Interview: G.R. Michael on Best Case Scenario

 I was lucky enough to spend a few hours trading questions and answers with long-time colleague and absolute GLoG luminary G.R. Michael on Best Case Scenario, the skirmish RPG that will evoke SCP and XCOM and other media with acronym names. He's kickstarting as a zine, and I thought it was a good occasion to get in yet another interview. As with others, I am not claiming anything like impartiality.

Not pictured: the artist

Tradition dictates that I ask you how you got into RPGs. What drew you to them?

a fine, traditional question...
When I was a bairn, I understood that I needed to have a favorite blanket, a favorite teddy bear, and an imaginary friend. While I knew these things were a crock, I had seen firsthand how much delight adults took in me referencing them. Even at the tender age of four I felt a responsibility to keep the public amused. 

The imaginary friends were a real hit with my little sisters. They demanded more stories about them, and eventually about the characters of My Little Pony, which I obliged
(not the modern version, I'm old, I'm talking about the characters of the 1984 film)

I continued to spin yarns for them, then for my friends. For many years my cousins and I maintained a sprawling science-fantasy setting over long phone calls made after 7:00 p.m. EST (phone calls before that time would rack up the phone bill too fast). Dissatisfied with our loose... collaborative-storytelling, freeform RP (I feel silly applying these terms to literal child's play but I guess that's what it would technically be), I started to introduce rules. I wrote a bunch of "heartbreakers", which now languish at the veeeery bottom of my Google Docs folders.
After a few moderately successful campaigns, we discovered 5e right around its release in 2014. I became a 5e DM for five years. This was a dark time in my life.

Then I discovered the GLOG and the broader OSR sphere, which takes us to the modern day.

In a sentence — I've always been a storyteller Grins 
no, that's terrible... just come up with something clever and say I said it

BCS is an urban horror game, a genre that has enjoyed wide popularity. What's your relationship with the genre and how do you keep the horror fresh for players who are well-acquainted with it?

Horror is a modern genre — that is, like modern art or modern poetry, it was born from political and artistic movements in the late 19th and early 20th centuries which formed in response to a growing cultural sense of alienation from a highly technological and increasingly deracinated and atomized world. I've chewed through Arthur Machen, most of Algernon Blackwood's spooky stories, M. R. James, Walter De La Mere, (here the author continued taking ghost story collections off the shelf and reading author names out of the indexes for some time)... One thing that unites their horror work (besides oogety spookety monsters and phantoms) is their focus on characters who are, you know, kind of boring everyday Joe Q. Public guys. If you wrote an M. R. James pastiche today, your characters would all be quaint caricatures of the middle-class of Edwardian England, but to him his characters were contemporary citizens, and the places they encountered unspeakable horror were contemporary seaside hotels or picturesque small towns just a little off the beaten path. I always tell people, Lovecraft wasn't writing "Lovecraftian Horror" he was writing bleeding-edge science fiction with bullshit (Italian race riots, industrial accidents, someone inventing air conditioning) ripped straight from the headlines. Stranger Things is a Stephen King pastiche, but Stephen King... actually King does write a lot of King pastiche, but he also wrote a lot of stories about contemporary citizens encountering unspeakable horrors in contemporary mountainside hotels or picturesque small towns just a little off the beaten path, usually with bullshit (ESP, mass shootings, CIA mind control experiments, delinquent youth) ripped straight from the headlines. Urban horror as a subgenre is, with its focus on bizarre things happening to normal everyday people (who don't deserve it, who are just victims of circumstance), the direct inheritor of the mainline tradition of horror. That's how I view it, and that's why I like it. Heck, I could probably ramble on for hours about what "horror" fiction inherited from "gothic" fiction, which of course was nothing but conventional contemporary (for the 18th and 19th century) people getting menaced by history... 

As for keeping the horror fresh, I read a lot of ghost stories and listen to a lot of spooky podcasts. Stick a haunted house from a short story written in 1905 by a lesbian in Australia into twenty-first-century Harrisburg, PA and people will think you're a genius. Collage is a modernist technique, you know. 

(deracinated means ripped up from the roots, not un-racialized)
(i know you know that, but you can never be sure with the reading public)

That's very well put. But it makes me think about maybe the most unique feature of BCS, that it's a skirmish game. By dint of being several armed operatives in a clandestine organization, the average BCS player character is a bit separate from John Q. Public.

ah! that's a good thot
High-speed operators operating clandestinely definitely aren't the same thing as, say, a teenaged girl attacked by a wicked clown one Hallowe'en night, or a bunch of gardening store employees in Japan failing to survive the end of the world as we know it, or a woman learning to move on after her husband disappeared while jogging through an underpass

But one thing that makes urban horror tick is... how to put this succinctly...

mm, I was searching for a quotation. I'll have to use my own words. One thing that makes urban horror tick is when characters are put into a situation for which they are grossly unsuited. A conflict between a brave barbarian and a venomous dinosaur is a fantasy story, a conflict between a clever detective and a cunning murderer is a mystery story, a conflict between two mismatched police officers and a city-wide drug ring is a buddy cop story, a conflict between an uptight mother in law who owns a milliner's shop and a neurotic young woman who just married the milliner's loser son is a comedy story.

When you have a conflict between a normal person and an incomprehensible threat which they could not possibly have prepared for, you've got yourself some horror. The PCs in Best Case Scenario being badasses out of a mid-aughts console shooter doesn't subvert that horror, but highlights it: normal people (even ones in body armor, carrying machine guns), get totally rolled by a haunted oil tanker that drives you insane and eats you
Being oo-rah badasses doesn't get them out of it. They're still subject to the, you know, weight of dead generations like a nightmare on their brains, or to the vampires who eat their brains.
Inadequacy is scary.

You've run and written for a lot of games with a more classic structure, where each player has just a single adventurer character in a continuous narrative. How did you approach making rules and procedures for squad-based skirmishes?

I think the first drafts of rules for Best Case Scenario were a blend of those for Albedo (a furry scifi roleplaying game from 1988, wherein you play as the captain of a small band of space marines), Boot Hill (specifically a hack from my friend Xenophon of Athens, who condensed the game into a very simple set of rules for shooting and being shot), and my vague memories of how Rebelstar: Tactical Command on the Gameboy Advance worked. The core of BCS, the meat of each session, is the constant risk of all Hell breaking loose and twenty people having a short but decisive gunfight in a civic library or a fish-canning factory, so I weigh all the rules based on how they'll serve to either push the situation closer to that point or get out of the way and allow it to reach that point on its own. The rules have changed a lot with testing (characters used to have three stats!), but they're in a good place now. Easy to apply, snappy to deploy.

oh, and the original impetus was to have a ruleset which would let me conveniently play Delta Green shotgun scenarios without the pain of Delta Green character creation or skill checks
that's an essential detail

In playtesting, how have players adjusted to controlling these PC fireteams?

