Meta-Abilities

 

 

Which is in where the players influence the world not through the actions of their character, but by writing the narrative around it. 

I've been using this kind of things more and more every year, and I love how much crap they cut, how many problems they solve and how many good ideas they inject into the sessions. 

As for now, I have "codified" them in separate skills, which must be picked up by characters alongside the combat skills and the spells. I think about them as the "rogue" moveset; solving some problems I had here.  Translated from my spanish rules, they are: 

 

)) FLASHBACK: Every character can roll 1d6 to declare having done a simple action retroactivelly (alerted an NPC, bought a item, took any specific precaution...). If you have the FLASHBACK skill, you roll 2d6 instead. If your character has a relevant backstory, this can involve specific items such as antidotes or lockpicks

On a 1-3, it didnt work. Deplete this skill

On a 4-5, it worked, but deplete this skill until downtime

On a 6, it worked

)) ALCHEMY: You are expert making a specific alchemical product that you normally have on yourself. If you have this skill, you can roll to produce any alchemical product you have seen in the game or just describe it, and your GM will give you the closest to it as possible. Roll 1d6:

1-3 you have that amount of your alchemical compound doses. Exhaust this skill until downtime

4-5 you either have your classic compound, or get any other but exhaust this skill

6 you get any alchemical thing but exhaust this skill

Normally I rule that health-related items are not alchemical, though poisons and acids are.

 )) INVESTIGATOR: You can ask the GM any question related to a presented mystery, and as always roll 1d6. The GM will tell you the answer but you must roleplay a moment of epiphany watching whatever random shit there is at the game location.

As always, roll 1d6: 1-3 means change your question. 4-5 means you have it, 6 means you do not expend this skill. It recharges by downtime resting.

 

These skills are tied to a specific character and I like that they are tied to specific archetypes. They can be meta, but are not dissociated and you can understand how they did work in-world, or what the character did to achieve those results.

 
I also have some other examples which are more or less open to everyone at the table, which are:

)) An In-game bestiary: a book with 1d4 pages, which will answer some questions about monsters and then be depleted. It can be ported to any other topic, though. 

)) Spend downtime in the marketplace searching for a specific item and roll 1d6: On a 6, you find the item 1 tier cheaper than its normal value, you can decide why it is so cheap. On a 4-5, the GM will tell you, though maybe when it is too late and you are far from civilization.

)) I want to incorporate a new one, which now goes like this: Once per session, ONE of the characters can state something he/she did, someone he/she met or something he/she learnt at some point before the adventure started. On a 6, it is mostly true. On a 4-5 it is too, but nobody can use this move until the next session. 1-3, you cannot use this move until next session. The GM will note what you said, though, and play along if he wants. 

The once per session per party is a limit so the game doesnt devolve into making up PCs pasts every session: the first character to speak, does it. However, another player may also declare the move at the same time: the one who rolls higher, prevails. 

The statements must not contradict previous information and of course, the GM can say no i guess. The kind of things you can alter includes:

"I know one of the NPCs in the crowd, its an old friend/lover/relative"

"I know the king of this land" 

"This city has a clandestine casino somewhere" 

 "We are safe, Owlbears do not wander the forest on Christmas"

Basically anything that speaks about what the character has done or learnt on his early life. Young characters can portray this skill as carrying and reading an elder relative's diary, for example. 

With this skill, I want to give my players some agency into introducing random things they want to see in the game at any given point. They do it many times without any rules, just organically. But I like to make rules to codify their behavior because thats how autistic I am. 

No, I want to explain me better: I want those rules to be a way to invite them to inject more random things on the campaign, because I've learnt that many good things come from it: They are more interested on the things happening, and it makes the world richer because it normally pushes the game to places I would not have gone. 

  

 

 

Evil in Worldbuilding

Every day, our real world's lore becomes more and more grimdark. If you read it on any fantasy series, you'd think the plot is unbelievable and cheap.

Once monarchy was succesfully removed from europe, capitalism was unhindered to reach its natural state of monopoly.  The families behind this "social" movements grew rich enough to literally buy the world in a couple of centuries.

Their crimes are enough to put any fictional villain to shame, starting with their satanic worship to baal and moloch; the kidnap, torture and sacrifice of children; but that encompasses the creation of wars, the killing and silencing every dissident voice, the rewritting of history, mind and social manipulation, artificial empoverishement of every possible competitor, overtaking all nations and world organizations to use them as puppets, everything aimed to maim humankind mentally, emotionally, spiritually and physically. There is an eventual point in which we feel so tired and weak that we try to not think about them at all, and pretend that everything its allright. After all, it cant be so bad when the news dont mention them and we have the world cup, right?

