The Sept-Vessel Economy - Navigator Domain Procedures Part 1

This system is a complete ripoff of Sofinho's excellent Alone in the Wilderness, except for the parts that are a complete ripoff of Phlox's beautiful Ten Blade Demigod. This part one of 4 where I work through my previously identified problems with my Navigator spaceship-nomad domain game rules. Later parts will go over new rules and generators for the "islands" of the endless halls of Machine Space, new troupe play and character advancement, and a complete "second edition" rules document.

Navigators divide time into two seasons - the Blue, where their home cylinder of the Volume is filled with breathable air, and the Black, where it empties and Navigator sept-vessels spread out through the megastructure. Each of these seasons is then divided into two turns, the Waxing and Waning. 

At the start of the turn, determine the amount of food foraged by your sept - in the Volume during Blue Season this is [population/6]d8, collected from the grasslands of the cylinder. In Machine Space this is [population/6]d4, from cracking water lines and looting transport rails. In the Volume during Black Season, this is [population/6]d2 - unsurvivable.

It is a bright day in the waxing half of Blue Season - under the linear sun, sept Certifier (population 36, so rolling 6d8) rolls 18 - really just startlingly bad.

Each member of your sept is assumed to eat 2 meals a day - this can be increased to 3, improving the morale of your sept and letting you roll sept members' HD twice and take the highest result when relevant. It can also be decreased to 1, granting disadvantage to HD rolls and leading to general whining and complaining. 

Your sept's food consumption is also divided by 6, to fit with food production. 

Certifier's population of 36 means they eat (36/6)*2 = 12 units of food by default. This leaves a surplus of 6. 

Having a surplus means that your sept has time left over after collecting enough food for the group. This extra time can be spent on sept projects. Surplus time can be added to a project over multiple seasons - improvements do not need to be completed in a single turn.

Improve the Vessel's Holdings

• Sept-vessels have 4 stats, called "holdings": Weaponry, Trade Goods, Reliquaries, and the rare Mysteries. Starting sept-vessels have 1-3 points spread through these stats.  
• The level of a holding can be increased by putting 15 points of time into the project per target level (15 to go from no holding to level 1, 30 from 1 to 2, et cetera). 
• This can be halved if a relevant item is included in the construction of the holding (if you recover your ancestor's gold-plated skull you can stick it in your reliquary, and so on). Any single item may only be used for this purpose once. 
• Improving the level of a Mystery requires use of a relevant item, and still costs the full price. 

Build an Asset 

• A catchall for the construction of other sept-vessel additions - gardens, spotlights, tow cables, et cetera.
• Asset prices are negotiated - they may gain a discount from, or require, access to a relevant item.

Craft a Treasure

• If you have a Mystery of at least level two, you can attempt to craft treasures based off of it at a cost of 15 surplus per property of the treasure. 
• Each turn you put surplus into this action, roll 1d20 + the crafter's Intelligence + the level of your Mystery. If you roll below a 20, a complication arises that must be resolved before the treasure is completed.
• The cost of the treasure is decreased by 1 for relevant rare substances or valuable objects used in the crafting, and by 2 if the crafter has a relevant skill. The roll for complication gains an equal bonus.  

Preserve

• By default, all surplus time is lost at the end of a season. 
• 2 points of time can be spent to provide a free point of time on the next season, as your sept works to preserve food and lower the amount of forage needed.
• (i.e. if sept Certifier spent 6 surplus preserving food, next season they would roll 6d8+3 for forage.)

Host

• You may host a particular character, or choose to open your doors to any number of other septs. This is used for any type of hosting activity - political councils, weddings, et cetera. 
• In the Blue Season, you may host another character in your assembly-ship instead of on your sept-vessel - this is seen as politely distant, while hosting on your own vessel is seen as extremely close. 
• On weddings - remember that all weddings are political alliances, and that they are only permissible between left-handed and right-handed septs. You may be expected to host twice - once for the discussion of the spouse-prices and placements, and again for the marriage.
•  Hosting costs at minimum 3 surplus, with increased spending striking awe in your guests.

Care

• Each wounded member of the sept costs 3 surplus to care for - if this is not spent, their wounds do not improve.

Work on the Assembly-Ship

• This can only be done while you have access to the assembly-ship (presumably this is in the Volume during the Blue Season, but if you move it or something I guess it's there now). 
• Spend any amount of surplus, plus any amount of rare resources. Gain surplus/2+resources Glory and add that many points to the tally of your assembly. Someday it will be finished. 

Attract Heroes

•  Roll 1d6+[reliquaries] on my secret table of weird freak heroes. The rolled result will arrive for your next adventure, piloted by another player, and then wander away. 

Adventure 

• Sending characters out from the sept-vessel costs 1 surplus for each character sent. Adventuring NPCs are equipped as you choose, with available loadouts based on the Weapons level of your sept. 
•  Further rules for adventure in Machine Space will be presented in part 2.

Raid 

• Sending characters out from the sept-vessel costs 1 surplus for each character sent. Adventuring NPCs are equipped as you choose, with available loadouts based on the Weapons level of your sept.  
• Roll (1d20 - the target's weaponry - 1 for every raider you bring with you) / 3. This is the number of turns you have before the defender is able to organize a response. 
• Further procedures for raiding are not relevant to the topic of this post. Hurt them and steal their things. You get it.

Sept Certifier chooses to spend all 6 of its surplus to Work on the Assembly-Ship, along with a beautiful set of malachite-and-cobalt plates they pulled from the Hanging Gardens. They gain 6/2+1 = 4 Glory and add 4 points to the tally of Assembly Elegiast.

The population of a sept-vessel comes from their Glory - acclaimed septs attract new marriages, adoptions, and hangers-on, while failing vessels soon split. At the end of each turn, Glory is tallied:

• +1 for each of a vessel's Reliquaries
• +1 if the sept defeated a significant enemy
• and another +1 for victory against all odds 
• +1 if the sept befriended a significant character
• and another +1 if they were an enemy when the turn began 
• +1 for succeeding in a raid despite making contact with the enemy
• +5 if a member of the sept was acclaimed Imperious
• +5 if a source of a rare resource is discovered and brought back to the assembly
• +∞ for the completion of your assembly-ship 
• -2 for each death among the sept 

Glory may also be lost as a consequence of raids, as part of weregild, or as a result of unpleasant events, general chaos, or other GM meddling. Glory begins at 0 - it can become negative.

At the end of a season, roll 1d10-(9-Glory) for the number of new sept members. This cannot be negative. 

Sept Certifier's prior Glory was -3. They gain 1 for their Reliquary and another 4 from their work on the good ship Elegiast, bringing them to 2. They roll 8 on 1d10-7 - a single person comes to join the sept, bringing them to a total population of 37. Time ticks on in the endless structure.

Rota Fortunae Retrospective (Handling Active Faction Sandboxes)

Before entering the agonizing labyrinth and struggling forever I ran Rota Fortunae, an 11-session superhero game in the Las Vegas suburb of Considerata. There isn't much retrospecting to do - Rota Fortunae didn't have a long list of campaign goals, it was just "ha, Go Away was pretty fun. Let's do Go Away again." 

There is one thing, though - unlike Go Away (which lived in a dissociated cloud of Obsidian pages because I wanted to try Obsidian (I don't find any benefit from Obsidian)) Rota Fortunae was safely contained in its "Whole Prep Document", a spreadsheet. This was another attempt to figure out a simple way to structure active faction sandboxes (after Go Away, which had basically no structure, and Owe My Soul to the Company Store, which was written for other people to use and thus looked nothing like personal prep).