They've taken to it really naturally. I ran the game for some line cooks who had never played anything except my version of GLOG before, and was surprised how little trouble it gave them. I was a little concerned, initially, that players might have trouble either keeping track of that many characters and their actions each turn, or roleplaying as multiple characters. But the rules are simple enough that the strategic level is never more than one or two interesting decisions ("a series of interesting decisions" being a good answer to the question "what is a game"), with no minor makework or bookkeeping to distract people. And by the nature of the game, it's not like each of your pawns needs a backstory on the level of a Vampire PC or something. The character concept (high-speed operator for a secret organization) is already set. Give them a cool name, a single quirk and a slap on the ass and set 'em loose to kill or be killed.

Any favorite PCs from playtesting?

John "Little Caesar" Schnatter, CO of OLIVE GARDEN. He died doing what he loved: going really really fast on a dirtbike and getting shot in the chest with a .50 BMG by a sniper 1.3 kilometers away.
Or Poisonous Cloud, a chaplain from an unnamed fireteam (this was really early in playtesting). The player had given him only an unsilenced machine pistol, so to get rid of some alien bikers guarding a suburban home he lured them into the back of a stolen panel van with the promise of meth and then he and the rest of the fireteam (also without silenced weapons) strangled them. In the struggle, a revolver went off, alerting the rest of the alien bikers. Then things really went to Hell...

RIP Little Caesar.

How far has BCS gone from the goal of running shotgun scenarios? To what extent is campaign play possible with such lethal rules and scenarios?

That's a question I'd be really interested in learning the answer to myself. I been running an open table game of sorts where players come and go and (in theory) slowly build up an institutional understanding of the nature of the supernatural threats they're facing, even when the individual footsoldiers of their organization die and are replaced. My other obligations (I run a lot of games) have kept me from utilizing that premise to its full extent. To my knowledge, none of the five or eight people who have run BCS have pulled the trigger on a full-length campaign, though there's no reason it couldn't be done. I have a real hum-dinger of an idea for one — a Narnia-style portal opens up linking the Bush-era U.S. to an alternate Australia in its equivalent of the end of the Pleistocene, and the organization swoops in to secure the oil and plutonium reserves while protecting the Jurassic Park-type enthusiastic scientists and jackass mineral rights speculators from their own stupidity and greed

but that's some foreshadowing for another time...

I normally ask this at the end, but since you bring it up-- what are your hopes for any future works after fulfilling BCS? Are you hoping to start publishing regularly?

Good close personal real-life online friend Sam Sorenson, whose many wildly successful projects have almost definitely possibly been positively influenced by adjacency to me in some way, you know, maybe through animal magnetism, has told me I should participate in ZineQuest many times over the years, but this is the first time I've listened. So far all I've really had to do for this project is write RPG rules and lay them out in a .pdf, which is how I have fun on Wednesday nights anyway. Assuming the process of getting these rules printed out doesn't involve cutting off any fingers, I don't see why I wouldn't do this again in the future. I have an OSR superhero game sitting in the drafts that will knock everyone dead, literally, chaos and carnage, blood in the streets. I have a whole mess of hexcrawls, dungeons, campaigns and more... as with everything else in RPGs, the problem is that there are only so many days in a week and so many years in a lifetime. So, yes, definitely hoping to start publishing regularly. 

Awesome. What finally made you take the leap this year?

2026 is the Year of the Gamer.
Pass it on.

lol
Back to BCS. What advice would you give to new BCS DMs for creating good scenarios?

The zine'll have a whole section on this (as well as a bunch of missions for your gaming pleasure). If you have thirty minutes until the session starts and you have literally nothing ready: first find or think up a striking mental image, like "a human arm reaches out of the tide pool, then a second, then three more. then ten more, then a hundred more, as an inchoate mass of all the missing resort guests drags itself towards you like a titanic amoeba," or "a puppet wizard". Second, either find a blueprint of a building or take a screenshot of a field somewhere on Google Maps; both of those things will come with a scale and you can use them directly as a map. Third, write up a paragraph as a mission briefing, telling the players where they're going and giving them some ominous foreshadowing of the threat. Optimally you'd have time to stick in, you know, some NPCs to talk to, some clues lying around — but a location with a monster hiding in it will get you 80% of the way there.
The gunfighting rules will carry you mechanically. What you need to provide is that one compelling mental image.

A lot of urban horror games have some degree of investigation. How do you know how much rope and foreshadowing to give players in advance of when you expect the monster to jump out?

I suppose it'll depend on the group. For me, in a mission about investigating a monster (as opposed to doing some social infiltration, or just charging into a hostile location guns blazing), it's the ol' three beats. Have an initial warning, which leads a breadcrumb trail to a more significant scene, which leads a trail to a confrontation. Don't keep people waiting for too long, but don't rush a good tension building. One of the three missions mentioned on the Kickstarter page is actually all about this, actually (the other two are, of course, a social infiltration and a guns-blazing battle)

what's the justin alexande rule, the three clues? never feel like you're giving too many clues, players are terrible at interpreting clues. they need as many as you can think of.

I notice the art is being handled by the excellent Loch Eil. Pretty good, no?

Pretty good! We're strategizing some real bangers

What does that look like for the two of you?

deus ex parabola draws a picture in Microsoft Paint, and then Locheil draws something fantastical
here's the deus ex parabola prompt for the drawing on the kickstarter page 

Neat! What a pro. 

I'm not a very visual thinker, so I just put all my trust in Locheil
haven't been disappointed yet

I feel like we've covered a good amount of territory. As a parting treat, what's one of your RPG hot takes?

Everyone talks about, "we need more tactical options. We need more player tactics. Players need more options in tactical combat." Giving players more options will either 1. slow the game down further, because players need to make more decisions, or 2. not slow the game down, because there's one golden path that is always optimal. I say we need less tactical choice. I am anti-tactics.
this will be the subject of a STUNNING blogpost which will SWEEP the 2027 Bloggies

Looking forward to it. Thanks for taking the time to talk about Best Case Scenario, currently sitting at $1,187 on Kickstarter with still over two weeks to go I wish you luck in fulfilling your campaign.

 Anyone interested in picking up a copy of BCS, or at least in checking out some more disconcerting photo-edited images can check out the kickstarter here. I've always been really impressed with Michael's writing skills and creative vision (which he's demonstrated with surprising facility just now in the stifling genre of the interview), and I'm hoping that the success of this project will encourage him towards doing more sooner rather than later. It's $7 for a PDF and $15 for a printed copy, both very reasonable for the words written or for the art alone, let alone combined. Selfishly, I'd really like to see enough new backers to get over the line to the stretch goal which will expand the example scenarios into their own booklet. 

