SCM: Mystery Generation System

December 22, 2025

samhaine Game Design 5e, mystery, noir, Shadow City Mysteries Leave a comment

Well hello everybody. It’s been a while, because a huge amount of my game design work has been going into the Shadow City Mysteries tabletop game. If you’re reading this near the time of posting, there’s still time to preorder it before we lock the book and start production (which is happening very soon). Even if you’re not into D20 games, there are a lot of cool systems in the book that can be repurposed for other systems (like how I adjusted the Influence system for my Changeling campaign, as explained in my previous post). Below is a subject near and dear to my heart, as you’ll see by clicking the Mystery tag on this post. This system (likely better edited by that point) is one of many you’ll find in the book, so I hope you’ll check it out! You can also watch the actual play run by our creative director for more insight into the system and setting.

Introduction: What is a Mystery?

In the broadest definition, a mystery in an RPG could be anything your players (and their characters) don’t know the answer to, but can find out in play. This can include questions like, “What’s in this dungeon?” “Is the knowledge we desire available in this library?” or “What kind of powers and defenses does this opponent have?” While these can be very fun questions to answer in a tabletop game, they are neither the main focus of Shadow City Mysteries nor the kind of thing you’ll have trouble finding other resources online to help you with as a GM.

Instead, the mysteries this section is built to generate are the ones that fill out the pages of noir fiction: something bad has happened (likely a crime) and the perpetrators need to be found to keep things from getting worse, or at least to bring some kind of closure to the victims. Along the way, the PCs will learn the motives and methods behind the inciting incident by accumulating clues that eventually lead them to a conclusion as to what happened and who is to blame.

There are two major ways of generating such mysteries for RPGs.

The method that is most common, particularly in modules that must accommodate any numbers of unknown and different PC groups, is to plan everything up front. Each likely location involved in the investigation is detailed, relevant NPCs are provided with potential motives and information, and clues are spread out like coupons that can be accumulated and cashed in to move along to the next location or suspect and eventually solve the mystery. They’re often easy to run, especially if they thought through everything PCs might try both obvious and whimsical, but they can be a lot of work to produce for your own home game.

The second method is improvisational: you simply work out exactly what happened, and rely on your players’ cleverness and your own knowledge of your greater campaign to eventually bring them to a conclusion. Rather than pre-writing a particular clue to find in a location, you can just rely on your understanding of the crime to decide whether the clue exists if the PCs decide to investigate that avenue. If you’re comfortable with that much improvisation, and your players are good at proactive detective work, it’s a lot easier for your prep than pregenerating everything, and can easily accommodate players doing the unexpected. But it can be less satisfying than a fully-planned plot if your players figure out the answer early, or get stuck and can’t figure out how to proceed.

This section attempts to provide an option in between these methods. By using this system, you will generate some elements that you could use for whichever you are comfortable doing: building out a fully-fleshed plotline, or improvising a mystery.

Components

To simplify a mystery, you can think of it as having the following components.

The Hook is the core element that brings the mystery to the PCs’ attention, and makes it their responsibility to solve it. This is often as simple as a Patron or Contact bringing it to their attention or some other NPC hiring them, but might be more personal, such as a friend or relative being hurt. Part of a Hook is identifying the Victim of the crime and the Reporter who brings it to the PCs’ attention (they may be the same NPC).
Many mysteries feature a MacGuffin, particularly ones generated through the Making Shadow City Your Own rules earlier in this book. These are typically items or events that are not directly important to the PCs, but are relevant because NPCs involved in the mystery want them or answers about them, such as a stolen item, missing person, or historical event.
The path through the mystery is built from Clues, which allow the PCs to piece together what happened, who was responsible, and potentially how to recover something that was lost. In Shadow City Mysteries, these are often awarded from relevant skill checks investigating a Location or interviewing a Suspect or Witness, with greater success providing more information.
The course of a mystery may lead to one or more Locations that might contain additional Clues. These are generally physical spaces, but experimental plots may use the term more loosely (e.g., the time of night that the killer always strikes might count as a Location). PCs may visit many places during their investigation, but only ones relevant to the mystery are generated as Locations by this system.
Nearly all mysteries will also feature various NPCs who might be interviewed for Clues. Some of these are Suspects, though whether the PCs encounter them early or only near the conclusion is a function of different types of mystery. Others are potential Witnesses, who often have their own reasons for hiding information from the PCs unless properly convinced. Some are both, while some are simple bystanders that the PCs have to eliminate as viable information sources.
Generally, a mystery will have Complications planned ahead to make things more interesting. These can be anything that interferes with the PCs’ peaceful and steady completion of their investigation. They might be unrelated plotlines that happen to coincide, or may be the result of NPCs attempting to influence the investigation’s outcome.
Ultimately, any mystery should have Revelations. These might be limited to the means, motive, and perpetrator that are self-contained within the event itself. But they often uncover new threads that your PCs can pull on to maintain momentum throughout your campaign.

Mystery Types

This system generates a mystery revolving around the following types:

The most dramatic mysteries revolve around Violence. Murder is the most iconic (particularly since the victim cannot usually identify their attacker), but might also include assault, poisoning, or a hit and run where the victim may be the person hiring the PCs to find who hurt them.
Some crimes involve a person’s Disappearance. They might have clearly been kidnapped (possibly with a ransom delivered), or might just be a missing person with no clear explanation. An unfortunate number of these are eventually revealed to be murders where the body was hidden.
Lower-stakes than death and disappearance are crimes of Lost Property, such as theft, burglary, arson, or a full heist. Typically, the victim is the person whose property was taken and wants it back (or at least payback for the loss).
Some mysteries involve uncovering a Hidden Antagonist. The victim is usually someone who is being blackmailed, extorted, stalked, framed, or otherwise threatened. Solving the mystery means finding out who is causing the problem and getting them to stop. A subset of this type of mystery is Espionage, where a person or organization thinks they are being spied upon or sabotaged, and want the PCs to prove it and stop it. On a lighter note, this might be some Immature crime, like pranks or vandalism (though perhaps those are just the outward signs of something more sinister).
Most commonly handled by PCs that are active private investigators are crimes around Relationships, such as trying to prove adultery or some business crime (e.g., fraud, embezzlement, or corruption). Run-of-the-mill jobs of this type are often just narrated in downtime, so if they reach the level of active plots, something complicated is going on that may feed into one of the more dramatic mystery types.
Finally, especially in higher-level play, mysteries may be something Esoteric, where the PCs are uncovering some kind of ancient secret or finding long-hidden treasure. This tends to serve as the MacGuffin that sets off another type of mystery.

Rolling Up a Mystery

The following section provides tables you can roll on to generate various elements of your mystery. Like all random tables, these are meant to guide your creativity as a GM. You are free to choose from any table instead of rolling, or reroll if a result doesn’t make sense to you. Realizing you don’t like an option suggested by a random generator helps you get to the better idea floating around in the back of your head. Some of these options will be more important to different types of mystery, so you can work them in if they seem relevant or discard them otherwise.

Type

1d100	Type	Subtype
1-11	Violence	Murder
12-19		Assault
20-22		Poisoning
23-24		Hit and Run
25-30	Disappearance	Kidnapping
31-35		Missing Person
36-40	Lost Property	Theft
41-45		Burglary
46-47		Arson
48-50		Heist
51-56	Hidden Antagonist	Blackmail
57-61		Extortion
62-67		Stalker
68-71		Framing
72-75		Threats
76-78	Espionage	Spying
79-81		Sabotage
82-83	Immature	Pranks
84-85		Vandalism
86-89	Relationships	Adultery
90-92		Fraud
93-95		Embezzlement
96-97		Corruption
98-99	Esoteric	Ancient Secret
100		Hidden Treasure

Hooks

1d20	The Victim is…
1	one of the PCs or the PC organization (not for murder)
2-5	a friend/relative of one or more PCs
6-7	a Contact or the Patron (usually not for murder)
8-10	someone unfriendly to the PCs (they have to clear themselves as suspects)
11-17	a stranger to the PCs
18-20	multiple people (a business, friend group, or other organization)

1d20	The Reporter is…
1	the victim (likely through a letter or recording, if missing or murdered)
2-5	a friend/relative of one or more PCs
6-7	a Contact or the Patron (they have a direct relationship to the victim)
8-10	someone unfriendly to the Victim (they want the PCs to clear their name)
11-17	a stranger to the PCs (usually connected by a Contact or the Patron)
18-20	a faction or other organization that enlists the PCs to handle it instead of the cops

1d20	The person’s faction is (roll for both the Victim and Reporter, unless it’s obvious from context)…
1-2	the same faction as one of the PCs (decide randomly or choose the most relevant PC)
3	the main faction supported by the Patron or Contact (if they are involved in the mystery)
4-5	a faction that none of the PCs is a member of (which limits the PCs’ ease of investigating)
6-8	the Society of Ravens
9-11	the Court of Rats
12-13	the Brass Consortium
14-15	the Iron Union
16-17	the Church of Astra
18	the Cult of Tenebrous
19-20	unaligned

1d20	If there is a MacGuffin, it is…
1-3	a valuable and easily-recognizable item of art
4-6	documents/plans full of secrets (possibly in a case or other container)
7-9	an unassuming item with a hidden compartment or esoteric powers
10-12	a weapon used in other crimes (or that is a military prototype)
13-14	a toxic or otherwise hazardous substance that leaves detectable residue
15-16	an oversized object that is difficult to transport secretly
17-18	a particular code phrase or similar clue to a greater mystery
19-20	a person that someone feels possessive of, or who knows many secrets

Suspects

In addition to actual Perpetrator, generate additional NPCs that will be Suspects that can be eliminated. In most scenarios, you should have at least three potential Suspects, and you might add 1d4 more for a Normal mission or 2d6 more for a Milestone mission.