 

The core of the spreadsheet that handled faction moves.

The generic faction system I was taught to use focuses, roughly, on what factions have, what they want, and what their problems are (look at Elmcat's excellent writeups of the Dolmenwood factions for an example of this). From there, the GM is expected to determine the factions' actions. In Rota Fortunae, the factions were instead ticking clocks to their supervillain(ish) schemes. Each downtime turn (after the end of an adventure) I threw 2d4 on the faction table and had those two make their next move.

The factions were:

• Pawns, power-armored supersoldier monarchs from the narrowly-avoided Bleak Future. There used to be a supervillain, Spider Eater - little street-level moron, shot Rays at people out of his hands. In the future he became much more powerful somehow, ruled the world with an iron fist, and then had a change of heart, built a time machine, and blasted his past self to death with Rays in broad daylight. The good future one, "Spider Eater II", is still, somehow, around. The Pawns ruled continents in the Bleak Future of the evil Spider Eater, and hope to bring him back from the dead, kill his future self, and set the timeline back on that path.
• Working Group TYPHON, a US government agency building a targeted chemical weapon to introduce into the water supply to tamp down water theft in the drought-stricken Southwest. (There was also Working Group RADIOSONDE, who was attempting to divine future technology from their communications with the Bleak Future, but they don't count as a faction because they just sat at the bottom of an evil lab.)
• The Mob, who are the Mob. At the start of the campaign there were only like 10 of them left, due to their prior conflict with...
• Hermes Trismegistus, self-professed "yes actually that Hermes Trismegistus", thousands-of-years-old divine alchemist. Threw the Mob out of Las Vegas to rule the city as Magister Ludi for some esoteric wizard reason until the Army got him to go home into his platinum-iridium palace in the old nuclear test site.

Hermes's events track is blank because I never actually figured out what to put there, never rolled for Hermes to move, and then suddenly rolled two 4s (I also never had a policy for what happens if you roll doubles) and decided "welp, I guess he's trying to take over Las Vegas again" and crashed him into the Mob.  

This structure worked! Superhero stuff is a naturally more reactive medium (the NPCs act and the PCs respond), so the players weren't bothered by every session being a couple new disastrous events. I would say that I ran Rota Fortunae with a lot of improv - things to keep in mind are:

1. Each faction should have an associated base or something for the players to break into. I built these as I needed them, so the only one I have is Working Group TYPHON's. I roughly, kind of, used Marcia B.'s bite-sized dungeons, ish.
2. Each one of those rolled events is An Adventure for the players to involve themselves with - when the Pawns rolled "steal Spider Eater's body" the PCs got a job offer to deliver Spider Eater's body to a concrete pit in the middle of the desert. Roll the events secretly at the end of a session so you have time to prep those adventures.
3. When something Happens it might change those tracks - when the PCs slammed a minigun-armed SUV through the TYPHON lab, their next move became "put out a doctored video of the PCs slamming a minigun-armed SUV through the local hospital", and when Hermes Trismegistus woke up it turned to "dose him with the secret assassination gun that shoots slivers of frozen poison".
4. You might actually want a plan for rolling doubles because I didn't have one. Two actions at once? A special move? An attack on another faction? 

Around the core were some supplementary things - to the right was a list of statblocks for local capes, sorted by the Σ-ratings deus ex parabola uses. At the start of the campaign this was 6 at 1Σ (matched to player characters), 4 at 2Σ, 2 at 3Σ, and Hermes Trimegistus, whose power was "instantly turn any material in his line of sight into any other material" and who nobody wanted to insult by ranking. These were all public figures - people like "No Time", the mind-controlled super-assassin TYPHON had, didn't live on the list because I came up with them after writing the list and forgot to ever update the list.

Below was a random minor events generator for "Son of Cancer is threatening to crush the Considerata Nuclear Test Range & Archaeological Museum with his 'unearthly capacities'" stuff. This got basically no use at all - with two major events going off every session, the PCs tended to ignore the Considerata Nuclear Test Range & Archaeological Museum. You could slow down the speed of major events, or you could just ditch the minor events generator - I'm not sure which would be better. 

The minor events generator did include a table of "where are you fighting", divided by neighborhood - this is worth keeping to add some tactical options. Our last fight and eventual TPK was held in Summerlin, the cul-de-sac suburbs, where the PCs tried to outrun a rocket-jumping mech as it obliterated family homes. Looked a lot different than the fight with the Pawns in the cramped vertical alleyway, or the fight with the Pawns on the open highway, or the fight with the Pawns in one of the PCs' apartments (I rolled Pawns a lot).

 

Next time I run one of these I'm going to keep the same structure - I haven't found any striking flaws with it yet, and it's convenient to run one of these games when you know what you need is "plug in 4 moves for each faction, write 12-ish capes, come up with a couple places". Nice low-stress gaming.

I'll probably keep the same rules, too - the G20-derived Go Away player doc is here, and for Rota Fortunae I added a couple changes to make high stat bonuses better (attacks crit on any roll of 20+ instead of only natural 20s, and if you rolled more than 20 on your initiative you took a turn at init 20 and a turn at the remainder). I do need to rewrite them, though; the downtime procedure, what powers look like, those Rota Fortunae changes, and a couple other rules bits live in the collective knowledge of the players instead of on the actual page.

Or deus ex parabola will finish his superhero rules PDF and I'll just start using that instead. Who knows. 

GLOGmas 2025: Crafting the Gu-poison

Merry Christmas, Grace :)

I was looking through your class list and got struck by the Kodoku Master, who traps all manner of bugs in a jar and shakes them around until only one survives, containing the Vital Energy and also Poison of all those it defeated. Then, I saw you mention that you would have preferred to have a full bug-tormenting simulator to attach the class to.

grace says: i would love if the kodoku jar was like a little Battle Royale island where the bugs can hide, lay ambushes, and find weapons and shit. And the battle takes place over multiple days, with little battle reports when you take a rest

So, here's a full bug-tormenting simulator. 

The kodoku master owns a killing jar, where poisonous bugs are sent to war against each other. Each bug in the killing jar has a Rating, which determines its save DC and the damage of its poison, and a set of Traits.

A rating 1 bug has a poison save DC of 10, and deals 1d6 damage when killed and used as poison (by default, it must be eaten). For every 5 points of Rating (at 5, 10, etc) the DC increases by 2 (12, 14, 16) and the damage by 1d6. The maximum Rating for a mundane bug is 20.

Bugs are set into a Leaderboard, arranged from highest to lowest Rating. Each night, as you rest, they kill and die: roll twice on the Leaderboard and the stronger of the two kills the weaker, absorbing one of its traits (chosen at random) and half of its Rating. 

For each level in kodoku master, you may have 4 bugs active in your killing jar. Jar modifications can be bought for whatever "a lot of money" is in your system of choice, and consumables can be bought for "a little bit of money" except for the Black Lotus, which costs "a lot of money" again. At dusk and dawn, you collect a new bug with 1d6 Rating and one randomly-rolled trait. Specialized or multi-trait bugs can be purchased, earned, or stolen from other masters of the poisonous arts (or dungeons or something).

