#gelgelim

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seximal functions and new project announcement

after two days of work, I can finally add two numbers and subtract two numbers in seximal in Excel! Constantly needing to convert numbers into base 10 for math and then back to seximal was a real pain in the ass, so finishing both custom functions has been hugely helpful.

And I have now successfully scripted some shit in VBA. I haven't really thought about programming shit in years, and it was nice to take something like this on, bash my head into it for a few days, and come out with workable functions (I mean, I can't generate negative seximal values with my subtraction function, and I can only do math pairwise, but that's not the end of the world).

Oh yeah, I'm making a ttrpg that's entirely in seximal. It's inspired by the GBA-era Fire Emblem games (mostly FE6 and FE7) and while the tactical combat stuff is all in seximal, I'm handling the melodrama aspects that make Fire Emblem really special with a full Belonging Outside Belonging game.

And the game is set in Nowa Polska, my Yiddish fantasy setting that smashes together the Polish Lithuanian Commonwealth, creatures and forces from Yiddish and Polish folklore, sentient magical constructs built for war in a time of peace, and the descendants of an invading Ottoman army, all kettled together by a very angry forest for a century.

It's tentatively titled Szlachta Emblem.

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TTRPG WIPs

@temporalhiccup tagged me in a thing, so now I guess I have to respond.

First, I'd be remiss if I didn't mention my big project that just launched, Bxllet Clip: a brand-new ttrpg periodical dedicated to all things [Bxllet>. Our inaugural issue has new adventures, new classes, an interview with Bxllet's author, optional rulesets, as well as a whole-ass Bxllet hack that's some of the most evocative game writing I've read yet. And you can pick up Bxllet Clip together with Bxllet for no extra cost! Grab your copy here: Bxllet Clip: The Pinxp Issue by Wheels Within Wheels Publishing (itch.io)

TTRPG Projects in some form of active development

untitled GBA Fire Emblem ttrpg that presents a sleek translation of the GBA FE mechanics to the tabletop.

TTRPG Projects on some sort of hiatus or back-burner status

MONSTER GUTS: DARK the Dark Souls-inspired expansion for MONSTER GUTS taking place on a Fidalgo Island that has been corrupted by an unknown force. It's a hexcrawl monster hunter experience where players risk losing their memories as they pursue new monsters to slay, new weapons to wield, and the only known cure for Blisters.

GELGELIM: For those of you who've seen my AP, Gelgelim: A Yiddish Fantasy Gone Rogue, you know that I have a Yiddish fantasy setting that I've been working on for the last 5 or so years set in an alternate-historical Grand Duchy of Lithuania circa 1630. What you might not know is that there's a whole game system that goes along with it that uses Tarot cards. If you're a fan of A TaroTRPG from A to Zine, 26 Tarot mechanics for adventure-style ttrpgs, then you should be real hyped as that zine is the closest I've come to publishing Gelgelim content.

TTRPGS I've let go of but might return to some day

nah, I don't really do that.

Anywho, let's tag some people to see what their WIPs are. @rathayibacter @legendaryvermin @vvvisection What've you got on your plates?

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For Dungeon23, I'm making towns and blocks for my Yiddish fantasy setting of Nowa Polska. We'll be starting with the town of Zamość, a town that has quite the unusual history. Zamość was built all in one go in 1580 by a team of imported Italian architects by Jan Zamoyski and modelled on Renaissance Italian cities. We run into a major setting-specific problem immediately: the Corruscation (which boiled the land and soured the seas) happens in the early 16th century, before the town was founded, and would have prevented hiring Italian architects, as hundreds of miles of impassible forest would have separated Italy from Nowa Polska. Ordinarily, I'd remove the city from my maps and leave the area empty, but Zamość was a major Jewish population center and is extraordinarily well-documented. We can sub in an Italian-educated architect already in Nowa Polska at the time of the Corruscation for Bernardo Morando (the Venetian architect for the city). Problem solved.

Onto blocks! (if you want to know what I mean by blocks, check out this lovely post by Alexis Smolensk: The Tao of D&D: Building Blocks) For Dungeon23, we build one room a day, so I'll strive to make 1 block each day. Once we populate Zamość, we'll move on to another city! If y'all have thoughts about where we might visit next, let me know!

Our first block will be the Great Market in hex 6,6. This Market-type block allows players to buy and sell all manner of goods. Due to the high foot traffic from all parts of the city, players who spend time here can ask questions about the city, learn about people of note, hear the hottest gossip, and so on. The Great Market is also where town festivals and celebrations are held, which provide their own opportunities for mischief and coin.

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☔,🌤️?

Hello!

We'll do 🌤️ first: favorite mechanic from a game I'm working on. My focus at the moment is tentatively titled Szlachta Emblem, a ttrpg inspired by the GBA Fire Emblem games set in Nowa Polska, my Yiddish Fantasy setting. The game is a mashup of gba FE's mechanics transported into heximal (d66 math, essentially) with Belonging Outside Belonging to replicate the melodrama and angst that makes fe games so unique.

