tools – Roll to Doubt

Rules Notes on Lost Girls v0.1

There are only two meaningful functions for TTRPG rules.

Botanical Wargames

War games are practiced by every society in every fantasy world. War games compose society itself. It is remarkably costly to enact war, even if it costlier still to keep one’s sword in its scabbard. To make war one needs territory that can be agreed on, expedient bodies to be spent, and a gentleman’s agreement about which casualties of those that know nothing of violence are acceptable.

It is not different in Saint Tenebrae. The girl gangs play their own war games, which seems natural. One’s zone, in the confusion of the city, seems like an owned battlefield, all bodies are glad to fall in line, and their blood thirst is such that casualties would never be considered. Yet it isn’t always practical to play war games in the street, to see at which point play spills into reality. A gang can jump on another, but it would be better if it was the last time, and not rehearsal. Not only that, such games could bring undo attention from whoever is the secret master of a zone or borough, and accidentally spill like toxic oil into another’s territory.

If all you are looking for is a quick spar, punch your sister.

Girly Bandwagon 💙 (+ Princess Rules)

Dedicated to Valeria and her blue hearts. It is only proper. Did I mention I enjoy *Claymore* too? No? Fuck.

(Current Girly Bandwagon index here)

The Sex Bandwagon is still going on and I don’t have any plans of finishing it. Quite simply, I understand people feel the need to take their time, even if just gathering the courage to speak of sex. The Girly Bandwagon is a natural development from it. Refer to my own words:

“I would come across as girly if I talked of romance: cute, idealistic, but ultimately silly. I talked of fucking because if people will react weirdly, I’d rather be called a pervert already, because I’m not silly then.” – Dungeon Kiss

You don’t have to think of romance to think of being girly. To be girly might be more challenging than to write of sex in the hobby. There’s space in sex to discuss in a range of registers, from solemn to crass to jokey to allusive to stoic to merely natural and even-headed. Girlishness issues the challenge of being earnest above all else. It’s hard to talk of sex, it’s harder to be a girl.

Princess, You Must Learn Etiquette

*For Havoc.* *Thank you for keeping it girly.*

Lost Girls v0.1 (A Proposed GLoG)

I was as honored to be included in this list as baffled, since I count many gretchlings as dear friends and respected acquaintances, but haven’t talked about their perversion more than once here, nor at the time had the pleasure to join them in their games. The GLoG sensual baroqueness and fecund community ethos is as welcoming and beautiful as old D&D’s stark, brutalist giant wheel that sweeps you away with its preciseness. Indeed, that’s what I briefly said the last time, four fucking years ago:

(what’s the appeal of GLoG) Beyond the DIY, devil-may-care feeling and community? The focus on campaign-specific rulesets, built nearly from zero, in the style of old supplements named after settings. “Play worlds” to the max. Also, the messy garage maximalism has an aesthetic appeal.

I was sketching notes for a Thief and Illusionist based game to experiment with OD&D’s play structure. My thoughts wandered to a witch-haunted sea where harbor villages blessed by the moon and built over piles of scrapped metal house eternal children who explore the world on small, motorized boats and yearn for monstrosity instead of becoming adults. I started writing, as a follow up to an old idea about Evil Narnia (as in, regular Narnia), and was stuck due to the return to old play structures and difficulties with tone.

While thinking it, I remembered this and everything else that was setting/frameworkless outside a proposal of affect and motif. I never wrote a play text that could cohere all of this baroque, freewheeling visions of

wait a fucking minute

The Reanimator (Class)

De Humani Corporis Fabrica

A psychoanalyst in touch with the esoteric. A too dedicated nurse. A budding geneticist or biologist with uncanny vision. A mutant whose cells only want to hug. A mother who can’t bear to lose another one. A child in the backyard with a scalpel and a quiet dog.

You can heal an ally from the Slow condition caused by Critical Damage.

