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.

The Long Journey of the Good Needle

Of all the scenarios I have written, "The Good Needle" is the one I have played most often and with the greatest number of different systems.
It startet out as a scenario idea for cubicle 7's excellent Middle-Earth rpg The One Ring. I wanted to capture the more whimsical elements of The Hobbit and especially, of Tolkien's beautiful and funny novella "Farmer Giles of Ham", and ended up with an adventure that featured man-eating fairy-tale giants, mean and surprisingly clever goblins, dead fish and a whole lot of sewing. Overall, it became a little more macabre than I had planned, but still felt like a well-behaved, kids-friendly scenario for do-gooder heroes. I went on to use it as my go-to scenario to introduce new players to The One Ring at our bookshop's open gaming nights, used it with Fate Accelerated to introduce my two nieces to rpgs and later expanded it and played it several times with Fantasy AGE. For the latter, I did a completely written and statted version (in my native German) with an eye to publication. However, for several reasons, nothing came of that.
Still, I wanted to see "The Good Needle" published. Badly. I have spent so much time with it, and it just seems to work remarkably well - GMing it, I got all kinds of things out of it, from "We'll talk our way through the whole adventure without ever baring a blade" to a fun dungeon romp (and, in one case, a would-be dungeon romp that ended with the group in goblin captivity).
Easy, most of you will say - just stat it out for some old version of D&D and put it on drivethru, at least three peoble will buy it, and you might even get a review. And that would be quite enough for me ... only, I totally don't speak D&D.

Don't put me in a box yet!

Recently, I've taken another look at a couple of systems to find out which one might be best suited for fantasy one shots. I do these a lot at the open gaming nights at our bookshop, and mostly, I've been using FantasyAGE and DungeonWorld for these, depending on how free-form I want things to be and how I feel about one or the other of these system on that particular day. However, one thing I don't like about these two systems is their pretty rigid character classes (yeah, I know, "playbooks" - they're still basically classes). So I startet looking around for something new ...

The Moss-Eyed Acephali

Acephali or Blemmye are among the human-like mythoogical creatures that seem to get little love in RPGs. RuneQuest 6/Mythras has stats for them, and its recent supplement Mythic Constantinople even features them as one of the major non-human races; but that seems to be it.

I really like them because while they seem excessively weird, they still seem to make sense on a fundamental level. You can imagine humanoid creatures with their eyes, noses and mouths in their chest as something that, in terms of a made-up biology, might actually work. (It would be much harder with, say, the Sciapods).

A while ago, I took the core concept of the acephali and tried to spice it up a little for a guest spot in my Numenera campaign; these creatures, as outlined below, are also part of my ever-changing heartbreaker setting. Except for the face-in-the-chest thing, they have very little in common with the Acephali/Blemmye of myth; but still, I like to call them that.

No stats - I used them as NPCs for Numenera, where you practically don't need NPC stats. If anyone feels like statting these guys up for one system or the other, I'd be most honored!


Moss-Eyed Acephalus

The closer you get to a moss-eyed acephalus, the less human he or she will seem - that starts with the he or she thing, because the Acephali have no discernible biological sex. From afar, they might look like skinny humans without heads, a greenish pair of eyes where a human would have his nipples, two nostrils and a broad slit of a mouth beneath them. Getting closer, you'll notice their three-fingered, nailless hands and feet and the fact that their eyes are not actually eyes. They are two big, dark-green blotchs of a kind of short bushy hair, frayed circles with small white spots in the middle. When they open their mouths to speak in their slow, high-pitched voice, you'll also notice their many small, rounded teeth and the two shorter extra tongues nested below their big, long main tongue. Their gums are dark gray, as is their blood.
There "eyes" are actually a type of lichen, with which the naturally eye-less acephali have entered a most beneficial symbiosis. The light-sensitive lichen grant the acephali the power of sight, while the Acephali serve to carry the lichen around to ever new habitats.
It is a matter of speculation whether the lichen drive the Acephali to roam or whether it is historical and social circumstandes that have made them a people of the road. Acephali tend to roam around in large family groups, sooner or later settling down with other races, often to move on two or three generations later. Usually, they are met friendly, but with a certain distrust, because while they bring many valuable skills with them, they are also considered fundamentally alien by most humans and similar species.

While they Acephali's sight is poor - they are all colorblind and bad at making out things that don't move -, they have an extremely developed sense of taste and smell. That makes them valuable as alchemists (or, due to discrimination, as servants for alchemists). They also have an iron stomach, especially when it comes to plants, which is mainly due to their ability to consciously transform substances that are poisonous to them by changing the chemical properties of their saliva. An acephali food taster can not only tell you which specific poison has been used in an assasination attempt, he or she is also re-usable.

Regarding the Acephali's sex and gender: That seems to be something that is not talked about to outsiders. Their genitals are hidden away in skin pouches between their legs (or so humans suppose). These are usually quite visible, since most acephali wear little or no clothes if the climate permits (they are are slightly less susceptible to heat or cold than humans). They don't seem to make any social gender distinctions, and since they tend to live in large families of about a dozen individuals, both adults and children, that doesn't provide much of a clue either. It seems that most acephali are able to carry children, which are born after five months. These children are smaller and even more helpess than human babies. Usually, they don't receive their lichen "eyes" before their fifth birthday, when they are considered ready to deal with this new kind of sensory input.

Atlas of the Horizons: Last Three Days!

It probably is kind of weird to start a blog with an advertisement for someone else's crowdfunding, since I probably don't have a readership yet to advertise to. Anyway, if you read this: Go and back An Atlas of the Horions by Benjamin Williams, because well, I desperately want it to meet its funding goal. You have three days!

So why am I so into this? First of all, its kickstarter page doesn't loke like a pinball machine. Honestly, who really cares about dozens of stretch goals, presented in gaudy colors? This one just tells you what the author wants to do in plain text: publish an RPG in a non-EDO fantasy setting that highlights exploration and optimism.

But oh, the little things about the setting the creator lets on! First of all, there's technology; but this is not another RPG grafting some steampunk trappings on a fantasy world. In the world of An Atlas of the Horizon, all technology is individual - creating a rifle or even a car is more of an arts & crafts thing, while industrialization and mass production don't exist. As a premise for technology in a fantasy world, this seems to make a lot of sense, and it is also something I haven't seen yet.

Then there's the Gods, who have locked themselves into their temples a hundred years ago and have left behind temple gardens with their strange and dangerous servitor creatures ... there's also talk of a big city that had lots of temples and has no become a very  dangerous place inhabited by criminals, adventurers and true believers ... quite enticing! And there's a fallen moon in the desert from which a strange ecology spreads ... all this hints at a rich fantasy cosmology with lots of room for the weird.

Then there's the rules, which sound like a very thematic rules-light to medium system with some original touches. I think I see some inspiration from The One Ring, which is certainly a good thing in my book.

Basically, I think this might turn out as something along the lines of Miyazaki meets Blue Rose, maybe with a hint of Numenera and a strong thematic focus in terms of setting and rules.