Interview: Hilander on The Valley of Lune

I got the chance to speak with friend of the blog Hilander the other day about the Cairn adventure he's kickstarting, the Valley of Lune. Fair warning, I like this guy and his work, and we have played in each other's games, so I'm not an unbiased interviewer, but it's not like I stand to gain from the success of this product or anything.

Pictured: the artist

How did you first get into RPGs? What's your "origin story?"

My older brother and I used to write miniature board games, often these journey-style games where you had to fight monsters and claim treasures.

"DnD" was strictly off the table though. According to Dad (a great guy by most counts) that was satanic.

Well college came around and I decided to find out for myself. As a player, I found it less Satanic and more dull. I was part of a group of eight, and we were playing 3.5. Unlike the combat, I didn't last very long there.

Then my siblings asked me to run a game, so they could experience it.

I thought 5e would save us, but our first campaign ended abortively. Our second game actually made it to a conclusion, but I was burnt out on the character-build, and rules balance, and combat crafting, etc.

I wanted a riskier, punchier, simpler game.

You've since written multiple systems, and Valley of Lune is written for Cairn. What have you learned about games in the time since that 5e campaign?

Systems are only half the story, and the less interesting one, I think.

The duty of a system is to stay in the background until play becomes uncertain, then resolve that uncertainty and fade into the background again.

"Who am I?" "What can I do?" "Do I kill the monster?" "ARE there monsters?" "What kind of scenarios are we dealing with?" These are essential questions, and a system should help answer them, but also leave a door open for other possibilities.

The more interesting half of the game is the scenarios characters have to deal with, and that half of the equation is one I've struggled with, a lot.

What kind of struggle?

Where do we find the right balance of story and game?

That is, how do we make an interesting situation in the world, while still making room for characters to play in that world and have multiple cool possible outcomes?

A question for the ages. How have you answered that question for this adventure?

For The Valley of Lune, I began with three assumptions: things have happened, things are happening, things will happen. The players enter a region with a lot of moving parts, and whether they act or not, the world is moving. They can shift the path of history, but it's not waiting for them.

 

 Can you risk spoiling the adventure a bit by giving an example?

 

Sure!

The Valley has strong themes of sleep and awakening. One of the factions that can be awoken is the Gearhearts, mechanical folk who come to life once the gears of the city are activated. These are living people, but the team that awakens them will be vital in framing how this faction perceives outsiders.

Are they viewed as an unthinking work force to be ruled over, or as fellow thinking beings with an existing claim to the city, their homeland?

The players will get to make their choice if they get there first, but take too long, and someone, or something, else may wake the Gearhearts. 
 

Very neat. Is theme an important consideration to your adventure design process?

 

Theme tends to come up as a secondary element.

Lune has been percolating in my head for a long time, but I think it started with my own childhood adventures in the rainy Pacific Northwest, and finding old bits of metal covered in moss.
Did I know it would be about Awakening? Not at all, but the theme kept coming back.

 

What other inspirations can you pinpoint for Lune?

 

I think there are echoes of the Hobbit here and there, as well as some Nausicaa. 

I've been listening to covers of the Majora's Mask soundtrack as I write. 

Can I say the moon itself inspired me? A major question found a sudden answer as I was pondering how to teach first graders the lunar cycle.
 

Do you think your teaching profession has given you any insights into better DMing or adventure writing?

 

I've read a lot of rough curriculum. These are books designed to help teachers run their classes, and they can be amazingly confusing.

When I'm teaching or running a game, I want a resource that is easy to reference, helpful, and with pages that are easy to decipher.

I hope that has found its way into the way I design adventures, but I know there's always room to grow.

 

Looking at a preview on kickstarter, I see you're using a combination of bullet point-like highlights with boxed text, which is not a combo I normally see. How did you decide to key the adventure in this way?

 

The style is intended as a layered system from the characters' perspective as they move through the scene.

The box test is what's immediately apparent, and the bulleted list contains further details when the players investigate, including secret information that isnt immediately apparent.

The goal is a smooth format that's easy for Referees to read and reference with minimal prep.

 

What do you like about Cairn's guidelines for creating an overland adventure space?

 

Humans navigate by Routes and Landmarks, and that's what Cairn focuses on. It puts the interesting things along pathways of one sort or another, and overlaps the paths to create intersections and decision points.

It just works.

Do I think hexes are bad? Not at all, but this recipe works for me. 

What feeling do you hope players in a Lune game will come away with? What will they be gushing to their friends about?

 Something I'm still fine tuning is the character descriptions, because I really want characters in this game to be that focus. Who is here, what do they want from outsiders? What would push them to fight? What can they bargain with?

It's an area I really want to shine, because characters and their connections to players are what I most remember from the games I've enjoyed.

After fulfilling Valley of Lune, do you have any other publishing plans? Any ideas cooking in your head?

There are a few ideas actually, an island chain with a hidden city "megadungeon" is somewhere out there, and a forest of nightmares grown from the bones of a dead goddess, along with the home of the Dwarrow.

The dream is a chain of adventure locations long enough to feel something like the Hobbit, adventuring through a series of locations on some grand quest. 

 Ambitious! I hope you get the change to see at least a few of these through. 

Finally, do you have any RPG hot takes?

Nope.

 I've been racking my brain all day, and I can't settle on a single one. [Editor's note: boo! hiss!]

Call someone today and invite them over to play your favorite game.
That's all I've got folks. Take the risk, play the game, enjoy life. 

Always the uniter. Thanks for agreeing to be interviewed.

There's currently just seven days left to jump on the kickstarter, which has already exceeded its goal by $218 as of the time of publishing. You can pick up a pdf of the adventure for just $5, or also get the physical PDF for $12. Personally, I think those prices are very generous, and I know very few people who approach Hilander for breadth of skill-- his rules are well-considered and properly composed, his art is charming, and his layout shows great understanding of how a book or zine can aid those who want to use it. If you have a few bucks, you basically can't go wrong with a Hilander adventure. And if you don't play Cairn, I'm sure as a reader of this blog that you know how to convert things easily. You do it all the time, you're a pro, you know good work when you see it, and you know a good deal when your favorite blogger shills it out to you. Go in peace.

You Shall Find in Him the Continent (Class: Personage)

Mounts

Horses are found wild and domesticated in Yarfu. A horse has 3 HD, but through careful breeding may have a sizeable bonus to its HP. A mounted party can travel for longer in the day.

