Category: What I’m Playing

The Wildsea Ship Creation

Felix Isaacs has suggested that you start by creating your ship and only then move on to the creation of the characters who will crew it. And who am I to argue with Mr Isaacs?

This is the fourth in a series of character creation posts I’m using to figure out which game I want to schedule for our next campaign. You can find the Triangle Agency one here. And you can find the Slugblaster one here. You can find the Blades in the Dark one here.

Shipbuilding

I recently reposted a piece I wrote last year about the Wildsea and how it exemplifies the tradition of giving your PCs something to care about and then fucking with it. Please check it out for the basics of the game, the setting, and the ruleset. In that post, I pointed out that, creator of the Wildsea, Felix Isaacs, has suggested that you start by creating your ship and only then move on to the creation of the characters who will crew it. And who am I to argue with Mr Isaacs?

Stakes

How much do you have to spend on your new ship? Well, the buying process is abstracted out to a number of stakes. You don’t need to worry about defining the exact amount of currency required to outfit a new boat, you just split it up like a pie. Each crew starts with 6 stakes to spend on ship creation, with an additional 3 per PC who will be crewing it. Most options will cost a single stake but some more powerful ones will cost two or three. Since I don’t have a real party, I’m going to pretend I have a full compliment of three, leaving me with a total of 15 stakes.

You can’t get any more Stakes to improve your ship during play, but it is possible to trade cargo for the same upgrades later.

Next, in the Ships & Shipbuilding chapter, it has a short section on “Personal Touches.” I think these are important to making a ship feel like your own, but I think I’ll keep them to the end of the process.

Creating Your Ship

A Wildsea ship
A Wildsea ship

The next page tells us about the steps to make your ship. There are three overall stages:

  • Design – you have to choose an option for each of the following:
    • Size
    • Frame
    • Hull
    • Bite
    • Engine
  • Fittings – these are all optional but they come in the following categories:
    • Motifs
    • Additions
    • Rooms
    • Armaments
    • Outriders
  • Undercrew – optional choices that come in the following types:
    • Officers
    • Gangs
    • Packs

On the same page, there is a helpful example ship statted out for us. It is essentially just a list of chosen options beneath each of the three stages. Beside each option is the cost in Stakes and the benefit it provides for the ship if appropriate.

It also lists the Ratings for the ship.

Ratings

These are tracks (tracks are like clocks in Blades in the Dark, in some instances and like health bars in others) that are used to record the current status of various aspects of the ship. Every ship will have all six of these:

  • Armour – speaks for itself
  • Seals – How well your ship keeps out the nastiness from the Wildsea
  • Speed – ‘nuff said
  • Saws – most ships use giant chainsaws or something similar to power their way through the waves of leaves and branches.
  • Stealth – how well can your ship pass undetected?
  • Tilt – this is your ship’s manoeuvrability

Each one of these Ratings starts as a 1-track but we’ll be adding to that as we progress.
Keep these Ratings in mind as we go through the process!

Step One – Design

Normally, this would be done by committee. Every player should be involved in the decisions on which the foundations of the ship are built. But, obviously, in my case, that’s not possible. Anyway, here we go!

Size

There are four sizes available and they each cost 1 Stake:

  • Nano – big enough for one person and maybe a passenger. +1 Stealth
  • Small – can easily accommodate between two and four sailors. A good starter ship. +1 Speed
  • Standard – perfect for five to ten people. +1 Armour
  • Large – ideal for ten to twenty people. +1 Armour and -1 Stealth

I have a limited number of Stakes so I feel like a Small ship is the way to go. Also, it’s for a crew of up to four, so it’s just right.

Frame

The Frame, the book tells us, betrays a certain attitude that you want your ship to give off to other wild sailors. Your choice will also give Rating modifiers like Size does. Here are the six available Frames:

  • Sturdy – meant to weather storms and bombardments both. +1 Armour
  • Moulded – somehow constructed from a single piece of some material. +1 Seals
  • Light – lightweight and dainty. +1 Speed
  • Scything – all about cutting through the treetops as well as they can. +1 Saws
  • Sleek – Keeps you “low to the waves,” and as quiet as possible. +1 Stealth
  • Flexible – bend before breaking. +1 Tilt

I personally think that one of the coolest aspects of these wildsea vessels is the fact that they use enormous chainsaws to cut through the canopy. So, I’m going to lean into that and choose the Scything Frame, giving +1 Saws and costing 1 Stake.

Hull

Interestingly, you can have more than one of these, if you like, but you must have at least one, for obvious reasons. There are twelve Common Hulls and three more Unique ones listed here. The cost ranges from free to 3 Stakes. Here are the Common ones:

  • Reef-Iron – 1 Stake, +1 Armour
  • Leviathan Bone – 1 Stake, +1 Seals
  • Broadwood – 1 Stake, +1 Tilt
  • Rough Bark – 1 Stake, +1 Stealth
  • Chitinous – 1 Stake, +1 Speed
  • Razorscale – 1 Stake, +1 Saws
  • Beastback – 2 Stakes, +1 Seals, +1 Tilt, “A half-living hull of flesh and bone, flexible and unsettlingly warm.”
  • Ceramic – 2 Stakes, +1 Armour, +1 Seals
  • Chrysalid – 2 Stakes, +1 Seals, +1 Stealth, “A hull adapted from the cast-off chrysalis of a massive insect, excellent protection against the sea’s incursion.”
  • Ghost-Oak – 2 Stakes, +1 Armour, +1 Stealth
  • Arachnesque – 2 Stakes, +1 Tilt, +1 Stealth, “Less of a hull and more of a giant insect grown to fit the specifications of your frame, usually something spider-like.
  • Exile’s Copper – 2 Stakes, +1 Armour, +1 Speed

Here are the three Unique Hulls:

  • Junk-Strung – Free, +1 Armour, -1 Seals, can salvage parts from it
  • Floraflage – 2 Stakes, +2 Stealth, -1 Armour, undetectable while stopped
  • Monument – 3 Stakes, +2 Armour, +2 Seals, made from mountain stone so can’t “Forge-ahead during a journey”

I like the idea of adding a little Armour Rating at this stage but also building on the Speed I improved before so I am going to go with Exile’s Copper for the Hull giving me a +1 Armour and +1 Speed. It will cost 2 Stakes but I think its worth it.

Bite

This determines the way your ship is propelled. It will also have an effect on your ramming damage and the ease by which others might track you. There are twelve Common Bites listed, as well as several different types of sails and a trio of Unique Bites as well. Here are the Common ones:

  • Sawprow – 1 Stake, +1 Saws, big chainsaws! Close Quarters (CQ) Serrated damage
  • Impellers – 1 Stake, +1 Speed, outboard engines. CQ Blast damage
  • Crawler – 1 Stake, +1 Tilt, kinda like crab legs? CQ Blunt damage
  • Underscales – 1 Stake, +1 Stealth, snakey. CQ Keen damage
  • Jag-Tracks – 1 Stake, +1 Armour, “Motorised grapple tracks.” CQ Hewing damage
  • Sluicejets – 1 Stake, +1 Seals, chemicals that push you along. CQ Acid damage
  • Longjaw – 2 Stakes, +1 Saws, +1 Speed, “An underslung chainsaw arrangement.” CQ Serrated damage
  • Propeller-Cage – 2 Stakes, +1 Speed, +1 Armour. CQ Blunt damage
  • Navapede Limbs – 2 Stakes, +1 Tilt, +1 Stealth. Like a centipede. CQ Spike damage
  • Voltaic Runners – 2 Stakes, +2 Seals, like the electric ships in the Matrix, I imagine? CQ Volt damage
  • Mulcher – 2 Stakes, +2 Saws, +1 Armour, -1 Stealth, “grinding teeth in a lamprey-style mouth.” CQ Serrated damage
  • Tentaculari – 2 Stakes, +2 Tilt, it’s tentacles. CQ Salt(!) damage

I am not going to go into all the Sail and Unique options here because there are too many already, to be honest, and I know I don’t want any of them. I need to stick to my guns, or my chainsaws in this instance. As I am worried about the number of Stakes I have left to spend, I won’t go for the Longjaw. Instead I’ll go for option number one, Sawprow, for 1 Stake, giving me +1 Saws.

