Hey, what's your AC?

TTRPG musings, the occsional bit of writing, technology, etc. Hire humans for stuff! Well over eighteen.

[weresandwitches]

What am I doing here?

Oh, look, it's a tumblr.

Hi. I'm Wren. I have bunch of creative pursuits that are - Too short to be posted somewhere like AO3. - Too TTRPG related to be posted somewhere else. - Etc. That needed a home. Thus, here are.

Bad writing, bad art, passable TTRPG stuffs (Mostly D&D or V:TM, but other systems too because I love running stuff like Mothership, Mork Borg (and its variants), etc.), and so on.

Stuff will be tagged as appropriate.

[weresandwitches]

"How many of you have darkvision?"

Entire table:

"Are you fucking kidding me?"

(Excerpt from my D&D session tonight.)

[weresandwitches]

Story Work: The Aboleth Cult

I will open this with an admission: I have a problem.

Wizkids makes these blind boxes of miniatures you can buy - they're usually $20-25 a pop, retail, and have three medium and one large (or larger) mini per. (These are D&D mini sizes, I'll point out.) They're one of those things that're super easy to do, and they make it easy to make sure I'm not leaving my LGS empty-handed.

Consequently, I have *a lot* of minis.

The most recent set, though... has Aboleths. That's right. These fucking things:

And now I have *two.*

This leads me to wanting to use them in a story, and thus did I start work on how I want things to work. Enter... the Aboleth cult.

Aboleths big thing is mind control/fuckery, so let's play with that. What might it look like if an Aboleth has had plenty of time to run rampant in an area populated by humans, but wants to play it at least a little subtle? I cooked on the idea, and came to the conclusion: What if Aboleth cult?

These aren't quite Aboleth worshippers per se. These are villagers, townsfolk who've had their minds wiped, filled with nothing but the Aboleth's purposes, with a 'cult' as the forefront to hide what it's doing similar to, say, Warhammer's genestealer cults, but with some particularly fun practices.

Anointing from a chalice of Aboleth Mucus, before a pool that leads down, down, down to the creature's lair? Hell yes.

The might even seem warm at the outset. Friendly. We're all here for the same thing, of course. We've come together to worship the Cleanser of Minds, Devourer of all that brings sadness. Join with us in glorious, peaceful purpose! All are welcome!

This all meant to creep the heroes out, of course. :D

I want to do this over three sessions, delivered each as a one-shot, but part of a series...

The Blessing's Curse

Session One (The Unhallowed Blessing):

The players first encounter the cult proper. They've probably built (or taken over) somewhere unlikely to use as a place of worship. Think lots of candles, silk, all the holy trappings. At its head, the leader, one of the first cultists. (Side note: There's a very good chance most of those there aren't actually in the aboleth's sway - they just know these folk talk a good game and hey, they *did* help us.)

Nothing's gonna get weird until we start talking about elevating one of our own to go down into the Holy Waters and be cleansed by him. This water, of course, has a layer of Aboleth Mucus overtop. Those who go down are only rarely seen again.

Assuming the players intercede, I want the climax of this to be with the Aboleth itself speaking to the players through the head priest. It refuses to explain its motives, of course. This is only session one of three. We're introducing the baddies, making it clear innocent lives are at stake, that kind of thing. Hooking them for the next two sessions.

I also want to introduce a pair of NPCs I think - the players will first see them at the start, being 'anointed' with the Mucus before seeing them dive into the water. This is a hook for session two.

Session Two (A Blessing Abominable):

We're going down into the crypts beneath the chapel - except these aren't crypts.

They're the city sewers.

Here we find one of those NPCs from session 1, desperate to survive and fleeing from the Aboleth's mind-controlled masses. They're building something down here, using the creature's Mucus and, just for good measure, its blood. Unleashing it upon the city will taint the entirety of the water supply, cursing them with the effects of the creature's mucus, forcing them all to the waters, and feeding them to the Aboleths' grip.

Wait. Was that 'aboleths' plural? :D

Session Three (The Blessed Abhorrent):

The cult has largely been stopped - but the sources have yet to be dealt with.

