1d20 Navigator Backgrounds (Lanthanide Horizon)

Navigators are a foraging society in the megastructure of Lanthanide Horizon - their sept-vessels, each holding an extended family, wander out from their holy sites in their home cylinder to trade, raid, and gather from their neighbors. 

These are character creation rules (kind of) for Navigator PCs - not HP and stats and so on (you have a system for that, I'm sure), nor classes (honestly I don't have a clue how I'm doing progression, maybe some kind of Wolves Upon the Coast ripoff classless scheme? or just make everyone B/X fighters or thieves or something, I'm not your boss), but equipment for the moneyless Navigational economy, and backgrounds in the style of this set for Sustainers.  

Communal Starting Equipment

The economic "person" in Navigator life is not the individual, but the sept (an extended clan/family, of about 15 adults and as many children). Within the sept, goods are shared, passed back and forth without money or debt. These goods can be Household (where there are enough that it is assumed that any member of the sept can get their hands on them when they need), Counted (where they are freely accessible, but the number of them is tracked), and Prestigious (where access to them must be earned). 

[You could also literally call them "common", "uncommon", and "rare".]

Each sept starts with the following items in these classes:

Household: food, water, pots, jars, cooking utensils, clothes, """torches""", woven-wire rope.

Counted: ten spears (medium), six foil softsuits (unarmored, 2 hour air supply), twelve crowbars, a barrel of mead.

Prestigious: nothing.

and the backgrounds of the first set of PCs generated provide extra equipment in one category or another.

Backgrounds 

1. Land-Islander

Your sept-mates hover near the sun, and their feet never touch the earth unless they wish it. The taller the tower, the more weight on the foundation.

Skill: one of Animal Handling/Climbing/Mimicry

Items Provided:

    Counted: two dozen chickens.

    Prestigious: an electric, propeller-driven ultralight.

Perk: You always know where the nearest food source, water source, and vantage point are.

2. Pilot

Some septs eke out scorned lives on the Volume's surface, their ships irreparable or lost. Count yourself lucky.

Skill: one of Singing/Mapmaking/Weather Prediction

Items Provided:

    Counted: an extra barrel of fuel and oxidizer, in case of emergency.

    Prestigious: a grainy black-and-white thermal monocular.

Perk: In your hands, sept-vessels move with perfect agility, even under bad conditions. Pull a backflip under gravity with a broken engine, if you want. If you find traces of another sept-vessel, you can track it unerringly.

3. Ship-Tender

When the pilot pulls a backflip under gravity with a broken engine, it's your sworn duty to hit them upside the head.

Skill: one of Electrical Engineering/Propellant Chemistry/Weaving

Items Provided:

    Counted: a wrench set, a set of screwdrivers, a corded power drill.

Perk: You have a finely developed sense for bad luck. If something terrible is about to happen (RFNA geyser, gravity switch, infohazard projection) you get a split second right before it happens to do something.

4. Comms Operator

It is so terrible to be alone.

Skill: one of Poetry/Low-Light Vision/Memorization

    Household: small mirrors of polished metal.

    Prestigious: a signal lamp installation installed on the chin of your sept-vessel.

Perk: the ability to read and write in Navigator semaphore, permitting communication between septs without sending messengers (or other inconveniences).

5. Espatier

A practiced hand with the axe and rifle, a survivor of koryos rites of passage (and thus, a full adult), but not yet awarded with steel mask and wolf-skin cloak.

Skill: one of +2 to-hit/Acrobatics/Demolition

Items Provided: 

    Household: light throwing-darts.

    Prestigious: an ulfheðinn's garb - demon-faced mask, feather mantle, and chains of medallions (heavy armor, 6 hour air supply) and six doses of their moxibustion compounds (doubled movement speed, two attacks per round, immunity to pain, injury, fear, & unconsciousness, chance of stroke, amnesia, blown blood vessels). Not yet yours.

Perk: You move at a flat sprint in zero-gravity, and never lose your (hand-and-)footing. 

6. Exorcist

Sacrifices in the present world turn into pure springs and beautiful orchards in the next. Shirk your responsibilities and the dead of the next world crawl back to this one, spreading malfunction and disease.

Skill: one of Medicine/Theology/Vigilance

Items Provided:

    Counted: eight honey-soaked antiseptic bandages, eight doses of anesthetic injection, a pair of drums. 

Perk: at a glance, you can see someone's current and maximum HP, if they are ill, and (if they are) whether or not they will recover. You are expected to travel - members of other septs, and even other Assemblies, have a 2-in-6 chance of recognizing you from an earlier visit.

7. Lawspeaker

An honorable Navigator will not permit themselves to be slighted. It takes caution to silence their feuds without blood spilled.

Skill: Law, unsurprisingly, plus one of Intimidation/History/Wrestling

Items Provided:

     Prestigious: a stone wrist-guard badge of office, in pure sapphire. Worn by you, and none other.

Perk: once per Season, when presented with a social situation, you may ask one of the following questions to the GM directly - they will answer honestly. 

• Who is really in control here?
  
• What is about to happen?
• What trait rules this person?
• What here is not what it appears to be?

8. Gunsmith Aspirant

The power to kill at a distance, and to make the tools that provide this power, is hidden. Initiation to the gunsmith's society requires both practical skill and spiritual tuning. You are not yet ready.

Skill: one of History/Intimidation/Diligence

Items Provided: 

    Household: lead ball bearings.