1d20	The Suspect is…
1-2	the same faction as one of the PCs (decide randomly or choose the most relevant PC)
3-4	the Reporter (could be trying to throw people off the scent/control the investigation)
5-6	the same faction as the Victim
7-9	the opposed faction to the Victim’s (Society of Ravens vs. Court of Rats, Brass Consortium vs. Iron Union, or Church of Astra vs. Cult of Tenebrous)
10	a member of the Society of Ravens
11-13	a member of the Court of Rats
14	a member of the Brass Consortium
15	a member of the Iron Union
16	a member of the Church of Astra
17-18	a member of the Cult of Tenebrous
19-20	unaligned with a faction

1d20	The actual Perpetrator’s motive is…
1-2	an accident or crime of opportunity (with little obvious motive to investigate)
3-5	money/greed (somehow, the Perpetrator expected to make money off the crime)
6-8	jealousy/envy (the Perpetrator resents the Victim and wanted something they had)
9-10	planned revenge (the Perpetrator has been planning to “get back” at the Victim for some time)
11-13	crime of passion (the Perpetrator decided to do the crime in the heat of the moment)
14-15	manipulation/corruption (the Perpetrator was convinced or hired to do the crime by a close contact)
16-17	obsession (the Perpetrator acted on a twisted belief they love the Victim)
18-19	just business (the Victim was caught up in a scheme that wasn’t personal)
20	esoteric (the crime may be for ritual purposes or otherwise weird or mystical)

1d20	This non-Perpetrator is a Suspect because…
1-2	they were in the area of the crime
3-5	they had a financial motive for the crime
6-8	they have had bad things to say about the Victim in the past
9-10	they and the Victim are known enemies
11-13	they and the Victim argued shortly before the crime
14-15	they are a known employee/enforcer for one of the Victim’s enemies
16-17	they are the Victim’s significant other or known to be in love with the Victim
18-19	the crime stands to benefit them in other ways
20	they are some kind of cultist or crazy person that had opportunity

Witnesses

In addition to the Suspects, who may also have information about the crime, identify or create NPCs that are specifically Witnesses. There should be a similar number of them to Suspects. These individuals have some obvious reason why they aren’t Suspects (which easily stand up to scrutiny, which Suspect alibis might not), but also have a reason why PCs might not just easily get information out of them. Most Witnesses should be people that can be placed as in the vicinity of the crime, but some might be identified by the Suspects as someone that can provide them an alibi.

1d20	The Witness is evasive when questioned by the PCs because they…
1-2	weren’t supposed to be in the area of the crime, and don’t want to admit they were
3-5	are a friend/relative of one of the Suspects, and are protecting them because they might be guilty
6-7	don’t like the PCs and don’t want to answer questions from them
8-11	are involved in an unrelated crime that might come out if questioned
12-13	were/are intoxicated, distracted, or just not paying attention even though they should have clear answers
14-15	don’t answer questions without a lawyer present, as a rule
16-17	have too much information, most of it irrelevant, and are excited to be questioned
18-19	could provide an alibi for a Suspect, but hate them and would like to see them in trouble
20	aren’t evasive, but because they’re so forthcoming, it feels like they’re hiding something

Locations

If it’s not clearly suggested by the NPCs involved, you can use the following table to decide on various Locations. A minor mission might only have the scene of the crime, perhaps one or two intermediate Locations where Witnesses and Suspects are interviewed, and the finale site where the Perpetrator is discovered or pursued. Normal and Milestone missions can have proportionately more, with clues sending the PCs all over Soreta over multiple nights to obtain more information and find more Witnesses and Suspects.

1d20	Location
1	Home of the Victim, Suspect, or Witness
2	Workplace of the Victim or a Suspect
3	Club where the Victim or a Suspect hangs out
4	Transit station (train or bus)
5	Dark alley
6	Society of Ravens mansion
7	Court of Rats safehouse
8	Brass Consortium venue (backstage)
9	Iron Union factory
10	Church of Astra temple
11	Cult of Tenebrous bolthole (beneath the city)
12	Police station
13	Warehouse
14	The docks
15	Government building
16	School campus
17	Upscale hotel
18	Seedy motel
19	Pop-up street market
20	Liminal/unreal mystical space

Building Out Your Mystery

With the randomly-generated seeds, you should now be able to start figuring out what actually happened. The first step is to gather up all the archetypes you’ve rolled and start giving them more details in relation to the other elements. See the examples in the sidebar.

Examples
In these examples, the PCs are a mixed group, primarily Court of Rats and Cult of Tenebrous, working for the Rat King as their Patron.

Example 1
The first mystery rolled is Sabotage, where the Victim is an Iron Union member unfriendly to the PCs and the Reporter is a stranger from the Society of Ravens connected by the Patron. The MacGuffin is a code phrase or greater clue.The Perpetrator’s faction is opposed to the Victim’s (the Brass Consortium) and their motive is jealousy or envy. Additional Suspects include: a member of the Court of Rats that argued with the Victim before the crime and a member of the Iron Union who also argued with them.

Three witnesses are evasive because they were drunk at the time, are a friend of one of the Suspects, and could provide an alibi for a Suspect they hate.

Locations include a dark alley, transit station, home of an involved NPC, and a Society of Ravens mansion.

This combination of factions suggests that the Reporter is a wealthy individual who was funding an Iron Union project, who has used his connections to blame the Rat King for an act of sabotage, and the Rat King has tasked the PCs to prove it wasn’t them. This is complicated by one Court of Rats suspect, and the Victim being inclined to distrust any proof the PCs find as a cover-up. The Locations suggest the job was at the Reporter’s mansion, and that’s where the initial investigation takes place, with the investigation eventually leading to a Brass Consortium counterweight, who sabotaged the project as cover for stealing the MacGuffin from the mansion.

Example 2
The next mystery is a Missing Person, where the Victim is a stranger to the PCs who is a member of the Church. The Reporter is also a member of the Church, and was unfriendly to the Victim who is the prime suspect. If a MacGuffin is required, it’s an art item.

The real Perpetrator is unaligned with a faction and was jealous of the Victim. Other suspects include: a member of the Cult of Tenebrous who’s had had bad things to say about the Victim in the past and a member of the Court of Rats who somehow benefits from the disappearance.

Witnesses include someone who doesn’t like the PCs, someone involved in an unrelated crime, and a friend of one of the Suspects.

Locations include a Court of Rats safehouse, Government building, Liminal/unreal mystical space, and Church of Astra temple.

This suggests something heavy into Church politics, where one of the Cult PCs might get asked to investigate because the Reporter knows they dislike everyone in the Church equally and haven’t already jumped to judgement. The presence of a liminal space and the MacGuffin suggests that the unaligned Perpetrator may have coveted the life the Victim had and inadvertently caused both of them to disappear into a hidden, mystical space by triggering an art object within the temple. Ultimately, conversations with the other Suspects (including the Reporter) and Witnesses will indicate that the Victim couldn’t have actually left the temple, leading the PCs to use their mystical abilities to find the liminal space.

Once you’ve worked out the scenario the randomized elements suggest to you, it’s time to formalize exactly what happened. Answer the standard reporters’ questions: who, what, when, where, why, and how? Figure out what information Witnesses might have observed or heard about, and the general path through the Locations you expect the PCs to take. The it’s time to set up the Clues, Complications, and Revelations.

Clues

Sometimes, the scenario you have in mind will make it completely obvious what there is to find (e.g., a brutal murder with the body left behind allows all kinds of forensics). If it’s not obvious, start looking at the available proficiencies. In general, each mystery should involve as many different skills as you can reasonably target, which gives multiple PCs chances to shine and makes them feel smart for picking skills that aren’t as generally useful. Don’t just rely too hard on Perception, Insight, and Investigation: save those for the areas of investigation that turn up general information about crime scenes or witnesses, and suggest other skills or tool proficiencies that might generate specific information.

Here are some suggested uses for various proficiencies:

Strength and Dexterity skills (Acrobatics, Athletics, Sleight of Hand, and Stealth) aren’t usually used to learn information, but might make it possible for a PCs to get to information that is out of the way or off limits.
Charisma skills (Deception, Intimidation, Performance, and Persuasion) might be used to get Witnesses to reveal information that they know. Depending on how they are initially treated and their reason for not wanting to reveal information, different skills might have Advantage or Disadvantage to get them to give up their most vital clues.
Awareness skills (Insight, Investigation, Perception), as noted, might be used when nothing else makes sense and to zero in on what other skills could provide better information.
Artisan’s Tools proficiencies can be used to precisely analyze or repair objects or materials related to the mystery of the type the tool can create. This might involve quick information at the scene or detailed forensics at a workshop.
Animal Handling: Were there any animals involved? Is there a pet on site whose behavior might provide a clue?
Arcana: Is there something Cult or otherwise mysticism related? Is information encoded?
History: Has something like this happened before? Is an item of historical significance? Is someone involved important and not mentioning that fact?
Medicine: Is there a body to examine? Are there strange injuries or maladies afflicting the Victim?
Nature: Are there any odd plants, insects, or other natural detritus at the crime scene or attached to the Victim? Would knowledge about the weather conditions at the time of the crime reveal something?
Religion: Does this crime have something to do with the Church? Is there symbolism (intentional or unintentional) involved in the crime?
Survival: Were there any tracks left behind? Does the way someone would have to move through the area suggest places where the Perpetrator might have disturbed something or left evidence?

Typically, it makes sense to give out some kind of clue at DC 5, and additional information for every 5 points the PC exceeds the DC (e.g., 10, 15, 20, etc.). By starting at 5, the PC will likely get some small amount of data that can suggest additional things to investigate, while higher rolls provide more actionable intelligence.

In general, you want to provide enough information on minimal successes that the players can eventually solve the mystery the long way, rather than becoming completely stuck because they’re all having a night of bad rolls. Conversely, you want to provide additional details for high rolls so players feel rewarded for rolling well and/or having high bonuses in relevant proficiencies.

Complications

Complications are optional. Particularly in your early mysteries, you might want to have everything be relatively straightforward, so you can get a sense of your players’ comfort with investigations and they can get used to how you are running them. Once you have a few under your belt (or if you’re playing with a group who have solved investigations in your previous campaigns), you might want to introduce Complications.

