God Creatures and Cults with Ulterior Motives

... I seem to be unable to come up with something else!

Well, it's not quite as bad as that. I'm okay with writing low fantasy stuff that doesn't touch on fantasy religion at all - dealing with wacky goblins, negotiating with a bored dragon, finding out about that giant boar that terrorizes the village.

But whenever I'm writing something that is supposed to feed into my far too ambitious weird fantasy heartbreaker setting, I come up with some combination of the following elements: Some (usually giant) god creature (floating in space in an ancient cocoon, sleeping at the ocean bottom with its back bristles breaking the surface, living in a giant hive of beetles conditioned to do staggeringly complicated calculations for it), some kind of cult that has access to a valuable ressource (a drug produced by people turned into trees that lets you experience a jumble of their memories, the boiling, poisonous blood of that sea good, impossibly accurate answers to complex mathematical and mathemagical problems), and an event that involves the player characters and that will probably upturn everything.

What's Up?

I haven't blogged for a while - so here's what I'm up to and what you can expect in the next few weeks from me:

First, I'm reading Sword of Cepheus (Sword&Sorcery based on the Traveller-inspired old school Cepheus Engine) and FrontierSpace, and I'm hoping to give both a spin soon, so reviews are coming up.

Second, I have a lot more Troika! backgrounds in store, but I'm also working on two scenarios to tie in with them, so I'm holding some of those back to see how exactly the scenarios shape up.

Third, I'm eagerly awaiting the "Zero Edition" of Newt Newports new d100 game Skyraiders of the Floating Realms. Don't know exactly what I'm going to do with it, but a lighter, more streamlined version of Newt's OpenQuest sounds very enticing to me!

Troika! Background: Godmiller

You operate the giant temple machines that feed the thousand gods of Dorpal. Back then, it was congegrations chanting and shouting their adoration under the iridiscent domes of the godstills, the essence of their worship drip-dripping through the central shaft and down into the Adyton cellars. The invention of the godmill changed that: Theologists scribbled down and analyzed the rites of worship and translated them into codes for punchcards. Now, most temples are filled with the creaking of giant clockwork mechanisms, the lowing and bleating of the beasts powering them and the stench of their manure.

Houseruling Troika!

So here's the Troika! houserules I plan to implement next session:

1. Roll-high all the way. I'm actually still a little on the fence about this, because I tend to finde roll-under slightly more intuitive, and more importantly, you have to do less math for it. However, my players keep asking me whether they need to roll high or roll low every single time; and since it's pretty much impossible to go all roll-under in combat, I'll go for always rolling high, including on Luck rolls. The standard target number to beat for unopposed tests is 14 - that way, you end up with exactly the same chances for success. I'll make everyone chant "High - is - Good! High - is - Good!" before the start of our next session, so they'll remember!

My Deceptive Memories of Star Frontiers

Back in my school days, when we were playing pretty much every rpg game we could get our hands on - one of them being TSRs Star Frontiers. My memories of this rpg are vivid: I remember the illustration of the amorphous Dralasite with its eyes that looked like textbook renditions of cancer cells (I immediately called dibs on that one); I remember the characters on the cover, expecially that kind-of-cool, but also kind of revulsive ape-bat creature that turned out to be a Yazirian (my best friend called dibs on that one, which figured, since his favourite childhood plush toy had been a little smiling monkey in a striped tee); I remember the big city map with its ugly, squarish design, that, I think, was supposed to show a spaceport city; and I remember that, when you held the boxes lid against the light, that it was actually from a D&D red box and they had only pasted the Star Frontiers cover on it! (What had happened there? Had they produced too many D&D boxes and saw no choice but to publish another rpg to make use of them? I guess that's not how it went, but it would make a good anecdote. Also, I'm writing about the German edition of Star Frontiers here, which was called Sternengarde, so don't be surprised if you find nothing of that kind when you hold up the lid of your original Star Frontiers box).
Anyway, my memories are so vivid and create such a deep sense of familiarity, I naturally assumed that we must have played the hell out of Star Frontiers and loved it. (I even claimed just that recently on social media).
However, thinking about it a little harder, I actually can't remember playing it.

New Troika! Background: The Swanosaurologist

You come from a noble house (or or from some upstart merchant family) that can afford paying to provide you with a reputable education that could not possibly be of any use. You have studied the biology, thaumology and the habits of the Swanosaurus, a fierce and beautiful swamp creature that has been extinct for decades. Others may sneer at you for learning fighting techniques you'll never have to put to use; but you know that one day, you'll find that last remaining Swanosaurus and slay it.

