Here's another Instagram find. Drew Rausch does these very cool limited pallet images with lots of black and silhouette. Mostly horror or Halloween themed. They're just wicked and fun. He has prints and maybe some mini comics on his site. Good stuff.
Or are you? And why did I go with something so common, so ho-hum unoriginal as hit points?
DEATH OR DEBASEMENT?
I didn't want zero HP to simply mean death. But I didn't want any fiddly "you really really die at -10" type of stuff. So in the end it seemed obvious to me and a light bulb went off. Just let the damn players decide it.
You get chewed on by a 12-legged lizard and reduced to zero HP. The GM looks at you and asks "Well, are you dead?". It's your choice, see. But a choice with a price.
"I choose death."
Ok, then you make a new character and they get a little benefit for your noble choice.
"No, the lizard chews me up and spits me out because of the nasty taste. I had just ate that dead hinrat we found and the thing's foulness permeated my body. I am alive, but unconscious."
Cool! Now roll on a little table because you can't just cheat death for nothing. You are going to have some kind of permanent problem. A missing limb? A basic stat gets worse?
WHY HP?
Because they work. In action adventure games, in my experience, this kind of system just works. It's a solid mechanic that makes sense and everyone understands it. I fiddled around with different kinds of systems and nothing sang to me. Everything felt like an attempt to avoid HP, but still felt like "you might as well have HP".
I like hit points. What can I say?
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ORIGINS OF THE THREE STAT SCHEME
Because GOZR's system started its life as another game called Dead Wizards, a sword & sorcery RPG set in the city of Kanebok, which later was folded into the Black Pudding setting of Yria. (I have a lot of lore that only really matters in my head, but I gotta say it out loud.)
I dropped Dead Wizards but had already conceived of the rudimentary elements of the game's system. I thought about my favorite sword & sorcery characters and what kinds of things they got up to. I decided that they most often deal with situations by their wits (Cunning), strength and skill (Prowess), and their natural or supernatural reaction to sorcery (Magic).
I think this concept is well-supported in RPGs. Games like Into the Odd, GURPS, Tri-Stat, Big Eyes Small Mouth, and Barbarians of Lemuria have three or four stats. D&D can be boiled down to three basic types of characters: fighting, clever sneak, and wizard*. Daniel Sell, author of Troika!, has a blog post that looms large in my brain and has influenced my thinking on games ever since I read it many years ago. In that post, he proposes an OSR house rule where all PCs are "adventurers" and at each level of experience you pick one of three skill sets to improve. And yes, they are fighting, skill use, and magic.
My concept of the game is that everyone is a hero, in the S&S sense. Larger than life. A cut above. Not your run of the mill milksop. So when it comes to dice rolling, you really only deal with things by might, skill, or sorcery.
*Original D&D had fighter, cleric, and magic-user. This is fine... but in sword & sorcery (as I perceive it) you don't need a cleric. The wizard and the priest are often one and the same. But I do think it's a useful distinction to include a sneak along with a fighter. It's elegant.
WHY STATS ARE LOWER-IS-BETTER
So that explains why I went with three stats. But why are the stats low instead of high? A lot of folks struggle with this. But it's super simple.
They started out as D&D armor class or saving throws.
The first iteration of Dead Wizards was basically a hack of OD&D. But then I morphed it to use the original armor class system as the core mechanic. Then it was as short leap of logic to say "hey, every roll is a saving throw!" or "hey, this is just like rolling to hit an AC in old D&D.".
And that meant the stats needed to get lower as they got better, exactly like a saving throw. I called them Action Classes because that makes sense to me and I thought the acronym "AC" was easy. Yeah I know... this is confusing to some folks because it's not really armor class. But just think of it like this... "what the AC of this action?"... and suddenly it'll make perfect sense to you, I promise.
The great benefit of this is that you know your target number already. It's right there on your character sheet. Since all rolls are player-facing, that means you know exactly what to roll. "My AC for smacking that wizard in the face is 10. I need to roll 10+ on a d20 to ring his stupid bell."
The GM can impose "unluck" to give you a -2 or worse penalty on that d20 roll to give some tooth to more dangerous tasks. And enemies have "threat", which allows them to do unexpected rules-breaking things like taking half damage or resisting magic.