Deeper we go, down beyond where the sewers were built by the hand of man and elf and dwarf, into the caves where the Aboleths dwell. I'm very strongly considering working up some rules for underwater combat, but the problem I'm having here is that underwater combat comes with... complications. To wit:

Fireballs become depth charges, which all the good and bad that comes with it.

Lightning bolts become ways to flash fry the party.

I'm still cooking on how I want the fight to go, here. Maybe the NPC from session one and two offers to sacrifice himself to let the players get a better shot? Will the players take the offer? I don't know. A lot of this depends on how sessions one and two go.

----

This is about where my session planning hits its stop, here. Session planning is a lot like weather prediction - you know what's going to happen in the immediacy, but the further out you go, the less it becomes a prediction and more a set of possibilities...

[weresandwitches]

M:TA Easter Eggs: Kibo!

With my M:TA 20th Anniversary game spinning up, I've started doing a lot of backreading - access to books that I didn't have back when Revised was still around, plus money to buy them and all that.

And I realized a *really* funny easter egg in the Virtual Adepts book, calling back to Digital Web 2.0.

In DW2.0, there's a mention of folks who've fully moved into the Web, and one of the names that comes up is Kibo. He's halfway referred to as a joke, but that he set it up throughout the web that if you invoked his name, he'd be alerted and could teleport directly to the person invoking it.

It's written halfway as 'this guy's awesome' and 'this guy's a joke.' (mostly the latter.) Then, in the Virtual Adepts sourcebook, in the lexicon part, Kibo is in there! Except now, it's an acronym.

Kibo - Knowledge in, Bullshit out.

Guess we know how the VAs felt about him in the end. :D

[weresandwitches]

Two Minutes

He shows up as he always does - no fanfare. No phone call. Not even a blip on every scanner we could think of. The bell on the door jingles. Time stops.

He's impeccably dressed as ever. Tailored suit, gun tucked into its holster under his arm, and that very subtle aura around him that only someone Awakened could pick up on: He's wrong. Paradox clings to him like a beehive. I can hear it humming, buzz buzz buzz - but it's not the hearing, that's the problem.

It's the feeling.

Had to explain how it processes, the sensation of reality humming against you, its constant stings just millimeters away from your skin. If he feels it, he doesn't say anything about it. Never has. I legitimately doubt he would, either way. He's just that kind of guy who has everything in place: Suit, tie, cufflinks, paradox. It's all right where it belongs, right where he wants it, never shall it ever be displaced.

If the Technocracy had a poster boy, this would be him - everything in its place, always, forever. Fine. Perfect. Strange, then, that he'd be coming here, to my shop. He's a beacon of order amongst disorder, bespoke suit among decrepit sleeper computers, cases yellowing, brought back to life by dint of love, care, and a concerning amount of solder. There's a machine, broken down to its component silicon viscera, laid out before me, RAM dislodged from its DIP sockets.

Pay no attention to Virtual Adepts chantry in the several floors below. It's fine.

After a moment looking about, he's in front of me, a quizzical glance at the hardware offered to me over his glasses, before he simply shakes his head, a hand dipping into his coat. Not the side with the gun. The other side. From his coat comes a folder, barcode on the front, Technocracy coding just below that.

"Marie." His voice is warm, almost fatherly. The kind of voice you could imagine chiding you for trying to lay hands on a hot cookstove. "As usual, two minutes." It's always two minutes. "Your request - and ours." He nods to the folder.

Inside is a dossier - Jordan Fredericks. Male, 33, brown hair, blue eyes. 5'11, 231 pounds. His photo, his family. His vampiric bloodline and suspected death date, too. My cabal and I have been looking for him for months, but we haven't had the resources to locate him. My Technocratic friend just handed him over, location, haven and all. It's good, actionable intelligence, just like it always is.

My eyes are back up on him, his offering acknowledged with a proper nod. I lean down, then, and produce an envelope of my own, handing it over in turn. Inside, three sets of coordinates. One is here in meatspace. Another on the Digital Web. The third is… elsewhere. The local Construct had asked us for information around a suspected group of Nephandi working to corrupt the Union from within. At those coordinates, he'll find a hideout that we, again, lack the resources to hit ourselves. It's funny how that works - they can't investigate themselves without getting Management involved. Thus, us.

Each place'll be firebombed within days, or worse. Say what you will, but HIT Marks are nice when they're pointed somewhere else.

