Essentially all of the dicéd gaming I've done in the last four years has been online, providing great opportunity for all manner of flaking. I've heard the reasonable solution to this problem is to "not have a session that week", but my solution has tended to be taking whatever one or two severely brainwormed players actually made it and forcing them to throw together OSE characters for a one-shot.
As these impromptu games have repeated, I started thinking about solidifying them - keeping the same setting on the GM's end and the same characters on the players' end, mostly just to see if it would be fun. And so, I did - creating a (rather thin) framework for some picaresque gaming, with an assumed few months between sessions, both for players and PCs.
System and Classes
The rules are minimal, bordering on nonexistent. Stat checks, attack rolls, HP, death, whatever, are all as G20 (by deus ex parabola) (except for the derived stats thing because I can't be bothered). The only changes are in equipment: players choose a Kit during character creation. They start every session with everything listed in their kit, and have two slots for items they want to keep between sessions. During the adventure you can carry more, or accidentally drop all your kit's gear down a bottomless pit, but during the assumed weeks of carousing between sessions, you lose all the former and regain all the latter.
This also applies to money - in between sessions, you spend everything on food, booze, and company, like any sword-and-sorcery protagonist worth the name. Then, when yet another vast hoard is spent (and turned into XP), you return to adventure.
In an attempt to reduce the tax on memory for characters you're probably only playing a few times a year, their rules and progression are part of their character sheets: one for the Rogue, a thief/fighter, and one for the Gestalt, the setting's wizard.
The Setting
Is, because I thought it would be funny, the first setting I ever had. Gateway, the last stop. A city on the edge of an empire that rewrote the earth; an empire that summoned a great and terrible god, who now stretches across the sky with the moon at his feet and the sun as a jewel in his crown.
But their capitals and their glories are distant - Gateway's imperial governor rages and foams in his new-built palace, but his conscript-legions are thin and his hold on the city frail, even after a roving army was sent to put a troublesome district to the torch a decade ago.
Gateway heaves with thieves, refugees, four-eyed Gestalt deserters, ogres, bugmen, and so on. A minidungeon waits under every manhole cover, and a heist in every locked room. "Deep worldbuilding", "complex sociology" and other such things are thrown right out.
Six One-Shot Ideas So I Can Remember Them In Like Six Months When I Actually Have Cause To Run This
- The distant Motherland, a vast fungus slowly crawling onto the stage of geopolitics, has sent a delegation of myconids (tall, chiseled, androgynous, and impeccably "dressed", as all the Motherland's social forms are) to make inroads with Gateway's governor - and like any Motherlandic mission, they come with a convoy of gifts. Valuable gifts...
- A week ago, the crime lord Iazelmei promised you generous payment in return for a certain gem. You fulfilled your end of the deal, but she won't. Steal it back from her ship, the Sky Flashed Bright - and don't mind the fact she's a dragon.
- An Imperial paladin is spending a week in Gateway to do something or other for the Governor. Make sure he never leaves. Don't worry, he'll be easy to notice with all the bells, and all the spikes.
- Out in the lavender desert past Gateway, where the stars shine through the day, the sand is interspersed with shards of ice, and the light breaks into the secret 8th color (which, it turns out, is Ghosts), sigils are being drawn. One at dusk, one at dawn, each one in a straight line closer to Gateway. Someone should probably see... why.
- A trio of runaway Gestalts are moving through Gateway, pursued by Imperial scouts. Get the wizards out before the Governor gets involved.
- The ol' Bricked Up Noble Mansion (Demons In It).
And if they ever tire of city adventures, I can drag the PCs to the door of any prewritten dungeon I wish. It's Efficient™.