A non-exhaustive list of possible Complications includes:

A Clue leads to a completely unrelated Suspect that must be eliminated from consideration (i.e., a Red Herring)
A Witness or Suspect sends the PCs to a dangerous Location or hires enemies to attack them (the fight should provide some additional Clues)
Something unrelated (such as bad weather) makes it much harder to pursue the investigation along the current route (this might also be time pressure for the investigation, to finish at a location before it’s too late)
An unrelated mission or the PCs’ day jobs require their attention so they cannot focus entirely on the mystery
Other antagonists want to prevent the mystery from being solved or obtain the MacGuffin
The crime, Victim, and/or Reporter are not what they seem (e.g., Victim wasn’t kidnapped but fled, Reporter is the Perpetrator, the crime was to hide a different crime)
A third party stole an important Clue/the MacGuffin
The Perpetrator or Witnesses are also the Victim of a different crime, making interviewing/punishing them much harder
The law or other major Faction don’t want the PCs involved (which can turn into just Antagonists trying to stop them, but may feed into issues of Influence)

Revelations

For long-term campaigns, it is generally ideal for the solution to the mystery to provide a Revelation that impacts the rest of the campaign, rather than being a full self-contained mystery-of-the-week. This can be pieces of lore relevant to the campaign that were functionally incidental to the mystery itself (e.g., in interviewing a witness, the PCs learn a secret about their Patron). It might also be something shockingly deep (e.g., the Perpetrator’s motivation for spying on the faction that hired the PCs is revealed as trying to find a dark secret about that faction that the PCs were previously unaware of). Mystery elements are also a type of Revelation: each NPC met and each Location visited can be relevant again later in the campaign with the additional context of the mystery.

Ultimately, after solving a mystery, the PCs should have new insight into the campaign’s plot, and new motives of their own when they interact with elements touched on in the course of the mystery.

SCM Mystery Generator Download

WoD: Downtime Systems

October 22, 2024

samhaine Game Design changeling, Craft, Downtime, White Wolf 1 Comment

I put these actions together for my Changeling: the Dreaming (20th Anniversary) campaign, based on the Influence and Crafting systems for Shadow City Mysteries. It probably works fine for other WoD games with some slight adjustment to the correct abilities and backgrounds (and benefits less from the mentions of Changeling birthrights). I changed up how XP works for the campaign, just having everyone spend it as freebie points, since I have issues with the normal scaling XP costs. This means that the Influence system also helped provide justification for when players could raise their Backgrounds (as it only costs 1 XP).

You can take one downtime action per normal week while still leaving time for your other responsibilities and one adventure on the weekend. You can take another by not sleeping: spend 3 WP, take one bashing level, and neither heal nor recover tempers during the week. You can also take another by skipping responsibilities for the week. You can do this as vacation once per year per point of Resources. Otherwise, you start having money and social problems.

Influence

An influence project might be minor (10 points) up to international (200) points, representing large social goals that are nonetheless attainable by a small persuasive group in their spare time. (Truly huge projects, like electing senators, are outside the scope of this system.)

For example, justifying raising a social background like Resources, Contacts, Allies, Fame, or Title, is a new level squared x 5 project. (5, 20, 45, 80, 125).

Opponents can work against your Influence, lowering your total over time as they canvas against you.

Conversations

Whenever you try to advance the project as part of a conversation with an NPC, you might gain points of progress depending on how the conversation went. It can go very badly (-2), badly (-1), neutral (0), persuasively (1), well (2), or very well (3). The NPC or group of NPCs can be minor (x1) through major (x5). The total is the points toward the project. For example, a conversation with the king that goes very well is +15 points.

How well the conversation went roughly maps to social success, and rolls can be made after the conversation if it isn’t obvious how it went to everyone from roleplay.

You can only make progress on the same project once with the same NPC: these are large enough that even the king will often need you to convince other people instead of just making multiple meetings to talk to him.

But you can gladhand in downtime!

Gladhanding

Downtime action, Difficulty 6-8 (Easy-Hard).

Select an influence project to target by making time to talk to and convince relevant unnamed decision makers offscreen.
Pick one Talent, Skill, and Knowledge that seem relevant to the influence project.
Match each to one of the social attributes (try to tell a story of what each combination represents).
Roll these three pools against the difficulty. Total successes. A botch on any roll is -2 success per uncanceled 1.
Add your Contacts, Allies, and Fame ratings, if any are relevant to the total successes.
Total successes are added to progress.

Crafting/Art

Most physical crafting is represented by the Crafts skill, and two-dimensional or written art by the Expression talent. For some items, Academics, Computer, Science, or Technology might make more sense.

Determine the value of the item you are trying to create. Approximately every $50 of the 2022 USD value is worth a crafting success. Pick the price of an equivalent real item for creating chimera. Pick the work for hire commission for pure art. For example, trying to make a $1,000 sword is a 20-success project.

As a downtime action, make three rolls with three different attributes. For most crafting, this is one each of each physical attribute, plus the relevant ability. Crafts that are less physically taxing might replace some or all with mental attributes, but each of the three rolls always uses a different attribute. Each success contributes progress toward your goal. If you get more successes than needed, you can make the result proportionately fancier, or contribute toward additional projects of the same kind. Boggans triple their successes for a normal downtime action, or can make the standard three rolls in two days (or one day of working too late to recover health and tempers).

The difficulty is 6 if you’ve made something very similar successfully before. It ranges from 7-9 if this is a new kind of project for you (higher difficulty if it’s less intuitive how to make and/or you have no instructions so have to work it out as you go). Having or lacking appropriate tools and a workshop might add or remove dice, but will generally be +0 dice if you have a basic, appropriate workspace and equipment.

If you botch any of the rolls, you can make a mental attribute roll at the same difficulty to catch the flaw and turn it into a cosmetic issue rather than a structural problem. If it’s a structural problem, you can scrap the project or deal with it. Nockers always have at least one cosmetic issue in their crafting.

Research/Decryption

Downtime action, Difficulty 6-9. Difficulty depends on how organized the library is or how easy to decrypt the files are (modified by the use of relevant powers).

Choose three applicable knowledge skills and pair them to one each of the three mental attributes. Roll against the difficulty and accumulate successes. A botch on any roll is -2 successes per uncanceled 1, as you waste time on a red herring. Add Remembrance as extra successes if applicable to the research topic.

Each success gets you 10 words of deliberately-written summary of the material or 100 words of GPT-filler text. Informing the GM in advance of what you’re researching makes it more likely those words will have been pre-written to be available at the session.

Instruction/Drilling

This represents training an NPC in a trait you are good at, rather than improving your own skills. To use this downtime action, you must have access to the NPC for the duration, you must be better than them at the trait you are training, and they must be willing to learn from you.

Roll Perception+Empathy, Manipulation+Leadership, and another appropriate attribute plus the trait to train. The difficulty is equal to 5 plus the NPC’s current rating in the trait (it’s harder to make progress when they’re already close to perfect). Botching on any roll might turn off the NPC or incorporate some kind of weird problem in their understanding of the trait. Otherwise, total successes divided by two are the number of XP they can put toward the trait. Add Allies as extra successes if they are one of your allies from the background.

Holding Improvement

As a variant Crafting downtime action, you can work on improvements to the structure, defenses, etc. of the freehold, courtyard, or other locations. Relevant other abilities or arts might sub in for the normal crafting rolls, if relevant to the improvement being added.

As a variant Influence downtime action, you can work to improve the Holdings rating of the freehold. Rolls for this likely involve Glamour or arts rather than social attributes and abilities. You might also start an Influence project to acquire retainers (enchanted mortals or chimera) for the freehold/courtyard.

Gambling/Petty Crimes

Downtime action, Difficulty 6. Roll each social attribute once paired with Streetwise, Subterfuge, and Larceny to get turned onto a profitable score/bet/game. Add Contacts to the final successes. Number of successes total indicates the magnitude of the opportunity. A botch on any roll means that you’ve been cut off for a couple of weeks for doing something that scared your contacts into thinking you were a risk/unlucky.

Roll 3d10 and allocate the rolls (i.e., choose which result goes to which column after rolling) to the three outcomes below:

Roll	Score	Danger	Complications
1	Overinvested and Busted: Resources permanently -1	Things Go South: Play out a scene of a raid by cops/rival criminals that could go badly.	The Eye is Upon You: You’ve drawn the attention of a major criminal, possibly supernatural.
2-3	No Joy: Broke for the next week	Arrested: Hope you have a good lawyer	Sideways: The crew/venue isn’t accessible anymore. +2 Difficulty for next use of this downtime.
4-6	Minor Win: [Successes] x $50 extra cash	Person of Interest: The cops have their eye on you for [successes] weeks	Nothing to Speak of: No complications, just smooth sailing
7-10	Major Win: [Successes] x $100 extra cash and count as an Influence project toward raising Resources	No Danger: Everything is aces over here	Synergistic Meeting: Count [Successes] as an Influence project toward raising Contacts or Allies with an underworld type

D&D 5e: Desert Mythos Magic Items

October 14, 2024

samhaine Game Design 5e, D&D, items, Pathfinder Comments Off on D&D 5e: Desert Mythos Magic Items

The PCs for my campaign of Strange Aeons (converted to 5e) finally got to a large desert city where they might be able to spend their pile of accumulated gold on something worthwhile for 13th level characters. I was using Sane Magical Prices as a guideline, and trying to keep things in the range where everyone in the five-member party might be able to afford something. Thus, some of the more powerful options (like the Staff of the Woodlands) got adjusted to the point it would make sense for shopkeeps to want to let them go for less than six figures. I was also erring on non-attunement for the weapons, to keep straightforward +2 items from being more attractive.

The party is currently an evocation wizard, a stars druid, an armorer artificer, a lore bard/swashbuckler rogue, and a beast barbarian/hexblade warlock/watchers paladin (I know). So the items were designed to appeal to stuff they might want.

Weapons

Asmodeus’ Star

Weapon (Morningstar), legendary (20000 gp)

You gain a +3 bonus to attack and damage rolls with this wickedly-barbed mithral morningstar.

The weapon has 18 charges. When you hit with the weapon, you may utter the command word to add 3d6 force damage to the attack, and it consumes charges equal to the highest die rolled of these three dice. If there are not enough remaining charges, it still does the damage, but does six force damage to you for every charge in excess. When you kill a target with this weapon, or the target dies adjacent to you before your next turn after dealing damage, it recovers charges equal to the target’s level or CR.

Dawnblade

Weapon (Scimitar), rare (5000 gp)

You gain a +1 bonus to attack and damage rolls with this gold-filigree shining steel scimitar.

It always sheds bright light in a 20-foot radius and dim light for an additional 20 feet. When you hit a target with this weapon, it deals an additional 1d6 radiant damage. If you critically hit with this weapon, the target takes an additional 5 fire damage and is set ablaze, suffering 1d6 fire damage at the end of each of its turns until someone takes an action to extinguish the flames.