Ulu are created by magicians. They have 4 HD, three legs, long snouts, and vibrant patterned hair. An ulu is cheaper than a horse, though less broadly available. It is smarter but very flighty, and the structure of its legs make it impossible for an ulu to rear up and trample men. However, its dextrous mouth allows it to hold objects firmly and even wield weapons in battle, most broadly the mouthpick. At a gallop, ulu actually hover over the ground for short durations.

Ulus are used not only as mounts but to harvest their eggs and tufan, a waxy spit that hardens to the consistency of soft clay or can be heated to the strength of hardwood. 

 

 

 

Class: Personage

   Between the Khepri and men are the personages. Understood to have the blood of Saver Heol's divine messengers and the blood of mortality, this vast caste is nobility for their nobility. While some hives call engineers or national officials their ras, most still look to a lord or lady to rule and dignify them. If, as a matter of taste, your version of Yarfu omits the depiction of any cruel or hateful deeds that have been common and widespread in history, you can say that this is because of the good influence of the personages— while not universally good, they are like an optimistic person's view of humanity.

   Start with: a horse and lance OR ulu and mouthpick, saddlebags, a cuirass and helm, a shield, a spear, a merkhet. Any number of these may display your sigil, your unique hereditary heraldry.

Every two levels, get +1 MD and +2 spells

A: Centitor, Blood Eyes
B: Magus
C: Duelist
D: Magus Major

Centitor: You have an inborn proficiency with bows, spears, swords, and knives. While mounted, your hereditary equanimity allows you to take attacks directed at your mount. You are very good at directing teams of engineers. No one fully respects you if they haven't seen your sigil.

Blood Eyes: By pressing your tongue hard into the roof of your mouth, you can push your second eyes into place. They glow red, and pierce through the darkness like bulls-eyes, allowing you to see in the dark up to 60'. They are blinded by mist and fog.

Magus: When wearing anything short of full lamellar, you are capable of casting a narrow band of spells. (See the Personage spell list below) You cannot learn magic-user spells, but may find diagrams with more rare personage spells in your adventures.

Duelist: On a successful melee strike, deal +1d6 damage, or immediately cast a spell with 1 MD.
 

Magus Major: You reach the full breadth of attainment, now capable of learning magic-user spells and  casting them while wearing any armor short of full lamellar. 

d12 Personage Spell

1.  Ramose's Wall of Bronze - [dice * 5] bronze panels the height and width of an average human rise up from the ground. You can arrange them how you like. They have images of warriors on them. 
2. Soft Animals of Your Body - weep and shiver, and vomit [sum] falcons. They cannot be easily commanded, but have a sense that they're on your side.
3. Yannez's True Strike - The next [dice] attacks you make within the next hour get +20 to hit.
4. Diet of Wyrms - Your sweat starts to glisten luridly. Those who touch you within the next [sum] without protection come into contact with a burning poison (1d4 damage), and must test Morale (or save with talent, for PCs) to resist immediately releasing you.
5. Water of the Pict - Choose an aperture you can see. Mirrorous fluid flows from it for [sum] rounds, inundating the surroundings. Your will can shift its aspect to make the water seem to resemble anything.
6. Flicker - [highest] times after you cast this spell, you can choose to not be real when something tangible would affect you, such as an attack or a spell. You are unreal until the end of your next turn.
7. Sorana's Courage - heal [sum] Morale divided among those you choose.
8. Animate Cloak - Your shadow animates and extends to follow your orders, moving up to [sum] cubits away and affecting objects and people with [sum] x 10% of human strength. It can be damaged by fire and has [sum] HP.
9. Become Ooze - You know, ooze! Lasts [sum] minutes.
10. Blade Atomic Blazing - Empower a weapon. It casts colorful light [sum] feet, damages ghosts, and inflicts [dice] fatigue on a successful hit for [sum] minutes. The spell is powered by a great fiery furnace deep underground.
11. Sapphire Snake Bolt - Fire a beam 150 ft., bouncing up to [dice] times. Targets save or take [sum] damage.
12. Silence - [dice] creatures are made incapable of making sound for [sum] minutes. With 4MD, can instead make a single creature permanently silent. 

 This completes the classes for Deserts of Vo. I am working on a big regioncrawl, a complete rulebook, and rare equipment list.

How Phlox Does It

 Grace of Choir of Fire described a few different ways of running games on a very literal level of personal habit, which inspired Louis of Garamondia to describe his own approach, and they have both inspired me. Speaking quickly to my current play:

Endless Eons

I run a weekly in-person game for my husband, brother, and a couple friends. My prep is front-loaded-- I wrote encounter generators and regioncrawling generators and a couple dungeons before the game started, and I've largely been coasting off of those. I made a reference document for an important alien conlang, but I've only referenced it a couple times. We all rolled starting characters together (I designed a character sheet!), and players came up with their concepts. Against my normal advice, their backstories and life histories pretty explicitly will not matter to the game. I put some intention in ensuring that we wouldn't ever have to wonder why these characters travel together despite disparate situations, but when new PCs join the party everyone jokes about "having a good feeling" about this stranger and immediately offer them a spot on the board of their company.

After only a couple sessions as wandering adventurers, the party entered a city and immediately started constructing a pyramid of graft and politics that became the main focus of the campaign. Between sessions, I came up with a stack of random, specific events for that city and scheduled them to happen every 1d2 in-game weeks. Since then, the party has deviated from the political game to raid a couple dungeons or explore new regions, but an average session involves talking to NPCs and handling two or three political flashpoints. A couple players are more comfortable driving the action and setting scenes, while the other two are less active but still engaged.

Typically, the game is at a friend's house. Sometimes when he can't host I do, and if more than one player can't make it we cancel, but I feel bad about it. We usually talk for an hour or more about movies and politics before the game starts, which I often feel bad about. From there we play for maybe three hours, or stop earlier if we reach a very good stopping point. Then we usually gab for a bit longer.

When I started running this game, I was worried about the hassle of bringing my laptop over to a friend's house every week. I therefore planned my prep so that it all stayed in a notebook or my phone. When I'm setting up, I place two sets of dice out for the players, a set of dice and a bunch of rolldown d20s (to track HP of monsters) close at hand for myself. I open my notebook, which is mostly lists of NPCs (names in pen, details in pencil), with some logistical concerns and lists in the margins. I swap my phone's internet app to the Endless Eons tabs (name generator, generators on my blog, a couple Paper and Pencil blogposts, a website that lists the etymology of real-world places). If the party is abroad, I pull out the player-facing map for them (by tradition for this campaign, drawn on paper towels).