Traits

1. Ambusher - this poison can be applied to a weapon and applied to a target on a successful hit.
2. Armed - the bug gains +5 to its rating only for the purposes of combat between bugs.
3. Paralyzing - when this bug is defeated, its killer loses Rating equal to half of this bug's. When someone fails the save against this poison, they are immobilized for a number of minutes equal to the damage roll.
4. Hallucinogenic - this bug's opponents have their Ratings inverted while fighting it. When someone fails the save against this poison, they hallucinate for a number of minutes equal to the damage roll.
5. Inhaled - this poison may be turned into a dust, taking effect when breathed in. 
6. Predatory - if the bug fights and wins, it then immediately fights again. They will only do this once per night.
7. Shelled - if this bug would die, it survives but loses this trait. 
8. Fatal - this poison deals d10s instead of d6s.
9. Harmless - this poison deals d4s instead of d6s. If this bug would defeat another, 50% of the time it loses anyway.
10. Slow - this poison takes 5 minutes to take effect. If this bug would defeat another, 50% of the time nothing happens.
11. Obvious - this bug is forced to fight if the number above or below it on the leaderboard is rolled. Poison made from this bug has a strong scent and visible color when combined with food and drink.
12. Pacifist - if this bug would defeat another, nothing happens. The poison from this bug heals half the amount that it would otherwise harm.

Jar Modifications

1. Inverted - when two bugs fight, the one with the lower Rating kills the one with the higher.
2. Hiding Place - a bug of your choice is concealed. If it would be forced to fight, reroll. If the bug has the ambusher trait, it will still fight as normal but only if it would win.
3. Tag-Team Ring - roll 3 dice instead of 2 on the leaderboard; the first two rolled fight the third. If their total Rating is higher, they win, splitting the Rating and traits of their opponent between them. If their Rating is lower, they both lose, and the victor gains half the Rating of each and one trait from each.
4. Landmines - each round, before fights are rolled, the bug with the lowest Rating dies. 
5. Radioactive Pebble - each round, a randomly-chosen bug swaps one of its traits with a randomly-rolled trait from the list above.
6. Champion's Crown - the bug with the highest Rating gains an extra 3 Rating each night.

Consumables 

1. Poison Powder - flip a coin for each bug: on tails, it dies. On heads, its Rating increases by 5.
2. Target Dye - choose a bug, and only roll one die in later rounds to determine the targeted bug's opponent.
3. Mitosis Gel - a bug divides into two, each with the same traits but with half the Rating.
4. Tiny Sword - a chosen bug gains the armed trait.
5. Gene Needle - lets you pull a trait from a bug, and inject it into another.
6. Black Lotus - a chosen bug gains the otherwise inaccessible ontological trait - its poison affects ghosts, stones, and other nonliving things.

GLOG Classes - Infraspatial, Sidhe (Libra)

Law and chaos are mirrors. Earth sits between them, in the habitable zone (at least, the human-habitable zone). "Magic", "psionics", "demons", "fairies" - these all come from our neighbors ana (up/toward/Chaosward) and kata (down/from/Lawward). 

Both of these directions are, at a certain point, inimical to life. At the furthest reaches, the only difference between Chaos and Law is whether the universe of homogenous hydrogen atoms is very hot or very cold.

The classes of Libra are arranged in the same way - from the most Lawful to the most Chaotic: 

• Infraspatial
• OSIRIS Theurge
  
• Psychic
  
• Mundane
  
• Wizard
  
• Ynnbringer [which needs a rewrite]
  
• Sidhe

And the conflict between the two (often characterized by those on the ground as "war", but in truth more like fluid dynamics) gouges the world. Chaotic factions are many: necromancer collectives, witch-terrorists, rogue psychics, mocking fairies, player characters, and so on. 

But there is only one of Law. Once there were more, all manner of SCPs Foundation and Deltas Green and Majestics Twelve, but if Law is anything it is centralizing, and the distant Pyramid they draw power from gets to pick and choose who carries its mandate. Some merged, some collapsed, and now all there is is OSIRIS (an acronym for... something, surely - who cares).

They are unbound by governments - the Pyramid is on their badges and all doors open for it.

They are unbound by ethics - the Pyramid is in their hearts and tells them of an eternal future. 

They are unbound by physics - the Pyramid is in their heads and reaches out to make adjustments. 

And, from time to time, they reach out - in one direction or another - and bring someone back. 

Class: Infraspatial

Starting Skill: 1) distimming the doshes 2) rasking juffets 3) uncrenning the delcot 4) smibbing into the brangy 5) lelloing shamtags 6) deaving in the dorl

A: Castaway, Pulled Curtain

B: Sidestep

C: Mitosis

D: Follow Close

one of my relatives drew this for me years ago 
❤ 

A: Castaway

You may only take the A template of Infraspatial as your first template in character creation.

You are from the furthest reaches of Law where human-coherent consciousness survives - past you, nothing is known to live except for abstract "demons" and the commanding Pyramid. You are a 6.28 foot-tall humanoid assemblage of fluted, many-colored glass. 

You are technically blind, but your array of freaky fourth-dimensional senses mean that actually you can see just as well as a person even in the dark.

A: Pulled Curtain

Combustion and electricity fail within 10 feet of you. The same effect radiates from Lawful demons - a stilling of the world. 

B: Sidestep

At will, you may become two-dimensional. This lets you slip under doors and so on, but you have to become 3D again to manipulate or interact with objects. You cannot bring items with you in this state.

C: Mitosis

At will, you may step off of yourself and become two 3.14 foot tall Infraspatials. Each share your stats and so on, but due to being tiny little glass guys are incapable of combat. When separated you still have one HP pool - damage radiates between you through distant spaces.

The two halves have to reach each other to step back together.

D: Follow Close 

People may hold hands with one Mitosis version of you and then teleport to the other. This sends them through the lawful planes - they must make a Wisdom save or be made more lawful, taking 1d6 damage and the associated effect: 

1. They arrive in a flurry of papers - printed surveillance photographs of them. A demon waits to crawl through angles and hunt them. 
2. One piece of their equipment is replaced with a low-poly nonfunctional granite replica.
3. One of their stats is moved to the nearest prime number (16 -> 17, etc).
4. For the next 24 hours, they roll 2d10 whenever they would roll 1d20.
5. Their digits are reduced to the nearest lower prime number (conventionally this is the disappearance of one finger to bring them to 19).
6. They return with a small granite pyramid grasped in their freezing hands.

Infraspatials pass this save automatically.

 

Opening a gate to Ynn is easy. An ivy-covered wall and a piece of chalk. People have used Ynn to escape prison - growing moss ever-so-carefully under broken tiles. Opening the door from the other side is more difficult, but difficult things have a tendency to happen eventually. 

 

Class: Sidhe

Starting Skill: 1) Chess 2) Poetry 3) Screaming 4) Hallucinogens 5) Sleight of Hand 6) Firestarting 

 

A: Mad Ambassador

B: Detached From Earth

C: Flash of Recognition

D: Furnace of Chaos

Harry Clarke, The Colloquy of Monos and Una

 

A: Mad Ambassador

You have come from the nearer lands of Chaos - the great Gardens of Ynn, where sidhe play endless games with ever-changing laws. You may only take the A template of Sidhe as your first template in character creation. 

 

When someone makes a promise to you and keeps it, your face twinges. Don't they know a word is nothing like an act? Why do they think they have to do this?

 

You can speak to wild animals - life is an expression of Chaos, after all. Tame animals abhor you, breaker of laws. 

 

B: Detached From Earth

You have somewhere else to be. You can, at any time, choose to weigh nothing (allowing you to walk up walls, leap forever, et cetera). 

 

C: Flash of Recognition 

With an hour's work, you can reshape your face (or is it a mask?) to match anyone you have studied. At will, you can break your disguise (permanently - you will never be able to hide as them again) to force anyone looking at you to Save or seize. 