    Counted: your tools: forge, barrel-reaming machine, hammers & mandrels, anvil, etc.

    Prestigious: three air rifles (+2, 1d10, side-levered, 5 round tube magazine) - your mentor's work.

Perk: You have the aid and mentorship of a full member of the society, and can expect hospitality from other members. When your initiation is complete, you will be able to build guns with a Season's work.

9. Foreman

The great Assembly-Ships will, someday, sail to the next world. But there is so much work to be done.

Skill: one of Architecture/Wire-reading ("green plastic tubes with yellow chevrons are filled with molten salt")/Mining

Items Provided: 

    Household: PVC pipe, dim LED status lights, rebar.

    Counted: four tubes of caulk, a full set of stick welding equipment (twenty rods of consumable electrode, mask, gloves, power supply).

Perk: under your instruction, each person engaged in labor (tearing up walls, repairing a ship, building a bridge, et cetera) counts as two.

10. Katabatist

On the surface of the Volume, like the pupil of an eye, is a six-mile wide hole, and a ten-trillion-mile long tunnel. No one has, yet, made it to its end (apart from the spirits of the dead, of course) - but you've gotten closer than most.

Skill: one of Endure/Tracking/Logistics

Starting Items: 

    Household: apotropaic icons, to cast out your pallidness and your empty eyes.

    Prestigious: a red plastic keycard. The only thing you brought back.

Perk: You are beneath notice. Passive machines (those built for noncombat purposes) don't notice you unless you attack them, and you will always be attacked last by combat machines and Firstborn. 

11. Lictor

Guards and enforcers for the Imperious, pulled from the warriors of the septs.

Skill: one of +2 to-hit/Authority/Wrestling

Items Provided:

    Counted: four heavy greataxes - executioners' tools. Two sets of beautiful (+1 to Reaction) clothes patterned with processions of floating figures in spacesuits.

Perk: At will, provoke morale rolls with your leaden mien. You are forewarned of any decrees of the Imperious.

12. Legalist

Why should the law be secreted away in the minds of lawspeakers and selectmen? Why can I not see it before me? 

Skill: Law, plus one of Foreign Lands/Oratory/Fleeing

Starting Items:     

    Counted: a pot of ink and 20 sheets of pressed paper.

    Prestigious: a multi-jointed mechanical limb from the foreign Oasis Kingdoms, currently attached to no one. Sometimes it twitches.

Perk: literacy - eloquence, even - in the language of the Oases.

13. Stowaway

Desperation claimed you.  

Skill: two of Foraging/Disguise/Climb

Items Provided:

    Nothing. That's the point, isn't it?

Perk: You don't pass out when exposed to vacuum. You'll still asphyxiate - but you'll stay awake the whole time. 

14. Former Imperious 

Just a year ago, your words rang with the unquestionable tone of a monarch. But power waxes and wanes, and now you are a man like any other.

Skill: one of Authority/Logistics/Knowing Your Neighbors

Items Provided:

    Household: shimmering banners and a bit too much pride.

    Prestigious: a set of jewelry, each displaying a particular Vibe to your fellow Navigators:

1. Sapphire diadem: aura of legal authority.
2. Four extremely dense bluish-white rings: aura of occulted knowledge.
3. Tangled bismuth necklace: aura of courage.
4. Bracelet of wound aluminum thread: aura of surplus.
   
5. Titanium cylinder of a cord: aura of piety.
6. Copper earrings: aura of military skill.
   

Perk: you still hold some fragment of weight. Among foreigners, you are always the most prominent member of a group, and your presence can be tuned to inspire awe or fear in onlookers. Your fellow Navigators would scoff at attempts to use either of these powers among them. If you return to your former position, members of your Assembly would treat every word from you as a Command.

15. Quartermaster

Why spend blood for goods in a raid when you can get everything you want just from talking?

Skill: one of Logistics/Foreign Lands/Smuggling

Items Provided:

    Counted: a pallet's worth of scented purplish lumber, four beautiful tapestries, and a crate of dried ephedra tea.

    Prestigious: a songline - a rhyming, rhythmic mnemonic-fable that leads to a place outside the Volume. Yours leads to...

1. the Spire, favored-city and greatest of the Oasis Kingdoms. There are many copies of this songline (as Navigators head to the Spire often, for trade or mercenary work), but yours conceals a rare shortcut.
2. an endless expanse of columnar joints, each made of house-sized metal cubes. The foreign Walker-Herds carve their walking cities out of these blocks, and set them to wandering among the vastnesses of the vault.
   
3. a maze of black glass tunnels too thin to fit a sept-vessel down, where faces of pointillist light dance and whisper behind the walls.
   
4. the cenote chambers of the painted immortals, now said to be closed as their armies quintuple their numbers in preparation for their march.
   

Perk: when you seek a rare good in a population center, roll 1d6: on a 6 you find exactly what you hope for. On a 3-5 it has an issue or condition (works poorly, a bad deal, stolen goods), and on a 1-2 you find nothing.

Simon Roy

16. Enemy

You can't remember who started it.

Skill: one of +2 to-hit/Drinking/Intimidation

Items Provided:

    Household: light dueling knives, painted to leave dyed scars - along with some extra paint-powder.

    Counted: four shields, carved with screaming faces.

Perk: If you roll 1 on a damage die, reroll it and take the second result. If you roll the maximum result on a damage die, it explodes. A member of your Assembly feuds with you - if you meet, there will be blood.