Getting both halves to play nicely with each other has been kind of tricky, but one of my breakthroughs today was adding a new type of Move: the Support Dynamic. In BOB games, there are four categories of Moves: strong, standard, lateral, and weak moves. Strong moves are powerful but require tokens, standard moves aren't as potent but don't require spending a token, and weak moves put your character in peril/make the situation worse in order to get a token. Lateral moves (from Galactic) let you give a token you have to another player. The only other way characters get moves is by taking advantage of another character's Lure, which grants a token to a character for reinforcing the fantasy/archetype of the Luring player. The thing is, I wanted to have the functionality of lateral moves, but I had a healthy number of strong, standard, and weak ones already that I didn't want to convert into lateral ones or cut to make space for new lateral moves. Then I had a moment of inspiration and figured out how to have my cake and eat it as well.

Last digression, I promise.

In FE, characters build Supports by fighting alongside each other. In the GBA games (and here), each character has a maximum number of supports they can have, so players have to choose carefully which relationships they want to formalize with a Support. As time passes, the characters grow closer, the player gets to read dialogue between them, and each gets mechanical boosts to their combat from having the other character near. So: how do we begin to meld the BOB framework and FE core mechanics while also solving the token economy problem described earlier? Support Dynamic.

Each class has both a Lure and a Support Dynamic. The Lure rewards other characters for playing into this class's central idea (characters who depend on the strength of a Hajduk to solve their problem gets a token, for example). The Support Dynamic lets the class give a token to someone they have a support relationship with (whenever the Hajduk enlivens someone they support, you gift them a token). Each class has their own, unique Lateral Move, limited by the degree to which they've invested in their personal relationships with the other characters. I'm quite pleased with this.

Now for ☔. This is really hard to answer, tbh. Are there any game ideas that I'm not sure I'll ever write? OK, sure. I had a setting before Nowa Polska that I'd spent years working on and writing a custom game for. It drew inspiration from a lot of different places, times, and folklores: ancient Greece, the Roman Empire, Irish folktales, and a lot from SE Asia. A lot from SE Asia. And then I went and did my research on ttrpgs drawing from SE Asia. And there are a ton of amazing games by designers who are, y'know, from/in SE Asia. I was just reading Balikbayan. Gubat Banwa is another phenomenal game. A Thousand Thousand Islands is just incredible. Diwata ng Manila's written some phenomenal games as well. The RPGSEA community is strong and vibrant and just incredible. I'm excited to have the chance to play some of their games. But I won't ever publish the setting that I was working on, nor the game I made for it. I don't think I could ever doe enough research or give enough due diligence to feel comfortable releasing it to the wider world. That's not to say some of the ideas I had won't be recycled into something in the future; some of them already have. But I'm happy to leave the setting as a whole behind me as I move forward to new projects and new horizons.

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(image from Armenian Tenement Houses | Zamość, Poland | Gábor Tikos | Flickr) Today for Dungeon23, we're continuing to write blocks in the city of Zamość. Yesterday, we did hex 6,5 (the Ratusz and nearby tenements). Our next block, hex 7,5, is mixed-use. Nearby to the Great Market, the Salt Market, and the Ratusz, (hex 3,7, we'll get there another day), this block boasts a tavern, an inn, and guild workshops. The second and third stories are dedicated housing: the inn has a half-dozen private rooms, the workshops house both the apprentices and family of the workshop's head, and the tavern employees live above the tavern. There are a few rooms available for long-term rent above the tavern, but the tavernkeeper would rather let the rooms stay empty than let untrustworthy folk stay there. This is still the respectable part of town, after all. The guild workshops might include a bakery, tailor, turner, or other trades that cater to the burghers' level of income and also aren't noisome (no smithies, for sure). Player characters can easily find short-term housing, of varying quality: the tavern floor is the cheapest, the inn's common room slightly nicer and more expensive, and the inn's private rooms the best one can get here. They can also get an excellent meal and good drinks, as all the burghers from the Ratusz will come here for lunch and dinner, and they'll likely frequent the tavern on the weekends to blow some steam off. Players hoping to ingratiate themselves with the Ratusz' burghers are likely to find much more success befriending them here, over a glass purchased at the player characters' expense, rather than accosting them at their place of work. Players who make friends with the residents of this block can get an earful of all the local gossip: recent guild feuds, spicy relationship speculation, rumors from nearby blocks, and so on. They would also be able to rent the apartments above the tavern for long-term housing that's less expensive than those available near the Ratusz. That'll do for now. I think we'll continue tomorrow with the next hex adjacent to the Great Market, hex 6,7.