I have regioncrawl maps for my own use, as when they're dungeoneering I have a full map for myself on grid paper. One player takes extensive notes and maps. Another player takes notes on his character's clothes and personal projects. A third player tracks ongoing expenses and the party treasury. The fourth player does not take notes.

We do not use minis, music, or battlemaps. Players speak in-character, and I largely do as well.

 

Great Chronicle of the Raven

This is a duet game with my husband, our first attempt at Vampire the masquerade 5E. It has a bespoke structure, with a 12th generation vampire in modern nights who reads the accounts of his vampiric forebears, with the player gaming through the flashpoints of their long existence. Thus, it's a game with one DM, one player, and nine PCs, spanning from prehistory to now. Again I tried to front-load prep, listing over a hundred and fifty vampires in the modern DC area, plus versions of the vampiric population from two earlier points in history. I made a chart of how the vampire clans changed over time, a reference sheet for their magic disciplines, and a timeline with a column for each PC. I made a reference document for the unfamiliar modern rules and a PC generator to become familiar with them. I walked the player through the intricacies of character creation, then generated the other eight PCs myself. It's understood that the 12th generator vampire probably won't die, but the others are fair game once they sire the next vampire in the chain-- this set-up is weird.

By design, the contents of a given session will vary a lot. I try to ask the player earlier that day which PC he wants to focus on-- usually we play a full session as one character or split it between the 12th gen and an ancestor. Then we need to determine when exactly in that character's unlife we are focusing on-- so far he prefers to go in chronological order for a given PC's story. Either he will have a plan for what he wants to do or we'll skip to the next event on my big timeline. 

Some events are covered in abstract, where he describes his plans and we roll dice to see how well it goes. This is especially important for pacing-- we don't need to roleplay everything the vampire De Corbin does in 11th century France, the game is not about 11th century France. Sometimes it requires actual scenes, or whole scenarios and adventures, like when he wanted to visit the very important vampiric community of Constantinople. Those characters, and his impression of them, will probably color a lot of later play, so I make a cast of kindred. In this example, I happened to make a generator that fits the era and region, so I used that as a base and mostly improvised changes. I look over the list of vampires in Constantinople until I spot a couple that would generate a lot of business and call that part good. Then I do quick googling about the likely route the character takes and copy down the results of one or more "travel gates" (generated by a button in the PC generator blogpost) which provide sparks for potential events that happen on the way. The travel spark tables actually require more thought than the destination, so in the couple hours between when I ask the player what he wants to do and when we actually play, I spend the most time staring at those and trying to figure out if X or Y city was actually a notable enough location in 1045 for the PC to stop off there, and whether it's controlled by the Byzantines or the Abbasids.

Reading the accounts of the ancestors allows for stories where 12 years can pass and it ain't no thing, but play for the 12th gen vampire follows a more conventional approach. There might be skips of a week or two, but we might play through a sequence going from night to night to night, with enough interruptions, human investigation, and hostile vampire activity to prevent the PC from resting too much on his laurels. This isn't very OSRcore-- the DM is essentially improvising plot in a character-focused journey-- but it works for us and for the odd premise of the campaign.

Playing this weekly game is very important to my husband. We never cancel and almost never reschedule. I sit on the couch, bring up my many tabs on my laptop, and play a little song to signify the start of the game. He is often cooking something or sitting across the room, and only bring up his sheet when he needs to roll something. There's a lot of sessions that are just characters talking to each other, so even in a tradful game like VtM we might not roll very much. When we do roll, because 5E uses proprietary dice, we use an online dice roller. Though there's a lot of conversation, I'm more comfortable than average summarizing and paraphrasing my NPCs otherwise to keep things rolling.

 

Habits
Most games I run are more like the former game, but I'm always doing some kind of weekly ongoing duet game with the husband. When I run for a group, I really enjoy the more OSR approach, whether that's GLoG or a BX hack or something else, and I try to keep things running briskly, with a realistic idea about how much time I might have to prep intricacies between sessions. When I daydream about games I want to run, I'm dreaming about door D&D, with adventure locations full of quicksand and dart traps and green knights. Duet games are really good for the slightly more bespoke premise, and allow for premises with a solitary protagonist, which is super common in other story forms but practically untapped in (good) RPGs. How do you solve the classic sci-fi RPG issues around giving every player something important to do in ship combat? Have only one player. What if only one player wants to read and annotate a novel for your Dracula Dossier game? Only play with that player (and also marry and smooch him).

As I mentioned, I really like to front-load my work when running campaigns. It's easiest to power through prep when I'm excited about the game, and often my prep helps me to become conversant in the rules and procedures. The last campaign I completed, using Hilander's Lost Fable system, was my first game with that system, so  understanding it quickly was important.

Like Grace and Louis, I hope you'll consider blogging about your own way of running things. It would be really neat to compare! 

This Sleep of Forgetfulness Will Not Last Forever (Classes: Magic-User and Chancer; d100 Spells)

 

art by Rebecca Storm

    Casting a spell requires a free hand and a strong voice. The aspects in the soul (housed in the organs) can't be entrapped in armor, but may be dignified by robes or other rich things.

    Common magic items include:

• Robes. Quality magical robes give +1 MD and some extra effect
• Wands. Cast spells with a certain number of MD a certain number of times.
• Diagrams. Drawings that evoke to the learned the insights needed to cast a spell— highly referential, very culturally contextually. Can be quickly imitated to release the spell in the diagram, expending it, or studied for three days to be learned with a d20 roll.

 Class: Magic-User

    Thanks to Louis, whose specialist I largely pulled from. 

    In Yarfu, magicians are called wizards because they have a reputation for wisdom, or for overwisdom. Students of the world as illuminated by Saver Heol, their traditions were wrought in academies which now moulder in ruins. The highest places of the Savadur are normally reserved for wizards.

    Start with a knife, 20 darts, an ornate hat, and two specialist toolkits of your choice— examples might include: a paint set, a set of surgeon's hooks, actors’ makeup, climbing gear, the makings for poisoning, a telescope. Start with a Lore of three topics

    +1 MD and +2 spells per template

• A: Lore, Quick
• B: Wizard Vision, Cool-Headed, 
• C: Practical Trade, Immunity to Sleep
• D: Instrumentalize

Lore: Made up a variety of topics you've studied and pondered. Remember, there is no writing here, so to study something fully you have to have visited strange and remote places, spoken to long-lived people, and connected dots on your own. Suitable topics includes:

• Any common artisan profession
• History and Etiology
• Military science
• Mathematics and architecture
• Surgery
• Curselore
• Folklore
• Poetry
• Philology
• Desertlore
• Bushcraft
• Arctica
• Alchemy
• Geopolitics
• Mythology
• Ex Chetera

The lowest possible roll for a skill check pertaining to a topic of your lore is 10. Most academics in Crocodole use the preceding list, minus the artisan professions thing, as a "total" taxonomy of knowledge.