Engine

This is the last bit in the Design stage. A few things to note about the ship’s Engine:

  • It can be used for more than just propulsion
  • It will require a specific type of fuel
  • In most instances, don’t worry about tracking the fuel

There are eleven Common Engines and four more Unique ones. Here are the Common ones:

  • Chemical Compressor – 1 Stake, +1 Speed. Fuel – crushed fruit and insect husks
  • Springwork – 1 Stake, +1 Saws. Fuel – manual labour
  • Parasite Pitcher (Plant) – 1 Stake, +1 Stealth. Fuel – living matter
  • Steam Piping – 1 Stake, +1 Seals. Fuel – water
  • Ratwheel Exchange – 1 Stake, +1 Tilt. Fuel – feed the rats
  • Pulsing Cocoon – 1 Stake, +1 Armour. Fuel – dreams
  • Jawbox – 1 Stake, +1 Saws, +1 Speed, -1 Stealth. Fuel – wood
  • Solar Compressor – 2 Stakes, +1 Speed, +1 Stealth. Fuel – sunlight
  • Magnetic Coils – 2 Stakes, +1 Tilt, +1 Stealth. Fuel – magnetic scrap
  • Ceramic Batteries – 2 Stakes, +1 Saws, +1 Seals. Fuel – lightning strikes
  • Acid Maw – 2 Stakes, +2 Saws. Fuel – salvage and scrap

The Unique Engines are fun too. One of them is this:

  • Tamed Hive – 2 Stakes, +1 Speed, +1 Seals. It’s a massive hive and can produce honey. Fuel – flowers and pollen

I love the whimsy of the Tamed Hive so much that I must have it! That’s 2 Stakes but it adds +1 Speed and +1 Seals

There won’t be any more changes to the Ratings from the remaining steps so our final Ratings are:

  • Armour – 2
  • Seals – 2
  • Speed – 4
  • Saws – 3
  • Stealth – 1
  • Tilt – 1
A weird looking wildsea ship
A weird looking wildsea ship

Step Two – Fittings

Pretty much every part of this is optional, which is just as well because I only have eight Stakes left…

Motif

So this is the general theme and purpose of the ship. Choosing one can help the whole crew get a clear vision of the vessel and will also influence how others see you and it. They provide specific things like emergency medicine, gaudy appearance or a reinforced engine room. They do not provide mechanical effects but they may play a part narratively.

Here are the available Motifs. They each cost two Stakes:

  • Transport
  • Hauling
  • Hunting
  • Salvaging
  • Pathfinding
  • Raiding
  • Rescue
  • Research
  • Entertainment

You don’t have to choose a Motif for your ship but I am enamoured by the idea of a Research vessel out there on the wild waves. Perhaps the unconventional engine was something we discovered during a past expedition and we figured out how to make our ship go with it through the power of research!

A Research vessel:

  • has better tech on show than most ships
  • contains a research library
  • houses a snapograph arrangement. Its a sort of big camera

Additions

There are so many of these, most of them costing a single Stake. We’ve got Firefly Lanterns, a Cargo Crane, a Steam Whistle and lots more. But, as I am getting worried about how much I’ve spent already, I am only going to pick up:

  • Anchor System – Its Free!
  • Tethered Kitesail – 1 Stake – its a glider that is hooked to the deck. Lets us go up and get a bird’s eye view when the wind’s up

Rooms

On a Small Size vessel it’s not a great idea to split your already limited space up any further. You already have the following rooms on your ship:

  • A Pilot’s Cabin
  • A Main Deck
  • Crew Quarters
  • An Engine Room
  • A Cargo Bay

You can add a lot of different types of rooms like a Galley, a Navigational Suite, a Tap-Room or a Brig and they are all optional.

But this is a Research vessel now and I feel like we need a good way to observe stuff. We have the glider to allow us to watch from above. I would like to add a Cupola to the hull, near the rear of the ship, giving a great view of the Underthrash. That costs one Stake. I am down to just four Stakes left.

Armaments

Weapons are next on the Fittings list. These, too, are optional. In this case, they are either placed on deck or fixed to the Hull. I’m not crazy about the idea of armaments for a Research vessel, however, since our Stealth sucks, I think it’s prudent.

We have a lot of choices, from Trebuchet to Storm-Rail to Broadside Cannons and a Bladed Prow. But I’m going to pick up something suitably sciencey:

  • Viper’s Tooth – 2 Stakes, sprays an acid of some sort dealing Long Range Acid Damage.

Outriders

This is another option for defence. Honestly, with a Small ship, I don’t have the space for this and I also don’t have the Stakes to spend on it. You have to build an Outrider much like a ship, although it only has two components. You will also then need to add a way to store and deploy it from your actual ship. It seems like a fun extra but I can’t afford it.

Step Three – Undercrew

Octopus crew
Octopus crew

These come in three varieties: Officers, Gangs and Packs. I’m not going to go into detail on each variety as this post is already way too long. Suffice it to say, the officers are Skilled, Experienced or Well-Travelled, the Gangs are not necessarily what you might think of when you think of Gangs (some of them are Tinkers, some are Spear-Fishers, but some are actual Marauders) and the Packs are animals…

You can have Spring-Foxes which leap along beside your ship to warn of danger, Rig-Ferrets who can do knots, Squirrel Flingers who will fight to defend your vessel. But what I want is one of the Insect Packs:

  • Glowbug Parade – 2 Stakes, they follow the crew members around and illuminate their surroundings for them!

Personal Touches

And so, with all Stakes spent, we come back to the start and our little idiosyncrasies. The book suggests describing the following, so I will:

  • Colour and Style – I think it was once a scientific grey and white, all straight lines but now it is a dark shade of honey as the insects crawled all over it. It’s all smeared and waxy. The crew have left it that way as they think it protects from parasites
  • Shape and Construction – I think this ship is quite blocky, almost as though it was constructed from prefab elements. But, once again, the engine bees have shored up all the joints and seams with wax and honey, making it look far more organic
  • Quarters Decoration – I don’t have my character created yet so I am going to revisit this when I have made them. I expect that all the crew sleep in a single chamber, though. They might each have a personalised corner
  • Quirk – Sometimes the bees go to sleep at night and we can’t get the engine to start
  • History – This has always been our ship. It has been on a mission of discovery and research for several years now. We were originally led by an old eccentric who built it and funded it. Now she’s gone, we carry on in her place

The final step? A name of course!

I name this good ship, The Beacon…

And here is a list of the options I have taken:

The Beacon

Design

Small Size (1 Stake, +1 Speed)
Scything Frame (1 Stake, +1 Saws)
Exile’s Copper Hull (2 Stakes, +1 Armour, +1 Speed)
Sawprow Bite (1 Stake, +1 Saws, Massive CQ Serrated Damage)
Tamed Hive Engine (2 Stakes, +1 Speed, +1 Seals, honey)

Fittings

Research Motif (2 Stakes)
Anchor System Addition (Free)
Tethered Kitesail Addition (1 Stake)
Cupola Room (1 Stake)
Viper’s Tooth Armament (2 Stakes, Massive LR Acid Damage)
No Outriders

Undercrew

No Officers
No Gangs
Glowing Parade Insect Pack (2 Stakes)

Conclusion

I’ll keep this short as that was very long. You should set aside a session just for this process, dear reader. There are a lot of choices and I can only imagine how much longer it would take with four or five people trying to come to agreement on it! However, it has given me a very clear idea of the Ship I just created and a few ideas for the type of character who might crew it.

On to character creation!

Blades in the Dark Character Creation

You play a scoundrel…doing [heists] with your crew. The setting is Doskvol, a city in perpetual darkness beset by inter-faction strife, corrupt leaders, and supernatural entities. The end goal for the character is usually to retire from that life with enough coin in their stash to live safely and securely without worrying about rivals or the authorities.

This is the third in a series of character creation posts I’m using to figure out which game I want to schedule of our next campaign. You can find the Triangle Agency one here. And you can find the Slugblaster one here.

Forging a New Era

From top left, clockwise, the covers of Bump in the Dark, Band of Blades, The Wildsea and Slugblaster
From top left, clockwise, the covers of Bump in the Dark, Band of Blades, The Wildsea and Slugblaster

Blades in the Dark, by John Harper has had such a profound impact on the TTRPG landscape since its release in 2017, that it’s hard to overstate it. It has a devoted following, it consistently appears on top ten RPG lists and it has spawned a bewildering array of games based on its system and setting. Forged in the Dark games like Band of Blades, Girl by Moonlight, Bump in the Dark, Slugblaster and Wildsea (debatably.) You can find a non-exhaustive list here.

The system is story-focused, encouraging players as well as GM to take a hand in building the narrative. Near the start of the book, it is pointed out that, “no-one is in charge of the story.” If I were to encourage you to take anything from this short summary, it would be that.

As in Slugblaster, you roll a D6 when attempting something. 1-3 is a failure, 4/5 is a success with consequences and 6 is a full success. The consequences from a failure or mixed success can come in the form of Stress, and thereby Harm and Trauma Conditions, which have more of an narrative effect on the story than a mechanical one (although they certainly have that too.) You can also add more dice to your roll and build a dice pool to give you more chance of rolling higher. You do this in several ways, by using pushing yourself, getting assistance or taking a Devil’s Bargain.

In all of these Forged in the Dark games, the rolls you make are highly abstracted. Instead of making a stealth roll, an investigation roll or a thieves’ tools roll, you describe what your character wants to do and then roll with the appropriate Action Rating. In most cases the Action encompasses a character’s whole part in a scene, rather than a single, explicit skill or combat thing like in D&D and similar games. The choice of the Action Rating used is explicitly left up to the player, but if the GM thinks it might be more effective to use a different one, they can reduce the impact of the action or increase the danger of the PC’s position, making the consequences for failure more severe.

Blades has several really cool mechanics, like the Flashback to go back and prepare something for the situation you find yourself in, but I don’t have the space to go into every rule here. Maybe I’ll do more of a deep-dive into the rules in another post. For now, let’s go about creating my Scoundrel.

Dark Heists

It’s important to remember the setting and the type of game this is. You play a scoundrel of some sort, doing jobs/heists/cons with your crew. The setting is Doskvol (or Duskwall), a city in perpetual darkness beset by inter-faction strife, corrupt leaders, and supernatural entities. The end goal for the character is usually to retire from that life with enough coin in their stash to live safely and securely without worrying about rivals or the authorities.