Drunkard’s Foil

Weapon (Rapier), very rare (8000 gp)

You gain a +2 bonus to attack and damage rolls with this magic, cold iron rapier.

While wielding it, you can never have disadvantage on your attack rolls with it due to the poisoned or frightened conditions. Additionally while wielding it, due to its stabilizing influence you have advantage on Dexterity checks and saving throws to balance, resist falling or being knocked prone, and similar effects.

On any turn where you make the attack action with this weapon, you may drink a potion or other beverage as a bonus action rather than an action.

Duelist’s Mirror

Weapon (Rapier), rare (3500 gp)

You gain a +1 bonus to attack and damage rolls made with this magic, mirror-polished mithral rapier. It weighs half as much as a normal weapon of that type.

Once per day, you can utter the command word as a bonus action to cause an illusory duplicate of yourself to appear within five feet of you or on the opposite side of an enemy you are currently adjacent to. This duplicate has AC equal to 10 + your Dexterity modifier, and resists grapples, shoves, and similar attempts to make contact with your Dexterity (Acrobatics). If someone makes contact, they pass through harmlessly and know it is an illusion. Otherwise it moves in its space similarly to you, and reacts realistically to effects that require a saving throw as if it had succeeded. It lasts for one minute.

As a bonus action, you can cause it to move up to your speed (it provokes attacks of opportunity normally). After you make an attack with this weapon, if the duplicate is within 30 feet, you have a 50% chance of teleporting to trade places with the illusion. This transfer is seamless, so will cause opponents without special senses to not know whether you have swapped.

Additionally, due to the reflective nature of the blade, you have resistance against Radiant damage as long as you are wielding it and not incapacitated.

Ghartok’s Flindbars

Weapon (Flail), very rare (8000 gp)

You gain a +2 bonus to attack and damage rolls with this unusual brass-and-ebony flail.

While wielding this weapon, you have resistance to poison damage and advantage on saving throws against the poisoned condition. Additionally while wielding it, If you hit a target with a bite attack you may consume a part of the target to heal an amount of damage equal to the damage you dealt. You may use this healing ability once per short or long rest.

Khopesh of Disarming

Weapon (Longsword), rare (3000 gp)

You gain a +1 bonus to attack and damage rolls with this hooked bronze sword.

While wielding it, you gain access to the Disarming Attack battlemaster Fighter maneuver. If you do not have any superiority dice, you have a single 1d6 die that recovers when you take a short or long rest. If you have superiority dice, you gain an additional one of your normal size that can only be used on Disarming Attack and while wielding this weapon.

Nethys’ Chaos Hammer

Weapon (Warhammer), legendary (20000 gp)

You gain a +3 bonus to attack and damage rolls with this adamantine-headed warhammer, with a bleached wooden haft.

The weapon has 9 charges, and resets to 0 at dawn and dusk. When you hit a target with the hammer, it automatically dispels (as if having cast dispel magic) the lowest-level magical spell on the target, and gains charges equal to that spell’s level.

When you critically hit with the weapon, it casts a random wizard spell of a level equal to the number of charges remaining. You may choose to make yourself or the target of your attack the target of the spell, once you know what it does. Area of effect spells are centered on the target. The weapon can maintain concentration on one effect, if necessary, and only loses concentration upon casting another concentration spell.

As an adamantine weapon, any successful attack with the weapon against an object is treated as a critical hit.

Pickman’s Model

Weapon (War pick), very rare (4500 gp)

You gain a +2 bonus to attack and damage rolls with this oddly-proportioned war pick.

When you critically hit with this weapon, both you and the target must make a Charisma saving throw, with a DC equal to the damage dealt, or suffer the Frightened condition for one minute. You may each repeat the saving throw at the end of each of your turns. The weapon is the source of the Frightened condition.

You have advantage on Charisma checks against ghouls when wielding this weapon.

Vigil Officer’s Axe

Weapon (Battleaxe), rare (4000 gp)

You gain a +1 bonus to attack and damage rolls with this ancient bronze battleaxe.

While wielding it, you are resistant to fire damage and have advantage on checks and saving throws to resist the detrimental effects of being inside an ongoing fire, such as suffocation from smoke and heat exhaustion. Attacks with the weapon have advantage against wood, plaster, or similar flammable structural objects.

Foci

Alaznist’s Angry Red Orb

Wondrous Item, rare (requires attunement by a wizard) (2000 gp)

While you are holding this ruby red orb, you can use it as a spellcasting focus for your wizard spells, and you gain a +2 bonus to spell attack rolls and to the saving throw DCs of your wizard spells.

When you deal damage with a wizard spell, you may choose to deal maximum damage instead of rolling. If you do so, you take the same amount of damage yourself. You may use this property once per long rest.

Sentience. The angry red orb is a sentient chaotic evil item with an Intelligence of 15, a Wisdom of 10, and a Charisma of 5. It has hearing and normal vision out to a range of 30 feet, and can communicate by transmitting emotion.

Personality. Its purpose is to destroy, particularly other wizards that are not sufficiently deferential to the attuned, and may come into conflict with the wielder if they have not been destructive or imperious enough. Do not taunt the angry red orb.

Minderhal’s Ball Peen #7

Wondrous Item, rare (requires attunement by an artificer or forge cleric) (8000 gp)

This hammer is sized to be a small tool for a stone giant, but can be used as a mace by medium or small characters. If wielded in this way, you gain a +1 bonus to attack and damage rolls. This feature does not require attunement.

If attuned, you may use this as a spellcasting focus. While holding it, you gain a +2 bonus to the spell attack rolls and saving throw DCs of your artificer or cleric spells. Additionally, you may use the booming blade cantrip, even if you do not already know it.

Finally, you have advantage on Blacksmith’s Tools checks while wielding this item, and on attack rolls to damage metal or stone items.

Staff of the Parchlands

Staff, rare (requires attunement by a druid) (10000 gp)

This staff can be wielded as a magic quarterstaff that grants a +1 bonus to attack and damage rolls made with it. While holding it, you have a +1 bonus to spell attack rolls and saving throw DCs.

The staff has 8 charges for the following properties. You may expend one or more hit dice after a long rest to recover an equal number of charges. If you expend the last charge, it deals 4d6 necrotic damage to you as it drains your bodily moisture and recovers one charge.

Spells. You can use an action to expend one or more of the staff’s charges to cast one of the following spells from it, using your spell save DC: Abi-Dalzim’s horrid wilting (centered on self only, 8 charges), absorb elements (1 charge), control winds (5 charges), dust devil (2 charges), pyrotechnics (2 charges), wall of sand (3 charges), zephyr strike (1 charge).

Cactus Form. You can use an action to plant the staff in the ground and transform it into a cactus. The five foot square it occupies counts as difficult terrain and anyone passing through it must make a Dexterity saving throw or take 4d4 piercing damage. The cactus has an AC of 14 and 18 HP, taking double damage from slashing attacks but half from bludgeoning and piercing. It casts absorb elements automatically if targeted with a spell, consuming a charge. You must destroy the cactus to recover the staff, provoking the same save with each melee attack to avoid taking 4d4 damage. If you take a long rest in the desert while it does not have full charges, the staff will often contrive to use this ability overnight, rooting itself in the nearest valid location. If left in cactus form, it recovers one charge per day at noon, and returns to staff form on its own once it again has full charges.

SCM: Crafting System

September 23, 2024

samhaine Game Design 5e, Craft, D&D, Shadow City Mysteries 1 Comment

The Shadow City Mysteries RPG crowdfunding campaign is currently live on Backerkit. The discussion below refers to the rules on pages 11-12 the Quickstart.

Crafting has always been kind of a challenge in D&D. The video games that have used it as inspiration have packed their gear lists with piles of granular upgrades, so putting in a system to generate gear was pretty easy. Craft a new item that’s slightly better than what you can buy at a shop for your tier, but not too powerful for your level? No problem. But mundane D&D items are generally on a much shallower advancement track, if they have one at all. And their listed cost tends to be low enough that buying them is pocket change for adventurers very quickly.

Thus all “crafting” in D&D tends to converge on enchanting. Magic items are both expensive enough that crafting them is a cost break and random enough that crafting lets you tailor your gear to your needs in a way the loot drops might not. And if the one player in the campaign willing to engage with the crafting system is a character without access to the relevant spellcasting prereqs? Not a lot of crafting gets done.

The Maker class in SCM at least partially solves the “who is going to want to do crafting?” issue: if someone plays that class, you can assume they want you, the DM, to give them some downtime cycles that they can use on crafting stuff. We’re trying to give every class something to do crafting-wise, in case other PCs want to engage (particularly if there’s a Maker in the party and the other PCs don’t want to be left out). And, similarly, we’re trying to make sure the Maker isn’t useless at other stuff, just sitting around waiting for the next time to make something cool.

The official solution to these problems is the Artificer. I don’t actually love the Artificer. It mostly comes down to dissociated mechanics: Why can a 7th level Artificer make three magic items for free with a long rest if they have none, but take weeks to make the fourth at full price (if allowed by the DM)? No reason other than game balance. I feel like the Tony Stark fantasy isn’t fully served by being able to make an arbitrary number of items quickly and for free, it’s about gathering the right resources, finding the time, and crafting things to actually get a leg up on the competition.

A lot of this also comes down to how much downtime there is in a campaign. If your PCs go level 1 to 20 as part of a non-stop thrill ride of trying to keep the campaign villain from enacting a scheme or to beat the ticking clock to the end of the world, you probably don’t have time to craft, even if you really want to. Meanwhile, a pastoral game that features the heroes of a small town periodically fending off threats to their home can have tons of downtime. My college game was of the latter type, and the party wizard wound up being way too powerful for his level because of it (I probably also shouldn’t have relaxed the XP cost rules from 3e).

We’re trying to square that circle in SCM from a few different directions. The first is keeping downtime actions fairly granular. You can make real progress on your projects during the day, without impeding your investigating/adventuring at night. The second is putting in rules for repairing items that is basically just crafting with a lower progress counter, since part of the work is already done. The DM can give out broken equipment (or repairable clues, like we use in the quickstart adventure) as a way to scratch that crafting itch even in a compressed time frame. The third is just planning on having some very solid DM advice on how to structure time in a campaign. This genre isn’t as big on zero-to-hero, end-of-the-world thrill rides, so it makes sense to clue DMs in on what expectations we had for ratio of downtime to uptime when designing the mechanics.