On my document and his, both, is a post-it note. Our next requests for each other. These exchanges are tit-for-tat. Mutually beneficial. Part of the deal - neither of us gives up anything that might actually be damaging to each other, and the exchange will always be information only. I look at his, he looks at mine.

"I have no problems with this." He says. It's the name of a guy we suspect to be- well. Better not to say. "No problems here, either." I reply. He's asking for shipment details from a local Pentex place. Easy.

He nods, and walks out. The buzzing fades. I tuck away the dossier just as time starts up again. The bell jingles as the door closes.

I go back to soldering. The folks downstairs get to work.

[moth-grrrl-mavis]

Vampire the Masquerade is about archaic power structures that treat different classes of people as lesser while elevating others, keep ancient out of touch idiots in uncontested power, and actively hold back any form of progress.

Werewolf the Apocalypse is about rebellion, personal responsibility, community organizing and waging an oft hopeless seeming war against the forces of climate change as you struggle to channel your inner beast rather than lose control.

Mage the Ascension is about individuality, creativity and remaining a free thinker in a world controlled by a cabal of fascist tech bros dedicated to complete control over human thought.

[weresandwitches]

Managing Workloads

As I mentioned in a previous post, I'm starting an M20 campaign. (At least one person following me is playing in this, and he knows who he is. Hiiii. :P)

The thing about Mage is that it's... a *lot.* Just in general, but especially for new players. That M20 core book? *700* pages. (Pathfinder 2e, itself an intimidating tome, is 640, and that game is waaaaaay crunchier!) There's a lot of lore and stuff packed in there, granted, but.

Then there's the other books. Book of Secrets, Lore of the Traditions, How do you DO that, etc. It piles up, quick, and expecting players to jump into it quick is a bit... well. Unrealistic

It doesn't hurt to manage the workload, especially in the early stages. From a storyteller perspective, the expectation is a little higher on you, I'd argue, than your players - but even so, I'll make the argument that you should put these books into one of three categories for folks:

Must Read

These are the books that are going to be essential. The core rulebook's in here, probably, but what else is going to have a direct hand in your game? For example, if you're running a technocracy game, Technocracy Reloaded might be here. (For my game, it's Quickstart, the core book, and Truth Before Paradox. Last one for the vibes of Mage.)

Can Reference

These are the books that don't need to be read, but should be kept on-hand for, well, reference. The Book of Secrets (Player's guide) is here, for my game. Same with Lore of the Traditions, and How Do You DO That?. All of these are useful, but I would argue that they don't need an immediate, full readthrough.

Nice to Have

This is probably gonna be just about every other book. Players can read 'em, probably won't have a full/direct impact on the game.

Is this essential? No, probably not. But explicitly stating 'these are what you need' with helpful resources pointed out from the getgo can help to make it a bit less intimidating. "Don't worry about all that, *this* is what you need to work on."

Mage can be uniquely jarring, already. Make it a little easier on yourself, and your players, before you start braindumping Consensus Theory on them. :P

[weresandwitches]

Fuck it.

Get in, loser, we're ordering a few books print-on-demand from DTRPG.

[weresandwitches]

M:TA Showerthought: Technocracy Side Projects

This is probably one of the more unhinged theories I've pulled together for a Mage: The Ascension campaign.

So, to explain for those who aren't in the know: In Mage, one of the biggest groups is the Technocratic Union, aka the Technocracy. Their whole thing is building a magical paradigm of technology such that they can convince the not-mage masses that their technomagic is just technology, so it eventually actually becomes not-magic, democratized, with a UPC, an ad on youtube, and a SKU on Amazon.

With me? Cool.

The internet is, of course, a thing in Mage, but it exists as its own demiplane of existence into which sleepers (aka the not-magic folks of the world) can peek with web browsers and phones and such. But Awakened Mages (...and a few werewolves...) can get there through arcane means, and actually pull themselves into it, physically.

To mages, Tron is a documentary. (Side showerthought: Did the Technocracy commission the Tron movies to try to normalize the thought of entering the web- er, The Grid?)