17. Shrine Keeper

Each sept has a chosen ancestor, and keeps tablets of their history in the midst of their vessel.

Skill: Theology, plus one of Oratory/Knowing Your Neighbors/Diligence

Items Provided:

    Household: fine incense and ephedra tea.

Perk: for ritual reasons, you are inviolable. Assuming you keep your pious reputation, and haven't struck first, Navigators must Save with Will in order to harm you.

18. Salvager

There is nothing new in the world.

Skill: one of Wire-reading/Demolition/Low-Light Vision

Items Provided:

    Counted: three cutting torches with 15 minutes' supply of fuel and oxidizer. Six wire cutters.

Perk: you don't need to roll to avoid damaging parts pulled from a ship or machine. (I probably have to write some kind of table for pulling apart robots 🤔 mmm procedures)

19. Skald

Navigators are, with the exception of the Imperious, fiercely egalitarian. It is your responsibility to insult the successful and the Select. Drag them back to earth with you. 

Skill: one of Poetry/Sleight of Hand/Fleeing

Items Provided:

    Household: musical instruments (long panpipes, morsings, & musical bows)  

    Prestigious: a terrible clattering horn that inflicts a -1 penalty to morale rolls, and lets you jumpscare people when it'd be funny.

Perk: each season, either choose to receive an unkind rumor on a certain topic, or add a rumor of your own into the ecosystem.

20. Ropemaker

Even at the end of time, a ship still goes through a lot of rope.

Skill: one of Endure/Climb/Weaving

Items Provided:

    Counted: a wire, fifty feet long, that moves on its own like a serpent. It was decided that this was your problem.

Perk: rope tied with your strange knots can carry twice its normal weight, and is treated as dynamic despite its construction (i.e. you can tie yourself to it, fall, and Not have your spine explode).

Solo Gardens of Ynn Play Report

After reading a bit of Sofinho's plans to play through the Stygian Library solo earlier this year, I became interested in doing the same, with the (original, 2018 edition of) the Gardens of Ynn. I'd never played a solo game before, and my opinion on depthcrawls has soured somewhat over time, but the two of them seem to fit together quite pleasantly. 

My framing device was based on my urban fantasy setting, Libra - a trio of prisoners from the government containment facility CATERPILLAR have spent months carefully growing mold under the floor of a common area - just enough life to open a door to the Garden. 

1. Adhara Matar, a Fighter 3 (17 HP, AC 10) has a tied-together-bedsheet rope and stole a Glock (1d8, 17 rounds, integrated flashlight) off a guard on her way out. She was picked up on a charge of smuggling supernatural goods - she is, herself, entirely non-magical.
2. Idris Nist, an 11 HP AC 11 OSIRIS Theurge 3 (my system here was "the GLOG that exists in my head" - Nist has 3 MD and 3 spells, Laplace Transformation, Squared Missile, and Irreality) with his hands enveloped in metal spheres and chained together to stop him from casting.
3. Noé Michaud, a Psychic 3 (6 HP, 10 AC, Apex Firestarter, Apex Inception) with a stolen toolbox.

Their goal is to pass all the way through the Garden, to an eventual location roll of 35 or higher. They can rest once for free - if they do it again, government agents and apsych kill teams will swarm into Ynn and appear on the encounter table. 

Depth 0

Noé pries up the floor tile, and the trio drop into Ynn, tumbling to a stop in a meticulously-arranged rock garden. In the center of the radiating gravel patterns is a stone sarcophagus, carved with images of cavorting humanoid salamanders. 

I threw a reaction roll for Adhara, who got to be team leader by virtue of her criminal career, and it turned out she was absolutely the kind of person to go "big sarcophagus! People put loot in those!". Noé breaks it open on her orders, and ignores the four skeletons within in order to pocket 20 rounds of verdigrised 9mm. She gets a Real Bad Feeling afterwards, but nothing seems to happen... 

(the cartridges were cursed, and Noé failed her save, but the curse was "next time you roll a character, treat all 6s as 1s", so I guess we're fine!)

While the others commit vandalism, Idris notices a set of smoldering amphibian footprints and decides "well, they lead somewhere, and that's better than nowhere"; so as Adhara pockets the rounds, the group follows.

Depth 1

The salamander's footprints lead through more and more precarious ground, and the sky starts to hang heavier and heavier until they switch places, and the PCs pick their way across a vine trellis hanging down from the ceiling above an endless, hungering sky. 

Idris's manacles mean he needs the help of the other two to move - unfortunately for him, he is promptly abandoned when Adhara sees their pursued salamander in arms and armor, going toe-to-toe with an animate topiary dog. The PCs win initiative and decide that the clearly intelligent salamander will probably make a better friend than the Literal Plant, so Noé tosses a couple MD into setting the plant ablaze, Adhara whiffs with a handgun round, and the salamander manages to throw the topiary into the abyss. 

It bows and turns to leave, but another reaction roll decides Noé is absolutely the kind of person to mind-control an innocent bystander. A psychic command of "You want to help us leave." fails due to a save, and the salamander swings away.

Depth 2

Noé won't leave well enough alone, and leads the other two after the salamander, following its footsteps through increasingly dark woods. When they reach it, their conversation quickly turns bitter - the salamander scorning their plans to cooperate.

The PCs leave, frustrated.