 

D: Furnace of Chaos

Law rules over mankind, many say - but some cultists point up to the Sun, purest expression of light, heat, and motion. Even from here, it pulls you towards it. 

 

When you break your disguise, you can shed your skin with it. For one beautiful minute, you and the Sun are one and the same. Your touch melts lead (2d8), your visage blinds, you step through the air, and then you are set to 0 HP and fall back to the uncaring ground. You are still too far away.

 

While you do this, your skin waits patiently where you left it.  

It's Better to Learn From Other People's Mistakes (Navigator Domain Game Retrospective)

A while ago I saw a post on the OSR Discord (I think it may have been Jenx's Zandan megadungeon retrospective) that talked about how useful it was to talk about failures. Disastrous campaigns and ill-formed systems that can serve as a warning for others.

This is, in part, that. A few weeks ago I talked about my dubious experience with "Ten Blade Demigodlikes", a domain game system originally by Phlox popular in the GLOG sphere (you can read its rules here and the rules I've been using so far here). 

The actual rules of the game went largely without mention there, but they've caused no end of issues themselves. So, in the spirit of talking about failure, the worst parts of my old system and some half-formed plans for the new edition I'll be using when the game comes off hiatus in 2026:

1 - The Economy

In Ten Blade Demigod and its imitators, the economy is simple enough. Each year your domain produces taxes based on your Level and Trade holdings, plus some randomization. Then, in each season, you can make one domain action - building things, hosting people, et cetera, which usually costs some money.

This is a perfectly functional system - if you happen to have things like "taxes" and "money". Navigators have neither - instead, I tried to experiment with a system based off of Luke Gearing's Reputation Tables, to simulate the soft power and persuasion inherent to their social structure. Each domain leader had a 20-entry table, half-filled at the start of the game and filled further through XP-generating-style activities like arranging profitable marriages, resolving disputes, and so on. 

When they attempted to perform a domain action, they made a number of d20 rolls on that table (varying by the action's "cost") and needed all of those rolls to hit a filled table entry. If any number of actions missed, the people of their domain said "sorry boss I'm busy making textiles" and the player must choose a different action for that season. 

This was the worst idea I have had in my life. It was meant to be unreliable, but this was shocking - 25% or less chances to accomplish basic tasks and a complete lack of control over the domain. It is the only mechanic I have ever had or seen that fully got a player to just Quit. I patched it - ways to pass failed rolls at varied costs, the addition of trade goods as a second track, and so on, but while that made it work (ish), it also made it a towering inelegance spread throughout the handbook with no organization.

My plan for 2e is to, instead, rip off Sofinho's genius new hunter-gatherer townbuilding rules, which use surplus time left over after hunter-gatherering as their base currency - renewed every season, impossible to save, and scaling off of population and local terrain. His recruitment and reputation system may also find use. 

2 - Exploration

Originally, Ten Blade Demigod had winter set out as its adventure season. The unnavigable seas froze to ice, allowing PCs to march out to the isles of Acmori. Later domain games generally abandoned this structure, though mine kept it - with the airless Black Season as the Navigators' venturing period.

However, despite this being (essentially) a naval game, I forgot to have a sea. The exploration rules were strange and exceedingly specific to constrain the PCs to single adventure sites when they had a spaceship and the nearest adventure site was a couple hexes of walking away. 

In 2e the focus of exploration will be ventures into Machine Space, tens of thousands of miles of vacuum-filled artery filled with Acmori-like "island" sites and ship-scaled random encounters. The larger hexcrawls will still exist, but be a rarer, difficult-to-find option where Navigator PCs will still be constrained to shock raids: sawing holes into the map from Machine Space, running around, and returning to their getaway ship before the megastructure notices the intrusion and sends an automated dreadnought and repair team.

3 - Player Characters

Prior domain games of this type have been set in autocracies - players had A Character, who ruled with an iron fist for life. Unfortunately, as with the economy, I decided to make my life difficult. Navigators are largely egalitarian, except for the position of the Select, a judge elected for a single year to resolve disputes and act as clan representative in negotiations. 

My solution to this problem so far has just been to ignore it, trapping the players in a flickering superposition between "actually their character" and "the mood of their clan" depending on what was more convenient on a gameplay level. This works, I guess, but is also boring and not particularly intuitive.

In 2e I want to fully detach the player from a character - more like Crusader Kings than D&D, Select drifting in and out of power and the player generating new PCs as needed when the time comes to play a character. 

I do not know how I'm going to do this yet. Legacy: Life Among the Ruins does something similar with a switch between long-term play as a faction and adventure play as a single-use specialized PC, but on a shorter timescale of seasons instead of generations it's more difficult to get rid of already-used player characters.

Re-specializing the Select as a judicial position would also permit the players to pilot PCs with other roles (similar, perhaps, to the roles given to newly-made Legacy PCs), but at a certain point I've started trying to do troupe play with a constantly shifting cast of possible characters, which sounds like Hell.

This is the system I'm furthest from knowing what to do with. We'll see.

GLOG Class / Monster - Antipaladin

The GLOGoids are thinking about paladins, again (and again and again and again), and I like being contrary (and I've had these template names sitting around for months).

Sometimes you want "deep worldbuilding", "complex sociology", "multifaceted problems", and other things like that. Other times you want to be able to point at a guy and say "this guy's evil - you can tell because of all the spikes".  

Probably not a class for players, but it means I can put one on a flaming horse somewhere and just say "Antipaladin C". 

A: Asymptomatic Carrier, +1 Attack

B: Shrike Ideology

C: Scatter the Chaff

D: Kill Their Creator and Make Them All Watch

Asymptomatic Carrier

You are immune to disease and curses. On a successful melee attack you afflict your target with one of the afflictions you hold, chosen at random. You may spend one of your curses (also at random) to imbue it into water - poisoning bottles and cursing wells. 

NPC Antipaladins, by default, have 1d4: blindness, terror, weakness, spontaneous combustion. 

Shrike Ideology

You may wear up to [templates] skulls of those you have personally defeated in combat. Generic skulls provide you with +1 damage and can be sundered to reduce the damage of an incoming attack by 1d8.

Skulls of people with class levels provide extra benefits in addition to the above:

• Fighter skulls increase your crit range by 1 and can be sundered on a critical hit to deal x4 damage instead of x2.
• Wizard skulls lower the [sum] of spells targeting you by 1, and can be sundered to cast Counterspell with MD equal to the number of shattered skulls.
• Thief skulls improve your initiative rolls by +1 and can be sundered to instantly move you twice your standard move speed, ignoring gaps, walls, and other obstacles.
• Cleric skulls increase your HP by 2 and can be thrown like a grenade to shatter into 3d6 damage screaming blasphemous fire.

The skulls of angels, demons, dragons, and so forth assuredly have powers beyond these.

Scatter the Chaff

When you would make a melee attack, you may instead make separate melee attacks against everyone you can reach. 

Kill Their Creator and Make Them All Watch

When you shatter a symbol of good (the throne of a righteous king, et cetera) the hex around it descends into a blasted wasteland under acidic rain over the next week. While in a corrupted hex, you have +1 HD and +2 to-hit. 

Roll 1d10 when a hex is destroyed: on a 1-5, gain that many 1 HD followers driven mad by your presence. On a 6-7, gain a 3 HD mount. On a 8-9, gain a local named NPC as a traumatized cultist. On a 10, a 5 HD demon rises to rule over the hex.