Blades in the Dark character creation steps
Blades in the Dark character creation steps

Playbooks

The types of characters available to play are suitably goth.

  1. Cutter – violent and intimidating
  2. Hound – crack-shot tracker
  3. Leech – explosive alchemist
  4. Lurk – shadowy sneak-thief
  5. Slide – social and manipulative
  6. Spider – factional mastermind
  7. Whisper – magic and ghosts

There are seven of them, as you will have noticed. So, I’m breaking out the DCC zocchi dice again. I got a 4 on the d7 making this character a Lurk.

The Lurk

The Lurk playbook in Blades in the Dark
The Lurk playbook in Blades in the Dark

There is no longer any sunlight — the world is plunged into eternal night. There are scoundrels who live in the darkness, who prowl the underworld unseen, trespassing where they will. They are the burglars, the spies, the infiltrators, the cut-throats — commonly called Lurks.

After this pleasing intro, the playbook description tells me that my Lurk will gain xp whenever they “address a challenge with stealth or evasion.” Each of the playbooks have a different way to earn xp that’s individual to them.

Here also, it asks a couple of questions to get the player thinking, not just about the mechanics of the playbook, but about the personality and background of their character:

Q. How did you learn the stealthy arts of the Lurk?
A. I was taken in at a young age by a band of pickpockets and sneak-thieves.

Q. Which Aspect are you drawn to most? The invisible watcher, spying on the unwary? The adroit acrobat, racing across rooftops? The deadly ambush predator, waiting for a victim in the darkness?
A. The intimate knowledge of the city’s underworld, its back alleys and interconnected cellars, its rooftops and sewers. Where to spy from, where to approach a potential mark/victim from and how.

Starting Actions

Everyone has three Attributes:

  • Insight
  • Prowess
  • Resolve

Each of these has four Action Ratings hanging off it.
Insight has

  • Hunt
  • Study
  • Survey
  • Tinker

Prowess has

  • Finesse
  • Prowl
  • Skirmish
  • Wreck

Resolve has

  • Attune
  • Command
  • Consort
  • Sway

You can have up to four points, or dots, in each Action Rating although you can only have up to two dots at the start.
The Attribute Ratings will equal the number of associated Action Ratings they have any score in. So if you have any dots in Attune and any dots in Command, you will have a Resolve of 2. You use the Attribute Ratings to resist different types of stress.

In the case of the Lurk, I start off with 1 point in Finesse and 2 in Prowl. I will add four more points to Action Ratings at a later step.

Shady Friends/Rivals

Your connections to NPCs can be key to a successful or disastrous career as a scoundrel. There is a list of five in a table here. I’m going to roll my d5 once for a Friend and once for a Rival

  • Friend – 3 – Frake. This is a locksmith who has taught me everything I know about lock-picking. He has an encyclopaedic knowledge of every type of lock, chest, safe and safe room in the city
  • Rival – 2 – Darmot. Once, he was one of our band of pickpockets, now, he uses his knowledge against them. He’s busted me many times

Lurk Special Abilities

You only get one of the eight listed abilities to start with.

  1. Infiltrator – you don’t suffer negative effects due to higher quality security measures employed by higher Tier enemies
  2. Ambush – Gives you an extra d6 when attacking from hiding
  3. Daredevil – get a bonus die if you take a desperate action as long as you take -1d6 to resist any consequences of it
  4. The Devil’s Footsteps – push yourself to do the impossible. This ability has a variety of effects
  5. Expertise – you have to choose an action rating and when you lead a group action with that, you can only take a maximum of 1 stress
  6. Ghost Veil – go completely invisible by shifting into the ghost field. Just take some stress to do it
  7. Reflexes – who should act first? You should, of course!
  8. Shadow – use your special armour to resist consequences from security measures or pushing yourself in physical endeavours

The book suggests taking the first one listed if you can’t decide between them. However, I am going to roll a d8 to make the decision for me. That’s an 8!

Shadow

You may expend your special armor to resist a consequence from detection or security measures, or to push yourself for a feat of athletics or stealth.
When you use this ability, tick the special armor box on your playbook sheet. If you “resist a consequence” of the appropriate type, you avoid it completely. If you use this ability to push yourself, you get one of the benefits (+1d, +1 effect, act despite severe harm) but you don’t take 2 stress. Your special armor is restored at the beginning of downtime.

I like this a lot. It matches the growing image of this character that I have in my mind.

Lurk Items

There is a section in the playbook description for items specific to the Lurk, but there is no need to choose anything at this stage. In Blades in the Dark, you simply indicate at the start of a Score how heavy a Loadout you have on you. That gives you a number of Load points to assign as the Score progresses. When you come across a situation in which you need “Dark-sight goggles” for instance, you write them down and mark the 1 Load that they take up. You never need to describe the items you have in your pack beforehand.

Heritages

The Shattered Isles map and description
The Shattered Isles map and description

There are six options here. Your Heritage is more akin to a real-world ethnicity or national background than a race or species. It is quite likely to shape your character’s politics, social circles and general way of thinking. It is unlikely to have any mechanical effect.
Here are the Heritages:

  1. Akoros – big, industrialised land. Like Europe. Duskwall is here.
  2. Dagger Isles – peopled by corsairs and merchants who sail the seas between their isles and beyond
  3. Iruvia – a desert kingdom to the south. Think Egypt.
  4. Severos – a wild place with nomadic people who survive in the ruins of ages past
  5. Skovlan – recently colonised by Doskvol. Many refugees from here have come to the city to look for opportunity
  6. Tycheros – a far-away land where the people are part demon. These characters get demonic telltales that mark them physically

Rolling a d6 for this as well: That’s a 1! Akoros. This is a local person whose family fell on hard times. While their parents were out looking for work, this guy was out running around with their gang, stealing and sneaking.

Backgrounds

What did this character do before going their crew? There are 7 options:

  1. Academic
  2. Labour
  3. Law
  4. Trade
  5. Military
  6. Noble
  7. Underworld

I would normally roll for this but I feel like I already have such a solid picture of this Lurk in my head that I am going to have to go for Underworld here. They were a street kid, a pickpocket within a network of urchins that spanned the city.

Assigning Action Dots

There are only a couple of rules to the way you can assign these dots (points) on your character sheet. You can’t start with more than two points in any one Action Rating. Also you should add one dot to an Action rating that reflects your Heritage and one dot to an Action Rating that reflects your Background.

I think, as a local in this industrial city, this character would get a dot in Tinker and as a wee guttersnipe, they would need a dot in Skirmish. I get two more dots to spend freely so I would like to add one to Hunt and one to Attune.

Vices

In your downtime between Scores, you might want to blow off some steam to relieve stress. That’s why you need a good vice!

Here are the options:

  1. Faith
  2. Gambling
  3. Luxury
  4. Obligation
  5. Pleasure
  6. Stupor
  7. Weird

There is a great deal of leeway to describe the specifics of your vice within the confines of the category. I’m going to roll a d7 for this. That’s a 1, Faith. I think my Scoundrel has found his place amongst an underground cult in the city. In fact, I think the band of urchins they have been part of since childhood is led by a prophet, a visionary with the ability to speak to god through the dead.

Name, Alias and Look

Name: Arvus Arran (I chose this from the long list of names in the book)
Alias: Bug (small, sneaky, seems to fly)
Looks: Non-binary, delicate, Fitted Leggings, Hooded Coat, Long Scarf.

Arvus Arran Lurk Character Sheet
Arvus Arran Lurk Character Sheet: Get yours here: https://ad1066.com/bens-character-sheets/blades-in-the-dark-playbooks

Crew Creation

Just like in Slugblaster, you really need a crew to finish out a Blades in the Dark character, but this isn’t really possible here, except to say there are a few crew types:

  • Assassins
  • Bravos
  • Cult
  • Hawkers
  • Shadows
  • Smugglers

And Cult seems to make sense here, imagining that the rest of the crew are also members of Arvus’ gang.

Conclusion

This is such a straight-forward character creation process that involves very little flipping between sections of the book. With a new character, you don’t have too many decisions to make and you can begin to get a feel for the character you’re creating very quickly. You can also see the potential for future stories and drama in elements of the process such as the friends and rivals.

I have only played the one campaign of Blades in the Dark but writing this post has whetted my appetite for more!

Slugblaster Character Creation

But what is the aim of this game? Well, its to be the most teen teen you can been.

This is the second in a series of character creation posts I’m using to figure out which game I want to schedule of our next campaign. You can find the last one here.

Kick-flip Over a Quantum Centipede

That’s it. That’s the game. This is the kind of weird shit your character should be doing, or, at least, trying to be doing. “What is a Quantum Centipede?” I hear you ask. If you have to ask, you’re just proving you’re a dork. Not like me and my crew. We’re Slugblasters and we go Slugblasting across the frikkin’ multiverse on our boards. Or, like, it will be me, after I get finished making this character.

Slugblaster

Slugblaster GOTY boxed set cover
Slugblaster GOTY boxed set cover

Slugblaster is a game by Mikey Hamm. It was released by Mythworks in 2024. It uses a Forged in the Dark system which means it’s based on Blades in the Dark. I will be making a Blades character as part of this series too, but for some perverse reason, I decided to do this one first.