WHY NO STAT-GETS-GOODER RULES?
The reason GOZR has no built-in method for improving those basic stats is also really simple. I didn't want power bloat. I didn't want to have a clunky system for improving a stat too much since you would end up with various modifiers anyway. If you start the game with an 8 in Prowess, then your fighting skill is 65% right out of the gate even if you have nothing to modify it. Finding a weird sword might get you some +1 or something. Being Lucky gets you +2. You can quickly approach 80% or better.
Your ACs can change, but they will do so organically, through play. For example, my friend Andy ran a wonderful GOZR adventure for our Monday night group and my gooz's Prowess was improved by 1 due to messing around with a magical (or super science?) dolmen of some sort. That's how you do it.
SUMMARY
• GOZR has three stats because those are the three things that S&S adventurers tend to muck around with.
• GOZR stats are lower-is-better because the stat itself is the target to roll.
• GOZR doesn't have built-in stat improvement rules because you don't need them.
Here's a bunch of sketches of the barbarian warrior Hymla the Horn, slayer of demons, scourge of bandits and handsy wizards, and seeker of adventure!
Hymla presented herself to me over years, at first a vague representation of slayage and only since late 2023 fully corrupting my mind and revealing her identity to me. She is here now. I can't turn her away. She has free access to my inner life.
She wants me to make comics about her. She knows about those other barbarians who have their own comics and movies and god dammit she wants hers too.
I haven't the courage to tell her no nor to tell her that if I do her comic it will go unseen by almost everyone on the planet. Only a small but elite cadre of weirdos will care.
But maybe that's enough to prevent her from gutting me from neck to navel, as she has all but promised to do.
Therefore I will do what I can, Hymla. I swear to Black Wing, god of death! But have mercy and be patient... I'm very slow at this stuff.
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Official playtesting of ZSF kicked off Monday night with a fun session zero. The group of four players (and me) created their weird PCs. The character creation rules seem to work very well... no one was confused and we had four solid PCs, some backstories, and some reasons to be together after a little over an hour. Including banter and discussions.
We started the adventure during the final 30 minutes of play. The PCs had been hired to crew the SS Stymie on a mission to check up on a lost science faculty. No other details were given other than the pay of $200 up front and $300 upon completion. Not a fortune, but a solid little gig.
The characters are a bit of a mixed bag of weirdos.
Lucian Kane is a drug-dealing devil. Literally a devil, as that is one of the 12 Forms you can roll if you choose. He bought a fake engineering background to get hired on the gig.
Z the Inscribed is a kind of experimental artificial person. Genderless, sexless, and created to aid/serve humans on a cruise ship (I think). But a tattooing incident resulted in a death and now Z, uncertain if they did it on purpose or not, is on the run and in existential crisis mode.
Nurse Twitchet is a flytrap plant person in pants. They are out in the ZSF just looking for love, it seems.
Doctor B. P. Chitterbati is a spider person and an engineer who is for damn sure very well-read.
The PCs are on board. The ship was locked down suddenly... seems the good Captain Deuce failed to pay his docking fee at Hellion Cross space station. But some quick hacking by Dr. Chitterbati silenced the alert and freed the ship for takeoff.
Now the ship is in space and the PCs learn that there are others on board... two agents of SEDCA... the ZSF's version of the CIA. Who is really behind this mission??
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Been kicking this one around a while. Black Pudding Comics... drawing from the treasure trove of characters and ideas in the zine as well as my other related works (I mean, there are a BUNCH of characters in the Meatshields of the Bleeding Ox section). Why not tell some stupid little stories about those guys?
I don't want to limit the comic to just material from the zine. Instead, the idea is to do comics that riff on the entire meta-setting of Pan-Gea, the whole "mythos" as I like to call it. There's the ancient world of Pan-Gea itself, then the sword and sorcery world of Yria (which is where the zine lives, mostly), and finally the sci-fantasy space setting of ZSF - the Zoa Space Frontier.