As mentioned last week, another key factor of the crafting system is the orders of magnitude rule: the tier of crafting is directly based on the number of digits in the item’s price. In addition to my own little idiosyncratic ideas about accessibility of purchases going up as each zero falls from the price tag, it’s meant to be a really quick way to figure out how difficult a crafting project is. No complicated lookup tables for item type and cost, you can just turn the price tag directly into the numbers for crafting it.

The system as written in the quickstart is still in flux, and I’m hoping a lot of people try it out before we get past the point of no return on writing the final book. My intuition is that there are some weird breakpoints where you might prefer that, say, the $999 item (rank 3, 99 progress required) was actually $1,000 (rank 4, 10 progress required). But I won’t know for sure until we get more playtesting done to make sure it feels fair throughout.

If this sounds cool to you, please check out the Quickstart and consider backing the project!

SCM: Lifestyle and Influence

September 16, 2024

samhaine Game Design 5e, D&D, Shadow City Mysteries 1 Comment

The Shadow City Mysteries RPG crowdfunding campaign is currently live on Backerkit. The discussion below refers to the rules on pages 11-12 the Quickstart.

A classic problem in modern games is what to do about money. D&D is usually strongly-focused on cash management, accounting for things down to the copper piece, while many other major games just abstract things to a resources rating (which may or may not have ways to overspend your rating and lower it). The D&D model is a problem for any game where you’re making a lot of small purchases: even at low level, I’ve never had a player thrilled to do bookkeeping when they buy dinner and a night at a cheap inn. Conversely, an abstract resources model can make money completely irrelevant to the campaign, even when cash payouts should be a meaningful reward. In games where you can buy your way into being a multimillionaire at chargen, “Why can’t we just solve the problem with money?” becomes a major question to contend with in scenario design.

I have this vague theory in real life that the order of magnitude of the cost of something gives you a pretty good idea of how affordable to you it is, depending on your own wealth level. People that can spend $1 without thinking about it probably spend $10 with only a little consideration, but have to think about a $100 purchase and really budget for $1,000, while $10,000 is a once-every-few-years purchase and $100,000 is only available with a major loan. However, someone that makes twice as much sets each of those levels at $2, $20, etc.

But we pretty quickly found that might be mostly applicable to the current value of the American dollar and class stratification in the early 21st century. It still exists as a useful piece of simplification for the crafting system (discussed next week), but didn’t make as much sense for a setting with costs targeting more at 1930s prices and wealth. We still wanted there to be a “petty cash” sort of benefit that was almost entirely there to let players not have to do bookkeeping for the small stuff, and have that be variable based on your current income.

The interesting thing about D&D is the standardization of ability score math. As much as it’s become more of a sacred cow than a necessary feature (since setting your ability scores to an odd number does little or nothing for you), the standardization of the math as 10 = +0 and everything else scaling up or down from there is built in. If your Lifestyle is rated on the same scale, suddenly it becomes both a value and a modifier. And you can do fun stuff with modifiers.

It’s not fully explained in the Quickstart, but Lifestyle isn’t just something you buy as you get a cash reward and then drop back down when you no longer need it. You buy it up incrementally, and it decreases incrementally in slow months: you can’t make it to high society instantly, even with a major windfall, but neither will you be living in the gutter after one month of missed rent. Characters have an income rating that’s dice they get to roll to see how much money came in from their day jobs, and that’s tuned for most PCs to even out around Lifestyle 10. Cash rewards from adventures and increased income dice from other sources allow them to gradually improve their Lifestyles. And hopefully the things you can do with that rating make it worthwhile for everyone to want it higher.

One of the main things it applies to is Influence: it’s just easier for the wealthy to enact large-scale social change.

The Influence system started conceptually as whether we were going to invent another social combat system. I have a ton of thoughts on social encounters and the standard social skills, which are probably evident to long-term readers of this blog. But various DMs have their own thoughts on how to run a social scene, and a formalized system for that kind of thing is likely to get ignored at most tables anyway, especially in a campaign with a lot of talking to NPCs. Rather than social combat, for roleplayed interactions we’re opting to add a few class features that players can activate and giving DMs advice on how to build witnesses and other conversational targets common to the genre in a way that makes it easier to write a satisfying social encounter (using rules as much as you’re comfortable with).

These conversations can still feed into the Influence system, which is more about long-term social goals. Did that conversation go well but didn’t seem to really make much mechanical difference? What if it got you points toward a larger social objective?

In Shadow City, even powerful faction heads like the Rat King are not unassailable: there isn’t a king that can unilaterally decide that something the PCs convince them of is what’s going to happen. Even kings in the real world would struggle with making big decisions that their key supporters hate. To take big swings on a city-wide scale, you need to win hearts and minds. The example in the Quickstart is getting the cops to consider your party as independent investigators allowed to look into a murder. Other examples might be electing or removing officials from power, moving an area to a different faction’s control, getting a piece of illegal tech licensed, starting or ending a faction war, getting a larger group to organize against a threat, and so on.

Honestly, a lot of what the system is doing is allowing the DM to go, “Yes. You plead your case to the person in charge. They’re cool with whatever PC shenanigan you want to do and are being pretty overbearing about. But you’re going to have to convince more people.” Maybe I just have an issue with my players running roughshod over whatever important NPCs I let them talk to, but I bet that experience is pretty universal. The Influence system lets you quantify whether the players have accumulated enough social effort towards putting their schemes into motion, rather than them feeling like they made a strong case to one NPC and therefore all the armies of the realm should back them up.

Plus, players like to roll dice and see a number go up. Knowing they are at least making progress toward getting what they want is a stress relief valve for a murky, heavy-roleplaying world of fragile alliances.

The full system will include rules for how opposing NPCs can fight back against PC schemes. It’s one thing to gradually talk to NPCs enough that they finally cave to what the players want to do. It’s another if they need to race against a clock to beat their rivals with a competing agenda, or at least identify them so they can take them off the social chessboard.

If this sounds cool to you, please check out the Quickstart and consider backing the project!

Shadow City Mysteries

September 10, 2024

samhaine Game Design, Setting Design, Video Game Design 5e, D&D, noir, Shadow City Mysteries Comments Off on Shadow City Mysteries

Hey all! Long time, no posts. My radio silence has a lot to do with not liking the new WordPress posting experience (and I can’t even open the dashboard in Firefox anymore), working hard to figure out how to become fanfic famous, and just generally running campaigns that don’t lend themselves to a lot of house rules that are interesting to share (though I have many new feelings about how many OP powers slipped into Changeling: the Dreaming 20th without playtesting).

But also, for the last couple of years I’ve been working with several friends to put together Shadow City Mysteries. The high concept for the setting is, “a Clockwork Noir that is Blade Runner by way of Lovecraft Country set in Frank Miller’s Sin City.” It’s a low-magic fantasy world that’s managed to hit a level of civilization that looks a lot from the outside like the settings of many early-20th-century noir films. But there’s enough mysticism and weird technology (most of which is based on an inexplicably-rotating material that allows self-powering clockwork) to keep it interesting for the genre fiction set.

Also, due to a divine calamity some centuries ago, the world is literally in black and white, save for the few pops of color from supernatural things and the mystery stone that powers technology.

We are working on several types of media for the setting, including a narrative adventure game that you can wishlist on Steam, but today’s release is more at home in this blog since we’re doing a 5e-compatible roleplaying game. In addition to building full new classes and subclasses to support the setting, we’re putting in a bunch of other subsystems like influence, crafting, and stronghold building for players and city/relationship map and mystery creation for DMs. So hopefully even if you aren’t huge into D&D, there are still a bunch of useful ideas in there for any city- or mystery-based campaign.

You can back it now!

And if you are at all curious before backing, we have an extensive quickstart guide (at the top of that page) with an introductory adventure and taste of some of the subsystems. I plan to talk about them in a little more detail here over the next couple of weeks.

D&D 5e: Treasure Averages

August 22, 2022

samhaine Game Design 5e, D&D, items 1 Comment

I revisited and expanded my treasure counts from this post. This is basically a way to determine whether you’re giving out treasure in line with what the DMG assumes (I suspect most people are not; all totaled like this, it feels like more than I’ve seen in most campaigns I’ve played in). Obviously, you can give more or less for your table, but I suspect with the way it’s locked behind random tables, incidental loot, and variable numbers of hoard per tier, most DMs don’t even know what is anticipated.

Overview

Based on DMG suggestions, a party of four PCs should acquire the following values across the tiers of play:

Tier	Levels	Total GP Value	Magic Items	Hoard Value	Individual Value	Magic Value
1	1-4	10,203	72%	2,630	180	7,393
2	5-10	142,034	36%	81,797	8,835	51,402
3	11-16	852,533	42%	434,550	55,873	362,110
4	17-20	3,824,977	23%	2,688,200	254,100	882,677

	Items
Tier	Common	Uncommon	Rare	Very Rare	Legendary
1	5.4	5.7	1.9
2	9	16.2	6.8	1
3	3.6	7.9	10.9	8.3	1.3
4		0.2	5.2	14.2	6.4

For example, across the entirety of tier 1 (levels 1-4), the party should find 10,203 gp value of treasure, 72% of it in magic items (or 2,630 gp value in hoards, 180 gp value in individual treasure, and 7,393 gp value in magic items). That magic item value is on average made up of about 5 common items, 6 uncommon, and 2 rare.

Increase the GP Value (and items awarded) proportionately for parties larger or smaller than four.

When awarding magical items, this table assumes that the GP Value of the item is in the middle of its range, or:

Common: 75 gp
Uncommon: 300 gp
Rare: 2,750 gp
Very Rare: 27,500 gp
Legendary: 75,000 gp

For example, if you award a Rare item, remove 2,750 gp from the budget for that tier.

Mathematical Figuring

Hoard Wealth

Page 133 of the DMG suggests that a typical party has seven hoards at Tier 1, eighteen at Tier 2, twelve at Tier 3, and eight at Tier 4.