Essentially, in a Forged in the Dark system you build a dice pool of D6s through various means. When you roll your dice pool to try and achieve something, the highest roll is generally the only one that counts. A 6 is a full success (and, actually, if you get more than one 6, in Slugblaster, it gives you 1 Style point.) A 4 or a 5 means you succeed but introduce a problem of some kind. Anything else is a failure.

There are other rules, of course, but that is the essence of it.

But what is the aim of this game? Well, its to be the most teen teen you can been. You have to do kick-ass tricks on your board, hack gear, get into drama with your teammates and rivals, and have “touching narrative downtime arcs.”

And the “classes” available to us reflect all of that so well.

Pick Your Personality

In this game, Personality is the closest thing to a character class or playbook. Here are the available Personalities:

  1. The Grit
  2. The Guts
  3. The Smarts
  4. The Heart
  5. The Chill

As the book tells us, “Your personality isn’t about what you can do, it’s about how.” Which seems appropriate in a game about teenagers. It also means that any PC can do anything, as long as they describe it in terms of the way their Personality would handle it. I like this a lot. It’s a strong foundation for a heavily narrative game. Anyway, I’m going to roll a d5 to see which Personality I go with. I got a 5, which makes my character the Chill. This is, by far the most important decision/roll you make regarding your character. The Personality itself defines most of the things that make you you.

The Chill

The Chill description, extra gear, attitude and traits
The Chill Beats and illustration

“Play as the Chill if you want to crack jokes, eat some snacks, let problems solve themselves, and not think too much.”

Maybe the Chill is just lucky or maybe they notice things the others never do. Things work out for the Chill, that’s all.

Here are some of the things the Chill gets:

Extra Gear

1-2 Something You Found on Your Way Here
or
3-4 A Pet

I rolled a 2 on a d4 so I’m going to take Something I Found on My Way Here. That is incredibly wide open. Could be anything at all. I’m going to say it’s something that all adventurers should have, a long length of cabling. It was just lying there on the pavement in front of Old Swenson’s ‘shop, wrapped in plastic and taped up. It took a while to get it open with my Swiss Army knife to see what it was. It adorns my shoulder, cross-body.

I think, technically, this item is whatever you need at the time during the Run. I don’t think you need to actually decide what the item is until its needed.

Style Bonus

I get 1 Style after a run in which I express “ease or flow.”
Style is a currency that you gain by doing cool stuff and playing to character. You can spend it during downtime to gain Beats, propelling the story in the way you want it to go.

Attitude

I get to add an extra d6 to all actions! Ad infinitum! This is massive. If I could otherwise only manage 1d6 for an action, this immediately doubles my chances of a favourable outcome. Don’t forget, it’s only the top result on your dice that matters.

Traits

You only get to pick one of these to start with. As you hit your Trait Beats, you get to choose more. For now, let’s take a look at what’s available. There are five to choose from:

  1. Steezey – Gets me an extra style if I roll doubles
  2. Umm… Guys – I happen across the stuff nobody else does
  3. Button Masher – I can utilise a “locked mod” but only for one action. You can normally only mod your devices when you have the correct set of components for them. You can also normally only use mods that you have on your own Signature gear. This would let me momentarily yoink a crewmate’s mod and use it for my own nefarious purposes
  4. Lucky – I can use this to have one thing go my way that otherwise would have gone south. But I could only use it once per Run
  5. Quirk – I would get to choose one thing that I’m inexplicably proficient in doing. If I can relate it to the action I am taking, I can upgrade any 1-3 roll to a 4/5 instead. What am I good at? Could be practically anything.

It would obviously be better to choose the perfect starting trait for the character you want to build, but I’m going to roll for it again. I rolled a 4 on my d5! That makes me Lucky! I’m quite happy with that. It is very thematic for this Personality and can be used in almost any situation.

Beats

So, you don’t start with any of these, since they are all about the advancement of your Slugblaster. But, I thought it would be fun to introduce the concept and some of the Arcs they can lead to. This system of Beats is heavily inspired by its namesake in Heart the City Beneath, which I discussed in this post last year. In Slugblaster, the Beats are a little more focused and you have to spend currencies like Style and Trouble to buy them. That allows you to play out a scene and send the story off in a way that you and your character want it to. This might be something to do with your Traits, like introducing your Origin Story, it might be something to do with your Family, showing your Trouble at Home or the Final Straw for your parents. It might be more to do with your Personality. Here is the Chill Arc:

  • Caught in a Plot – this costs 1 Style. Wrong place at the wrong time? Right place at the right time? Somehow your luck makes sure you discover some sort of plot.
  • Serendipity – this costs 2 Style. The plot thickens. Your crew might have something to say about it. This one gives you +1 Legacy. Legacy goes towards your ultimate Epilogue, deciding the type of life your teen will have in the future.
  • In Too Deep – This one costs 4 Trouble, which is quite a lot. The corner you painted yourself into with this case of mistaken identity has gotten very narrow and claustrophobic. You get found out. Things are going bad and one of your teammates notices how bad. This one gives you +1 Doom, which has a similar, if more negative effect on your Epilogue.
  • Somehow Works Out – The last Beat in the Chill Arc costs 3 Style. As the Chill, everything always works out in the end. Why were you ever worried? -1 Doom, +1 Legacy and +1 Trait.

Like I said, I can’t pick any of these at this stage, I just wanted you to get a feel for the types of Beats available to a Slugblaster character, dear reader.

Vibes

This one is an actual d6 table. Nice.
Here are the options:
“

  1. Space cadet
  2. Just woke up
  3. Laundry day
  4. deadpan
  5. Always eating a bag of chips
  6. Kisses their mom on the lips and isn’t weird about it” (!)

Here we go! That’s a 3 on a d6. That gives my Laundry Day. Just out there wearing the punishment underwear and the ripped jeans.

Look

There is another table, this time a d6xd6 table that will help me define this Slugblaster’s looks. The first roll is a 1 and the second roll is a 5. That gives me the result, “ballcap.” I think this a baseball cap given to me by my brother, who has left for college.

I’m going to roll again on this table, because just “ballcap” isn’t much of a look. This time I get a 4 and a 4. That’s “chains.” I’m imaging a lot of different sized chains hanging off a thick leather belt connected to a bunch of different things like keys, that Swiss Army knife, a little flashlight, an oversized Garbage Pail Kid keyring.

Family

Another d6xd6 roll here: I get a 5 and a 4, which gives me “sheltered.” Maybe that means they are a family who distrusts the rest of society, and they just want to be left alone to do things their own way. I imagine this could lead to an interesting Family arc! You are supposed to roll on this table twice, so I rolled again and got a 6 and a 2, “relaxed.” This seems to be at odds with the first one, but maybe it just refines the story a bit. Maybe the family has been sheltered for so long that they have become complacent about the outside world. Maybe, when to comes back to bite them, things will change.

Bond

This one is not really possible for right now. It requires there to be other actual players. The book suggests that everyone should choose the PC of the player sitting to their right to have a bond with. This is a nice random way to conduct this sort of thing. Sometimes, you find that a player is most likely to choose the other player that they already know best for this sort of bond. In my car, I am going to just roll a d4 to decide the other Personality type that I am Bonded with. I rolled a 2, which gives me the Guts. That’s the Personality with lots of confidence and “sass.” There is a d6 table here that you can roll on to better define the type of relationship you both have. I rolled a 1, which means we were childhood friends.

Gear

Rayguns
Rayguns

Everyone starts with a phone, a raygun and a hoverboard as well as the extra gear provided in your Personality description.

Since the Phone section suggests that it doesn’t need to be phone shaped, I think I will go for a wrist-console

I get a Raygun… There are two steps to making it. Step A and Step B, each of which involves a d6xd6 table. I got a 1 and a 3 for Step A and a 3 and a 5 for Step B. This gives me a Particle Blaster.

And then there’s the Board. Obviously the average Slugblaster’s most price piece of kit. The “Your Board” section of the book has a nice intro to the origin of the Nth Gear Hoverboard and how it revolutionised the world. The section also has several tables to help you design your board. So here we go!:

Grip Colour – 2 and 3 gives me “red.” I’m thinking gaudy, tie-dyed red
Grip Cut – 4 and 3 gives me “logo.” The stylised face of a little gremlin
Deck Graphic – 2 and 5 give me “name of a sponsor.” The sponsor is called “Gremling”
Type of board – I got a 5 and a 1, “oldschool”

You also get two pieces of gear from the list on page 66 of the book. I’m going to check that out right now.

Here are the two items I have selected from page 66:

  • Grappling Hook – it has 100 feet of cable, can stick to almost anything and has a handy winch
  • Pro Camera Gear – This could be anything from a decent DSLR camera and tripod to “shoulder-mounted 3D rigs”

Pick Your Signature

Signatures
Signatures

This is the item you are probably going to use to solve most of your problems given half a chance. People know you by this item and it’s your most prized possession. I’m going to use the table to help me describe it! 3 and 3 means its dirty/worn.

But, what exactly is the item? There are twelve listed so I’m going to roll a d12 for it obviously. That’s a 10, which gives me a Kinetic Deck, which allows my oldschool board to go faster over solid ground and make it super-heavy at will.

I get one mod to start with, although there are five listed. I’m going to go for the Stasis Anchor which can make the board totally immovable until its deactivated.

You get some more tables to add flavour to your Signature.