Depth 3

A maze of silver-stemmed roses, with a gantry of ships beneath an immense steel grate at its center. Noé, feeling high on MD, torches the place and awakens a pair of Rust Bumblebees from their newly red-hot hive. 

The PCs win initiative again, and Idris runs forward to cram his shackles into the jittering antenna of one bee, while the other is shot at (Adhara missing again) and set on fire (Noé keeping her dice, again). On the bee turn, one of them obligingly rusts off Idris's chains, and the other stabs Noé through the arm.

Now able to cast, Idris shoves a pair of dice into Laplace Transform - the three PCs are flattened into 1-dimensional lines, and hover untouchably past the bees, past the burning maze, and through the grate.

They drop their chosen vessel into the underground river, and sail for hours, resting, joking about the prison break, and watching bioluminescent fish stream by.

Depth 9

Their ship runs aground near the blown-glass mausoleum of a dead Sidhe, with rose dryads woven around it as grave decorations. Between a sense of altruism and a desperate desire for extremely valuable Sidhe bones (2500gp, which I'm sure is rather a lot in USD), they smash the place up, freeing the roses and running off with the skeleton before anything gets too upset.

Depth 10

An actual building, all granite tile and hulking bronze mechanisms. The party touch absolutely nothing and tiptoe out as quickly as they can.

Depth 11

The clamor of salamanders returns, and the party follows it to their city - wrought-iron palaces in wrought-iron fields to feed hives of Rust Bumblebees. Noé's psychic sense prickles - for all the city's hospitality, it is cursed. Any leaving it immediately take 1d10 CHA damage - the Ch7 Adhara and Ch5 Idris decide not to take that chance. The city of the salamanders isn't Earth, but it's better than prison - Hell, it's probably better than Pennsylvania, too.

But the curse needles at Noé - pressing and stabbing and twisting. She can't stay here. Noé shoulders the Sidhe skeleton and Adhara's stolen handgun, and bids the rest of the PCs farewell, letting the curse wash over her.  

Depth 12

A vast gnashing maw of fire, howling with laughter. Noé flees in a panic through poisonous air, moving not one layer deeper, but seven.
 
Depth 19

The promise of an ending. Between rows of broken pillars, a ladder stretches up into limitless space, engraved with "to Earth, by way of Ynn" in tiny, precise text repeating across its surface.

Three pale apes wind between the columns, throwing stones at a pursuing giant worm. Noé avoids the ire of the combatants for a couple turns while throwing save vs. charm psy-attacks, and eventually manages a lucky hit on the worm. After crushing the apes, Noé rides the mind-controlled worm up the ladder and steps across the boundary, back to Earth - an orchid grove in Patagonia.

Noé doesn't know the language, doesn't have a hold on the local esoteric underworld, and has a $250,000 payday in a bag over her shoulder. I wish her luck.
 
(rolling an option that skips six depth followed by another that skips seven really accelerated the experience, didn't it)

End-of-Year Slushpost

I wrote it, and now you're stuck reading it.

Sewer Rats Epithets

Every two years I seem to doodle with another pick-up game to never use. Gateway this year, Orbiters Local 519 in 2022, and Sewer Rats back in 2020. While digging through my drafts from back when I used GMBinder, a HTML editor for making "things that kind of look like 5e trade dress if you squint", I found these four levelless non-classes for Tim B.'s Squires Errant. They're... four? years old, if I had to guess.

(S) is a spell that can only be used once, (E) is an item you can lose, anything else is just a skill. 2024-Archon's notes in italics.

Veteran - Survivor of the newest of the City’s expansionist wars, now haunted by their violence.

Paranoia: when you enter a room, you suspect three objects within are traps. If there is a trap, it will be one of those three. (Can you imagine playing a game with this? It'd take forever!)     

Surplus Arquebus (E): a heavy rifle (2d8 damage, 1d6 ammunition, two-handed, loud).    

Your Friend's Ghost (S): cut down in the war, now whispering constantly of better times. It can be sent to attempt to haunt a target - they must Save, taking 1d12 damage on a failure and being possessed on a success. (The effect-on-passed-save is a nice trick, I think.)

Vermin Druid - Even in the core of the City, there is still life: fleas, spiders, and rats.

Rat Form (S): become a rat for 1d6 Exploration Turns.    

Swarming Insects (S): a room fills with flying, stinging insects for 1d4 Combat Rounds. Everyone except for you is either blinded or takes 1d4 damage per Combat Round.    

Polluted Blood: you are immune to poison, and your blood burns things who come in contact with it. Melee attackers take 1d4 damage after they hit you.

Urchin - Abandoned by the world, you march into the sewers out of desperation.

Pickpocket: if someone isn't paying attention to you, you can steal anything they aren't holding without a roll.    

Escape Artist: you can fit through any space larger than your head at normal speed, and escape grapples or being tied up in one Combat Round without a roll.    

Inconspicuous: even if a fight has broken out, you won't be attacked as long as you hide, cringe, and otherwise appear to be harmless. (Should be "are attacked last", probably.)

Gutter Alchemist - description not found.

Waxy Green Brick (E): when consumed, sends the afflicted into a nerve-deadened frenzy. For 2d6 Combat Rounds they can act twice per Round, and damage done to them is ignored until the effect ends. After the effect ends, they are disoriented (check penalty placeholder thanks, past archon) for the same duration.     