The average of the cash treasure (including gems and art) on these treasure tables are as follows:

	Hoard gp value
CR 0-4	375.70
CR 5-10	4,544.30
CR 11-16	36,212.50
CR 17+	336,025.00

Thus, the number of hoards expected per tier indicate that the total average value is:

	Hoard Value
1-4	2,630
5-10	81,797
11-16	434,550
17+	2,688,200

Individual Encounters

The averages of the individual cash awards on page 136 of the DMG break down as follows:

	Individual gp value
CR 0-4	4.97
CR 5-10	92.50
CR 11-16	946.75
CR 17+	8,470.00

Assuming this is awarded as the “pocket change” for a medium encounter, the following are the expected total number of encounters if you only had medium encounters of the correct level:

Level	Encounters	GP/Encounter	Total GP
1	6	5	30
2	6	5	30
3	12	5	60
4	12	5	60
5	17	93	1,581
6	15	93	1,395
7	15	93	1,395
8	16	93	1,488
9	14	93	1,302
10	18	93	1,674
11	9	947	8,523
12	10	947	9,470
13	9	947	8,523
14	10	947	9,470
15	11	947	10,417
16	10	947	9,470
17	10	8470	84,700
18	10	8470	84,700
19	10	8470	84,700

Thus, for the following tiers, this is the total GP accumulated from individual encounters:

180
8,835
55,873
254,100

Magic Items

The hoard tables also include rolls on magic item tables. Averaging the chances for each table, each tier has the following average number of rolls per table:

	Mix of Magic Items
1-4	A x 6, B x 3, C x 2, F x 2
5-10	A x 10, B x 9, C x 5, D x 1, F x 6, G x 2
11-16	A x 4, B x 6, C x 9, D x 5, E x 1, F x 1, G x 2, H x 3, I x 1
17+	C x 4, D x 9, E x 6, G x 1, H x 2, I x 4

The rarity of items on each table breaks down as follows:

	C	U	R	VR	L	Value
A	90	10				98
B		100				300
C		4	96			2,652
D			1	99		27,253
E				50	50	51,250
F		100				300
G		2	98			2,701
H		2	6	92		25,471
I			4	12	84	66,410

Taking the average value of items at each rarity (as discussed above), you can give an approximate value to each table, on the right of above table.

Finally, combining that average value with the number of rolls for each table per tier, you get the following total values for magic items:

	Magic
1-4	7,393
5-10	51,402
11-16	362,110
17+	882,677

D&D 5e Warlock Patron: The King of Dreams

August 15, 2022

samhaine Game Design 5e, 5e Character Options, D&D, Warlock Comments Off on D&D 5e Warlock Patron: The King of Dreams

On some worlds, an entity deep within the ethereal or feywild gains oversight of the concepts of dreams and nightmares. When such a being is in play, sleeping creatures are, in a real sense, casting their minds into the realm of the King of Dreams. In such places, dreams and nightmares might become coherent, thinking entities in their own right, and gain enough power to threaten the waking world.

Far from omniscient or omnipotent, the King of Dreams often must rely upon servants to attempt to police the vast realm of dreams and the recalcitrant denizens therein. While tending to favor relying on other dreams and nightmares forged by their own hand, sometimes they will speak to a gifted dreamer and offer powers in exchange for service in maintaining the dream realm.

Warlocks of the King of Dreams are often tasked with hunting down rogue dreams and nightmares. These may take the form of fey or aberrations when they escape to the waking world, or may simply hide in the recurring dreams of certain mortals for a Sleepwalker to find. The warlocks may also be sent on more whimsical quests: some religious philosophers struggle to cleanly explain the difference between the King of Dreams and any other Archfey.

Pacts

Blade: Pact weapons of the King of Dreams seem altogether too fanciful to be real; the idea of the weapon, but not the reality. They tend to be overly large and have adornments that no waking smith would include. And yet, they strike as effectively as any mundane weapon.
Chain: Devotees of the King of Dreams often have a raven tasked to their aid, a protector and a spy for their patron. It has the statistics of the Psychopomp, though instead of being able to transport incorporeal undead, it can transport dream and nightmare fey and aberrations.
Tome: A classic dream journal, a dream-pact warlock’s book of shadows is often fanciful, with multicolored ribbon bookmarks, an intricate cover, and beautiful images that spontaneously accompany the spells inscribed within.
Blood: Blood-pact warlocks of the King of Dreams are generally descended from those that procreated while stuck in a coma, deeply linked to the realm of dreams while bringing a child into the world.

Features

Warlock Level	Feature
1st	Expanded Spell List, Lucidity
6th	Sleepwalker
10th	Sandman
14th	Dreamworld

Expanded Spell List

The King of Dreams lets you choose from an expanded list of spells when you learn a warlock spell. The following spells are added to the warlock spell list for you.

Spell Level	Spells
1st	silent image, sleep
2nd	calm emotions, phantasmal force
3rd	catnap (xge), phantom steed
4th	confusion, phantasmal killer
5th	modify memory, seeming

Lucidity

At 1st level, magic can’t put you to sleep unless you choose to let it affect you. Additionally, when sleeping (naturally or through voluntary acceptance of magical sleep), you retain a rudimentary awareness of the world around you. You do not have disadvantage on Wisdom (Perception) checks made while sleeping, and may wake and act immediately on your initiative when danger occurs while you are sleeping. You may, similarly, choose to wake immediately if subjected to danger that affects you in your dreams. These abilities do not apply when your patron puts you to sleep.

If you are normally incapable of sleep you may choose to sleep and dream. If you would normally rest fewer hours (e.g., four hours for trance), you only need to sleep this long to complete a long rest.

You have advantage on saving throws against illusion and enchantment spells, and on ability checks to recognize an illusion. You may use your action to grant a target you can touch a new saving throw to end an illusion or enchantment spell. At the DM’s discretion, these abilities also apply to effects that are similar to illusion or enchantment spells, but not technically spells.

You have advantage on Wisdom (Insight) rolls against creatures that dream.

Sleepwalker

Starting at 6th level, you gain the ability to walk through dreams. While sleeping, you may enter the dreams of any other sleeping creature within ten feet per point of proficiency bonus. The DM can describe the creature’s dreams to greater or lesser extent. You may encounter creatures of the dream realm within these visions, interacting with them as if you were in a waking encounter with them and the dreamer. Regardless of the outcome, you gain advantage on Charisma checks against the dreamer for 12 hours after they wake, due to your insight into their mind.

You may also use this ability to visit the realm of your patron while you sleep, and converse with them. At your patron’s whim, you may be led to other dreams or dream realms, and interact with them as if you were in a waking encounter.

Additionally, you gain resistance to Psychic damage.

Sandman

Starting at 10th level, you gain the ability to send other creatures directly to sleep, regardless of hit points. As a bonus action when you hit a target you can see with a weapon attack or spell (or the target fails a save against one of your spells), you may force the target to make a Wisdom saving throw against your spell save DC or fall asleep as if affected by the sleep spell. Undead and creatures immune to charm have advantage on this saving throw. If you affected multiple targets with the triggering attack or spell, you must choose one creature affected to be subject to this effect. You may use this ability a number of times equal to your proficiency bonus, and regain all expended uses when you finish a long rest.

Additionally, you add the dream spell to your spell list (and may choose another spell if you had already learned this spell).

Dreamworld

You gain conjure fey (6th), mirage arcane (7th), demiplane (8th), and weird (9th) as additional uses of your Mystic Arcanum for the listed level (you may cast the spell instead of the spell you have chosen at that level).

After you take damage, you may use your reaction to enter the Ethereal plane, making it more difficult to affect you with subsequent attacks. You return to your original plane at the start of your turn.

Invocations

Warlocks of the King of Dreams count as warlocks of the Archfey to qualify for invocations.

Dream Vortex

Prerequisite: King of Dreams patron, 5th level warlock, Pact of the Blood feature

You add summon fey (tce) as a known warlock spell (and may choose another spell if you had already learned this spell).

When you cast summon fey or conjure fey, the fey spirit takes the form of a dream or nightmare of a creature within 60 feet of you when you cast the spell; that target has disadvantage on saving throws against the summoned creature’s abilities, and the summoned creature has advantage on attack rolls against that target.

Some Simple Gambling Systems

August 1, 2022

samhaine Game Design gambling Comments Off on Some Simple Gambling Systems

So your players have gone into a casino and want to gamble? Here are a few basic systems for some common games. These are mostly tuned for D20, but should work for other game systems with minimal adjusting.

Roulette

An American-style roulette wheel has 38 numbers, so the odds are pretty easy to simulate with a d20 roll (rerolling 1s). In this system, players don’t really specify exactly what they bet (it’s not a pure simulation), just the odds they’re going for. Payout indicates how much they’ll win times what they bid (e.g., a Single Number returns 36 gp if the bet was 1 gp).

If multiple PCs are playing at once, assume they coordinate their betting (e.g., if one player is betting Column, and another bets Single Number, assume the first player bet the same column that contained the second player’s single number); this way, high numbers are good for all players.

Payout Table

Bet	Payout	Roll
Single Number	36	20*
Split	18	20
Street	12	19-20*
Corner	9	19-20
Green Corner	7	18-20*
Line	6	18-20
Column	3	15-20
Red/Black, Odd/Even, or 18 Numbers	2	11-20

Always reroll 1s
* If you roll a 20, you must also get a 2 on a d2 (or some other kind of tie-breaker) for it to count as a win

Using Powers and Skills

Lucky: Players with luck that lets them periodically reroll a die can just reroll and take the better result. If the game features some kind of always-on minor luck, treating all results as one higher (up to a max of 20) is probably fair, depending on how reliable the character’s luck is.
Telekinesis: If the player has some kind of invisible way to influence the fall of the ball in the wheel, you may call for some kind of reaction check to do it fast enough to get a useful result. The player can provide an arbitrary bonus to the roll, but for anything higher than a +1, nearby staff members get a perception check to notice that the ball is behaving oddly. If multiple players at the table are also trying to influence it, there might be a contested roll as invisible forces fight over control of the ball.
Precognition: Depending on the strength and accuracy of precognition, the character can generally just make as much money as they want at roulette. In general, if a precog plays conservatively (mostly making 2:1 bets and losing slightly less often than they win) the cheating may only be discovered over long amounts of time. However, if the precog cannot get a constant feed of the future easily, they may have to make larger bets, and the staff will likely be very interested in looking into someone that suddenly bets big on a high-payout result after previously-normal play (leading to contested social and perception rolls).
Telepathy: Mind reading is not helpful. The croupier doesn’t know the result any more than the players do. Mental control might get the croupier to miscall a number or mispay a bet, but this is likely to be immediately obvious to anyone else paying attention. There are safer ways to use mind-control to get money.

