TTRPG – Project Work by Shane P.

Old Maps and Starchasers

December 15, 2023 ShaneLeave a comment

The oceans have always been eyed up greedily by humankind. Transport by boat was crucial for emergence of empires and economies over the few hundred years, and remains so today. Shipping routes aren’t the only thing to be jostling for; what’s in (and under!) the oceans are crucial too, from oil to food.

Our jobs are much easier nowadays with fossil fuel powered, enormous ships, not to mention highly accurate maps and nautical equipment.

Maps aren’t new though. They are more prolific, but there are many maps we have of older civilizations. These maps, especially before 1300AD, show other issues with traveling through the inky green: dozens of sea monsters.

A mosaic of a lion-sea creature. Its upper body is lion-like, but its lower half is a long fish tail, coiled around itself.

I’m reading Sea Monsters on Medieval and Renaissance Maps (Chet van Duzer) and couldn’t help but do a bit of world building here. The images in this blog post are scans of part of this book. (With hundreds more in the book!)

The creatures range from sea-pigs, to merfolk, to leviathans that could be mistaken for islands. In fact a common supposition was that “every land creature has an aquatic equal”. These creatures appear all over the world, corroborated on multiple maps. They were discussed in Green literature, known as “ketos”. Marco Polo in 1254 writes of spells needed by the pearl farmers which they incant to keep away the sea monsters.

An adorable pig-dog. A stocky creature with something like a dog's face, a pig's body, and flippers. — A “pig-dog”. I can’t imagine this guy was a menace. A familiar, maybe?

Then, quite suddenly, these warnings of sea monster being to disappear from new maps. Rare and rarer still throughout the 1500s, until today where maps are very dry. The oceans are empty of most nuisances, other than weather (which we’ve never really been able to tame). Not a winged sea dragon or a ichthyocentaur to be found.

What happened to them?

There is a place where these creatures can still be found, and witnessed quite safely by every person on Earth. Look up. What made the ketos disappear from our oceans and reappear as constellations?

Order of the Seraphic Seas

The Order existed for a few hundred years and then was dissolved once their job was completed. Their singular aim, given to them by the church and funded by vested merchants, was to tame the seas.

They did this, quietly and with great honor, by hunting the seas for “ungodly” creatures and extincting them by force. These paladins were efficient and thorough. As the might of man stood against the ketos, there was no doubt about the end of this road. The ketos would be wiped out.

A gentleman playing a lute with a fiddle, except he's half sea-creature. Like a centaur, but if it was a sea dragon instead of a horse. — An ichthyocentaur. Apparently that’s what this is.

The smarter, more sentient of these creatures, made a deal with something for protection. Like Noah and his arc, the creatures who accepted the offer of help were swept away from their waters to safety.

They shelter in the cosmos now, their eyes glinting down at night, watching. Awaiting a return? Trapped in a pact they can’t escape?

Whatever they were doing, they were exterminated from the seas and so the job was done for the Order.

The Starchasers

But stars don’t always stay in the sky. “Tiny, harmless meteors,” we’re told. “Safely crashed into the ocean, causing no harm,” they say.

Some escape the hell they were confined to, in the maddening space between silence and dark. In their escape, they make a beeline for the place they once called home.

It’s possible before the Order that these creatures were aggressive only in protecting their home. Now though, centuries of abyssal torture has driven them mad and their fury is all they have left. Not only that, but the vile darkness has left its mark on them. Twisting them. Granting them unearthly strength.

With the Order gone, it falls to a much more ramshackle group to deal with the mess. (This is where the players come in!) The Starchasers hunt down these creatures – on land or at sea – to finish off the Sepharific duties of the Order.

I think this is a fine premise for a monster of the week style game, and you’ve got hundreds of ideas for bad guys from actual maps. And, of course, cryptids.

Imagination & Cryptids

December 7, 2023 Shane1 Comment

“I don’t know you how do it” is a pretty common refrain when hearing about someone running a marathon, writing computer code, or making art.

“Yes, you do!” I often want to scream. The runner spends hours training, the coder hours learning, and the artist hours practicing. There are very few skills humans are born with. We have to learn them. Suggesting otherwise is to disregard the effort someone has put into something.