Even after you die, the ruins will remain.

I Don't Know How I Feel About TBD-like Domain Games - a Panic Attack in Writing

Part of the reason it's been so quiet around here is that I've spent the last few months at the helm of a "Ten Blade Demigod"-like - a Discord PbP domain game in the pattern of the inimitable Phlox's Ten Blade Demigod, later followed by Locheil's Ashes to Ashes, deus ex parabola's Right for the Wrong Reasons, and Gokun's Daughters of Necessity.

They've become a staple in the corner of the GLOG I run in, and have a nearly gravitational pull on that corner, thanks to their 20+ player scale, long runtimes, and fractal complexity. Each player is put at the head of a territory/Discord channel and run through seasons of solo-PbP adventure and large-scale politicking and development.

And yet, apart from scattered and impossible to find Discord conversations, I don't think any of those GMs have talked about their experience running TBD-likes. I invite them to. For my part, I have run two - the promptly-disintegrated Seeing From Outside and the current Who Decides Such Things. 

Odilon Redon, Apparition

Some players have described them as essentially a best of all worlds:

• all the individual agency of a solo game 
• but with other players to interact with 
• the timescale and individual focus for neotrad OC personal moments look at my weird guy thinking 
• while inside an OSR sandbox ecosystem

though from the GM side it looks, possibly, like the inverse: 

• all the siloed player separation of a solo game 
• but with thinly spread focus and NPC cast 
• A story where everyone gets two lines of dialogue 
• and a sandbox stripped to the bones by a locust swarm of half a dozen meandering groups 

These are structural problems - write a shortlist of NPCs per domain for the players of those domains to crash into over and over, and instead of the big pre-written hexcrawl I defaulted to, build something more malleable. To the best of my knowledge, much of Acmori was randomly generated, and Daughters of Necessity doesn't have most of its adventure sites until the moment a player says "I want to go find a place where I can find a freaky demon sword", incentivizing the players to pre-announce their desired destinations by providing omens and free hirelings in exchange. 

Between Seeing From Outside and Who Decides Such Things I hadn't figured this out, and instead threw myself into hexcrawl prep and rules tinkering, neither of which were the right direction. 

this is a great post to use "some pictures I kind of have lying around"
phobso

 

The potentially unresolvable issue is a vibe problem. Firstly, "work expands to fill the time given to do it" - it is a constant expenditure of effort spent either running the game or intentionally not running the game while knowing people are waiting on you. When there are messages, I sit and watch a little red 1 or 2 or 6 stare at me from my Discord client. When there are no messages, I wonder if I've done something to drive people away.

Synchronous play has an emotional rise and fall. Before the session you grab your prep and go "wow :) gaming soon". You start and the group falls into a groove - when you have yourself in the Mindset a lot of choices become automatic. Then you end and go "wow :) gaming next week" and then, probably, spend a little bit going "wow :) I sure messed that one up". Play by post doesn't provide any of this. There is no groove - you enter the game for a few minutes when it's convenient, then disappear to wait for the relevant player to return. Every choice becomes laborious - conscious decisions with agonizing limitless time to dither. The feeling is, more than anything, like "wow :) I sure messed that one up" unwinding forever.

But the structure of the game is beautiful! I want (or perhaps, want to want) to run a domain game - the breadth and depth available with this many players, over this much time, is limitless. The opportunities for exploring settings and changing them, for getting right into the folds of the brain of someone's PC, feel unmatched, at least from my perspective of a player in Daughters and observer of Ashes to Ashes. 

I don't plan to stop running Who Decides Such Things yet - I'm too stubborn. Though, when it comes to its close, I don't plan to run another. Instead, I think I will take TBD-derived systems, domains, and starting treasures for use in games with a standard format and party... and take a break from running this setting for a minute. 

Mothership Play Report Session #1: Trusting the Obviously Untrustworthy Android

I've just started playing in a duet Mothership game using adventures from the Devil's Due backer's preview PDF - and for once remembered that it's a lot easier to write play reports when I don't wait until the end of the campaign. Spoilers for Severance Package follow.

Session 1 

After my unfortunate development of sapience, my sudden discharge from the Marines, and the removal of my railgun hardpoints, it became pretty tough to find work. Sure, I was cheap, but people get nervous around combat androids, even after I stuck these googly eyes and this boring sweater on. 

Eventually my downward spiral took me to Flotsam Station, where the possibility I could snap and start trying to crush people's skulls in my mechanical fists didn't even make me the most threatening person in my apartment complex. Of course, by then I'd burned through my emancipation check from the military, and my possessions totaled out at a dog-eared copy of Zen and the Art of Cargo Arrangement, a self-diagnostic tool, and a lockpick set I folded out of wires I was pretty sure I didn't actually need.

So, when that drunk said he'd pay 500kcr for somebody to get a box of cyborg parts off some rickety pirate ship he'd just gotten thrown off of, and that not needing to breathe was a requirement, of course I took him up on it. Said it'd be an easy job, too - fold up into a crate that's being sent in, crawl out into the cargo bay, grab the parts, book it to one of their skiffs, come back, meet his fence, get paid. 

Problem is, I start searching the cargo bay and there is a distinct lack of cyborg parts. I head to Engineering, and note that, just like my fixer said, the ship was at 99% power draw only running comms and life support. Of course, he'd either forgotten or neglected to mention the extra homespun cabling running from the power exchange to God-knows-where, and the engineering terminal doesn't mention it either. So. Evil lab, I assume.

Thought for a second about all the ways I could scuttle the ship, but I'd at least want to find the crate before I start hitting buttons - so I kept walking. Met a crewman in Life Support, lied about being bought by their captain, and gave him a hand cleaning the compression coils in their air circulator. And then I considered something: I could blunder through this ship, hunting a crate that might not exist, fighting a dozen space pirates while unarmed, and maybe getting hunted myself by whatever's eating the power, or I could just... not.

Saying "hey, you hear about the guy offering 500k to get revenge on your crew" fast-tracked me to the XO (I think), and mentioning the cyborg parts sure got her attention. My whole "I came free with your oxygen bottles because my boss wanted to get rid of me :)" lie fell apart at some point, but by then they'd decided I was useful anyway.

   

Together, we came up with a plan - go to Hangar 4, just like my fixer and his fence wanted, then, yknow. Gun violence. So, with them trusting me just enough to only threaten to put a bullet in my head instead of doing it, we pack into a skiff (walking past, incidentally, a giant warning-label-covered box in the infirmary with a giant cable sticking out the side - imagine that) and strap in, a spot on their crew promised if my information pans out.

When we're further through the adventure I'll interrogate my GM for insights into the module - but I've always been more of an "AP as reading experience" than "AP as useful tool" writer anyway.

Behind the Times (GLOG Class - Libra Mundane)

Your friends might be psychic, or wizards, or cultists of strange gods, but you're the only one with a driver's license. Godspeed.

A: Hurt People, Background, +1 skill

B: Connected, +1 to-hit

C: Known to be Dangerous, +1 skill

D: Dangerous to Know, +1 to-hit

Hurt People

Unlike all other classes, you do not begin malproficient with firearms. Weapons you wield, even improvised ones, deal 1d8 damage if they would deal less. Your stat penalties no longer apply to your attack, damage, or maneuver rolls.

Background

There are eight below - choose one and gain its benefit.

Connected

Whatever organization, underworld, community, or creed you belong to is connected to people and places everywhere, and there are signs by which you may recognize and be recognized as a part of the same. When you roll a natural 7 on a reaction roll, reroll it and the encounter is in some way connected to your background.