  • Origin – 4 – made it myself
  • Form – 3 – There’s an enamel pin made by my best friend, the Guts, stuck to the front of the board
  • Slogan – 26 – “ALT” and its got a holographic face that keeps changing as the angle changes

Name Yourself

My parents know me as Benji McWhirter. My friends call me Bench and I call myself Alter.

Conclusion

And that’s it, that’s the whole character creation process. I imagine, if you’re not writing about every step, it is probably quite quick to roll up a new character. There are a lot of fun ways to customise the base character but the fun seems to be in advancing, gaining Beats and Traits, Doom and Legacy and Fracture (another type of currency which is used to break up the crew!) But it starts you off with the tools to make things really awesome and dramatic as the game goes on, and that’s what it’s all about. I have a couple of gripes and they involve the gear. What you get to start with is stated in a couple of different places, but in each one, the list of things you start with is different. Also, there is an element of confusion around the Signature still. I am not sure if my Signature is my oldschool board that has this Kinetic Deck upgrade, or is that another piece of equipment on top of my board? It’s not super clear.

Otherwise, I have one more mechanics-related complaint and that is about the jargon used in place of more (for me) understandable terms. Boost, kick, turbo, slam… is it because I’m not a skater? The meaning of these slides off my brain, unlike the terms used in Blades in the Dark: goal, action rating, position, effect, harm.

Maybe I would get used it in play.

It is a gorgeous book, I have to say. The artwork is colourful and creative and inspiring and the writing is witty and just right, theme-wise.

Have you any experience with Slugblasting, dear reader? I’d love to hear your thoughts.

Throwback Sunday: Wildsea – Campaign

Even the concept of the post-apocalypse that is so impossibly verdant that sentient life has had to scrabble for a foothold amongst all the greenery is unique and bold.

Traveling

Dear reader, I’m off on my travels again. This time, I’m in the east of England where the weather is beautiful and the swimming pool is indoors. Anyway, I’m using this razor-thin rationalisation to excuse reposting this post from about this time last year. It’s about giving PCs something they care about that you can fuck with, and Wildsea, which is one of the games I’m considering running in the near future. It’s also a game very much about journeying so it seemed appropriate.

Wildsea – Campaign

I’ll be back with something original soon, dear reader. In the meantime, I hope you enjoy this blast from the recent past.

Troika! Whalgravaak’s Warehouse Review

Here’s the story: hundreds of years ago, the city’s premier logistics wizard, Whalgravaak, abandoned his warehouse, having shredded the Manual of Operations for his Sphere Pool (a mechanism used to import and export goods across the cosmos) so that his rivals could never figure it out.

One-shot fun-shot to campaign of terror

You know what it’s like, dear reader: you want to introduce some noobs to RPGs or just to your group of players, you want to make a good impression but you don’t want to scare them off by plunging them into a multi-session campaign with a complicated, crunchy system. So you pick up a location-based adventure, thinking you can just use a small portion of it, just what you need, just enough for one session, one single shot. But, after that session, the curiosity gets the better of you all. That was a weird, but enjoyable experience, you tell each-other. I bet we could have fun exploring the rest of that odd locale, you tell the players, why not have some more sessions and see how it goes? So you do that. And then the bloodbath begins.

Whalgravaak’s Warehouse

SPOLIERS BELOW! If you are interested in being a player in Whalgravaak’s Warehouse, turn back now!

The covers of three Troika! 1:5 adventure modules, Whalgravaak's Warehouse, The Hand of God and Eye of the Aeons.
The 1:5 adventures that I own, Whalgravaak’s Warehouse, The Hand of God and Eye of the Aeons. All from Melsonian Arts Council

Whalgravaak’s Warehouse is a Location based adventure by Andrew Walter for Troika! The design is by Shuyi Zhang. It came out in 2023 and was the first of the Melsonian Arts Council’s 1:5, an ongoing series of location-based adventures for Troika! There are a couple more available now and another out very soon. You can find them all here. My somewhat rotating group of Tables and Tales members just had our last session in Whalgravaak’s Warehouse on Monday night, after spending a total of eight sessions there.

Here’s the story: hundreds of years ago, the city’s premier logistics wizard, Whalgravaak, abandoned his warehouse, having shredded the Manual of Operations for his Sphere Pool (a mechanism used to import and export goods across the cosmos) so that his rivals could never figure it out.

Since then, the strange nature of the warehouse, staffed by giants and stocked with oddities, has only grown stranger, and more dangerous. It houses a handful of physics defying, Tardis-like chambers, not least of which is the terrifying Deep Storage, a swirling mass containing several pocket dimensions and a wraith-like being who wants nothing more than to consume intruders. At least one cult has taken up residence, and they are often mutated into horrific Chaotic Spawnlets by the effects of the radiation still spilling from the Sphere Pool. The warehouse is sandwiched by a vast desert of dust occupying the roof, which is peopled by the descendants of Whalgravaak’s former employees and, underneath, the tunnels of a pack of unpredictable Worm-headed Hounds.

But entrance has been forbidden by the Autarch for centuries and, even if you were foolhardy enough to ignore a diktat like that, you would still need to be brave enough to face the unknown dangers within.

The Hook and the Party

The book suggests a few potential hooks for your PCs. Since my game started off as a one-shot, with brand new characters and no existing campaign to work it into, I went for one that seemed like the object might be achieved in one session. They, along with many other groups of mercenaries were contracted to return with the head of a Cacogen, known only as the Opportunist, to their patron, an Exultant of the Autarch’s court. But we dealt with that in flashback as they all sat in the weed-choked yard of the warehouse, dotted now with small encampments of adventurers and brigands all gathering their courage to gain entry. The PCs’ band consisted of a Monkey Monger (and monkeys), a Gremlin Catcher (and dog), a Wizard Hunter and a Landsknecht. They were, to put it bluntly, a motley crew.

That first session was all fun and games. Every encounter, except for the last one with the Cacogen, was resolved peacefully. This happened mainly due to the rolls I made on the Mien table for each encounter. The worm-headed Hounds they encountered wanted to play with the Monkey Mongers monkeys, they did not want to eat them. The Flat Serviceman was happy to follow the party around and clean up after them. The Segmented Crippler in the Pigeonholery, didn’t want to wake up, so they skipped that one entirely. This is a pretty standard mechanic in Troika but I think it gave the players a false sense of security. The session ended with this motley crew finding and defeating the Opportunist quite handily. And, at that point, we thought that would be it.

But a few months later we decided to continue with their explorations of the warehouse. Obviously, their original motivation to explore was gone. They had achieved their objective, but the players were all good sports. They decided between them that the motivation was purely one of curiosity and greed. They had spotted, through a bubble like window in one of the rooms they had traversed, a vast and terrifying pool of chaos and wonder in a room far too big to exist within the confines of the building. This was enough for them. Essentially, they went in search of adventure. Although, through the sessions that followed, I did introduce the idea that they might want to find that cult I mentioned earlier and that they should seek out the incredibly valuable Tome of the Sable Fields that was reported to be stored in the warehouse, somewhere. This gave them a little direction when I thought they might need it, but, honestly, I think my players just wanted to see what new wonder/horror the dungeon had in store in the next room.

The Dungeoncrawl

It was only from this point that I started to really treat this adventure like the dungeoncrawl it is very much meant to be. The book does a good job of introducing the concepts of tracking resources like lantern oil and provisions as the party explores. It also explains the concept of exploration turns and their effect on the game, i.e. the distance you can travel in that time, the amount of lantern oil you use per turn, and the likelihood of running into an encounter. I followed all these rules to the letter and they made for some interesting moments in the game. But, to be frank, the weirdness of the setting is the real draw here, not fiddling with rations and light levels. Also, few of the characters lived long enough for starvation or oil-skins to become a problem.

It also has rules for dealing with the spatially distorted, impossibly large areas within the warehouse. It suggests that the players should make Luck or Skill checks to avoid getting lost in these areas, but, in all honesty, I didn’t really require that sort of thing.

Mapping is also a part of the dungeon crawl format and this adventure does want the party to attempt to map the space for themselves. The thing is, when some rooms appear to be a kilometre wide and the next one is spatially normal, that map becomes effectively impossible for them to draw accurately after a relatively short period of time. Eventually, I gave up and just shared the one from the book with the players, trusting their ability to separate player knowledge and character knowledge. My advice, if you are doing this, try get your hands on the PDF version, since the one in the physical book stretches across two pages and the crease obscures part of it.

In fact, the adventure has four maps:

  • the warehouse floorpan, using 10ft squares to denote distance
  • a hex crawl for the desert on the roof, replete with points of interest
  • a map of the Worm-headed Hound tunnels beneath the warehouse, superimposed over the warehouse plan
  • a largely vibes-based map of Deep Storage

These are all great but usefulness will vary. In our game, the party spent several sessions trapped in Deep Storage but took one look at the desert and noped right out of there. This seems like a good point to note how good all the artwork is in this. There are plenty of colour and black and white illustrations but they leave me wanting even more!

Warehouse Workers and other Beasties

A warehouse is a dangerous place to work, especially when the correct safety protocols are not observed. It doesn’t help at all when you are trespassers and several of the residents are large enough to crush you with a single blow.

The crimson giant, Paude, the pipe-smoking, bearded giant, Arbuthnot and the blue, jelly giant, Gamtomerian.
The giants are not what you might expect.

