Dank Dungeons

Lately, I've been running Curse of Strahd, but not with D&D.

That would be too easy.

I'm running it with Mothership.

No, not space vampires, although that would be awesome. This is narratively gothic horror fantasy with the d% rules chassis. I've made a ton of tweaks that are necessary for the genre, like re-flavoring the classes to actual social classes of early modern Europe. Skills, items, etc.

There is one big change I've made recently that wasn't necessary at all: retooling the damage system.

HP-less Damage

So, for those unaware how damage works in Mothership, here's a rundown:

You have HP and also a certain number of Wounds you can take (usually around 20 HP and 2 Wounds)

When you take damage you subtract from your HP, if it hits zero then take a Wound and reset your HP (account for spillover)

When you take a Wound roll on the Wounds Table and gain a special condition based on the damage type (sometimes this results in instant death if you roll real bad)

I absolutely adore the Wound Table in Mothership but I super don't care about the math that gets to it.

So I cut the math. Here's my current procedure:

When you take damage compare that number with the Wound chart (stuff like armor reducing damage still applies)

Take the associated Wound and deal with it's effects

Other Influences

In a word: Warhammer.

I always loved the critical damage tables in Dark Heresy. One time my character's head exploded and everyone else slipped in the blood fountain my body turned into. Good stuff.

The Warhammer Fantasy RP crit tables were a big source of inspiration on mine.

Scaling

Where Mothership was a d10 table, I needed something at least double that size given how much damage monster do. Even with my monster damage dialed back from Mothership standards, right now my table goes to 20 but I should probably expand it to 30.

It also seems important for the chart to escalate like Mothership's can. That is to say, get certain Wounds makes it more likely to get more Wounds later. Where Mothership has Bleeding, I went with something more general that interacted directly with the chart. Also, something to dictate length of injury.

Wound Keywords:

Add - the next time you take damage add X

Temporary - lasts until end of encounter

Ongoing - lasts until resting or treatment

Permanent - lasts forever (unless something dramatic happens)

Okay, Get to the Dang Table Already!

Still working on other damage types, like Fire and Gore, as well as tweaking the existing chart, but this has been a promising start.

During our last fight the party priest was attacked by one of those animated Scarecrows a few times while exploring a swamp. The first cut just made his allies Stressed (Profuse Bleeding) the second made it hard for him to run (Severed Tendon) and the third put him in a really bad spot (Artery Nicked).

This was all extremely dramatic and changed the party's calculation every round. Plus there was very little math. So I consider it a big success.

In Closing

So that's another thing I'm working on.

After all, why bother finishing a project when I can just start another one?

In May...

Jorphdan and I were talking about doing a project. We had, sometime in the distant past, mentioned that it would be fun to do an itch jam. So we decided to do that.

An itch jam is a competition (usually) held on the itch.io website. Its hosts get to make it about whatever and the site handles sign up and submission tracking.

We came up with a theme. It was The Appendix N. Where others had made contests around writing rpg supplements for specific systems or based on specific works, we chose to go in a bit more general direction.

The Appendix N is a collection of recommended reading Gary Gygax put in the 1st Edition AD&D DMs Guide.

The Appendix would serve only as a guide...or a vibe. But the content would be constrained.

Only 4 pages. Only modules. And only using a title prompt we provided. I wouldn't give participants a real book title, that would invite copyright infringement, instead I created a list of fake titles and randomly distributed them.

I also came up with a number of graphics for fake book covers. If you've followed this blog you've already seen them. They appear in my previous two posts.

We assembled judges. People we knew from the indie rpg sphere who had different specialties:

Diogo Nogueira (writer)

Tony Vasinda (publisher)

Nova aka Idle Cartulary (reviewer)

Sam Mameli aka Skullboy (artist)

We made a fun little promo video and launched just before July 1st.

Suffering From Success

Okay, I had done a lot of research going into this. I compared participant numbers of similar jams vs the popularity of their creators and a few other factors like time of year and prize pools.

Everything I saw pointed toward us getting around 100-150 sign ups and maybe 75 actual submissions.

We had over 150 sign ups on the first day.

As of writing this at the halfway point of the month-long jam we have over 600. In fact, I believe it's in the top 10 most participated jams happening on itch right now.

Luckily this has slowed down considerably but it did leave me in a complete panic the first week of the jam. I had to give out fake titles to each participant. I had prepped 100...so for a few days there I just spent every waking minute trying to pump out more titles.

An Amazing Community

We had set up a Discord Channel for participants to use for bouncing around ideas. I've been poking my head in there a lot to answer questions and I have been totally floored by not only the amount of creativity on display, but also the kindness, support, and encouragement demonstrated by these creators.

When we did a stream to introduce judges to the contestants and answer questions we were also given permission to show off some works in progress and it was great fun.

A Whole Lot Of Reading

Soon will come the next challenge. After the submission period ends at the end of the month all the judges will be setting to work reading and reviewing.

As you saw above we've already got over 25 and while I don't particularly trust my preliminary research, I would still assume we're not getting an over 50% submissions rate. So it's going to be a lot but our judge team has a plan.

Hopefully after a month or two we can have our awards ceremony (probably another livestream).

Closing Thoughts

I'm so grateful to the help I received on this project and completely blown away by the creativity of this community.

The Pulps! Pt2

check out the first 4 fake covers and some useful links here

The Pulps!

I've got a project coming up and as preparation I'm trying to get better at emulating that '70s beat up paperback look using Photoshop.

These images use techniques like photo collage, reticulation noise, gradient mapping, and texture overlays.

They use free images from Unsplash and The NYPL Digital Collections. Free fonts from Fontesk. Plus lots of info from YouTube tutorials like TextureLabs and Spoon Graphics.