Neon Blue Vial (E): when consumed, the drinker becomes invisible for 1d4 Exploration Turns. After the effect ends, they are blinded for the same duration. 

Pink Bottle (E): when poured on to a person or object, it becomes weightless for 1d6 Exploration Turns. At the end of the duration, it becomes twice as heavy for the same duration. This will, generally, immobilize people.

Purifier Novitiate - your creed is to protect the City from sin: monsters, strong drink, foreigners, and so on.       

Smite (S): As part of a melee attack, your crown of fire flares, and you add 1d12 to your damage. This can also be used to destroy anything not bigger than a car and not stronger than steel. 

Imperious Visage: you may reroll Reaction Rolls, but positive results on Reaction Rolls are terrified instead of friendly. If given a chance, they will run or betray you. (I'm stealing this later.)

The third Purifier Novitiate ability is missing, and the sixth class just has the words "bear trap" on an empty page.

GLOG Class: Psychopomp

A: Never Spoke in Prose, Smoke Cloud
B: Pennies for Charon, Prophetic
C: Empty Eye Sockets
D: Undying

Never Spoke in Prose
The Flame (different from a flame, though you wouldn't expect others to understand) instructs you - there are those who have escaped their destined fate. The Flame is meant to seek only the undead, but it is tired, and the divine laws are long. For each person you kill that it asked you to, you get enough goodwill to make up an excuse for why someone you want dead has cheated the wheel.

The Flame knows where your target lives. It grants you Advantage on your first to-hit and damage rolls against them.

Smoke Cloud
Turn into a black mist to zoop through vents and other narrow openings. You, importantly, can't fly - the smoke is too heavy to just hover into the air.

Pennies for Charon
Whenever you kill someone, you find a pair of coins behind their eyes. You can give these to the Flame, and for each 3 pairs it hands you a gun, 1d4x10 rounds of ammunition, or a grenade.

Prophetic
The Flame gives you 1 piece of information about your target when you begin seeking them - perhaps it tells you that they tend to leave their back door unlocked, or that they keep an antique machine gun in their basement.

Empty Eye Sockets
You can see without issue in the dark.

Undying
You do not need to eat, sleep, drink, or breathe. Spend your free time watching grass grow, or listen to a calming symphony.

GLOG Class (Fragment): Antipaladin

Sometimes you want "deep worldbuilding", "complex sociology", "multifaceted problems", and other things of that ilk. Other times you just want to stick your players in front of a guy in armor with spikes on it.

A: Asymptomatic Carrier, +1 Attack

B: Contact Outsider

C: Shrike Ideology, Smite

D: Scatter the Chaff

i forgot what these abilities were. such is life.

Five Dungeon Concepts for Gateway

1. Out in the frozen desert sulks a ruin built by the Elfs and their armies of the living dead in past ages. Seek souls bound in iron, wands (a forgotten Elfish invention) of Bones to Dust, and sealed great evils of past ages, but beware refracted laser-traps, prismatic spirits, and sealed great evils of past ages.
2. As a show of force, the Imperial army burned a district of the city to the ground, then wandered off (much to the chagrin of the city's governor). If you wait, on moonless nights, you can still see part of it - a single tenement spun from gleaming silver. Seek liquid memories, items that can touch dreams, and the treasured possessions of the missing, but beware Imperial traps, false floors, and the dawn.
   
3. An abandoned Imperial cathedral has pride of place in the richest quarter of Gateway, untouched for fear of divine or legal reprisal. Seek its bell (rumored to be a casting-bell keyed to Earthquake), armor of imperial paladins, and huge piles of sanctified platinum, but beware anchorites in the walls, bell-armed gargoyles, and direct contact with the Imperial god.
   
4. Optimists and fools say Imbril:Grove:Acosta:Aelrue, a Gestalt of four, retreated into his buried sanctum to plan a terrible revenge on Imperial governance. You don't care, you just want to root through his wine cellar. Seek the aforementioned wine, abundant spell scrolls, and the thrice-real-size golden statue of himself I:G:A:A conjured as a joke, and beware the 8 MD wizard who stuffed so much spiritual mass into a single body he leaves afterimages whenever he moves, the thrice-real-size golden statue of himself, and more than a few of those abundant spell scrolls.
5. The governor's family lives in a many-roomed mansion out on the edge of town. Now, the mansion itself is impregnable - but in the basement (sealed to the guards and almost always unoccupied) one could seek occult blackmail, daemonic heirlooms, and the family tutelary spirit (one of the few to survive the executions) - but beware geases, curses, and the unexpected appearance of the rich and powerful.

GLOG Class: Demonologist
A: Familiar, +1 MD
B: Advisor, +1 MD
C: Talents, +1 MD
D: Multitasking, +1 MD

a hideous abomination

Familiar: after six years of study in the demonological arts, and weeks of blood, sweat and tears (mostly blood, and not all of it yours) you have summoned it - a horrible creature, a wide-eyed round head with sticklike limbs. It peeps and wheedles, pulling on your sleeve to beg for crumbs of magic. It is intangible, and imperceptible to all but you.

It cannot be separated from you - if you are ever more than ten feet away, the familiar is dragged to you by an irresistible force.

It is, to put it nicely, "charmingly incapable" - apt to become distracted, sleepy, confused, or bored unless watched over.