Quick: You are skilled with all one-handed melee weapons and pick things up quickly when you need to. You can be taught something complicated by someone who knows what they’re doing, and will be able to do that thing as a passable amateur for the rest of the day.

Wizard Vision: One of your eyes changes to a random color. It can now see invisibility, and detect magic. If you lock eyes with another person you can tell how many MD they have.

Coolheaded: You can choose whether you wish to be affected by intimidation, seduction, charm, etc. This only works on non-magical effects. (I get that this is largely already true for PCs, but consider it extra license and a warning about magician NPCs.)

Practical Trade: If you make a melee attack on a target who is not aware of your presence, your attack inflicts an additional 2d8 damage. 

Instrumentalize: You can push yourself in pursuit of your goals. Once per day, you may do one of the following:

• When you take a turn, you can take another one immediately afterwards.
• You may attack three times instead of once.
• You may move at three times your normal speed for one turn.
• You may roll three times for a single ability or skill check, and choose the highest result

Spells
Magician players should work together with the DM to invent custom spells. A d100 table of the most common spells can be found here:

(Some of these spells are from Ashes to Ashes by Loch Eil. Crabalanche by Dunkey Halton)

 d100 magic spells (on repeats, round towards 100, or towards 1 if you're a priest of Saver Heol)

1. Sacred Bond - With a one hour ritual, establish a bond between yourself and another creature whom you trust, which contains [sum] points. You may each draw points from the bond to restore missing HP. You may only have one Sacred Bond at a time.
2. Ramose's Wall of Bronze - [dice * 5] bronze panels the height and width of an average human rise up from the ground. You can arrange them how you like. They have images of warriors on them. 
3. Beryx's Deferral - This spell is cast in response to taking damage. The incoming damage is reduced by [sum], and [dice] black pins appear in your arms. Wrenching these pins free deals 1d10 damage to you. If you have more pins in you than you have Max HP, you die by rotting over the course of a minute.
4. Water of the Mure - Choose an aperture you can see. White water pours from it for [sum] rounds, inundating the surroundings. That soaked with the water cannot do violence and barely exerts friction. Shoes walk as though on ice, hammers tickle, and damage cannot be done.
5. Yanessa's Glorious Emanation - Transform into a ray of light, firing at an impossible speed towards any location within sight. The journey burns and weakens you to the tune of [lowest]+2 damage, and you may "bounce" your journey, turning at up to [dice]-1 non-black surfaces.
6. Sanctuary - Designate a space of up to [sum] by [sum] cubits that are currently warmed by the light of the sun. The undead cannot transgress the space and animals and those with evil intent must test morale to enter it. Lasts [dice] days.
7. Aset's Possession of the Power - Target corpse explodes for [dice]d6 damage, up to its HD total, in a [sum]x4 cubit radius. This spell can target an undead creature, but if it is not destroyed by the damage it does not explode out.
8. Water of the Prive - Choose an aperture you can see. Runny green water flows from it for [sum] rounds, inundating the surroundings. It ignites flammable objects, and deals ~1d6 damage to someone the first time they touch it.
9. Ease Burden - summon [a yoke/a wheelbarrow/a cart/an ulu].
10. Water of the Al - Choose an aperture you can see. Thick sludge pours from it for [sum] rounds, inundating the surroundings. The waters are sticky, and after ten minutes harden into a kind of groddy resin.
11. Hoopoe's Crown - Remove your head covering, and vibrant feathers (the color of your wizard eye, if you have one), bolding present themselves. You are the most prominent member of your group, and  those you newly encounter roll reaction at +2. The spell lasts for [dice] hours, and affected encounters reroll their reaction at the end of that time.
12. Teneniu's Royalty - Cause [dice] objects of up to [sum] stones to float in a gentle orbit around you for up to [dice] hours.
13. Izolda's Flare - At your solemn word, "Los-Kadur-Ra," the sun looses a missile of fire and light, and 1 minute later (or five minutes at night), it arrives, blasting the area you designate, dealing [dice]d6! damage to anyone present and scattering wooden structures as well as [marking/damaging/destroying/destroying and penetrating] stone or clay.
14. Magic Mouth - draw a simple image of a mouth on a surface. Whenever someone passes by it, or does some other triggering act you specify, the mouth animates, repeating a message you speak as you cast the spell lasting up to [sum] seconds.
15. Soft Animals of Your Body - weep and shiver, and vomit [sum] falcons. They cannot be easily commanded, but have a sense that they're on your side.
16. Instant Summons - You mark items with a special glyph that you learn when you learn this spell. You may snap your fingers and summon a marked item, expending an MD. You can have [level] active glyphs at once. The absolute maximum size of objects that can be moved is 20 slots. 
17. Mantra of the Plover - You yank the living spirit from yourself or a willing ally, in a movement like tearing a sheet off of someone's head. The character is undead for [sum] minutes, and doesn't take damage from being dismembered as long as the pieces come together before the spell ends. We should be well prepared.
18. Unnamed Hive - Follow an ache that tells you how to find the [dice] nearest places where a kiss was shared.
19. Gael's Memorialism - absorb [sum] XP and [dice] memories from a recently deceased human. If 4+ dice are invested, 500+ gp in funeral expense is expended, and the total HD of deceased figures involved in the ritual is 10+, summons a Mourner Giant, loyal to the caster but foul of temperament.
20. Tiye's Vantablade - summon a light-eating one-handed khopesh into your hand. For each die invested, choose one effect: 1. Foes attacking you treat light levels as dimmer than they otherwise are. 2. You get advantage on your attacks with the vantablade. 3. deal +1d4 damage with the first wound inflicted by the vantablade each round. 4. the blade shrieks and drinks blood, causing a morale test for worldly foes when it is summoned and when it slays a significant enemy.
21. Water of the Acon - Choose an aperture you can see. Scintillating yellow fluid pours from it for [sum] rounds, inundating the surroundings. Wild beasts and undead cannot cross the waters.
22. First Men - Summon a 4 HD slime warrior and get +[dice] reaction with it. It gets +[dice] to morale if following your orders. Lasts [1 hour/1 day/1month/indefinitely]. Slimes without plants and fellows of their kind will grow sad.
23. Mantra of the Obelisk - In [lowest] Turns, do the skilled work of 10 laborers or architects acting in 1 Turn