So my idea is to do comics of any of these flavors because they all share the same backbone: the Pan-Gea mythos. The gods and demons such as the Sun and Moon and Hunter Raven and the Worm Witch, and so on. These are ideas that have lived in my brain and in my creations for decades. A sandbox to play in. Might as well play, right?
Right now it looks like I have quite a bit of finished material that would fit nicely into the book, mixed with new stuff I'm working on.
Disclaimer: I'm high on the idea right now and it's Saturday night. This could all crash and burn. I'm just daydreaming here. We'll see.
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| I mean, look at all these goofy bastards. |
Update to my constant preaching about how much I love Sailor Kiwaguro ink.
My second bottle of the stuff went gray. I don't know how or why, but it just happened. One day I'm using it fine and it's as black as ever (which was always very dark gray, not as black as Noodler's for example). Next day I grab my brush pen and it's like... "Oh, is this the gray inked one?" But no.
I inked up a new pen with Sailor.. the ink was gray. Or, at least, much grayer than ever.
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| Turned the bottle over to show no residue at bottom. |
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| See that gray bot? That's using black ink. |
I dunno. It's fine, though. I'm still going to use it all, because I enjoy artifacts of physical media more than I ever have in my entire life.
I don't know if this is a common thing for the Sailor inks or not. I haven't done a ton of research on it.
But I've since decided against that. The "final" playtest form is a simple 2d6 additive roll, with various conditions for adding more dice, getting doubles, and so on.
Other than that, things remain mostly the same. The character sheet elements, which I've been teasing for over 2 years now, remain the same.
Playtesting soon. The game is reaching a form that I'm comfortable with. I might have too much material going on. I don't know yet. It's a big world and I just keep having ideas to fill it up. Thankfully it's the whole damn galaxy so there's plenty of room for it.
A couple years ago for Xmas I bought myself a bunch of brush pens to try out. I have been using a few of them consistently, but there were a couple I hadn't yet cracked open.
Recently I inked up this Dawegama fountain brush pen, a Chinese pen from what I can tell. Very cheap at less than $10.
It has a metal body and a snap on cap that, honestly, snaps very nicely. Cheaply made, the pocket clip is janky and wiggly. Which is fine for a cheapo.
It has a built in plunger feed. You dip the tip into your ink, then slide the plunger up to suck the ink into the chamber. The body screws off in a less than satisfying scratchy way. Not very precise tooling, doesn't feel like it'll ever seal quite as tightly as you'd want.
The tip is very soft and flexible with real brush fibers. But it isn't precise either. It doesn't come to a consistent point. You cannot get a consistent line. But you can get a huge range of thick to relatively thin, making it a useful wash or fill tool where precision isn't your primary concern.
One drawback is the body is thin so the ink chamber doesn't hold a lot. It holds slightly less than a more typical pen, from what I can tell. I say this because I burned through the chamber very quickly the first time I used it. Or it felt that way, anyway.
Like the Yongsheng 3009 (another cheap brush pen), this one gets a 2 star rating. Not the worst, but not great. I might go 2.5 out of 5... it does feel slightly better than the Yongsheng to me. For price, it's well worth having one just as an ink fill tool to play around with. But I don't see myself using this for any kind of profession or precise work. This is a sketching tool.
Here's my guide to brush pens, if you're interested.
My space fantasy RPG ZSF is on the front burner again. It is an adventure game set on the Supercalla space highway. I begin playtesting it in a month or so. This is probably the first game I ever designed around a character sheet, which I created before making any game rules. I'd say this isn't a bad way to do it, though I would caution doing it exactly how I am.
I drew tons of these character sheets between 2023 and now and I haven't changed the elements. I'm locked in. These are the elements I used to design the game. I refused to change them. Why?
Because I gave it a shitload of thought and these are the elements I need for this game. The skill list (abilities, attributes) includes the six things that all spacers will do in this game, over and over. Explore, Drive, Fight, Operate, Shoot, and Talk. Everything else can be a Trait.
Anyway, here's the first two sheets I ever did. You can see in the first one that I was not 100% locked in but by the second sheet... I found it.
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| The first ZSF sheet. |
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| This is the second one, on the next page. |
To demonstrate how this sheet hasn't changed... here's the most recent one I did.