Slots

Slot machines have large payouts with commensurately small chances. Assume that a relatively-fair slot machine will be set up with about a 96-97% payout rate: for every 100 coins deposited in the machine, the machine returns 96 or 97, and keeps 2 or 3.

This payout isn’t usually as simple as 1/100 spins pays the full money, and the rest lose. Some may be mega-payouts that ultimately pay out less than 1/100 times, but pay a lot when they do hit. Others may be designed for variable reinforcement, paying out much more frequently for smaller amounts. Two basic systems for the two types are below.

Jackpot Slots

The player rolls one or more d20s, depending on the size of the jackpot. Only with all dice showing 20 does the machine hit the jackpot and pay out the listed amount. The jackpot is a multiple of the cost of the payment to play (e.g., a 19 jackpot for a cp coin slot returns 19 cp).

d20s	Jackpot
1	19
2	388
3	7,760
4	155,200
5	3,104,000

Variable Reinforcement Slots

This slot machine pays out more often, but pays out less. Roll a d20 for each play, and the machine pays out based on the roll (e.g., on a 19, which pays out 4, one coin was put into the machine and four came back out). On a roll of 20, roll another d20 and compare to the jackpot lines.

Roll	Payout
1-16	0
17	2
18	3
19	4
20	Jackpot
Jackpot + 1-14	5
Jackpot + 15-17	10
Jackpot + 18-19	30
Jackpot + 20	50

Using Powers and Skills

Lucky: For luck that allows rerolling a die, it works normally on slot machines (choose which of the dice to reroll). For smaller, more consistent luck, treat rolls as one higher (and may require some kind of roll to activate). In general, this latter type of luck shifts the payout so the character can consistently make +50% over a long play session (e.g., after spending 300 coins on the slots, the character will have 450 coins). On average, it takes about six seconds to put in a coin and get a result on a standard slot machine (hey, a round!), so an attentive slot player can put in 600 coins in an hour, getting back 900 with this more consistent kind of luck. The staff are likely to notice if this continues for quite some time, but likely won’t question it for the first hour or two.
Precognition: Seeing the future has very little effect on a standard one-coin slot machine: assume the inner-workings aren’t truly random enough that a precog can time the pull of the lever to generate a better result. If the precog has access to several of them, however, they can identify the one most likely to pay out at a given moment. Make whatever rolls are necessary to activate the power, then preroll for each of the machines, tell the precog the result, and let them play the ones with the better payout. This is not likely to make much difference in the short run (since once that machine is used, it rerolls normally for the next pull), but might if the precog can wander past a row of slots every so often after others have used them. As usual for cheating, the staff will eventually notice someone wandering the aisles, only playing slot machines that are ready to pay out.

Blackjack

Blackjack tends to have a much smaller house edge than roulette or slots, giving a standard player with basic understanding of the game and no special powers a basically-even chance of winning or losing money over time. A conservative player that comes to the table with 1000 coins, on average, will walk away with 997-999.

For standard play, simply ask the player how much they’re coming to the table to bid for a session. Assume a normal session is at least a hour of play, and the table bet maximum may influence how much a player could reasonable play at a table (a character looking to play with 1000 gp over an hour probably can’t play at the table with a silver piece per round betting limit).

Roll 2d20, add them together, and compare the result to the following chart. The payout is the percentage of the character’s starting money (e.g., on a roll of 21, the player basically came out even, taking away as much as they came to bet, though there may have been some ups and downs during the session, and on a roll of 23 a character that walked up ready to drop 10 gp walks away with 11 gp).

Payout Table

Roll	Payout
2-12	0%
13-14	20%
15-16	40%
17-18	60%
19-20	80%
21	100%
22-24	110%
25-28	140%
29-31	180%
32-34	210%
35-37	250%
38-39	350%
40	750%

Using Powers and Skills

Gambling Skill: Unlike the previous games, skill can have a reasonably large effect at blackjack. A character that has no idea how to play might make bad bets and lose more often. Meanwhile, a skilled character that’s learned how to count cards can turn the house edge to a mild edge for themselves. Make an intelligence-based gambling skill check, with the difficulty based on how complicated the house’s shuffling system is (low for a single deck, increasing to high difficulty for multiple decks mixed together and various rules for reshuffling). A significant failure against the difficulty may impose a -1 to the final total of 2d20. A success adds +1. Major success may add +2 or +3, at the GM’s discretion. Casinos tend to be on the lookout for card counters that win big over time, banning them from continuing to play.
Lucky: For luck that allows rerolling a die, it works normally on the result of blackjack (chose which of the dice to reroll). For smaller, more consistent luck, treat the result as one higher (and may require some kind of roll to activate). Both of these stack with gambling skill.
Precognition: Usually blackjack is played over so many hands, with enough of a table limit, that limited-use precognition is not very helpful: if you can only see the future a few times a day, you’re just as likely to see a hand where the dealer wins as one where you do. Table limits to bets likely keep this from making a difference (and it might be very suspicious to only bet the table limit a couple of times when you barely beat the dealer). Treat the result of this as a +1 for every use of precognition for the session. Meanwhile, always-on precognition, as with roulette, can let you win as much as you want from blackjack, and the trick is to keep from getting caught. Add as big a number as you’d like to the die result, but the bigger the number, the more suspicious the staff will be.
Telepathy: As with roulette, there isn’t a lot of hidden information for mind reading to find, and mind control to mess up the dealer is likely to be noticed by all the eyes on the table.

Poker

Alone among the games in this list, poker isn’t played against the casino, and is purely about the skill and luck of the players. Generally, the house either takes nothing from poker (though in this case many suspect some consistent players are working for the house) or takes a small rake from the table or amount of the tournament pot. But, unlike the other games, you don’t stand to win functionally-unlimited house money if you’re really lucky: if you’re playing poker against three other people, a win just gets you the money the other players are willing to put into the pot.

Basic Game

At the beginning of the game, each gambler puts in the standard amount of the table for chips (e.g., at a 10 gp table, it costs 10 gp to play).

Each gambler at the table makes a gambling skill check representing several rounds of play (taking several minutes for each round). The gambler that rolls lowest goes bust. Distribute their current chips evenly around the table, with the remainder going to the highest roll. That player might be able to buy back in at the table cost to keep playing.

Repeat this roll for each round, slowly eliminating players until there is only one left. If the table allows it, a gambler may exit with their current value in chips before rolling for a round, rather than risking going bust.

For example, a 10 gp table has four players. After the first round, one player goes bust and the remaining players now have 13 gp, 13 gp, and 14 gp, but the bust player buys back in for 10 gp. After the second round, one of the 13 gp players goes bust (split 4 gp, 4 gp, and 5 gp), leaving totals of 14 gp, 17 gp, and 19 gp (the same player rolled highest both rounds). At this point, the player with 17 gp exits while still ahead. After the final round, the winner walks away with 14 + 19 gp (33 gp).

Tournament Play

Tournaments generally take a buy-in at the beginning, do not let players that go bust buy back in, and do not let players walk away while they’re ahead. Each match of the tournament is basically a table of gamblers trying to eliminate all but one, who moves on to the next round. Obviously, different tournaments might change some of these rules, but they simplify play overall.

Essentially, iterate multiple basic games, with the player characters only moving on if they win their tables. As a hedge against one bad roll making you go bust even though you handily won previous rounds (and thus should have a big chip advantage), you might choose to give the winner of each round a cumulative +1 for subsequent rounds at the same table.

Gradually increase the skill of the opponents at the table as the player characters approach the final match of the tournament.

If they are eliminated early, players may receive a prize for previous table wins. For simplicity, assume they recoup their tournament entry fee for winning each match (e.g., 4x their entry fee for being eliminated in match 5). The overall winner of the tournament instead gets half the total entry fees. (You can do more exact math if you want; this is a quick and dirty way to split it up.)

Using Powers and Skills

Gambling Skill: Gambling skill is key to the whole operation, and already built into the basic rules. Note that players might choose to configure exactly how their skill manifests, based on whether they’re bluffing, purely playing the odds based on visible cards, or trying to catch other people bluffing (i.e., for D&D 5e, player’s choice of using Charisma, Intelligence, or Wisdom as the attribute involved in the Cards tool roll).
Skill-based Cheating: Sleight-of-hand is the traditional way to cheat at cards. The type of game might make this harder or easier to do (e.g., it’s pretty hard to do for televised Texas Hold’em, but might be fairly easy in a dimly-lit pirate bar playing stud). Each round of a match, make a contested check against the non-allied onlooker with the highest perception, on success gain a bonus to the round’s gambling roll, and on a major failure you’re caught. (For 5e, roll Dexterity (Sleight of Hand) against the highest Passive Perception of anyone that might turn you in for cheating. On success, gain Advantage on your gambling roll, but if you fail by 5 or more, you’re caught cheating.)
Lucky: For luck that allows rerolling a die, it works normally on the gambling check each round. For smaller, more consistent luck, gain a +1 or the equivalent to your gambling rolls.
Precognition: Poker is iterated over enough hands, that a single glimpse of the future usually won’t completely swing the match, but can reveal whether you’ll win a high-value hand or should avoid going bust trying to match the player with the better result. Treat a limited use of precognition as Skill-Based Cheating or Lucky, letting you reroll a round and take the better result. If you have always-on precognition, act as if you’re doing Skill-Based Cheating on every round (there’s still some luck involved in the cards you get), and prepare to make social checks to prevent others from realizing how easy it is to win.
Telepathy/Clairvoyance: The ability to know what cards another player has is massive, either by reading their mind or viewing their cards. Similarly, mind control can fairly-subtly convince a player to bet big on your high hands or fail to push you when they’ve got a winning hand. Essentially, if you’ve successfully used telepathy on another gambler at the table, you can cause them to automatically go bust instead of the actual loser after the rolls are revealed for the round; you generally want to wait to use this until you’d go bust if they didn’t.

Reconceptualizing D&D 5e as Supers

July 25, 2022

samhaine Game Design 5e, D&D, superheroes Comments Off on Reconceptualizing D&D 5e as Supers

I’ve been thinking about this since watching Unsleeping City (which is more modern occult than supers, but a lot of the concepts carry over). The idea is basically to just use D&D 5e with as little conversion as possible to run a modern-day supers game. D&D characters are already fairly superheroic, especially at high level.