MD can be fed to the creature to:
- make one of its limbs twist into the real world, letting it pull levers, push buttons, or start poking people. 4 MD thus means four limbs, providing the familiar the ability to interact with the world as a human does.
- make the familiar perceptible to others with one sense (sight, sound, et cetera) - more MD move it up the scale from "weird little guy" to "baron of Hell".
- allow the creature to move 10 [meters/tens of meters/hundreds of meters/kilometers] away from you

Advisor
The familiar can, with MD payment, answer questions on matters of natural philosophy, botany, and rhetoric. The more MD expended, the more useful the answer.

Talents
The familiar gains a skill, as a PC would have. In matters related to this skill it is reliable, focused, and capable.

Multitasking
You wake up one day to find *two* of these things. You definitely didn't summon that second one. Hm.

Owe My Soul to the Company Store, out now on itch.io

 My ZQ project from this year is out in PDF - a 28 page Mothership social adventure in Isotelus Complex, a Jovian colony-in-progress.

Bug offices, forge rumors, assassinate officials, and wrangle competing factions under the shadow of Callisto as the Complex's first wave of colonists approaches, radical ideologies spread among the workers, provocateurs sabotage the colony for political gain, and a months-long takeover scheme finally comes to fruition. It contains:

• 16 major NPCs (and about half a dozen minor), split between baseline humans and "labor bodies" - licensed human minds downloaded into 11-foot-tall cyborg bugs. Each one with their own set of missions, goals, and rewards.
• A 72-room map of the Complex's surface half and orbital space elevator.
• 5 overarching factions, a 7-day timeline of the future, and a set of final moves the Complex's rival owners keep in reserve to throw both at a labor body revolt and each other.
• A whole lot of the color yellow.  

 

Endless, Endless, Endless (Lanthanide Horizon Gazetteer)

The river is gone. 

It didn't dry up over years, through overuse and changing weather. In a single day, the river deltas turned to cracking mud flats.

It sprang, unbeknownst to you, from a crack in a pipeline a mile wide and a hundred thousand miles long. After however many years, the humming mind of the world had the hole sealed. 

That humming mind didn't know you were there. It still doesn't.

And yet, it is killing you nonetheless.

huleeb
the ground, the walls, the ceilings, they are all nests of wires and pipelines
a transit hub for raw materials

"You", in this case, is Cell Cesme - a village of Sustainers. 100 people lived here, growing papyrus and fishing from rafts. Another 300 slept, and dreamed the world into existence. You have to leave - and you can leave no one behind. Even if you have to drag all three hundred sleepers behind you with rollers and chains (and you will), if you leave them behind you are Sustainers no longer.

Your leadership is divided. The twin priest-storytellers, Sevket and Coskun, draw and redraw routes. There is no way out except through the territories of your rivals. Diplomacy or violence - almost assuredly the latter, as you drag your herds through their dying lands. 

Well. They aren't your herds. The vast majority are Yasar Herdsman's (thus the name, I suppose). The crisis will soon bring the erasure of debts - so Yasar waits for their chance to build a new, near-unilateral debt network, one where everyone owes them, and they owe no one. Of course, players grab for their spears at the slightest sign of autocracy - but will they really take time in an emergency to resist Yasar, destabilize the Cell, possibly cost them their best negotiator (which, make no mistake, Yasar is), and lose access to Yasar's near-constant gifts of treasure and livestock? They are no tyrant, they are not cruel, and they are useful. 

Cesme's march goes on and on, through miles of dangling wires. Through biting wind, through sideways rains of melted plastic, through rotten floors and crumbling footholds.

Your nearest neighbor is Cell Rakam. They are impatient, riotous, lovers of pottery, worse herders and better hunters. They keep a shrine in the middle of their Cell, around what they say is the footprint of an immortal, burned into solid steel. You have been rivals for years, squabbling over a pipeline of clear sugar syrup. 

They keep a champion, Fevziye Bladesmith. They are three hundred and twenty seven years old. They have spent every year of it fighting. Their spear is a solid bar of some odd metal that splinters to a sharp point, leaving flakes that glow white-hot in the air.

Cutting across your path is a perfectly square tunnel. In each corner an electromagnet hums - and, from time to time, a house-sized steel cube passes through the maglev path. At hundreds of miles an hour. Without warning.

Now you are through, to Cell Kaynasmak, behind their veil of raining splinters. Caravan travelers, and good friends to Cell Düzenli, up in the plains. A massive hollow cylinder hangs down from their ceiling - to speak to Düzenli, they ring it with hammers like a bell. The response from Düzenli is fragmented; awful tales of replication, of worm-cavalry, of burnt homes and refugees. 

They have picked up a Düzenli variation to their religion - the idea that the mind leaves traces of itself in the body, and that your "past lives" can be resummoned. 

One of their scavengers, Gokce, has been bilocated, uninentionally. They left to go... somewhere, months ago, and never returned. The Kaynasmakites deemed them dead and pulled their backup out of the dream. Replication is taboo - one Gokce will be expected to return to sleep, or to die. Neither of them wish to.

huleeb

Liquid screens well up from the tangle of wires you walk on. They pool around your feet, as if pawing at your ankles for attention. The picture within them is alive. [missing referent], a sapient-adaptive infohazard complex. Look into the screen and you will see it - then look away, and it will not leave you. A negative-space figure, a hole in a twisting, crackling background. 

It wants to head north - there is a labyrinth of black glass, where it believes it can return to the wires where it belongs. The outside world is so cold, and so small. For a point of Wisdom (permanently) and a cherished memory, you can insert [missing referent] into your speech, and make demands of it.