The giants are the main NPCs of the adventure and Whalgravaak’s only remaining employees. Each one is fabulously interesting, diverse and well-drawn. They have their own motivations and desires. I was gratified that the party managed to encounter all of them during the eight sessions we played. In fact, one player had two different characters killed by two different giants. I will point out that it is entirely possible to avoid violence when dealing with the giants, it’s just that, sometimes, the Monkey Monger on the team has monkeys who decide to fuck with them and one thing leads to another.

The wraith-like Gulf Man Roamer from the swirling vortex of Deep Storage is a potentially lethal foe who has a chance to show up each time the party moves through that already dangerous room. If it captures you in its bag, it’s going to spirit you away to eat you in its extra-dimensional lair.

No warehouse is complete without forklifts. Whalgravaak’s forklifts are humanoid constructs with the face of the wizard himself. They treat intruders like stock, and will attempt to whack them and pack them. They hit very very hard.

Its a black and white dog, with a neck like an earthworm
When you read the words, Worm-headed Hound, is this what you imagined?

There are also a bunch of random encounters, including the Worm-headed Hounds I mentioned before, desert nomads from the roof, and Bandits/Burglars/Bastards. These only turn up on the roll of a 1 on a 1d6 for each turn the party travels. It didn’t occur very often in my game. The Roof and the tunnels have their own random encounter tables as well, but I never used them as the party never spent any appreciable time there.

This is just a selection of the possible encounters you can have in this setting. I haven’t even mentioned the tiny army guys, the sentient crane parts, the Onion God or the Mulled Dead.

The Rooms

I have hinted at rooms that defy physics and rooms with pocket dimensions, and those are usually the big-ticket locations that contain some of the greatest set-pieces in the adventure. Deep Storage alone evoked some of the most inventive use of skills and spells and a great degree of fear and tension from the PCs. It killed one of them (two if you count the Rhinoman eaten by the Gulf Man Roamer.) The Roof could act as an entire short hex-crawl campaign and the Sphere Pool has some truly memorable and dangerous elements to it.

However, many of the other rooms have weird and wonderful contents as well. Some of them, the party will glance at and move on, while others will capture their imaginations and encourage them to interact. I never really knew which reaction I was going to get from them, actually. The room full of melting rope? They had to spend an hour trying to figure out how to set it on fire, the eternal battle between tiny armies playing out across a battlefield seemingly larger than the whole warehouse? Just popped their heads in and left with some captured little men.

Some of the rooms were relatively mundane warehouse style rooms with shelves and containers. The book has tables in the back to help you identify the state those rooms are in and the contents of the containers, which is useful.

One of my over-riding impressions by the end of our game, was that in some ways, the great variety of bonkers content in the rooms served to detract from any unifying theme. There were some elements that went together, such as the warehouse’s disdain for traditional dimensions. If my PCs had explored the Roof or even encountered any of the nomads who dwelt there, they might have found a distinction between those descendants of the ancient striking workers and the giants who continued to obsessively do their jobs even long after their employer had passed on. But, none of that is to say that the rooms weren’t endlessly fun and inventive.

A Note on Lethality

I recently wrote a post sharing some of the obituaries of the characters who met their ends in Whalgravaak’s Warehouse. You can check it out here. There are only three of them in that post. A few months previous to that, I wrote this post, which contained the obituaries of two more. The mathematicians amongst you will have summed those already. That’s five. In the final session, we lost another one. That makes six. That was three character deaths each for two particularly unfortunate/reckless players. Warehouse work is dangerous. Only one of the original party survived to the end. You have been warned.

Conclusions

The covers of the two different versions of Troika! that I own.
Numinous or otherwise, its the same game.

There is so much to recommend in this adventure. It is endlessly entertaining, challenging and bonkers. It has such a variety of locations and such a diversity of encounters that you would need to work hard to get bored in Whalgravaak’s Warehouse. I think it works so well to show off Troika! as a system, too. The problems it asks the PCs to solve and the encounters they have to deal with utilise things like the Luck check really well and encourage players to invent their own unique Advanced Skills. But if they get into fights, especially with the incredibly random nature of Troika! initiative, there is a very high chance they are going to come out of it dead. There are a few opportunities for insta-kills throughout the warehouse too. I can’t overstate exactly how lethal this adventure is. Luckily, my players leaned into that, even when they were creating new characters to join in the same fight the original one died in (they got very quick at creating characters.)

I think it’s also flexible enough for many GMs to easily take it or part of it and fit it easily into their own ongoing Troika! campaign. As I said at the start, our game started as a one-shot and it could have ended there. But we were able to easily adapt it into a short campaign of its own.

Dear reader, let me know if you have played Whalgravaak’s Warehouse or if you would like to! I’d love to know your views on it.

DCC’s The Grinding Keep Review

At one stage, the Elf cast a Magic Missile and it caused a rain of frogs on the entire party and all their enemies, almost killing several on both sides!

DCC Day

I kind of knew it was DCC Day on the 19th of July. It had been advertised to me enough times on Instagram after all. But that was not why I had scheduled a DCC one-shot on the 20th of July. That just happened to be the best day for most of my players. As serendipity would have it, the module I planned to run was the Grinding Keep, an adventure designed by Marc Bruner, which appeared in the Adventure Pack for DCC Day 2024 along with the XCC RPG adventure, Tucson Death Storm!

Hook

I had introduced the hook for this adventure in our recent run of Sailors on the Starless Sea. The PCs discovered a map to a keep and a note hidden in the lining of a cloak in amongst the charnel remains of many butchered humanoids in that adventure’s tower. The note was from the patron of the poor unfortunate who lost their cloak and it indicated that their patron would pay 1000 gp for the safe return to them of a magical lantern. As budding adventurers, most of whom barely had two groats to rub together, this seemed to be motivation enough.

Each player had only one surviving character from the 0-level funnel and one of them was not able to make it to this latest game so I supplemented the four characters who advanced from 0-level to level 1 with a couple of pre-gens kindly provided for the Grinding Keep by Goodman Games themselves.

Big Party

So the party was made up of six level 1 PCs, a Warrior, a Wizard, a Cleric, a Dwarf, an Elf and a Halfling. Two of the players played two PCs each and two of them played one PC each. All of their abilities proved useful. I would say a varied party is very beneficial for this module. On the other hand, if I had to do it again, I probably would have left the players with one PC each even though the adventure calls for 4 to 6 level 1 PCs. They all survived easily enough, although there were a couple of close calls.

Starting the Adventure

SPOILERS! – If you are a player who might want to play this module, stop reading now!

To begin, I plonked them right at the door to the keep as the text suggests. The module wants you to do this. It is designed to be a one-shot by the gods, and it will be! No faffing around in town, shopping or gathering rumours. Just get them in there as quick as you can. I did have to utilise the handy, and essentially invulnerable Leaf Elemental that waits on the grounds of the estate for anyone foolish enough to hold up the proceedings of your one-shot by searching for herbs amongst the overgrown gardens which seem to be under the influence of all four seasons at once. The seasons are a recurring theme and I was gratified to note that the players realised this almost immediately.

Anyway, once they had been chased inside the keep, they were confronted by something that could only have been a magical effect that transformed the interior from a ruin to an immaculately decorated and lit hall. They were greeted by the white robed Host and eventually waited on at dinner by his veiled servants. All of this set up was important. It presented clues to the nature of the keep to the PCs and let their imaginations run with them. Enough strangenesses occur during dinner and upon their investigation of the ground floor of the keep that they should be suspicious. Indeed, before they had even left the dining room, one of my players joked, “the house is a mimic!” He didn’t know how spot on he was…

Of course, the keep is, in fact, an other planar entity who comes to the world to feed, in disguise. The PCs had seen windows and chimneys on the outside but could find no sign of them on the inside. The couldn’t get through any doors that the Host didn’t want them to enter, etc, etc. Clearly, there is enough evidence to allow your players to uncover the truth before things ever really get interesting.

One regret I have is how much time I allowed them to devote to this whole section before Event One occurs. They spent a lot of time searching, theorising, investigating, and it ate into the more adventuresome elements in the latter stages of the module. My advice would be to get them into the Guest Quarters and asleep as quickly as possible. The adventure does not provide much in the way of motivation for the characters to do this, however, so be prepared to improvise.

Event One

Event One is triggered when they wake up after a nights’ sleep in the keep. I was lucky enough that the players wanted to rest and one of them was rendered magically asleep, but without that, it would have been a struggle to get them to wait until the next morning. I probably would have triggered Event One early, if that had been a problem.

What “Event One” means is that the keep is waking up. It will soon be ready to consume a fresh meal of adventurers.

Mechanically, what it means is that every time they open a door, they will be confronted with an intersection of corridors that lead to two randomly determined rooms in the keep. These could be rooms they already visited in the first part of the adventure, or ones that would have been otherwise inaccessible up until this point.

The first room my players visited was the dining room again. This was satisfying as it gave them a chance to kill the Host and his servants from earlier (although, technically they just put the Host to sleep and dragged him around with them for the rest of the adventure.) After that, they encountered one of the three rooms that contained the organs of the keep. They had discovered the journal of a former prisoner/meal in their quarters that gave them hints as to how to deal with each of the organs; eyes, heart and lungs, and that proved useful in the encounter they had with the heart. It is significant that they identified several magic items that act as keys for the doors to these special rooms. But their first instinct was to destroy them if they could. Luckily they forgot about that plan and just kept ‘splorin’ instead. Eventually they managed to overcome the challenge in the heart room and at that point of our session, I realised I was running out of time to get my one-shot done in one shot so I focused things up a bit.