My initial inclination was to do a ton of work with custom classes and abilities to fully turn it into a supers game, but, honestly, I think you can get most of the way there changing very little. You just have to reimagine a lot of the mechanics from medieval fantasy to modern pulp. And, this way, it’s probably a lot easier of a sell to your players who are familiar with D&D.

Note that this isn’t really meant to model existing supers franchises, though the examples indicate that it can get closer than you’d think. You probably can’t use it to model any given hero’s powers closely enough to replicate them as a PC (though you can get a lot closer as the DM making an arbitrary NPC stat block).

Ability Scores

10 is the true human level of basic competence. Most individuals have all of their scores at 10 or lower.
12 is well above average. Many people that excel at their careers and pursuits have no scores higher than a 12.
14 is exceptional competence. Few people have a 14, and extremely few have more than one ability score at a 14 or higher. Assume that IQ/10 basically equals Intelligence, so Int 14 is a genius IQ, and other scores are similar outliers.
16 is the practical maximum for most humans. Paragons of various disciplines might have a 16. These are olympic athletes (Str, Dex, or Con), top-of-field geniuses (Int or Wis), or enduring global celebrities (Cha).
18 is the technical maximum for true outliers. The strongest unaugmented powerlifter in the world has an 18 strength. Stephen Hawking likely had an 18 intelligence.
20 is beyond human. Scores this high and above are only available to those that are augmented.

Player characters generate their ability scores normally for D&D, just use these as guidelines for how omnicompetent they are compared to baseline humans. And when creating unaugmented human NPCs, try to keep their ability scores within this frame.

It is up to the DM to decide whether to create a dramatic ramp on the lifting chart for strength to treat 20 as much more superhuman than normal. At the very least, you should allow more dramatic lifting stunts than you otherwise would, even if the practical carrying capacity isn’t increased that much from the normal chart (it’s not like supers tend to carry a ton of gear like fantasy characters anyway). At the very least, as noted in the Equipment and Improvised Weapons section, I think Str 18 can probably throw a motorcycle and Str 20 can hit an enemy with a car (though they might not be able to carry them around indefinitely).

Races

In general, most players should use the Custom Lineage rules (from Tasha’s), or just play Variant Humans. If you want some minor superpowers that don’t make sense with your class, work with the DM to make a custom race that seems balanced.

For example, rather than build Superman as a high-level Eldritch Knight to get flight, heat vision, and cold breath, Kryptonians may simply be built as a race with a fly speed, the fire bolt cantrip, and a 1/day burning hands (which does cold instead of fire). See Classes and Spells, below.

Equipment and Improvised Weapons

The armor from your starting equipment and either one weapon or one weapon and shield from this package become “phantom gear.” Unless you are suffering some kind of power suppression, you are always considered to be wielding them. Unless it makes sense for your power set, these don’t actually manifest as spectral arms and armor, but simply represent your basic enhanced toughess (armor), punching ability (melee weapon), or reusable energy blast (ranged weapon). Feats and abilities affect the phantom weapon as they would a normal weapon of the type (e.g., great weapon master works if you’re wielding a phantom greatsword).

For example, a fighter with the basic gear might have AC 18 and a 1d8 punch (as if using a longsword and shield) or AC 16 and a 2d6 punch (as if using a greatsword).

Phantom gear may improve at story moments where your powers are enhanced (at roughly the same schedule the DM would dole out better gear in a regular campaign). For example, the fighter’s AC may improve by +2 when they go from phantom chain to phantom plate in some event that increases their durability.

Since you can only choose one weapon, you will need to use improvised weapons for whichever of melee or ranged your phantom weapon doesn’t cover. In general, at Str up to 14, you can lift things that count as d6 damage weapons (and might have finesse), at Str 16 you can lift 2d6 weapons (objects up to a couple hundred pounds), at Str 18 you can lift 3d6 weapons (objects up to half a ton), and at Str 20 you can lift 4d6 weapons (objects up to a ton or more). It’s up to the DM whether cars to throw at people are readily available and/or reusable, so even high-strength characters may be limited to lesser improvised weapons depending on the environment. And picking up such a weapon uses up your bonus action in most cases (possibly also your move to get to it). Finally, improvised weapons don’t count for feats and abilities that affect specific weapons.

Tech-based characters (or your modern fantasy characters that actually wear armor and wield swords) may choose to forego phantom equipment, and represent their capabilities with physical gear. In this case, they should probably treat all their equipment as +1 enhancement higher than it would otherwise be, as a bonus for being able to disarm them without power suppression.

In general, replace physical weapons with their closest modern equivalent. This mostly means that guns just swap in for bows without any practical changes. Yes, a modern firearm should be way more deadly than a shortbow in a true simulation, but for pulp games, it doesn’t really matter that much.

Classes and Spells

Think of classes as your main powerset, and do your best to make the concept for your powers fit. A speedster might be a barbarian or monk (or rogue that just uses cunning action to dash). Most strength-based characters represent various types of brick, dexterity-based characters are your ninjas and acrobats, and casters are blasters.

If the character concept really doesn’t support a particular class ability, the DM should allow the player to swap to something equivalently powerful that makes more sense. But try to do this as little as possible, since the whole draw of this is to avoid having to make a ton of houseruled classes.

While prepared casters usually represent your true Dr. Strange types, and warlocks may be witches, spontaneous casters and most half-casters use spells to represent various energy projection powers and miscellaneous utility powers. At minimum, allow spells that represent powers to switch to the character’s primary energy type (e.g., for a sorcerer that’s a fire blaster, all of their damage spells should be switched to do fire damage). Most “spells” also don’t really have components, though you can still impose a monetary cost on the ones with expensive material components as part of their balance. In general, try to limit your character to spells that make sense, and the DM should be generous in allowing you to describe the effects of a spell in a way that makes more sense for your concept (e.g., the charm and suggestion spells as mind-control or super-Charisma).

For some characters, the wide raft of spells don’t make a lot of sense, because they’re really just trying to pick up a particular power (e.g., flight). As noted above, this might work better as a custom race. But if you really just want to have one trick, the DM can experiment with giving you more spell slots but fewer known spells (though try this gradually and be careful of balance; there are probably certain spells that could make this too good).

Also think heavily about spells per day as having some level of narrative implication. Maybe your Cypher-esque omniglot can’t technically run tongues all day for 100% linguistic comprehension as you conceived, but should be able to get it running most of the time when it matters. If there are still aliens to interpret for after running out of spell slots, maybe you just have a stress headache or need to do something else for a while.

Skills, Tools, and Languages

Not all of the standard skills make sense for a modern supers campaign. However, standard sheets don’t make it easy to remove and add skills, so I’ve endeavored to make the transfer below as simple as possible. You may just have to make a note somewhere to remember that Arcana is actually Science.

Science replaces Arcana, and represents most hard sciences (biology is still Medicine and Nature).
Academics replaces History, expanding it to a broad knowledge of liberal arts education topics.
Nature remains the same, but takes on more of Survival’s ability to forage in the wilderness.
Occult replaces Religion, and covers Religion, Arcana, and other esoteric, mystical concepts.
Streetwise replaces Survival, and focuses more on navigation and tracking in an urban environment (allowing Nature to carry more of the rare out-of-city adventure tropes).

Computers are a new tool proficiency. You may also want to create separate tool proficiencies for things like Electronics. Driving a car is Land Vehicles. You might also add Air Vehicles for planes. PCs should have a broad ability to swap out existing tool proficiencies for the modern technology ones.

Common is replaced by the dominant language of the country in which you’re setting your game. Allow players to swap other fantasy languages for Earth languages. If you want to play a true polyglot, consider getting the tongues spell, as mentioned above, rather than chasing down adding every possible language to your sheet.

Knockback

This is an optional rule to have more cinematic fights like in the comics.

Whenever you take damage from a kinetic or explosive source that could presumably send you flying, you may reduce the damage to half and move away a number of feet equal to the damage ultimately taken (e.g., if you take 20 damage and halve it for knockback, you suffer 10 damage and fly back 10 feet). This is a free action that stacks with reactions such as Uncanny Dodge; it’s fair for characters in supers fights to be twice as durable if they’re willing to get smashed through walls.

If this knocks you off a ledge, you suffer falling damage normally. If you would hit a wall, you go through the wall if the damage you took would also be enough to break it. This does not generally do additional damage to you, but is just cinematic.

If the damage you took is higher than your Dexterity score, you fall prone at the end of the knockback. If it is equal or lower, you can keep your feet (unless you are also knocked off a ledge).

Enemies

In general, it’s pretty easy to convert standard monsters to supers threats. Swapping their type to Construct for robots or Monstrosity for science mutants goes a long way. Tweak resistances and immunities to make sense, and change how you describe the creature and you can get away with reusing stats.

For human threats, keep the rules about ability scores in mind, if only for verisimilitude. In general, unaugmented humans should probably be limited to CR 1 or less. Anything higher, and you’re looking at standard-issue power armor and laser weapons, or explaining why they have low-level powers.

In general, you have the same problem as in regular D&D justifying why high-CR intelligent NPCs are working as mooks for an even bigger villain rather than setting up their own enterprise in another town where they’re less likely to get punched.

Introduction: What is a Mystery?

Components

Mystery Types

Rolling Up a Mystery

Type

Hooks

Suspects

Witnesses

Locations

Building Out Your Mystery

Clues

Complications

Revelations

Influence

Conversations

Gladhanding

Crafting/Art

Research/Decryption

Instruction/Drilling

Holding Improvement

Gambling/Petty Crimes

Weapons

Asmodeus’ Star

Dawnblade

Drunkard’s Foil

Duelist’s Mirror

Ghartok’s Flindbars

Khopesh of Disarming

Nethys’ Chaos Hammer

Pickman’s Model

Vigil Officer’s Axe

Foci

Alaznist’s Angry Red Orb

Minderhal’s Ball Peen #7

Staff of the Parchlands

Overview

Mathematical Figuring

Hoard Wealth

Individual Encounters

Magic Items

Pacts

Features

Expanded Spell List

Lucidity

Sleepwalker

Sandman

Dreamworld

Invocations

Dream Vortex

Roulette

Payout Table

Using Powers and Skills

Slots

Jackpot Slots

Variable Reinforcement Slots

Using Powers and Skills

Blackjack

Payout Table

Using Powers and Skills

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