If you do not carry it to its destination, it will take these memories on its own.

Then, finally, Cell Uzakta, cell of wind chimes and mason's guilds. But by the time you reach them, they will be Uzakta no longer. The sleepers will hum agonizing (not agonized - they are so very calm, and so very quiet) tones, and the wakeful will watch you from behind black glass masks. People came from above - from where you head. They knew there was no water. They offered it, in exchange for work. And eventually, Cell Uzakta broke. 

Now, it is The Garden Where Nothing Is Bitter. A farming outpost for the Firstborn above, in the ventilation plains. There was a grove of carbon fiber towers, carved into perfect shapes. They fell, they must be replaced, but the cities of the plain delay work. Cause losses. The Firstborn needed a beachhead, and a labor source. In the midst of the Garden is an elevator - built in a day to move grain and soldiers.

You might have had cousins in Uzakta. They will not recognize you. 

On the way there, you may meet Ipek and Batuhan - Scavengers, both, sent to see if the river is truly gone. There has to be an alternative. But by the time they return, Uzakta has already made their deal. Ipek is pious, jocular, pitying. Batuhan is silent.

But even the Firstborn are not free from threat. They are here to support the Host Parallel in the plains - but the Host is an artillery/cavalry regiment, optimized to cut down Oasis city levies in an open field. Here, their railgun rounds clatter into walls, and their spring-cavalry are lost in mazes of tunnels. There are still so many opportunities for something to go wrong. 

An envoy of theirs, Gift of the Generous World, wanders the random encounter table wrapped in 3D-printed fabric, heralded by a screaming ball of iridescent plasma, and guarded by a magnesium-framed thing in the shape of a nervous system.

Past the Garden is the Door. Six feet of steel between you and the plains. It has been open for so long that you forgot it could close.

But it did. 

The Gift Economy In Play

From time to time, the gift economy appears in RPGs - but it’s a niche enough topic that I can probably drag some(?) uncommon advice out of it, after using it in one of my most recent campaigns, set among the Sustainer Cells of the megastructure.

The Sustainer economy works off of personal debt. Goods and services are given away unprompted, and the receiver later reciprocates, getting leaned on if they seem like they’ll never carry out their half of the process. If the PCs want specific items, they have to find someone who makes them, figure out what they want, and go seek it so they can give it away and get their target NPC into their debt.

In this system, it is key that no gift ever quite equals another. To erase your debts with exact returns is to cut yourself from the social fabric.

Above the background noise of the clattering ledger is a system based loosely off Moka exchange as a type of aristocratic conflict. To compete over social standing, two people can give reciprocal gifts, each greater than the last. When one fails to repay, they have lost, losing status as the victor gains it.

1. Start Your PCs in Debt

   Every position in the gift economy offers a hook of some kind except one - the blank slate. If you are in debt, you’re always looking for ways to get out of it. If someone owes you, you’re always looking for ways to leverage that. But since the PCs in the Sustainer game started off without debts, interacting with the economy was optional.

   Future campaigns among the Sustainers will tie debt into starting equipment - along with the gear from your background, you can throw some dice on an items table; but for each die you roll, you owe one of the local NPCs.

2. You Have to Track NPCs, But Not That Much

   Having to track personal debts means that you can’t just have the PCs throw handfuls of money at an equipment list in your players’ handbook and then call it a day. But most of what you need is just what they can give, and what they especially want. “Weaponsmith, wants strange metals” will get you far enough. You also don’t need extended, time-consuming shopping sessions - just the time it takes for a player to cross “tapestry” off their inventory and add “gave Kelebek a tapestry” to their sheet.

3. It’s Best to Stay Local

   The benefit of the gift economy is that it entwines the PCs with their community. Even the most bloodthirsty adventurer presumably wants equipment, and if you want equipment you have to consider the people around you instead of slinging a bag of bloodstained coins into a blank void labeled “shopkeeper”. Because of the time it takes to develop PC/NPC relationships, and the extra tracking you need for debts, you benefit from having the PCs return to the same place, with the same NPCs and the same debts. In games where the PCs wander far and forever, never staying in the same town for two nights in a row, there’s no time to tie them into anyone who isn’t moving along with them. This applies just as much in-world - why would I want to have some stranger who just wandered into town today in my debt, when there’s a good chance they won’t be here to give anything back?

4. Your NPCs Have to Be Active

   Running a game with more PC <--> community involvement lets you lead into a game with more PC ambition - not just to accumulate wealth, but to do things with it. A game with PC ambition then benefits from codified downtime, and codifying downtime loops back around and helps you track your NPCs - because they have to be busy.

   Your NPCs want the players in their debt - so, when possible, they give the PCs gifts, entirely unprompted. The NPCs then want these debts to be paid - so, when possible, they start standing around and hinting about how much they would simply love one of those dresses they weave up north in Cell Orakbocegi.

5. Every Gift is a Hook

   Or, at least, an excuse to go somewhere. Scrabble through dungeons in order to get the favorite gift of someone you desperately need the aid of, or embark on an overland expedition to find someone who actually wants this pile of gold coins (because, remember - when they aren’t coinage, gold only holds value as an aesthetic trapping. Someone might want two or three to make jewelry with, but nobody around here needs the other five hundred… but maybe in the distant city-states they’ll want some?)