I've noticed that its hard to make a serious setting featuring themes of good vs evil without making evil either an antisemitic analogy or, on the other hand, a cartoonish caricature of evil that is not even evil on its own setting (like koopa in super mario or something as shallow as that)

 I think that the only viable third choice is to set games on settings in which evil/demons exist, but monarchies are still strong enough so demons are still relativelly weak and do not control kingdoms, or are still confined into evil zones. Sauron in the third age is already on the next stage, sending its influence beyond Mordor through spies and agents. 

 

Naruto + Pokemon

 

 

The little black dot in the head of the frog that is in the head of the other frog, its a human.

 

My untested greatest rpg project of all time is to replace the whole magic system of my D&D clone with something parallel to pokemons: Wizards catching and collecting monsters that cast or are the spells, but at the same time create a bond with them. But at the same time, having the fighter class a viable and interesting choice.

After beating Koga, the ninja trainer at Fuchsia City Gym at Pokemon: Team Rocket, he says something like he had used techniques that were 400 year old. That got me thinking on how the relationship with pokemon was back then, in a feudal japan type world. Which is very close to my thing. 

 

 

Then I realized that Naruto could have become this very easily. In a different world, the Naruto anime went mostly the same until the Chuunin exams, and then derived fully into its "mon" facet: Kakashi's dogs, Jiraiya's toads; everybody's hawks, snakes, monkeys, etc. 

But I would have taken it further: Making every ninjutsu & genjutsu technique (that means: every technique that is not purely martial) some kind of summon; and that includes rasengans, illusions and shadow replications, personified with a little monster that actually does the thing for its master. Sharingans and Rinnegans could be reframed as family "spirits" that serve a clan or maybe keep them as genetic privileges, why not. You even have the bijuus working like that already, filling the setting's slot for legendary pokemon, with the steel type pokemon being the ninjas themselves; filling the slot that pokemon never tackles: Is there space for human fighters in a pokemon game?

I mean; I love Naruto. Gaara and Orochimaru are probably my favs. But how much better would be the series with 80% less Pain and Great ninja wars, and replacing it with mon catching and training, to be the very best like no one ever was? The pokemon entries on this blog are probably not over. Stay in tune.

 

gaara and his sandshrew

 

 

Pokemon and Worldbuilding

I am playing Dragonsden's Pokemon: Team Rocket Edition again. Its a fan game made by a Spaniard but I think its becoming translated into english already. It might be the greatest pokemon game ever made. This is the pitch:

You start the adventure as just another recruit on the Inta Island headquarters, at Archi7, with the intention of ascending little by little into the Team Rocket organization. Yoy must fulfill succesfully the missions assigned by your superiors. 

The story unfolds in the same timeline than Red's and Blue's adventurers (the MCs of gen 1 pokemon) and, given that you will be sent to Kanto, you will be able to witness their stories from the perspective of a Team Rocket's member, and everything that happened on the backside, keeping the canon from the original games intact but adding a surprising depth into the lore.

You soon find that the Team Rocket, while still being criminals and Pokemon thieves, are at the core a patriotic resistance from Kanto, resisting an invasion of the Lance, a warlord from Johto, and their Elite 4 who invaded the region using their pseudolegendary Dragonites, and you can feel first hand the campaign of hate and the media manipulation they use trying to paint Giovanni's Team Rocket as crazy terrorists (If you were a vaccine-skeptic person by covid times you'll know what i mean)

If the plot is not enough to sell it to you, the pokemon-training part is awesome: you can potentially capture basically 99% of pokemon of the first 4 generations and fully visit Kanto, Johto and Hoenn. This is my current team:

 

This game really shows how good pokemon worldbuilding is. We don't speak enough of how crazy its premises are:

* A world where there are no animals beyond a very specific number of species, most of which are evolutions of each other, and a great number of them are legendary and not really seen around. 

* Pokemon can be so powerful that there are no arms race between countries. No guns, tanks, nukes or even more primitive weapons: There is no need of them when you can just train a worm into a Beedrill and make it fight for you. Everything in Kanto, from the small to the big, is settled by combats, and all combats are fought by pokemon. A government getting hold of Mewtwo is the equivalent of the race for the Nuclear Bomb.

* In a sense, pokemon work as local fauna, flora, workforce, weaponry, pets and shinto gods. Everything and everyone in the setting has a different relationship with pokemons. Every city has a pokemon something: a museum, a safari zone, a pokemon burial yard. 

See this video if you want to see all the types of pokemon trainers of gen 1, or just marvel on how artists could make peak 56x56 pixels pictures with 4 colors. If you are like me (a worldbuilding ultra geek) you can spend hours thinking on how each of the random trainers represent an alignment chart of personality x strate of society, which defines their lifestyle and which pokemons they get:

Bugcatchers are kids trying to get pokemons in their nearby forest. I like to think that, given that bug type pokemon are strong against dark and psychic, those kids can defend their homesteads of evil Sneasels, Hypnos and Kadabras. Some bugcatchers will stay sheltered or forego pokemon hunting as adults, others will attempt to get a Pinsir or a Scyther, but most will switch to another type as they grow up. 