Imagination is exactly the same. “I’m not creative enough to write a story.” Neither was Gaiman, until he put a bit of effort in. No one is born with thoroughly unique ideas and no one sits around waiting for a muse.

Imagination is an active process that works of the fuel you’ve been collecting for years: books, music, TV. Almost every piece of popular culture is built on top of a predecessor’s work. Munched own by one author to be mulled over and reshaped by the next.

The writing advice of “always be reading” isn’t to improve your vocabulary (that does help, but you may want to turn to crosswords for that!), it’s to fill you up with ideas you can take and work with.

Not wholesale stealing – I believe the industry frowns upon that. But you largely have free reign with the ingredients of stories; if stealing from one place is bad, stealing a tiny bit from lots of places is industry standard!

“It’s Sherlock Holmes, but if Sherlock was a house elf, and he’s trying to track down some keys, like from Locke and Key, but instead of keys they’re dog collars from Infernal Soldiers.”

All ideas stolen from books I’ve read recently, but altogether make a unique premise. Is that imaginative? There’s nothing inspired about it in there – it’s a collection of stolen ideas. But their combination will connect ideas no one has every had before. The twine that connects those threads will make a whole world out of nothing, and the story you tell will come sort of naturally out of that. You’ll have to explain the Infernal Soldiers for one thing, and the relationship between your-version-of-the-house-elves and the rest of society. You’ll have to figure out why the main character is interested in their left over collars – if nothing jumps out at you pick the obvious and see where it takes you. “Well, because he lost them.”

A fantastic and seemingly endless (and public domain!) well spring of ideas to fill up on are folklore stories.

I’m reading an indie published book, Myth & Lore: Cryptids of the UK, which is full of ancient and Weird creatures. These creatures are so mysterious that there’s often large white pieces of canvas around them which need to be filled in with stories. Rarely, for instance, are the motivations of the Loch Ness considered. Lets accept that there is a huge dino swimming around the Scottish lakes, but then the question is why was this singular creature placed there?

Take the macguffin from the last book you read or film you recently saw. Chuck that at the bottom of the loch and suddenly Nessy is there to protect that! That’s a story (or at the very least a side quest)!

That’s what imagination often is. The fun of combining ideas, jumbling them about to see how they play together, and then hopefully their summation ends up inspired.

A Trap Has Grown Here to Farm the Droppings of Hornet-Women

November 28, 2023 ShaneLeave a comment

McGrogan asked over on their blog asked about a trap for hornet-women. Here’s by naturally occuring option.

Pseudo Nests are actually a fungus that survives mostly on the … processed leavings of hornet-women as they’re going to and from their actual nest. Mostly harmless to non-hornet creatures, these imitation nests become more proficient at luring their meals towards them as they grow from small patches of fungus to swallowing up whole forests if allowed.

Spores of this fungus can be found, quite harmlessly, inside many hornet-women’s digestive tracts, largely dormant. These spores are swept up in the normal processes of the hornet and are expelled, often quite near to an actual nest. They begin to reproduce only when in contact with trees or soil which it makes its habitat and yet still survives off of hornet droppings throughout its life cycle.

Once passed their immature stage of “hoping” for food delivery, the nest takes a more active roll in finding food: the developed fungus looks and smells nearly identical to a hornet nest made of traditional material. Akin to catnap or nicotine, the hornets stop by regularly simply to breath it in (and there by picking up more fungus inside of themselves).

For the largest colonies – a key identification for gardeners is the speed of growth and if it reaches unnatural size – the colony has been known to take the addicted, starved bodies of the hornets and reassemble them in the ape of a queen hornet.

With a “queen” present, whole swarms settle and ultimately perish to the fungus. This seems to be the natural limiting factor to the size of Pseudo Nests: they ultimately become too efficient at capturing their prey and can wipe out entire swarms that pass.

Loadouts

November 3, 2023 ShaneLeave a comment

“Did anyone remember to buy a healers kit?”

There are some situations where characters would behave smarter than their players. That’s why we have passive checks and other checks to see if the character thinks (or even remembers) something the player doesn’t.

One of those situations is remember to leave the house with their winter coat when in the middle of the darkest months. It’d be cruel for a DM to suggest that since the player didn’t specifically say, “I’m going to dress up warm,” that the character would be wandering around in a t-shirt and shorts.