Now - all of this assumes a pretty inabstract system. There are no Debt Points (at least, not that the players can see), no randomized values, no randomized inventories. There are goods, and there are people. There are abstract alternatives - it is a matter of preference.

This post is mirrored on a substack I have, because ???it seemed like a good idea at the time???. It is meant to be a place for shorter, more common posts - but we both know there's no way I'll manage to write short posts.

Addenda (12/7/24)

How do I leverage a debt someone owes me?

If you wait long enough, your debtors will give you gifts in order to flip the balance. As long as they haven't yet, you can ask them to resolve the debts in a way you want - "Hey, if you [give me this/do this for me], you will [owe me half as much / owe me barely / I will owe you barely]", and see if they agree to your terms.

How much bookkeeping is this, really?

Here's a worked example, from the Sustainer campaign:

The topmost four are personal gifts, the bottom pair is the track for a Moka exchange-equivalent in progress. "X owes Y in exchange for Z", and that's all. 

 If you want to work with exact numbers, you could assign debts GP values (or your game's equivalent) and have your PCs track that they have a debt with Fevziye to the value of 35gp, that they can use to either "buy" 35gp-worth of whatever Fevziye provides, or wait to get 40+gp of the same as they flip the debt. But I don't think it's necessary - I didn't do it, after all.

If my PCs are outsiders, how do I make them respect the debt owed?

If your PCs just arrived in town and expect to be on the other side of the world next week, they'll absolutely go "Aha! I can rack up a bunch of debts and then run, never to return!" - and your NPCs know this!

Historically, these low-trust systems are one of the situations where you get actual immediate barter - "I'll hand you this grain, you hand me those swords, and then we turn around and walk away". NPCs may demand this mode of exchange, or they may (as happened in the Sustainer campaign once) require that you give gifts in a party first, in order to tie you into the local economics by virtue of you being the one owed, instead of the one owing. 

That ledger looks like a lot of pretty major purchases - what do you do for food, or a night at the inn?

For food, this culture is assumed to have a high level of "everyday communism". Assuming you're socially connected and in good standing, people don't indebt you for food - you're a member of the community, and you need food to live. If you're provisioning a large, long-term expedition, you'll be indebted for that - but you don't have "living expenses". 

"Inns" aren't really a relevant cultural concept - the expectation is more that, having inserted yourself into the local economics (probably via throwing a party, as above), you are hosted by a local magnate, who wants a good relationship with Adventuring Sorts as a status symbol (and, perhaps, in order to ask you to do something about this local monster...).

What about XP?

Here, I can give less advice and more ideas - the Sustainer campaign had no leveling. 

If you wanted, you could retain the hypothetical GP values of extracted loot, and use that as the XP reward for its recovery. 

You could mark out particularly strange items as capital-T Treasures and reward huge chunks of XP or entire levels for them. 

Either of the above could reward magnificence - keeping only as much XP as you have in wealth displayed, proving the depth of your pockets and how good an idea it is for others to follow behind you. This also provides a choice between XP and possessions - anything you give away to create or resolve a debt costs you levels.

Or, you could abandon treasure leveling entirely and use boasts - rewarding players with levels and stat improvements for public, heroic deeds.

Mothership Month - Ghost Ship

(for the month, i'm going to throw together a couple short, unedited posts. no scope-crept regional hexcrawls, no 1d20 character classes, no nothing. just sitting in front of an intentionally-uncomfortable setup and hammering out some text)

Back when you could hold orbit over Mars, instead of getting shredded by Kessler or blinded by the ring-sun, back in the days of the intendencies, Colcom wanted to do something about the secessionists. We'd made a couple lucky hits on ground sites, on low-orbits, started a riot or two on the moons, and they decided they needed a show of force. 

So, they took this old destroyer, CCMS something-or-other, rechristened it the CCMS Olympus Mons - a threat, get it? We still own you. Loaded it up with high-altitude neutron bombs, so the infrastructure'd still be around for them to retake. Wanted to make sure we knew about it - staged some photos of the payload bay and then let them leak. Knew they wouldn't have to pull the trigger, just hang the sword over our heads. Didn't want to use them, anyway - things were tense enough between them and... what, they weren't the Leaden Conference yet, they were the... were they still flying that old banner of Fleet Kadzkadzat? 

Doesn't matter, just know that the LC, under whatever name, would've had a tantrum if their rivals made it rain hard neutrons over Noctis Labyrinthus. 

source

Of course, it didn't get that far - the Mons missed its braking burn, sailed right past us. Never closed its orbit. A few days later it popped, in clear view of everybody and God. All hands lost, reactor solidified. Drifted through the Jovians, but the LC wouldn't touch it - didn't want the implication that they did anything, so they just made a couple mocking press releases and painted any Colcom ship who tried to go after it with a targeting laser. 

By now it's dead-cold. Could be anywhere. Every once in a while some out-system tinpot tyrant says they picked it up, but they've always been bad fakes; hauler with a couple PD guns and a hold full of kinetic bombardment rods with "neutron bomb" stenciled on them, you get the idea. 

Colcom and the LC are in a god-forsaken court case about the thing - Colcom's trying to get them strung up on public-endangerment-via-loss-of-radioactive-materials, ignoring distress calls, et cetera. Never tried to blame them for the wreck, though - never said anything about enemy action. I'll choose to believe it was us, somehow. Engine sabotage and a field of magnetic limpets, or something. A bright spot in our history to look back on.