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Dungeon23 15jan23 hex 8,5 - Tenement Workshops

Before we get to today’s block, I want to make a procedural note. We’ve been working in a spiral, extending out from the city’s center, which works passably well. However, in doing so, I omitted some rather important information from blocks 3,7 and 7,5 as I didn’t pay attention to the synagogue next door to both, which recontextualizes them somewhat. When we finish with Zamość and move on to the next city, I’ll try to place landmarks down first and then fill in the interstitial blocks. Block 3,7 errata: Much of the food available for purchase at the Salt Market is halal/kosher. Even the goyish food vendors are likely to look into paying the rabbi to certify them kosher. Block 7,5 errata: rather than szlachta apartments, these residences are for the high-rolling Jews. Okie, onto the new stuff. I debated calling today’s block mixed-use but decided to use Tenement Workshops to disambiguate between 7,5 and 8,5. We’ll find no inns or taverns here - visitors from out-of-town will stay with kinfolk, and the rigors of kashrut make maintaining a kosher tavern challenging. Most of these buildings will be workshops for Jewish crafters and artisans, with housing above. Now, the trade guilds were expressly Christian and thus did not permit Jewish members. The way both communities worked around this was twofold: as part of the condition of allowing Jews to settle within the city, the Jews were forbidden from specific trades (in Zamość, Jews were prohibited from being cobblers, furriers, and potters), and Jewish crafters formed their own guild-like associations (havurot). From the little research I’ve done, the strength of these havurot depended greatly on the degree to which the existing trade guilds resisted Jewish members. In our Zamość, we’ll say that resistance is fairly strong, and consequently there are several robust havurot. Jewish player characters will, as in blocks 3,8 and 7,5, find temporary housing and food through kin-relations, as well as be able to learn all the gossip the Jewish Quarter has to offer. Jewish characters without a kin-relation have an opportunity to entrench themselves into the Zamość Jewish community if they’ve a spare nibling or kid they can apprentice to one of the crafters. This does not come for free: it would require an act of service for that crafter, or a sizeable financial gift. Characters with a more duplicitous bent could suborn away dissatisfied apprentices, but doing so would burn any bridges they had in Zamość. Non-Jewish characters will find little of interest here. Some shopping, artisans they could commission for custom work, etc. 

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Dungeon23 13jan23 hex 3,8 - the Zamość Synagogue

As promised, today we get to the (sizeable) Jewish population of Zamość. Sephardi Jews lived in Zamość from the city’s beginning, receiving permission to build a synagogue, mikvah, and cemetery within the city limits (something that, even in the religiously-tolerant Grand Duchy of Lithuania, could not be taken for granted). Jan Zamoyski, the founder of Zamość specially invited folks across the known world to live in the city, and the first Jewish residents were recruited from Venice and the Ottoman Empire. Ashkenazi Jews were not allowed residence in the city, which is a fascinating bit of history. Clearly a lot of politics going on here, and if I were a historian, there’d be plenty to plumb. But I’m not a historian, and our version of Zamość was built half a century after Nowa Polska lost contact with the rest of the world. That doesn’t mean we don’t have Sephardi Jews, however. It turns out that, roundabout when the Corruscation happens and our setting diverges from history, an Ottoman army had invaded the Grand Duchy of Lithuania. Thousands of Ottoman soldiers and attendants with no way of going home. And, of course, a notable minority of them would have been Sephardi. These are the Jews who first settled in Zamość. Let’s turn from history to the block. We have the aforementioned synagogue, of course, as well as the mikveh (ritual bath) and a kahal. Jews within the Grand Duchy (and Nowa Polska, therefore) had the right of self-government and autonomous organizing. The kahal was both administrative building and legislative body of the Jewish people, for the Jewish people. All urban Jewish communities had a kahal which functioned as a secular center of Jewish life to complement the synagogue. Furthermore, we also have a few tenements for the wealthier Jews. Zamość also has a small Muslim population - the Grenadan artificers, as well as other remnants of that Ottoman army. As they are not numerous enough to warrant a permanent mosque, the synagogue doubles as a mosque on Friday afternoons and as needed for the other Islamic holy days. Where the rest of the city primarily speaks Polish, Yiddish and Arabic are the lingua franca of the synagogue and its environs. The synagogue block presents many opportunities for Jewish player characters - consulting with the rabbi, finding a minyan, studying Torah with the elders and wealthy (although there is no yeshiva in Zamość), even temporary housing. Muslim player characters have a dedicated place to worship, may seek the imam’s counsel, and get a lead on where the other Muslims in town live. Christian player characters (of all denominations) will find little for them in the synagogue block. Centuries of pogroms do not vanish after a few years of nominal religious tolerance.

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Dungeon23 4jan23: hex 7,6 - tenements

While our last block was mixed-use due to its proximity to 3 major city landmarks, today's block is purely residential. Remember that Zamość is still a very young town - the year in Nowa is circa 1630, and Zamość was only founded in 1580. The population is only about 400, which doesn't require a lot of commercial infrastructure. The residences in block 7,6 house the burghers who work in and around the Ratusz as well as apartments owned by szlachta who spend most of their time on their country estates. Players who make themselves useful to the szlachta (if you do this, you are a class traitor) could be granted permission to live in their apartments. More realistically, these apartments provide excellent opportunities for larceny, provided you burgle the szlachta-owned ones, not those housing of the local clerks and solicitors.