Swimmers strike to me as some sort of 60s surfers, living in the coastal areas by and for the sea. Sailors are also water-pokemon users, which reminds me that while there are cruises available, there are no sight of cars. Kanto is a good example of a non-globalized world where people lives near their workplace, and travelling is done by bike and for fun. I don't think planes are really needed either, when important persons can teach FLY to their pidgeottos.

Bikers and Team Rockets are the organized criminals, the former using poison/fight pokemons such as weezing or mankey, and the latter using their signature rattatas/zubat combo. As revealed in the game i'm playing, they pretend to be lamer than they are as a way to gain advantage over the elite 4. As Giovanni says: "you cannot fight what you don't know it exists"

Mountaineers (geodudes and onixs) are the common country man who loves Lynyrd Skynyrd. Blue collars become engineers (magnemites and voltorbs) in more industrial zones. Fishermen complete the middle class triad. The most drunk of them talk about the magikarp they will never evolve, the most level headed about where and when to find more (or less) level 19 tentacools at this time of the year.

Those self called Cool Trainers (endless nidorinos) represent the snob, against the true Gentleman's Arcanines and Manectrics. The Nerd will get their personal pokemon waifu (usually Slowpokes) for personal fulfillment instead of elitism. 

Maybe its just me, but I see many people at the street who could be the Gambler. Those old men with a couple of poliwags or wasted junkies with a meowth who should be taken away by the pokemon welfare; trying to get all or nothing in a street combat. One, trying to recover the spirit of his younger days; the other, some coins for some Silph-manufactured crack.  

Which leads me to one of the greatest pillars of the setting: Scientists. Wherever you go, under a very thin veil of innocence, they are doing massive pokemon-related shit. Cloning Articuno, Creating Mewtwo and creating countless waste (Dittos) in the process, creating all types of pokemon steroids, resurrecting fossils, inventing the pokedex or better types of pokeball, or closing the gap between science and parapsychology with the silph scope. I like to think that, just as they invented the teletransporter tiles, Escape Ropes really work as teletransporters in-setting. The clash of nature/divine vs science/manmade is a heavy underlying theme through all the games.

Karatekas, who use machops and hitmonlees, are beautiful to have. You never ever see a man vs man (or man vs pokemon) fight in all the game. I understand it so that no man can match the fighting skill of those fight pokemons, yet they still practice karate to hone their spirit, strenght and skills. True spiritual man that seek for enlightment and possibly get inspired by the energy of their pokemon companions. 

The spiritual representation continues on the Channelers at Lavender Town. It is refreshing to see that the game cares to show you that there exist death rites and beliefs in this world for men and beasts alike. They double up as goth girls, making the world become suddently much more interesting. Also, see this note on how Erika, the plant gym leader, was probably destined originally to be a ghost trainer or a ghost itself.

 

If I was a real person on Kanto, however, I'd probably be a Bird Keeper. They strike me as sort of a middle ground between a complete outcast and a functional life. Fearow is probably my favorite pokemon: its not just beautiful, but also a real (glass) cannon, a true sweeper if you can manage to never let your opponent get a turn

Interesting how policemen trainers carry growlithes for protection instead of guns or batons. I like to think that when they carry a random haunter or pikachu, they do it because they are on a special mission, so they are not easily targeted by a water-user criminal. 

As a wrap up, I'd say that all this examples paint a world in which the common people is very connected to nature, and most of them live meaningful lives pursuing their passions. You might not have noticed conscioulsy yet but now you just did. I will probably expand on pokemon-related ideas this month, because I am a huge pokemon nerd.

As another wrap up, just some quote that I might extend on the future: any worldbuilding is not great just for what the world shows, but for the stories and explanations it allows you to make. 

 

Is the Owlbear spanish?

Looks like an Owlbear, but its a Bú!

 I like Owlbears; it's probably my most used monster straight from the book. I love that, without having powers, they are big and terrible, and make players fear camping out at night in the woods. I rule that they can be easily stunned by flashing lights, as their pupils are so used to the dark.