At Level Two, you get Cure Dice (starting at 1d6, +1d per level), and can roll or take the median result to heal stat damage during a delve or mission. You recover these at downtime, one every two days. Describe what cure looks like. A psychoanalyst might heal STR and DEX by convincing or reminding the target of unusual theories about the becoming nature of the body-mind, or readressing their fundamental humors; a nurse might restore CHA with great bedside manners and support, or soft, non-intrusive head trauma.

When improving your stats during level-up, you can state to the GM that, besides studying, you played with yourself. Say what you did according to the improved stat (a small extra eye or experimental stimulant for DEX, a replacement finger or changed metabolism for STR, vocal surgery or induced heterochromia for CHA etc.)

Once every four months, you can do dedicated research in downtime to improve one of your allies (use the Electric Bastionland or Cairn Scar table.)

Notes:

Oddlikes describe that standard Critical Damage reduces the character to crawling. I’m assuming a character that suffers it is Slow for movement purposes; the Reanimator as class exists to safeguard against this resource depletion in the crawl structure, as well as other depletions. This also means that the Reanimator is an easy target and must be protected.

I’m assuming the level-based progression from the original Into the Odd, requiring therefore that the Reanimator takes an assistant or apprentice to keep evolving; I will probably also require monetary investment into a clandestine clinic.

Tags: into the odd, tools, urban fantasy

Glaugust: Doomed Fighters

(Old notes I’ve found of years prior, back when running a freeform thing. Typed up unaltered for Glaugust HPless combat prompt)

Damage takes two forms: Wound and Doom. Assume:

A character can take one Wound. A second wound becomes Doom.
Damage causes a Wound, not direct Doom, unless something is known to be Dooming by itself (the roar of a monster, fighting while heartbroken, swearing your life in the next stroke)
Referee and players can establish new things that are Dooming during play. Write them down.
It takes a resource and time to heal from a Wound. It takes a miracle in short-notice to recover from Doom.

Tags: tools

Proposals for Player Conduct

Organizing my Conduct of Play section on a campaign document, I realized I’ve never talked here about it. Players are often advised to Ask Questions, Play Their Characters Well, Take Notes and Be Collaborative, but not how to improve at these fields. Reading the required rules and campaign primer is obviously a given for a good player. I also find Havoc’s post about joyful play to be important.

Spreadsheet Prep and Organization for RPGs

Writing is a continuous process, not segmented into easily contained steps but a molecule that takes pride in amorphous shapes as new connections emerge. One of the ways we keep pace with that molecule is finding the most pleasurable ways of following it, as pleasure breeds focus and the levity we need to change with it without losing sight of why we do it; without pleasure and joy, it is nothing. One path to joy in writing has been the use of analog measures: a good pen, a good notebook or binder, a small notepad with me everywhere and right besides my bed as the mind winds down from the day into the night realms and as the doors open, small fragments of light pass by and demand to be half-defined before I’m finally lost.

So a lot of my TTRPG writing is first done in paper, without distractions. As time goes by, I prefer to digitalize that material in spreadsheets instead of word documents. I have a fairly developed folder and document discipline, but the spreadsheet is a staple in organization for good reason. When I’m writing notes for a fictional story or similar, no matter how well organized they are, I’m writing them to internalize their logic while I work through the compositional drafts, and occasionally refer to them during my rewriting. Notes for TTRPGs are constantly referred due to the mental tension of running the game and communicating that logic to others in real time.

What a Horrible Night to Cast a Curse

Curses are the foulest of arts. Curses are speeches against life, a winter breath coming from the cold, dark night of the soul. In some worlds, a sorcerous practice, studied by only a few alienated occultists. In others, omnipresent in daily speech, as eldritch forces, genius loci, cruel fae or some inexplicable law of the land hear baleful promises by an angered individual and turn them into weird fate. Curses can be either the spite of the powerful or the last resource of the downtrodden victims.

Even in worlds where everyone may cast a curse if their fury is powerful enough, people won’t curse each other for every slight, or even for every heinous act, both because curses are themselves very risky for the caster and because of cultural reasons. To partake in profane words and states of mind is both an indictment of existence and a sin against oneself by degrading your own person by stepping so low. In some cultures, worse than the one that violates the other is the one who violates themselves.