And valuables you’ll find!

Heft the shining blades and

Gleaming treasures of the past!

Give tongue to long dead magic words,

That long to writhe at last!

Break the traps that guard them!

Break immortal guardsmen too!

I came here to enrich myself,

There’s no riches left for you!

What gods are looking on here,

At what merry sport we make,

Of their temples and their grave goods?

That we nab, acquire, take?

Well you idols, keep on looking!

To that old god we heed!

Sanctifying our ablutions,

To that giddy god called Greed!

“Transgression”? “Violation”?

These are just words to me!

I’ll buy the corpse-king’s entire stock,

For the low, low price of free!

Emerald, ruby, sapphire!

Jade and jasper, myrrh!

Diamond, mithril, osseum!

Silver perfect, pure!

Chip the golden filigree!

Pilfer princely prizes!

Be a buzzard growing fat,

From ghoulish enterprises!

When I, myself, am dead and gone,

Crack the coffin! Crack the lid!

I’ll make it worth your time, my friend,

You’ll be so glad you did!

- Regalia, Song of the Tomb Robbers