24. Adorn the Case - Create an unguent which can preserve a body for [sum]x[dice] days. If this unguent is slathered on a weapon, it instead makes that weapon deal double damage against the undead for [highest] hits.
25. Prima Vedex - Assess up to [sum] symbols divided among [dice] objects as though they spoke their intention, context, subtext, exc.
26. Mantra of the Shining Gem - Enemies must test Morale to attack you for the first [dice] rounds of a combat. Lasts for 1 hour.
27. Yannez's True Strike - The next [dice] attacks you make within the next hour get +20 to hit.
28. Diet of Wyrms - Your sweat starts to glisten luridly. Those who touch you within the next [sum] without protection come into contact with a burning poison (1d4 damage), and must test Morale (or save with talent, for PCs) to resist immediately releasing you.
29. Water of the Pict - Choose an aperture you can see. Mirrorous fluid flows from it for [sum] rounds, inundating the surroundings. Your will can shift its aspect to make the water seem to resemble anything.
30. Soul Jars - With a defiant twist, remove [dice] of your organs and place it in a vessel. You get +[dice] x 2 HP until the organ is replaced, and if the organ is your brain you can wear a helmet without interfering with spellcasting. The spell cannot be recast until the organs are returned to your body, and if one is destroyed you suffer the result.
31. Gwen's Sweet Archaic Song - Send a poem [sum] seconds long to a recipient you have met before. It arrives in their mind 1d6 x 10 minutes later.
32. Flicker - [highest] times after you cast this spell, you can choose to not be real when something tangible would affect you, such as an attack or a spell. You are unreal until the end of your next turn.
33. Nimlot's Little Slip - Make a chamber or labyrinth "skippable", going directly from an entrance to another area it has connected to which you've been to. Maintain the slip for [dice]+[dice] Turns.
34. Karoma's Dancing Blade - animates weapon to attack with +[dice] to-hit until it’s done [sum] damage.
35. Anger - For ten minutes, the next [sum] times someone tries to attack you, you get to attack them first.
36. Sorana's Courage - heal [sum] Morale divided among those you choose.
37. Ligia's Monstrous Form - Perform a sort of Haukepo'khe dance and transform into a bald woman of striated stone and metal. Gain [dice] DR for 30 minutes.
38. Animate Cloak - Your shadow animates and extends to follow your orders, moving up to [sum] cubits away and affecting objects and people with [sum] x 10% of human strength. It can be damaged by fire and has [sum] HP.
39. From Beneath, Devourer - You may crawl through the ground and breath dirt for [sum] minutes. Attacking foes from below grapples them.
40. Tara's Silent Hound - summon a silent (but vicious) greyhound that serves you for an hour. Invest 2 MD to make it a silent wolf, 3 MD to call two wolves, or 4+ MD for them to have ever-burning fur.
41. Telekinesis - lift [sum]x2 equipment slots of substance or [dice] people. Lasts [dice] minutes.
42. Become Ooze - You know, ooze! Lasts [sum] minutes.
43. Indifferent Rays - Swirl and dance and hop around a space, and after two rounds a half-cubit orb will give off a burning light for an hour, dealing 1d6 damage to organic things. Anyone reduced to 0 rolls on the atomic Table of Consequences. You have [sum] temporary HP to resist radiation for the duration of the spell.
44. Samzun's Arson - cavort and conjure [dice] 10x10 cubits of fire created.
45. Siamun's Command of Wealth - [sum] slots’s worth of coins act according to your command with [sum] x 10% of a human's strength.
46. Tenenan's Passage - Make a cut in your head (dealing 1 damage), then go unhindered through [highest] barriers. Makes a light twinkling sound.
47. Blade Atomic Blazing - Empower a weapon. It casts colorful light [sum] feet, damages ghosts, and inflicts [dice] fatigue on a successful hit for [sum] minutes. The spell is powered by a great fiery furnace deep underground
48. Flame Unto Flame - cause a fire to grow in heat. If enclosed in an oven, a kiln, or a hole, it becomes a marvelous furnace, though any item placed within burns with Atomic energy for [sum] times the duration it is inserted. The flame lasts up to [dice] hours
49. Wild Beasts - You summon [sum]HD of slavering beasts up from the ground. They are hostile to everyone
50. Mantra of the Large Pond - For one hour, see your surroundings as they might appear decades and centuries later, ruins of ruins. There is a [dice]-[dungeon level] in-6 chance of a rent ceiling that allows natural light to show, and a +[dice]-in-6 chance of searching for secret doors and other hidden things.
51. Sovereign of All the World - bleed a stinking green acid from beneath the nail of your pointer finger for [dice] rounds. Each round of contact destroys non-magical material— a fist of metal, a head of stone, a chest of wood, a horse of dirt, exc. the acid may be used as a melee attack for 1d10 damage.
52. Scorpion Sting - Summon a curved light knife made of chitin. The first creature stabbed with this knife takes [sum] extra poison damage, save for half.
53. Become Newt - You transform into a small lizard (the color of your wizard eye, if you have one), capable of climbing slowly and running at human speed. This lasts for four hours. During that time, you have [dice] HP.
54. Ally Across Time - Summon up to [dice] alternate selves. You may instead summon fewer selves to get rerolls. 
55. Sapphire Snake Bolt - Fire a beam 150 ft., bouncing up to [dice] times. Targets save or take [sum] damage.
56. Remote Viewing - See any space up to [sum]x10 feet away.
57. Water of the Cry - Choose an aperture you can see. Cerulean water pours from it for [sum] rounds, inundating the surroundings. The water numbs and makes heavy, and makes living things giddy with excitement.
58. Mimic - Disguise yourself as an object you have seen, which is smaller than a cart. The object must at least be big enough to contain your body, unless you cast with 3 or more MD, then it can be any size, down to a pin. Objects you mimic work perfectly well for mundane purposes. You can be harmed and injured normally if people attack your Mimic’d form. 
59. Morvan's Acid Arrows - conjures [sum] bolts of lurid yellow acid you can throw like a bow sends arrows.
60. Animate Objects - Up to [dice] objects will be able to move of their own volition, [sum] rounds strenuous actions, [sum] minutes otherwise. Objects have a [dice]-in-8 chance of being particularly loyal, this is only rolled the first time you cast the spell on a particular target.
61. Tanguy's Coldsnap - An area [dice] x 5’ in diameter is exposed to a sudden burst of frigid cold. Creatures in the area take [sum] cold damage, water freezes, & so on. The area gradually returns to its normal temperature over the course of an hour.
62. Comprehend Languages - You understand and speak one language perfectly for [dice] Turns.
63. Siamu's Crabalanche - Point at a crevice and crabs start pouring out of it. Like a hundred crabs per round. They don't really do anything, just mill around for a while and then wander off. Lasts for [sum] rounds.