Similarly, when you are on floor four of a mine, where the job was to collect a few diamonds, only to realise that no one noted down a pickaxe, the group should be given the benefit of the doubt. Obviously the character would have considered this and picked one up.

Full disclosure: I’ve not actually read Blades in the Dark, and only know it from the Adventure Zone, but it has a nice system for this kind of thing. Before setting off on an adventure, the players decide what loadout they’d like to take. I believe these are along the lines of light and heavy.

The items in those loadouts aren’t decided immediately, but are decided in the adventure as they’re needed. If you’re going in light you can get away with a small handgun or an iron file or some such. Small things. Too many small things will eventually add up to a heavy load, so at some point you can no longer add more things.

A heavy load means you can start pulling out great axes and whatnot. The downside here is that (even before you’ve decided on what items there are) people around you will know you’re packing. Suspicions are going to be raised pretty quickly.

These loadouts might cost an upfront payment, but making the group pay for the items at the end might be more fun, adding a push-your-luck mechanic. Shall we splash out on a Scroll of Detect Lies now? What if it reveals nothing? What if the dungeon is a bust and the PCs end up going into debt? Drama! Tension! Oooh!

The DM can of course have final ruling on what a loadout contains. Maybe it doesn’t make sense for the PC to be carrying a glass making kit. It’s important to remember rule one of being a good DM though: at the end of the day, your job is to make the players feel like their characters are heroes. If that means they pull the perfect macguffin out their ass and it makes for a cool scene, then why on earth not.

Give the gift of Taking Notes

May 3, 2023 Shane1 Comment

The Tuesday Group, where I’m a player, are on the cusp of finishing Horror on the Orient Express. A very good adventure, which has spanned much more than a year of sessions. 39 sessions and counting. In that time we’ve travelled through a lot of Europe, both west and east and done a lot of investigating.

The investigations often have a lot of exciting twists and turns as we realise that that person is actually the same person as that other person!. When those beats hit, they hit really good and the table gets very excited about it. However, after two years of playing we can’t possibly remember every character’s name, so we turn to our notes.

Playing Cthulhu more than any game has shown me the importance of taking good notes. The investigative mechanics mean you’re given a lot of information that you can’t possibly remember. Dates of when someone died, dates of when they were last seen (often many years after they’d died), and first mentions of cults, the kinds of injuries cult members are likely to have.

Not everyone’s notes are complete. Often it won’t be clear that the tidbit you’ve just heard is important, so it doesn’t get written down. But between you all, hopefully, someone has written it down. There’s excitement in that moment too. “Oh, I remember this. I have half a note about it from session six. Does anyone else have anything?” The flicking through pages is full of anticipation.

Hitting a wall in the investigation happens too. Fairly often actually. But if the DM steps in too quickly at that point, the game begins to be lead by the DM and not the players (an important principle in investigation games). The leads don’t actually have to match up with what’s in the DM’s adventure: the DM is looking for any excuse to give you more information, the players just have to lead the DM to those excuses. With that in mind, keeping a list of potential ideas noted down is crucial. Did you check the newspaper? Ask the hotel clerk for anything interesting going on? (Although, we probably went back to the cement factory more often than was useful.)

I’m certain I’m not the only one that struggles to pay attention the whole time whilst playing ttrpgs whilst at my computer. I’ve found that taking notes keeps me actively playing even when I’m not part of the scene playing out. There’s always something to be writing down which may help in the future – you never know what you’ll miss in a game like CoC.

All the above is fine the player, but it’s wonderful for the DM. It’s disheartening when a world has been finely crafted, only for your players to forget about it later on. The twists aren’t noticed and clues have to be crude. I think it’s really fun for the DM when the players can have a conversation amongst themselves about the world being weaved. It shows player buy-in which is all a DM is ever striving for.

It’s always endlessly useful when a player can answer a lore question before the DM has time to look back a hundred pages to find it. “Does anyone remember [the throw away] name of the train driver from six sessions ago?” “Yep – I wrote five full pages of notes about him.” What a delight for a DM that didn’t realise that Trevor the Train Conductor was going to be a major character.

Write notes – you’ll enjoy it!

There are two other ways you can be a good player over on slyflourish.