Event Two

The way it was supposed to work was this: every time they left a room, I would start marking that room off as no longer accessible on the random room table, until there was only one possible room left; the one that contained the Alien Intelligence itself. I didn’t have the time for all that. We were approaching the four hour mark at that point and people had work in the morning. So I just told them that, after they destroyed the fiery orb that acted as the keep’s heart, the entire place shook and when they re-opened the door to leave that place, the corridor beyond led to the last room. The players, unknowing, proceeded to their fate. Their fate, as it happened, was to murder the Alien Intelligence of the Grinding Keep, all its Animated Corpses and the Giant Animalcule Swarm that accompanied them. Destroying the heart had pretty much halved the creature’s HP so it wasn’t too difficult. In the end, they fled through the windows in the back of the room, utilising the Feather Fall spell (which two characters had, by coincidence) to safely land in the river at the bottom of the canyon beyond.

Conclusions

Perhaps you can see now why I think I should have made things a little harder for them by reducing their numbers. On the other hand, I am glad they all survived. They had all created and played such interesting and fun characters, even in the context of a game that is not RP-heavy, to say the least.

I was a little disappointed to reach the end of the adventure with so much cool content unexplored. They didn’t find the trap/treasure room where the magic lantern was stored, they didn’t find any of the other organ rooms, which all had really fun mechanics. On the other hand, I felt the adventure was designed to be flexible enough for a Judge to shortcut it exactly the way I did to get them to the end a little quicker, which seemed like good design to me.

This was only the second time any of us had played DCC and the first time with characters of anything other than 0-level. This was a different game to that first experience. PCs used magic and Mighty Deeds at every available opportunity and they got to roll on the crazy magic random tables a lot. At one stage, the Elf cast a Magic Missile and it caused a rain of frogs on the entire party and all their enemies, almost killing several on both sides! This is why we loved DCC. It’s the wonderful and potentially lethal randomness of it and the endless inventiveness of the adventures.

I would recommend the Grinding Keep as a one-shot DCC adventure, as long as you are willing to either cut out bits or extend it to two sessions.

Time for a Change

If you had to choose one, dear reader, which one would it be? If you are one of my potential players, which one would you like to play?

Anniversary Posts

More anniversary guest posts coming soon. In the meantime, have some musings.

Old School Rut?

I’m not sure how it happened but, recently, all I have been playing is OSR, trad and adjacent games. With the exception of Dungeon World, which is about as close to D&D as you can get while also flying the PBTA banner, its been wall-to-wall, dragon games, Borgs and Troikas. And this week? It’s Dragon Age, DCC and maybe some Black Sword Hack or UVG (which is pretty trad in its ruleset to be quite honest.) Am I in a rut or have I just naturally gravitated towards these games? Maybe I have found my niche and I’m occupying it. I don’t think that’s it. I think it has more to do with the ease with which I can roll out one of these games, if I’m the GM, at least. It’s also pretty easy to fall into one of them as a player when you’re familiar with the overall concepts, rulesets and themes. And, don’t get me wrong, it’s not that I’m not enjoying them. But it is time for a change, I think.

Options

So, I have a few options of non-OSR, non-D&D, non-trad games to try out in the near future. My current game of Troika! will be coming to an end next week and Dragon Age probably only has a couple of sessions left in it, for a while. So, some calendar spots are opening up! I’d like to fill them with something completely different.

The Triangle Agency Normal Briefcase Edition
Inside The Triangle Agency Normal Briefcase Edition
Nice One Idiot

Triangle Agency – I’m reading this at the moment. I have to say, so far, I’m loving the way the game is presented, the really original ideas, the surprisingly bare-bones ruleset and the way it treats the GM (General Manager) as as much of a player as the Agents. It has gotten me excited to play it and I am trying to get potential players excited about it too. The downside is that I feel like I still have a lot to read before I can think about getting it to the table.

    Slugblaster GOTY Edition
    Inside the Slugblaster GOTY Edition
    Panic Energy Drink
    Name Your Crew
    Slugblaster Two Page Spread

    Slugblaster – I got this great boxed set for Christmas and have yet to crack the spine of the rulebook in anger. But I have been listening to the excellent My First Dungeon actual play of the game over the last several weeks. It has made me want to try it out despite having little to no understanding of skate culture. I know at least one player who would be very interested in playing so I’m sure I could get a few more. Once again, the difficulty is that I have not even skimmed the rules yet. This is somewhat ameliorated by the fact that I’ve been learning how to play while listening to the podcast.

      Blades in the Dark Front Cover
      The Devil’s in the Details
      Silkshore

      Blades in the Dark – Although I was a player in a campaign of Blades last year, I still haven’t run it as the GM. I think I would enjoy doing it and it is such a classic, it would be a shame not to put a game of it together. And it is the basis for games like Slugblaster and The Wildsea, which also feature on this list. I have been nicking enough rules from it for my D&D game, also, that I feel confident I would mesh quite well with the ruleset. At least I have read this one cover to cover and played it before, so that’s a big tick in the “pro” column for Blades.

      The Wildsea Front Cover
      The Foxloft
      The Threat of Death

      The Wildsea – I wrote about this already last year and still haven’t managed to run it! Essentially, this game imagines a world where the entire surface has been covered in a vast forest and your players are sailors across the canopy, using boats with giant chainsaws attached to sail. Take a look at the last post about it if you want more info. I have rad a lot of this and could probably run it ok, but I am afraid of doing another game where my players are sailors as I am already doing that with Spelljammer and kind of, with UVG.

      Deathmatch Island Front Cover
      Trust Building
      Competitor Registration Forms

      Deathmatch Island – I also wrote about wanting to play this around this time last year. I having been feeling the urge to scratch the Lost, Severance type itch over the last few months. I watched both of those shows in the last half a year and they have stuck with me a lot. I think Deathmatch Island would be perfect for that. Also, I have read it completely and would be very excited to try out its mechanics. Here’s my post about it from last year.

      Apocalypse Keys Front Cover
      The Shade
      The Basic Moves
      Orbital Blues Front Cover
      The Crew Ship
      Rogues Gallery
      Easy care Galactic Wear

        There are a couple of outsiders as well, Orbital Blues and Apocalypse Keys, both of which I purchased on something of a whim (and a sale.) I’m curious about them but have barely opened either. I know Apocalypse Keys is a PBTA game and that it is beautifully illustrated, but that’s about it. And I know Orbital Blues is a game of sad space cowboys ála Cowboy Bebop and Firefly so that is a big tick in its favour as far as I am concerned.

        If you had to choose one, dear reader, which one would it be? If you are one of my potential players, which one would you like to play?

        The Quantum NPC

        This works even better through the medium of TTRPGs than TV to be honest, because your imagination simply works around them, never focusing on their details.

        Star Trek

        I’ve been watching a lot of Star Trek the Next Generation lately. I hadn’t seen it in many years, although I watched the whole thing as it came out in the eighties and nineties. I have obviously been watching it with different eyes this time around. I have noticed things in it that I don’t think I could have seen before. I wonder, for instance, about Mr Data. Would he have been such a sympathetic character today, as an AI in humanoid form? I think about how many of the episodes had no action, how many were just talking heads and techno-babble and whether Sci-fi TV shows today could get away with that. I ponder the special effects and make-up and marvel at how well they stand up 35 years later. But I have also been looking at these episodes with TTRPGs in mind. Now, of course, Star Trek has been made into a number of role playing games. I have never played any of them and this post isn’t about them. This post is about the crew of the Enterprise. Not Picard and Riker and Troi and Worf, but the ones who you see occasionally pass the bridge crew on one of the ship’s many lushly carpeted corridors, the ones having their own conversations in the background in Ten Forward, even the ones who so consistently took the con after Wesley Crusher left. They would get names sometimes and every so often, they’d even get lines! There are a couple of those that are recurring characters, such as Ensign McKnight and Robin Lefler. The most iconic of these, Chief O’Brien, went on to enjoy a major role in two Star Trek shows. But when he first appeared on the Enterprise, he was an unnamed bridge officer. Total NPC. He only became someone when the show creators decided he had to be someone.

        The Quantum NPC

        So this is what I have started doing for crews in my Spelljammer campaign. I think it would work in any game where you have a lot of NPCs that hang around in close proximity to the PCs all the time. So it works particularly well for ship crews.

        In the main campaign, the party lost their original crew in the best possible circumstances. The crew, a bunch of spirits who had lost their memories and were not initially aware they were dead at all, finally fulfilled their goals and were able to shuffle off to whichever outer plane would have them. So, the PCs were forced to hire a whole new crew to take care of rigging and swabbing and whatnot. Now, I did not want to spend an entire session where they press-ganged or interviewed eight or nine NPCs that I would then have to name, outline and give voices to. That kind of thing can be fun but I don’t want to spend two full hours at it. Instead I told them that they picked up eight new competent crew members and that we would come up with their characters as and when they were needed.

        So this is how that works, you imagine the scene where the PCs are on deck, in the foreground talking about something like how to defeat the weird root creatures that have invaded the ship from some eldritch, otherworldly space. In the background, just like in Star Trek, you have a few crewmembers, maybe they are even in uniform, but they are ill-defined and unremarkable. This works even better through the medium of TTRPGs than TV to be honest, because your imagination simply works around them, never focusing on their details. But then! They need one of the NPCs to be good at something, a specialist, an expert. Or maybe they just need a buddy, someone to talk to, or someone to listen. That’s when the players get to stretch those imagination muscles!

