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.