So here's the thing: Mages uploaded so can walk into sectors populated by sleepers. This is one of the main ways they can interact with them, in point of fact, while on the Web. This means it's not infeasible that a mage could hang out with folks in, say... Second Life. To a user, they've just got a really cool avatar, one hell of a mocapped AO, and who the hell gave this dude admin rights?

This is where the showerthought theory comes in: The Technocracy maintains Second Life via Linden, VRChat, even the 'Metaverse' (even typing that makes me nauseous, sorry.) Ways for sleepers to interact with mages in the Web proper, and those denizens in it. This would explain the dramatic improvements in basically all of them. (Yes, the scrapping of the Metaverse is a dramatic improvement to it.)

I'm not sure what the Technocracy would have to say about the SL furry population. (A not insignificant segment of Iteration X probably has at least a tail in their wardrobe, though.)

Either way - I do enjoy coming up with these admittedly weird theories.

(Side note: I'm running an M20 campaign! Mage is my favorite of the WoD properties, by far, so I'm rather excited. Probably more posts about M20 coming soon.)

[weresandwitches]

Sans Seraph

I'm part of a thing that does a series of connected one-shots in a shared/consistent setting. Sometimes, a story idea is hard to come along. Others...

Discord added a thing to change the font of your name if you have Nitro, and a player commented on the fancy font gang. I made a joke about embracing Serifs.

Enter the session name:

Sans Seraph.

When you get Seraphs, you need others. Hey, let's throw some Aasimar in there. Story base: Aasimar without Seraphs. Murder! What kind of Aasimar, though? Mercenaries. New Roman mercenaries, capable of Arial combat. What's the McGuffin?

A font. Specifically, a Font of Judgement - those guilty of crimes get destroyed by it. :D That just means we need to someone to save from it. Someone who *is* guilty of crimes, but not necessarily this one.

I love puns. Sometimes it gets the players pun-ished, though. :D

(Also, they only have themselves to blame. :P)

[weresandwitches]

Writing Mothership Content

The One-Shot of the Day plan fizzled out a little because

I started writing a story proper again.

I'm writing a mothership oneshot rn.

I'll confess: I'm not used to writing Mothership stories. I'm used to things like D&D where the default reaction to "The monster pops out of the crawlspace" is "Let's roll initiative, I want to shoot it in the head." And combat ensues. Mothership is more, "I shoot it in the head. ...wait, why is looking angry instead of dead?"

The TOMBS approach from the Warden's guide goes a long way here, yes. It's super simple, but once you see the pattern it's hard not to see it when you watch things like Alien, Hellraiser, Event Horizon - the sort of thing Mothership is built for.

Thing is, this difference means there's a ton of difference in the story build. It's not "Players find and kill the monster." It's "Players skirt the utter edges of danger trying to find their way to an answer."

Pro tip: That answer is *never* wholly satisfying, by design. Mothership has a thing about Survive, Solve, Save: You can only pick two.

There's other considerations, too. Players need to be down with the fact that things are gonna get weird and lethal quick. Not 'roll death saves' lethal. Think more 'the party manages to seal the door to the medbay and cauterizes what's left of the soldier's arm before he can bleed out.' Trying to be a hero gets you killed faster than Vasquez shouting "let's rock!" and lighting up with the smart gun.

(This approach looks cool, but uh. Sorry, Vasquez. :()

That 'sealing the door to the medbay' scene is a great example, too - you can have that scene of the crew frantically trying to emergency jury-rig the elevator, or maybe lock the gravity ring out of alignment so passage into it becomes temporarily blocked, but after that? There's quiet The players have the chance to breathe. Track their wounds. Count their dead.

But the monster isn't done yet. It's coming.

Don't let them forget that. :D

I'll admit, writing this post is as much for me as anyone else who might be reading it. Jotting down pacing notes, building in points for the post fuckery breather, etc.

...I need to make characters to have on-hand just in case someone does decide to be a hero, though. I'm not above red-shirting a player when the lethality has been lampshaded, broadcast, lit up in neon and shone upon the ever-present cloud cover over the city.

[weresandwitches]

One Shot Idea of the Day: The Only Question

(Inspired in part by Honor Among Thieves, which I maintain is a terribly underrated movie. Fight me.)