Known to be Dangerous

With an hour's effort (in a large city - a day's effort in a small one, a week's in a neighborhood) you are guaranteed to be able to find a contact with something you need (items, information, invitations), willing to exchange it with you in return for, presumably, committing crimes for them.  

You project a capable aura - humans and animals with fewer HD than you will avoid opposing you if at all possible.

Dangerous to Know

You can't get this deep into the underground without knowing how to handle yourself. You make two attacks per round.

Backgrounds

1. Imageboard Lurker - you have an extra stat, "Unanswered", that starts at 0. Every time you encounter a major question, write it down and add 1 to your Unanswered stat. When you seek an answer, roll 1d6 and spend that many hours staring at the board. If you rolled less than or equal to your Unanswered, lose points equal to your roll and receive an answer. If you didn't, they just call you slurs and talk about "vril".

2. Black Market Pharmacist - you can make hydrocodone, penicillin, and amphetamines out of off-the-shelf substances for $50 and an hour's work per dose.

3. OSIRIS Dropout - you can smell demons (pennies), hear fairies (someone playing the flute in your ear, poorly), and feel psychics (like someone staring at you very, very intensely) from a hundred feet. 

4. Cat Burglar - walls others would need equipment and preparation to climb can be climbed by you without either.

5. Alien Abductee - there is an antenna implanted in your jawbone and your sinuses are full of microchips. Your blood is iridescent, and clots into stringy electrically-conductive paste. 

6. Doomsday Prepper - the bunker's out in the woods. Two years of food and water. Seeds for local plants. Solar panels. Four rifles. 120 rounds of .223. Questionably accurate explosives handbooks. Enormous Gadsden flag. 

7. Number Station Listener - if anything big is coming (nuclear war, natural disaster, martial law) you'll hear about it a week ahead of time.

8. Monster Hunter - you gain +1 to-hit and damage against non-human targets for each useful fact (den location, name of species, etc) you know about them, up to a maximum of your level.

6 Navigator GLOG Classes (Lanthanide Horizon)

This is an experiment - Lanthanide Horizon has always been classless, so I was interested in what would change if I replaced its backgrounds with more standard GLOG progression. No idea how I feel about it. 

Koryonos
A: Warband, +1 to-hit
B: Hunter-Gatherer, +1 skill
C: Houses Like Torches, +1 skill
D: Pack of Wolves, +1 attack per round

A: Warband
You lead half a dozen of the koryos - the youth-band, those not yet ready for the responsibility of full sept membership. Unbound by propriety, you live in the wilderness through the Blue season, then attach yourself to whichever sept deigns to take you in the Black. 

Warband members are 4 HP, 10 AC, 1 Discipline, and deal 1d6 damage with hatchets or 1 with thrown rocks. “Stop ransacking the town and stealing silverware and throwing people out windows” is a maneuver requiring a successful Discipline roll. 

Your warband has two advantages, and one disadvantage:

Advantages

1. Your warband is armed not only with stones and axes, but with Navigator throwing darts (1d6 damage, can be thrown 50’, or further with a -1 to-hit penalty for every 10’ feet).
2. Your warband carries shields, raising their AC to 12.
3. Your warband is doubled in size - its other segment led by a lieutenant you promote.
4. Your warband follows you loyally, increasing their Discipline to 5.
5. One member of your warband is betrothed to a sept - as long as they live, this sept is a safe haven.
6. Your warband carries a device with it - something halfway between a chariot and a shotgun. 2d8 damage in a 120’ cone, though you move terribly slowly as you pull it.

Disadvantages

1. Two members of your warband fight for the affections of a third in a way that is certain to eventually blow the whole thing up.
2. You are followed by something - the lights of some machine shine on the edge of your firelight.
3. A sept considers you in their debt.
4. Your band is young and still untested. They have -2 to-hit.
5. Your band is impatient, chafing against even successful orders to halt an attack or abandon loot. 
6. Your band has become known for impiety, beyond that expected of the koryos - outsiders find you offputting, if not a potential magnet for curses.

B: Hunter-Gatherer
As long as your warband never spends more than a night in the same place, they collect enough food to survive. 

Each night, ask one of the following questions and receive an answer:

•     Where is the closest drinkable water?
•     How do I avoid the most dangerous creature in the area?
•     What is the most fortifiable defensive location around?
•     Is something hidden from me here?
•     Am I being tracked, followed, or watched?

C: Houses Like Torches
What a beautiful light. With a shout, your unit moves and attacks once again. You can’t do this again until you’ve done one of the following: revel in the ruins, land a critical hit, or slay the leader of an opposing force. 

D: Pack of Wolves
Units you lead have +2 HP and +2 damage. Enemies you face have disadvantage on Discipline rolls and rolls on the Failures of Discipline table. When they rout, roll 2d8 instead of 2d6.

Espatier
+1 to-hit per template.
A: 3D Mindset, +1 attack per round
B: Saboteur
C: Turn Against Them All
D: Ulfheðinn 
Δ: Lictor

A: 3D Mindset
You move through 0g as if you were flying.

B: Saboteur
The torch is your tool - the axe is just to get people out of the way. With appropriate tools, you can cut a door-sized hole in a wall in a single round, or perform other acts of property damage.

When applicable, your list of combat maneuvers now includes “hack a hole in the wall and see what comes flying out”. 

Many stop here, and turn to peaceful arts.

C: Turn Against Them All
Before taking this template, you must seek a hero of the Ulfheðnar, the breakers of men.
You sit in the airlock, breathing. In, out. In, out. The smoke fills your lungs, the moxa burns round scars into your skin. In, out. In, out. Think about what you have done, and what more you could still do.

The airlock opens. Your spit boils on your tongue in the moment before you fall unconscious.

You wake with four points of rage.

D: Ulfheðinn 
Before taking this template, you must complete the task given to you by your teacher.
You will be sent out to do something none could. Raid your hated rival alone, and return with five captives. Duel a towering machine and bring it to the earth.

With this complete, your teacher presents you with the demon-face mask and the feather mantle. Nothing separates you. 

You know how to make the same moxa that turned you into this - if you are prepared in this way before a fight, when you rage you automatically attack anyone who attacks you in melee, and ignore the effects of wounds and death until your rage ends. 

It will not be long until you have a student of your own, hoping to walk the killing path.

Δ: Lictor
Abandon your sept, and pledge yourself wholly to the service of the Imperious.
All doors are open to you, and tyranny shrouds you like a cloak. Human foes must check Morale to begin combat with you.

Gunsmith
A: Someone Else’s Child
B: Calming Voice, Modification 
C: Journeyman, Breathe Easy
D: Master

A: Someone Else’s Child
You are immune to the decrees of the Imperious. Let them howl and scream all they like. You are the most prominent member of any group - perfectly still in the midst of them. Navigators must save or be unable to bring themselves to harm you. 

You can expect to be hosted in any sept-vessel that harbors the Society. Members of it will approach you, expecting the same - even if they come from your greatest enemy, and your sept hungers for their blood.

These protections are lost if you show greater loyalty to your sept (or to yourself) than to the Society.

B: Calming Voice
You may attempt to calm all listeners with soothing words. Intelligent creatures get a save, though those with fewer HD than you fail automatically. When a creature fails the save their emotions dull to grey outlines, anger drains, joy becomes hollow, battle-lust fades.

After using your Calming Voice you can't use it again until you have done at least two of the following: get a full night's rest, drink a dose of wine, consider the mysteries of the Society for two hours.