64. Water of the Vote - Choose an aperture you can see. Stinking fluid pools from it for [sum] rounds, inundating the surroundings. This is flammable, and belches yellow smoke upon ignition.
65. Silence - [dice] creatures are made incapable of making sound for [sum] minutes. With 4MD, can instead make a single creature permanently silent
66. Mantra of the Crocodile - Seem to be a log, pillar of rough stone, or similar knobbly furnishing. You are totally silent. Lasts for [dice] hours or [until you take a step/until you are seen taking a step/until you attack/until you release the spell.]
67. Promethean Shriek - Call fire towards you by calling its name ("AAAAAAAH"). For up to [sum] rounds, pull a flame from up to 40 cubits away into your open mouth. On later rounds, you may spit the flames elsewhere as an attack or to set it safely onto good fuel.
68. Ego - Gain [sum] temporary HP and turn undead of [dice] HD or fewer.
69. Threading Dew - For [sum] rounds, instead of moving a normal distance you may flow like wind in the trees, seeming to suddenly appear elsewhere without having to physically traverse the distance.
70. Imperial Heart - Make a heart small and black and hard. It is indestructible and, if inscribed with the image of a river, immoble, even hanging in the air. Lasts [sum] minutes.
71. Jackal-Son-Of-Jackal - eat flesh and at least one organ from a dead body to learn the answer to [sum] questions. -1 die to compel honesty, -1 die to ensure full mental faculties. Eating a rotting organ has a [days dead]-in-20 chance of contracting a harmful akh.
72. Stone Plague - Your touch ‘infects’ stone or clay, transforming [sum] cubic cubits into damp sand over the course of [dice] minutes
73. Hide - Enchant a hooded cloak to disguise you from [highest] senses, sight counting as two. Fire touching your cloak reveals you. 
74. Enervate - Inflict [dice] Fatigue on a target, or [sum] if you have a part of their body in your hand (plucked strands of hair, for example).
75. Corpse Mask - Turn a corpse’s face into a magical mask with [dice] of the following properties while worn: resemble the face’s owner, gain their voice, learn one of their languages, recognize what they recognize. 
76. Snakelike Jaw - swallow things whole and get an extra attack each round, biting with +[dice] to-hit , +4 if you are stuck in or grappling. Lasts 1 Turn.
77. Night Dog Bite - Shivering, you make an extremity or object undetectable by pressure, sound, or pain for [sum] minutes
78. Leaden Bandage - The next [dice] magical objects you touch writhe and scream. If [sum] exceeds their HD, spellcasters and magical creatures are also affected, though only once per casting of the spell.
79. Shatter - Target object is struck as though by [sum] iron hammers, with a loud bang. 
80. Door to Chaos - Tracing a line of blood along the frame of a portal, name up to [sum] doors (minimum [lowest]) within a quarter-league that you have seen. Anyone passing through this door appears in a random door from among the ones you designate. Lasts 1 full day.
81. Animating Force - distribute [sum] HP among [dice] corpses, each one ritually prepared. They stand and serve as simple servants, clumsy fighters, and poor conversationalists. They lose 1 HP per day due to erosion.
82. Orbs of Lightning - String up to [sum] electric orbs throughout an area, no closer to each other than 4 cubits. Coming within 1 cubit of an orb causes a sharp discharge, expending the orb to deal 1d4 damage. Lasts 6 hours.
83. Viorel's Fumigade - spit [dice] bulging, scored seeds up. When thrown, a seed emits a hazy poison, filling a space with an 8-cubit radius, dealing 1 damage per round to all living and/or plant creatures. A seed retains potency for 1 day before crusting and sugaring over into an ingestible hallucinogenic sweet.
84. Rubbery Body - Immune to bludgeoning, fall damage and similar things. Amazing contortions. Lasts [sum] minutes.
85. Send Out - You transform into a buzzard. This lasts for [sum] minutes. During that time, you have [dice]x[dice] HP.
86. Torch - Breath on [the ground/a piece of architecture/an item/a face]. It glows with light (the color of your wizard eye, if you have one) in a 30' radius [for 4 hours/for a month/until broken/until broken]. An affected creature saves with favor or is blinded by the light
87. Sleep - [sum] HD of creatures suddenly enter a waking dream, sleepwalking as though living out their vision.
88. Tréphina's Cynical Work - Take a turn to perform an occult bone massage to heal [sum] HP, spending 5 to instead heal an injury.
89. Lust - Track someone by scent for [dice] hours. Get +[sum] to notice details about them but -[sum] to resist their deceptions.
90. Water of the Ride - Choose an aperture you can see. Thick red foam pours from it for [sum] rounds, inundating the surroundings. While it moves, it makes a baying sound that attracts living things (MOR test to resist), and functions as low-density blood, if you might need any.
91. Charm Person - One person with [sum] or fewer HD and wearing no charms or amulets treats you as a friend and teacher for a month and a day.
92. Ironflesh - Turn up to [highest] sixths of your body into immobile iron. Lasts until you desire otherwise.
93. Viamanse - [know the direction of the nearest road/intuit everyone who has walked a particular trail/ken the provenance of an item/bind a tiffin giant to serve you for 101 days]
94. Mantra of the Dark Green Hill - You and up to [sum] characters pass through [sum] nights. If cast in a forlorn place, instead that place passes through those nights, essentially existing in a time between time until the spell ends. You do not regain MD in these nights.
95. Babble - Issue [dice] commands to plant creatures. They will obey, provided they are not attacked, but impose [lowest] strictures on you in return. Their demands are usually irrational, rather than overtly dangerous.
96. Maelys's Eclipse - cast a heavy shadow on up to [dice] targets. Can make a person anonymous, conceal a doorway, exc. lasts [1 Turn/1 hour/1 day/until the target is bathed in the light of a rising sun.]
97. Ovidiu's Illusion - Create a moving, silent image which lasts for [sum] minutes, centred on a tiny songbird you conjure, which flies away into the sky at the spell’s end. You can move and reshape it as you like if the songbird can hear you whistle. If the songbird is killed, the illusion is destroyed. 
98. Darkness - Summon a black torch, which sheds darkness as a torch does light. It lasts for [sum] minutes. 
99. Enora's Dark Star - Play your hand over a flame. Its color becomes grey (or the color of your wizard eye if you have one], and you may have it switch between shedding light to shedding fog. It burns for [sum] x 10 minutes.
100. Mutant spell! Roll twice and combine. 

-

Class: Chancer

In the "jianghu scene" of Yarfu, there aren't really any characters of the chancer type. Stories from abroad speak of slinking wildmen, at home in the places where trees grow so thick they blot out Saver Heol's light, hirsute outlaws who fly on stone birds, assassinate priests, and lie. Thus "chancer" is a term of derogation and disdain.