 I've heard the tale of Gary Gygax making up the monster around a cheap toy he found on some shop:

 

 

Yesterday, researching some myths, I heard about a creature from a spanish region neighbour to mine: The Bú (maybe coming from the first syllabe of Búho? Thats how you say Owl in spanish) 

 

This page has some good lore about it (in Spanish). It is believed that it has it's origins on an ancient god, maybe even older than our celt/iberian/celtiberian past. I'll translate some of the descriptions:

 

"A hunchbacked person of bloated face and open feet"
"A bird of great size and terrifying aspect, of the likes of the owl and the barn owl"

"Gargantuan owl of enormous red eyes"

"Dark and sinister bird"

My favorite: "A big and black owl's body, great silent wings, plate-sized red eyes, a menacing beak and claws as big as traps for wolves"

 

It was said that on this villages the monster used to appear on the night sky, searching for kids playing on the streets after sunset. Mothers and Grandmothers called upon the Bú to scare the children when they didn't want to sleep:

 

Duérmete mi niño,

Que ya viene el Bú.

Que se lleva a los niños.

Así como tú.

 A castillian lullaby that translates to "Sleep my children, for here comes the Bú, that takes the children just like you" (perfect rhyme even in english!). But there are enough mountains and other landmarks dedicated to that monster to incite me to believe that, for the locals, it was a little more than a mere kid's tale. 

 

 

Sex scenes

 Related to this post, but not actually about that. 

I am working on a magic system outlined in here, which works by calling forth magical spirits instead of casting the spells, and I was thinking on the incubus-like nature of ifrits. 

I don't know about how often do sexual themes or scenes appear in your games. Its not something I bring to the table on purpose (or so I think), but feel that sometimes they appear on their own and I have to work to circunvent them. 

From D&D, B/X: Nixies are 3' tall water sprites. They look like small beautiful women, and their skin is light blue, green, or gray-green. They avoid combat, but may try to charm an adventurer. Ten nixies can cast one such charm, and if a save vs. Spells is not made, the victim will enter the water and serve the nixies for a year. (Each nixie can cast a water breathing spell on her slave, but this must be renewed every day.)
If forced to fight, nixies use small tridents (treat as spears) and daggers, and each will summon a giant bass to aid them. Nixies dwell in rivers and lakes, making their lairs in the deepest part of the water.

You can try to make up whatever you want, but the logic on nixies is that they are obvious rapists of men. It makes sense they do it like this to reproduce, as their own race has no males. The charm, their attractiveness, the myth of nymphs and sirens and even the implied sensuality of water play into this story too well as to not use it. 

It think its appropiate to have Ifrits play a specular role, being smug fire devils that like to molest women. An ifrit taking/burning the clothes off a sorceress as a drawback from a partial success could work so good on the paper. Or granting strenght to a male caster, but also filling him with an unbearable lust. 

 The problem is that what makes sense on the worldbuilding aspect may be a little weird to pull on an actual game, like if you were pushing your rape fetish or suddently doing ERP with your friends. Sometimes the sexual option is the most valid: I've pulled out nixes straight, but also bandits who kidnap women to make them serve in brothels. My shadowrun elf was a gay samurai who prostituted himself a couple of times to advance plot (lol!). Never described actual sex scenes beyond the classic "roll a d20 to see how you perform" and that is OK. Its not something I search for itself, but I do sometimes think that its a shame to actually deprive a world from the sexual dimension, which is so important in both our world, our history and our myths. From monsters that look a suitort to classic rapist bandits, they are expressions of human emotions and sometimes trying to tone them down is funny and childish; other times are bland and artificial, specially if they contrast with the tone the players assumed in your campaign.

 

6 Attributes and what are they used for.

In a way that they are important for everybody regardless of their "class". They are randomly generated, and there is a random chance to improve your chosen one at level ups!

1. Strength: Improves HP; Improves damage with some weapons, defines maximum load. Can be used to test something when you want to kick a stuck door. 

2. Dexterity: Check this when you want to spend your turn dodging an attack, checking if you do something fast, silently or when doing a risky jump; but it doesn't improve ranged attacks, or any other kind (see the Weapon attribute)

3. Intelligence: Defines how many times you can pull a Flashback scene per adventure (in the Blades in the Dark sense). This includes producing an object you didn't have. Specialist objects must suit your background (choose one at some point); and you can use it to do checks when applying your background too. 

4. Magic: this defines your Mana Dice and your skill using magical items or checking for magical awareness. 

5. Charisma: As I am using Cohorts (Blades in the Dark again) this is what you check when leading them (or even aquiring them). Wizards also use this to command spirits, while kobolds will use this to bind and manage animal companions.

6. Weapon: A bonus on this attribute means you have bonus skill on a given weapon (sword, maces, bow, fists). Not all weapons are trainable in this way, some are too crude. A penalty on this attribute means you cannot fight effectivelly, with a corresponding disadvantage. 

On my notes right now, you cannot pick a class; but you can swap two attributes, so use that to analogically choose one (getting some magic will make you a caster, and getting dexterity or intelligence might make you some sort of thief)

There are only two races: Humans and Kobolds (hobbits by other name). The latter get a bonus on dexterity, but half the strength. 

At some point, the character must roll the overall importance and status of his/her clan or equivalent (it determines available money)