C: Journeyman
With an evening’s work you may make modifications to firearms, at the cost of weight and misfire chance, or make 3d4 rounds of specialized ammunition (tungsten-core AP, hypergolic magnesium, et cetera).  

C: Breathe Easy
You are meant to use them, sometimes. Each round you spend aiming before firing provides you +1 to-hit and allows you to roll an extra damage die, keeping the highest 2 (or however many your chosen gun happens to roll).

D: Master
Before taking this template, you must build a weapon that fires further and more accurately than any Master’s.
With a week’s work, you may make a rifle.

Lawspeaker
A: Judge of Character
B: Prediction OR Code of Hammurabi

A: Judge of Character
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?

B: Prediction
If you've spent more than an hour in someone's company or read sufficient biographical information you have a 2-in-6 to predict their reaction to any given event (increases by 1-in-6 for spending a week/month/year in their company). 

B: Code of Hammurabi
You have forsworn the common law of the Navigators to spread the commands of Spiral tomes and steles. You learn the language of the Spire, if you did not know it already. 

When writing a contract, you have a 2-in-6 chance to slip in clauses the other side misses. If someone breaks an oath sworn in front of you, you know immediately.

Skald
A: Leveling Mechanism
Δ: Jester’s Privilege

A: Leveling Mechanism
If you tell a tall tale, people will believe it and pass it around. Your tales are attributed directly to you. Those you slander will hear of it, and may pay you a visit if thoroughly incensed.
If a tale you’ve told is proven false, save vs. a tarnished reputation. Once tarnished, those who know of you will still pass around your tales, but will not believe a single word without clear proof.

Δ: Jester’s Privilege
Insult the Imperious to their face and get away with it.
You can hold the attention of any crowd as long as you keep talking. Watch them hang on your words. Even if they’re here to kill you, they can’t help but listen.

Katabatist
A: Beneath Notice
B: Follow Me
C: Apotrope
D: Alone, Alone, Alone

A: 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. 

B: Follow Me
There is something wrong with your eyes. Look into someone else’s and they are forced to make a Morale roll. If they fail, they are rooted to the spot until you break eye contact. They may still defend themselves. If they pass, they notice nothing amiss.

C: Apotrope
Machines roll Reaction when meeting a group you are in. On a positive roll, they blink lights at you. They hope you will understand.

D: Alone, Alone, Alone
Those who fail morale rolls caused by Follow Me are knocked unconscious.

Archpendix N

The wagon of bands for September 8th - inspirational media (in this case, for Lanthanide Horizon). Like weirdwriter I will be writing this in 15 minutes, though in my case that's because if I think about it for too long I will cringe right out the back of my own head. 

Debt: the First 5000 Years / The Dawn of Everything

David Graeber's Debt is not the origin of my fixation with the gift economy (nor is Marcel Mauss's The Gift), but since I don't recall the source it gets the spot.

Graeber and Wengrow's TDoE is the direct source for Navigator subsistence and seasonal government (based on their description of the Nambikwara) and the institution of the Imperious (based on their description of the Great Sun of the Natchez).

Ignition!: An Informal History of Liquid Rocket Propellants

A good bedrock for the "evil chemistry" pillar of the game - a multi-decade comedy of errors. People burn through concrete with aluminum-fluorine cutting torches, try to shame rocket motors into working correctly by playing the sounds of a launch, blow up extremely valuable scientific equipment, cover acres of woodland in powdered metal, make a fuel so unrelentingly foul and fly-attracting that they seal the container and throw it into the San Francisco bay, and get attacked by "nine thousand demented bats".

Atomic Rockets fulfills a similar role for my obsession with deeply impractical radiator designs.

Firelock 198X is a recent fixation that filled in the vat-grown Firstborn and (in combination with Ignition) has given some 1960s-military-engineer-fever-dream tinges to megastructural technology. 

Also there are a lot of things I haven't read - The City as Text: The Politics of Landscape Interpretation in the Kandyan Kingdom, which I know only through these blogposts, or the fact that when I really give up I just poke around in front of the Wikipedia pages for political and economic anthropology. Eclipse Phase should clearly have some influence on the transhuman elements of the setting, but I've never read it either, only the yearblogs Farcast and Seedware.

 

Mounted on a Pin (Aclas Dungeon)

The central dungeon of Those Fragile Bridges, my funnel hexcrawl for Locheil's Aclas.

The Panopticon is shaped like its namesake - a 3-floor tower of 30 foot high rooms, each open to a central pillar and its arcflash-white spotlight.

There are no random encounters; the Mystic would not permit loose variables in his home. Instead, each exploration turn the spotlight clicks one segment clockwise - starting at 2/5/8, then 3/6/9, and so on.

If the spotlight sees the PCs (which is different than "passing through the room they are in" - there is a chance to hide), it flashes red. Puyinthel notices you. He reaches out with telekinetic hands to drag a PC into room 10 for interrogation. The rest take 1d8 damage per round as the light burns them away into nothing.

This spotlight is a real, physical object, and can be destroyed. If it is, Puyinthel leaves 10 to hunt the saboteurs. The spotlight does not notice those under the influence of the killing-chalice from hex C1. 

Each room connects to each other on its floor, with the exceptions of 8 and 10. The staircase between the first two floors is from 3-6, then the next from 5-8. There is an unlocked door into room 1, and a barred window into room 6.

1. Tribute Room

The only place in the Panopticon open to others - an altar for the people of the island to leave food, water, and gifts for Puyinthel.

2. Ankle Cutter

Seams run across the bottom of this room's outer wall, and a holographic two-dimensional eye floats in the center of it. If the eye sees you (it cannot be destroyed, but can be blinded with sand and so on) pass through this room, curved blades snap out from the seams, aiming for hamstrings (1d8 damage, immobilizing you on a 6+), and the eye laughs and laughs and laughs and laughs as the Gargoyle comes.

3. Gargoyle - Stairs

A statue of a bearded man dredged up from the depths, its cracks filled with gold. Its head ends above the lower jaw, a flat ruby shaped like <0> hovering where it would have been. 4 HD, 14 AC, takes only one damage from things not meant to break stones, slow, knocks you prone with a slap for +2 1d8 or stomps on the prone for +4 2d10.

The Gargoyle sees only through the ruby, which can be plucked from its head (worth 200gp - the gold in the statue is worth another 100). If Puyinthel dies, it shuts down (the intact Gargoyle, sold as an art piece, is worth 1000). 

It sits on the floor like a reprimanded child, still except for the ruby spinning like a radar dish. Next to it, stairs lead up to room 6.

4. Serpent's Egg

This room has no doors in or out, only thin plaster walls. Behind them is an empty, dusty room, with a soft golden egg laid haphazardly on the floor.

If brought to the sea serpent in hex A2, it will do anything for you in return, even if it spells its own death. If heated in a forge, it will hatch into a newborn sea serpent.

5. Lockbox - Stairs

A heavy safe with jewelry (750 gp) stolen from Puyinthel's guests or manifested from nothing. It has no key - Puyinthel locks and unlocks it with his Crown when he needs to pay his Pursuers. As such, the keyhole has been filled with lead.

6. Window

The outer wall here is barred, instead of solid. Small and agile PCs could sidle in through it. On the inside, it is covered in a sheet of paper with the barest beginnings of some convoluted design painted in ink on its bottom-left corner.

7. The Error

Kept where Puyinthel can see it. A haunting spirit, something like a tree, something like a worm, colored perfectly flat grey like a missing texture. The Mystic has stuck it to the wall with nail after nail after nail. It bleeds a sheenless black.