        Pulling the NPC Out of Their Quantum State

        The NPC existed in theory but not in practice. They were always there as a number, but not as a person, not as a character. Until the players make them up. The GM asks a player who this NPC is, what their name is, their ancestry, their job, what their personality is like. The players generally end up working together to do this but I usually start by asking the player who decided they wanted one of the quantum NPCs to become real for some reason. I ask that particular player the type of character they want in this situation with the understanding that, once they have been defined, they will forever be part of the crew, taking up one of those eight spots. It’s just like Blades in the Dark items. You know how many slots you have to fill when your PC is out on a Score but you don’t define the items until you need them in the narrative. Once you have said you have “A Blade or Two,” though, those blades are filling one of those slots. Same-same but different.

        In this manner we got these three NPCs:

        Deckhand Dewey – kobold, he/him, spry and wiry and can fit in little places.

        Cook – Barry Keoghan (this is the consequence of allowing the players to name NPCs) – orc, he/him, big guy with big arms, beer belly, loves food and loves cooking. His chef hat does not fit very well. Apron always slightly dirty. Has a space rat companion.

        Mr Cannon – Halfling he/him – weapon-master.

        As you can see some of them got more detailed description than others. Barry Keoghan was described thoroughly partly because of who I asked to describe him and partly because of the moment I asked for his description, i.e. a quiet moment aboard ship where they had some time to talk about provisions and joke about silly Disney movie references. Meanwhile, Mr Cannon was created in the literal heat of battle. But that was ok, because the idea was always to flesh these NPCs out as time went on. We did, for instance, in subsequent sessions, discover that Mr Cannon had a wife waiting for him at home and that Barry Keoghan had some sort of tragic love-affair in his past.

        I think, in future I will bring Between the Skies to bear on the Quantum NPCs as they are being birthed by the players, giving them desires, bonuses, hindrances, quirks and all the rest. Time allowing, of course.

        The Quantum NPC method has the added advantage of endearing the newly created NPCs to the players from the off. They are, after all, fully their own creations. From the players’ point of view, I believe it was also quite devastating when both Mr Cannon and Deckhand Dewey got breath weaponed into oblivion by a lunar dragon along with the rest of the NPC crew (apart for Barry Keoghan who was in the galley at the time of the attack.) Unforgettable.

        Dad-quest

        Dad-quest is getting under way tomorrow night. Our resident Giff Fighter-Paladin, Azimuth is rounding up a crew of misfits (the other players with their new characters that I discussed here) and a few more Quantum NPCs and spelljamming out to the Amos Expanse to find his Dad. Can’t wait to see what new crew-members the players come up with this time!

        Obituaries

        …Whalgravaak’s Warehouse is, by a long way, the most murderous I have ever run. Death truly waits around every turn. It’s really just as well Troika! characters are so easy and quick to create.

        Bring out your dead!

        In the last several months, since I published Death and Troika! the Tables and Tales RPG community has suffered the losses of many more PCs. Good and bad, greedy and selfless, sci-fi and fantasy. Most of these mortalities have been described or at least touched upon in the two DCC posts here and here. Sailors on the Starless Sea proved to be one of the most lethal modules I have ever run. But it’s a 0-level funnel so of course it was always going to have a high body count. If I am counting correctly, it took eighteen of the 23 PCs that sailed it. But, for a non-funnel adventure, Whalgravaak’s Warehouse is, by a long way, the most murderous I have ever run. Death truly waits around every turn. It’s really just as well Troika! characters are so easy and quick to create.

        Nicksen aka Sticky Nicky

        An impressionistic depiction of a Rhinoman with a tiny helmet on his head and a small spear in one hand. Red lines on yellow background. The illustration is from Troika! Numinous Edition.
        Nothing in the world is Rhinoman-sized.

        The character who replaced Tim the Gremlin Catcher lasted just three sessions. Here is his obituary:

        The heroes continue to meet their ends in Whalgravaak’s Warehouse. Nicksen, known by his friends and casual acquaintances as Sticky Nicky, came to his end in the swirling maelstrom of Deep Storage. We had little enough time to get to know this intimidating Rhinoman but we did discover that he had been sent to the warehouse by one of Troika’s underworld bosses to track down a band of underlings. Instead he had been captured and almost exsanguinated by Paude, the vampiric red giant. When our other warehouse workers discovered and freed him, he joined them in their explorations and told them of a treasure they could seek out. Sticky Nicky used his formidable strength to help them break into the energy maelstrom of Deep Storage where they met a Gulf Man Roamer, a wraith-like creature. In his efforts to fight off the swirling menace, Sticky Nicky found himself trapped in a sack and whisked away to be eaten alive in the depths of the void by his captor. A moment of silence, please, for Sticky Nicky.

        Socrates Honeysuckle

        The black ink on white background drawing of an owl perched on a branch. The owl has a smadt, checkered cloak and a sporran-like satchel. The illustration is from the a supplement to the original edition of Troika!
        His Excellency, the Prime Minister of Owls.

        Borrowick Grimpkin, Wizard Hunter, was replaced quickly by a most august personage who also lasted only three sessions. Here is his obituary:

        All Socrates Honeysuckle, Prime Minister of the Owls, had ever wanted was to regain control of the Owl Nation from the Usurper Queen. Shamefully, however, politics is all about who has the biggest pockets these days, and Socrates had been thrown out of Owl Parliament on his ear, with barely a Silver to his rather ostentatious name. He was forced, as a consequence, to assume the unseemly roles of adventurer and treasure seeker in the hopes of striking it lucky with one big score. The Prime Minister had heard of the potential riches stored in the Warehouse of Whalgravaak, the city’s most notorious and dead wizard, so he flew there, heedless of the unknown dangers within. Inside he happened upon his soon to be fellows, Ba’Naana , Puddle and Sticky Nicky (RIP.) Together they succeeded in exploring the strange reaches of the Warehouse. Socrates Honeysuckle had a way with words that succeeded in getting the party out of trouble on several occasions but, in the end, his silver tongue proved useless when he was sucked into the void outside time and space at the bottom of the vortex known as Deep Storage. Despite being the only member of the crew with the ability to fly, his luck ran out and his slight, owlish frame disappeared forever into oblivion. Doff your caps, dear friends, for Socrates Honeysuckle, Prime Minister of Owls.

        MHIEE

        A red, yellow. and white illustration in a cubist style of a humanoid with oddly shaped limbs and an unbearded face. The illustration is from Troika! Numinous Edition.
        There’s something off about this dwarf.

        Sticky Nicky’s replacement was a poor lost soul. He survived only two sessions (being generous.) Here is his obituary:

        Very little is know about MHIEE. To all intents and purposes, he seems to have popped into existence, whole cloth, in an infinite wardrobe dimension, where he, almost literally, ran into Ba’Naana, Socrates Honeysuckle and Puddle the narcoleptic Sorcerer of the Academy of Doors. They had been exploring the pocket dimensions of Deep Storage and experimenting with the wardrobe’s automatic garment dispensing properties. To their eyes, MHIEE was nothing more than a regular, if somewhat forgetful Dwarf. And he was happy to allow them to labour under that misapprehension throughout their short acquaintance. The fact was, though, that MHIEE was a Derivative Dwarf, carved from the ancient rock by a Dwarven mason. On completion, he was deemed imperfect, flawed, poorly made. So he was abandoned. Only a Dwarf could have seen the flaws, however. To all others, he was the very epitome of Dwarfishness. MHIEE and his new companions had adventures together and while Socrates Honeysuckle’s luck gave up on him in the vortex of Deep Storage, MHIEE’s positively carried him to the exit. Soon afterwards, they encountered the giant, Arbuthnot, warehouse employee and stickler for maintenance. He attacked them when Ba’Naana’s monkeys attempted to steal his master key. But he was soon tricked into falling through the unstable floor above the sunken lair of the Mother of the Worm-Headed Hounds that lived in the tunnels below the warehouse. MHIEE fought bravely, whacking the giant, over and over, but finally, all it took was a single mighty blow to connect. Arbuthnot crushed MHIEE with his enormous fist. Our thoughts and prayers are with his surviving companions, Ba’Naana and Ishmael D’Undifoy.

        Warehouse closure

        We are nearing the end of the PCs’ time in Whalgravaak’s Warehouse. I have warned them that the next session will be the last. I have also warned them that, like the last session, which claimed the lives of both Socrates Honeysuckle and MHIEE, I reckon there is the potential for at least two more PC deaths. Can Ba’Naana continue to be the only original player character to survive, or will he too succumb to the deadliness of the Warehouse?

        Corkers

        I’m off to Cork for the weekend so I won’t have time to come up with anything new today. Instead I thought I would share a couple of posts from last year. I wrote these at a time when I was first experimenting with some homespun rules and borrowed mechanics for our D&D 5E campaign.

        This first post is preparatory to introducing a Blades in the Dark style engagement roll to our Spelljammer game.

        Forged in the Dungeon

        And this one is an update about how it went!

        Forged in the Dungeon, Part 2

        I’ll be back next week with some new posts. In the meantime, I hope you enjoy these re-posts!