Traverse Fantasy

Sorry to keep Cinco! -posting, but Alex from  To Distant Lands wrote a really fun addition to magic which I wanted to share and also slightly refactor: Metamagic When you work with another mage(s) to combine your powers into a new spell using the same motif, each of you pay one inspiration. All additional inspiration spent afterward is multiplied by the number of casters for the purpose of defining the effects of the spell. This is really cool and, I can imagine, produces the cool sort of scene where you get a crowd of mages casting a spell together. My first thought reading it was, oh geez, one of us needs to come up with ways to spend more inspiration (or at least scale up the rules that currently exist)! But that made me think: oh, maybe the approach is backward, and rather than multiplying effects we can treat it as a discount on combined effects. This is my revision: Multiple mages in one zone with complementary motifs may cast a spell cooperatively. Each ‘helper’ spen...

Alex from To Distant Lands had been considering Cinco! to play his Gran Carcosium setting (which I had played in a little bit ago !), and he asked me where I was at with feats since he wanted to play with that sort of approach. He wrote a couple of his own, which made me realize why I had been struggling with it on my end. My prior approach was to use feats to gatekeep specialized rules for characters, which was a fine thought, but I was too granular in splitting up and encapsulating those rules in feats. They didn’t have the pizzazz of, how Alex had put it, being excited to do something new and unique. So I consolidated those—from seven granular feats to just one feat for arcana rules and another for weapon rules—and had fun with all the rest. I hope these are more fun! I still haven’t played with feats because when I asked some of my friends how they felt about them, they preferred having a minimal character sheet and letting me handle the rules stuff—which is real and why I’m h...

I really like Eldritch Fields ’ table for encounter activities , but I wanted to simplify it so that I don’t need an entirely different set of indices for sentient vs non-sentient creatures. Instead, roll D20 below; for non-sentient creatures, subtract 10 if the roll exceeds 10. D20 What’s Up? 1–2 Dead 3–4 Resting 5–6 Foraging 7–8 Examining 9–10 Sparring 11–12 Traveling 13–14 Camping 15–16 Working 17–18 Meeting 19–20 Partying I guess you could also divide by 2 but that’s kind of annoying to me, and I basically like to treat the D20 as a D10 by looking at the least significant digit. Or as Tamás from  Eldritch Fields  commented (hi!), use D10 instead! I just use nothing but D20 and D6 at my table :)

Jesus Christ. Am I some sort of influencer or thought leader that others both really follow my words and hold me responsible to their idea of them? I got a comment a few days ago while I was out: Why do you care so much about Paul? Religion is wrong and backwards. You are wasting your time. How is it possible to read Settlers and then come crawling back to fucking Christianity? Revolutionary communism is what’s true. Don’t you want to be part of the real movement to abolish the present state of things? Are you going to learn how to overthrow capitalism-imperialism from Paul? Please. First of all, this fucking rules and it genuinely made my day. I agree with Semiurge on one hand that that’s some coelacanth type shit, but it’s so refreshing for someone to call me a proverbial opium addict. I’m grinning ear to ear. Love it! Anyway. I thought since I guess it fucking matters, I would give a general update on where I’m at with things. Didn’t delete the blog. Just had an emotional c...

Alright, my babies. We’ve heard from the ‘orthodox’ Marxists from the DSA . We’ve heard from the crypto Marxist-Leninist party . Now let’s hear from the Maoist-tendency Marxist-Leninist party, the Freedom Road Socialist Organization. I have a friend who had visited a meeting in his current city, and the main thing with which he walked out of there was that they on one hand are really into the Kingdom of Hawaii, and on the other hand think that American Indians (whether on a collective or tribal basis) haven’t yet developed a national consciousness with which they can act as a nation to bargain for self-determination. It was just my luck that he had told me about this after I had already bought their program—but having been spoiled, I was all the more excited to learn about how big of a deal this really was for the party and about what other weird hills they had to die on. How did the FRSO come about anyway? Freedom Road has a proud past. In the late 1960s and early 1970s, there was a...

A lot of people who are culturally Christian are often surprised, I’ve noticed, to learn that the so-called “seven deadly sins” do not originate from the Bible. Certain Catholic monks from late antiquity—or the early Medieval era, take your pick—took it upon themselves to enumerate fundamental evil thoughts or wrong-doings. I know some of y’all love that shit. Can’t stand it. Enumeration. Love to put things in your little boxes. Well, here’s the history of the pursuit . I’m not going to recount it. Go be a monk if you want to! I think the idea that there could be any fundamental set of sins, some eigenspace of evil, is deeply misguided if not entirely missing the point. Chairman Paul loved to list the many ways in which people tend to be harmful or stupid, but he never did he suppose there to be any base “sin” except perhaps for idolatry (which contains more nuance than being the literal worship of idols, being more about how humans project artificial laws onto Nature , becoming blind...

I wanted to have a pseudo-lifepath thing in the appendices for Cinco! to help players conceptualize characters if they’re at a loss with where to get started. Below is what came of that! You’ll recognize a lot of material from my original draft, FIVEY , but I tried to condense everything into providing just enough information to contextualize a character origin without pigeon-holing individual characters. Thanks to Alex from To Distant Lands for providing really helpful feedback on that front! Without further ado… If you’re playing a character, pick or roll on the table below for your character’s origin; keep in mind, though, that the Game Mother might disallow certain origins just to make the setting more cohesive. If you’re the Game Mother, considering building your setting around the characters your players create; otherwise be upfront with expectations and don’t surprise your players with them! A setting handout helps everyone. Changeling (1–2): A fairy snatched a baby to pay...