He made a mistake, when he was younger and more foolish. He let it in. It has a parasite-Crown drawn from Puyinthel, under the inverse focus Loneliness. This Crown overrides Puyinthel's - it is immune to all of his effects, but he is not immune to its.

Anyone touching it disappears as long as they are doing so - and cannot see anyone else as long as they are under this effect. 

The Error exists only to kill Puyinthel, but is also mindlessly, obviously hostile to all other humans. It has an effective 2 HD and 10 AC (and grinds for 1d8 damage at +2 to-hit with its radula), but as long as the Mystic lives it will return from death, crawling out of the earth miles away.

8. Collage

The inner wall of this room is covered in hanging paintings - amateurish portraits and landscapes and delirious abstracts, many half-finished. They are layered - take a canvas down and find another beneath it. Take it too and reveal another image, painted directly onto the wall. 

9. Prisoner

This room has no doors in or out, only thick stone walls. 

A room empty apart from painting supplies and a jug of water, home to the weaver Jarde. He has spent weeks here, Puyinthel coming daily to ask questions. How did you feel when you were born? Please, draw an image of yourself. What day do you think it is? What is your favorite color? 

Jarde is unharmed. Not even shackled - where would he go, except down a 60 foot drop? When Puyinthel bores of his answers, he will be hurled from the Panopticon to break on the stones of the Graveyard (hex B1). 

10. The Pupil

There is no path to the center of the eye. 3 doorways stare out in each direction, but there are no bridges. Jump.

When you do, you reach a massive domed room, dominated by a raised-relief map of the island. If you look closely, you can see tiny figures walk across it - and tiny figures standing in the Panopticon, looking closely at a raised-relief map of the island. The map updates automatically to show the nearest seven hexes.

If you have escaped Puyinthel's notice, he is here, absentmindedly painting a figure for the castaway Siwatu Amaechi.

Puyinthel has 10 HP, and is unarmored, though he carries a finely-made cane-sword (+1, 1d6, worth 350 gp) to protect himself from the Error. His Crown is a 10 meter (30 foot) radius marked out around him in staring holographic eyes. Within this radius he has complete control of reality. He could do whatever he wishes - his favorite options are

a) to annihilate you, layer by minuscule layer like an MRI scan, so every particle of you can be viewed and known.

b) to replace you, first disintegrating your brain and then constructing a new one with a set of forged experiences that make you fully loyal to Puyinthel.

On his turn, he can do either of these to one person inside his Crown. Neither provides a save.

 

For G L Å U G U S T 2 0 2 5 - prompt 3:1 "wizard tower dungeon (must have a gimmick) OR train dungeon (NOT too linear)" 

Those Fragile Bridges (Aclas Hexcrawl)

Far in the south of Aclas, in the Yaladine archipelago, is an island, and a looming tower. Sailors call it the Lure - they say it glows at night, and is the home of misshapen beasts and a cult who wishes to flood the world - so they keep their distance.

It is, in truth, a prison, or a toybox. Domain of the Mystic who calls himself Puyinthel - mystic of the focus Control. From his tower he watches you dance, and he calls you his. Escape attempts are untenable as long as he lives - from miles away he looks down, reading thoughts and breaking necks.

Your parents lived and died on this island. You don't plan to do the same.

Random Encounters

2. The mystic's attention - he checks a snapshot of your fears, emotional state, and obsessions (as Insight) for anything out of the ordinary. The hair on the back of your neck rises.

3. 2d4 Pursuers (1 HD, shields, swords, shortbows) - Puyinthel's guards and killers, armed with figments of his imagination. Barbed arrows damage you again each time you move between hexes - but they'll catch you if you slow. If you roll an 8, this is the full set of Pursuers and includes Inga.

4. A cow-sized nudibranch (stats as carrion crawler) festooned with Sithican decorations in verdigrised bronze.

5. A recurring NPC - if the players have met no one, a fisher from Home out on a pleasant walk :)

6. 1d6 predatory lungfish (1 HD, slow movement, ambush predators, bite +1 1d6) drag themselves out from the damp earth.

7. Siwatu Amaechi, a hapless soldier (2 HD, big spear, real armor) from some island or another, now washed up on the Lure. 

8. The Ghost.

Hex Keys

A1: Home

A fishing village of a couple hundred - with no boats. Its residents dive, or fish with spears, but never further from shore than they can swim.  

Well, almost no boats - Puyinthel's eight Pursuers live in a long hall, and keep one among them to hunt for those desperate few who try to swim. Their foreign captain (and Duelist A, with the Vom Tag technique of her former Ossean training), Inga, tires of this post - Puyinthel provides them little for their loyalty. She is, in a way, just as much a captive as you. If you hunted down the deserter in C2, this would be enough to turn her towards you, and away from the Mystic.

A2: Sea Serpent

A great snake made of gold writhes offshore - it has been dying, bleeding glowing ichor into the sea, for decades. Ever since Puyinthel struck it down.

Serpentists see this as an extremely heavy-handed and not particularly positive omen - and for more materialist PCs, the dying snake means anyone swimming or sailing through this region has a 4-in-6 chance to be crushed, drowned, reduced to splinters, et cetera. 

Its blood ignites like gasoline. Its hatred of Puyinthel burns like the sun.

B1: Graveyard

Where the Mystic leaves broken toys. Sometimes, whether he doesn't trust them or because he's just bored, someone from Home gets an invitation to his tower - and when he's tired of them, they find themselves thrown, bodily, to the west to shatter on the ground.

These people are only buried at night, when the villagers think the Mystic isn't looking. 

And during these nights, and their vigils, a ghost stalks the graveyard. It tears at its own grave, howls at the rising sun, howls at the Panopticon, screams and screams and screams and screams its childrens' names and its parents' names and then, in the middle of a syllable, falls silent.

If it were given someone to possess, it could think. And it could take revenge. It knows this - and it screams this, in those moments when it is conscious enough to communicate.

B2: Panopticon

The pillar of the tyrant, manifestation of Control. 

B3: Shipwreck

Once the pirate ship Never Seen This Man In My Life, Officer - now, a ruin, scythed apart by coral and stones. Inside is a sole survivor, mind fizzing from exposure to Puyinthel, maddened by the belief that he is that mystic.

On his hip is an immense break-action pistol (1d8+4 damage, ignores armor, two-handed) - four brass cartridges jangle in his pouch, and a fifth is loaded.

C1: Sithican Temple

A buried ruin, carved with angular squid. Its half-sunken, gateless door is just large enough for you to crawl through, into a claustrophobic tunnel flooded with sticking, drowning mud.

Past this, the temple opens - a dark room, filled up to your knees in silty water. Rolling in it, desperate to stop itself from asphyxiating, is a multicolored cow-sized sea slug (stats as carrion crawler). 

Behind the nudibranch, on a mud-covered stone plinth, is a pearlescent chalice of piercingly blue water. Those who sip from it feel as if they are drowning, and then "die", for three hours - they still move, and speak, and think, but according to spells, spirits, anyone you ask, and mind-reading, there is nothing here but a corpse. There are six doses.

C2: Deserter's Camp

Surrounded by noisemakers on strings. In the center, Matvei fails to sleep. He fled from the Pursuers out of conscience - unable to bear any more time acting as the Mystic's boot.

Inga will execute him if he is captured - she has a reputation to uphold. 

For G L Å U G U S T 2 0 2 5 - prompt 5:1 "Tiny regional hexcrawl"