The Moss-Eyed Acephalus for Troika!

Back here, I introduced the moss-eyed acephalus, a kind of sfnal take on my favourite mythological creature. I figured that it would feel right at home among the million spheres of the hump-backed sky, so here we go:

Moss-Eyed Acephalus
Your brain - situated firmly in your chest cavity and not, like with many other species, in some bony upper protuberance - is being fed impressions of light and dark, movement and stillness, by the symbiotic lichen that grow around your nipples. Your double-tongued belly-mouth leads directly into the complexities of a digestive system that recognizes and transforms all kinds of substances. You're three-fingered hands are crafty, and your extended family will always help you out, until it won't. Everyone else, they think you're just not from here, and, while useful, never to be trusted. They're not quite wrong, at least about the first part, as proven by the garden chest you have to carry with you wherever you go to inhale the spore-laden scent of your ancestor's home from it. Even though you might have spent your life among humans, you still have trouble figuring out concepts like "male" and "female". Procreation, to your kind is a festive social act, and the whole neighbourhood is invited when a family feels that it is time to sire a litter.

Alchemists make you of you as a cheap and universal analyzer, and dukes, kings and even emperors value you as a re-usable food taster. They just tend to forget that what you can neutralize, you can also create.

Fronds of Benevolence

Fronds of Benevolence is the first published scenario for Troika!, and I can't seem to be able to stop singing its title in my head to the tune of the utterly terrible Paul McCartney song "Hope of Deliverance", so thank you very much for that, Andrew Walter, author and illustrator of this wonderful little book!
I recently ran FoB (stop that singing, Paul!) on an open gaming night with a random group of players. We had a blast, getting about four hours of play out of just 3 of about a dozen sites and encounters featured in this slim chapbook due to its general high concentration of weird and adventurous. There are a few structural stumbling blocks in the scenario, but they are more than made up for by the sheer amount of great material.

Troika!

I finally gave Daniel Sell's minimalist gonzo science fantasy rpg Troika! a spin a few weeks ago - running it's first published scenario Fronds of Benevolence, and I am just as delighted as I expected. I've seen its implied setting described as "Hipster Planescape", and while I'm not very familiar with Planescape, I suspect that hits the nail on the head - you might also add that healthy doses of Monty Python, Michael Moorcock and Terry Pratchett might be involved.
Basically, characters are expected to be anything from temple-knights who carry around half a dozen swords to demonstrate their readyness for the end times to a Monkeymonger (comes equipped with 1d6 trained, edible monkeys) or a Thinking Engine (who has to weld it's whorly, strangely-wood like skin back in shape to regenerate). My favourite player background, however, remains the Ardent Giant of Corda:

Every Giant has a different story about Corda, well told and interrupted with tears and laughter, of how they lost it and mean to find it soon enough, but oh, what of today? We should drink and cheer, we'll search once again in the morning!

 This passage not only perfectly encapsulates both the lyricism and the wackiness of Troika!, it also displays how setting is presented in this game. You won't get chapter headlines like "An Overview of the City of Troika" or "A Traveller's Guide to the Humpbacked Sky". Instead you get all of these allusions and suggestions that begin to form the mirage of Golden Barges travelling through said humpbacked sky to countless worlds encased in crystal spheres. When you've read through Troika!, you'll have idea of its cosmos in very broad strokes, and you'll have lots of details (like dwarves being made rather than born, and some of them coming out ill-made, or pocket barometers being the current fad in the city of Troika, even though the city has no discernible weather).
Now, you can either see this as an "Oh my god! You're telling me I'll need to be constantly hunting for the tidbits of information to learn about the setting?", or as "Whatever comes up while we play the game becomes part of our Troika! universe. Whatever doesn't come up doesn't. When something comes up that contradicts something already established, it's either untrue or both of the contradictory statements are true. Suck it up." Obviously, the latter is where the fun lies with Troika!.

Ashen Stars: Hidden Depths is out!

So, there it is: my first published RPG scenario in about 20 years, and the first I have ever published in English. It is for Pelgrane Press's investigative science fiction game Ashen Stars and published as part of it's brand-new Gumshoe Community Content Program. Hidden Depths is my take on hard-ish high concept science fiction within the framework of a setting inspired by TV shows like Firefly, Farscape and nuBSG.