The party has been tasked with hunting an artifact for whatever reason - maybe it's needed for a heist, maybe it's a commission for retrieval, or maybe it's just something the party's wizard needs. Whatever it is they've been set to searching for, their lead is a field of corpses from the battle the artifact was last seen at.

There's only one problem - the party gets there, and the bodies have already been interrogated. Speak with Dead fails. (Remember, D&D folks - speak with dead only works if the target hasn't been SWD'd in the past ten days.)

The implication is obvious: They're not the only ones hunting the artifact, and whoever else is hunting it is ahead of them.

Ultimately, they do find a single corpse still conscious from Speak. It sits, begging for someone to ask them a question. They've been left conscious for days, torn from restful death and forgotten but moments later as the party rushed off. Now the party is faced with a very simple quandry:

What do we ask?

How many questions are left is up to you as the DM, but I would personally say one. No more than two. Force the party to get *creative*, and remind them that asking the corpse how many questions they have left is, itself, a question. (If you're nice, allow an arcana check or something to maybe 'sense' it.)

Plot hooks from there: - The patron who sent them off hunting has, unbeknownst to the party, sent off more than one crew, and this other crew is *not* up for sharing credit. - The item is cursed! When the party follows whatever clue it is, they find the other seeker trapped in the throes of whatever curse there is. - Remember: Speak with Dead targets can lie. The corpse might well have lied to the other team. Maybe it's lying to your party instead.

[weresandwitches]

One Shot Idea Of The Day: The Memory Library

The party, in one of their shopping expeditions (DMs, you know these sessions...) finds their way to a store that they haven't seen before, despite having been to this shopping district on numerous occasions: A bookstore.

Inside, the shopkeep is friendly, helpful, but the books sold are not of a variety that the party recognizes - they're written in every language of the region, and some beyond. Before the players can even start thinking about buying the book, the shopkeeper, helpfully, volunteers one of the characters a tome, careworn leather and with that delightful old book smell.

Assuming the players accept, whoever winds up carrying the tome, after their next long rest, awakens with a skill proficiency they didn't have before. Something seemingly random, unlike them - the cleric awakens with knowledge of the Survival skill, for example. That's strange. Stranger still - when she uses it, the has memories she didn't have before. A forest. Friends. Perhaps an animal companion?

Back to the bookstore. The shopkeeper smiles and explains - these tomes carry not stories, or writings, but memories. These are, the shopkeep insists, given up voluntarily for a handsome sum.

But are they?

Plot hooks, then: - These memories are stolen. Bandits or worse have been using these arcane tomes at the shopkeep's behest, bringing him ill-gotten memories for sale to whoever might ask. - Perhaps the library is a check-in, check-out sort of thing - players can gain new proficiencies, but at the cost of one of their own... and the memories to go along with it. - The shopkeeper is on the up and up, somehow, but the memories in the books are more than memories - they're souls, and carrying the book now pairs the player with a Johnny Silverhand-esque figure they might not want. Worse, that Johnny Silverhand comparison might be a little *too* accurate...

I used to write these one-shot ideas as creative exercises for myself, one daily. It didn't hurt to have them on hand when I needed something for my own home game, either. :D

Use or modify as you like - but if you're going to post elsewhere, please toss me some credit?

[weresandwitches]

House Rules: A Deal With The Devil

One of my favorite house rules when playing D&D and Pathfinder, especially, is one I picked up elsewhere some time ago: The Deal with the Devil.

The rule goes a little like this: You rolled a nat1. I, as the DM, offer you the Devil's Deal - I will take that Nat 1, and in turn, replace it with a Nat 20. Straight-up. BUT. I, at my convenience and discretion, can return to you that Nat 1 on any other roll you might make, at any time, and you cannot reject the 1's return. Your success now, for your failure later.

Simple enough, but I do tend to put a few limits on: - You can only have one Deal active at any time. If I still have a 1 to give you, I've no 20s for you. - This deal is only offered in pivotal moments. The deal will only be concluded at pivotal moments. A deal with the Devil is never made lightly, and never made without consequence.

When and how you return that Nat 1 is always DM discretion, though I do suggest things like avoiding handing it back on death saves, 'cause that's kind of a dick thing to do. Obviously, this works better with a table you know and trusts you; it's easy to let this become a DM vs Players thing otherwise.

Failure should always be plot relevant. :D