Between the Skies – The Dice Pool

Prep Part 2

Still Prepping

This post is part of a blog bandwagon started on the Roll to Doubt blog.

Click on the link above to take in the blogpost that’s piloting this bandwagon. Wagon-jumpers abound. You can find a very nice read on the same topic and a handy list of related blogposts on the Among Cats and Books blog.

And here’s a link to the first post on this topic on the dice pool dot com.

Between the Sessions

I am an unapologetic shill for Huffa’s Between the Skies. It’s one of my most used and most valuable RPG books. I use it constantly in lots of contexts. But I love using it to prepare for sessions. Its approach to random encounters in particular is one I highly recommend. The encounters are built, not just to make your session interesting, but to introduce potential allies and enemies, recurring characters, locations, objects. In short, they help you to truly build your campaign without relying on GM-written plots that the players may or may not want to interact with.

The methods and tables introduced in the book make for interesting, impactful characters and occurrences. And they have depth, too, enough to hook your players and keep them hooked. You know that old story that your players would die for the unnamed goblin you just made up on the spot but won’t give a shit about the NPC you spent two weeks crafting an elaborate back story for? I feel like the techniques in Between the Skies are almost designed to prevent that. Why? Well, firstly because, if used as your main way to drive the game forward, you are not going to be spending so long lovingly hand-crafting those NPCs, you are just going to roll them up on the tables provided and not worry about whether or not the PCs run into them, because whatever they run into will be interesting and fun enough to capture their imaginations. So, all the NPCs are more like the loveable nameless goblin and you don’t feel the need to make sure the PCs interact with any of them in particular. This has the effect of allowing the players to dictate the direction of the game to a large extent. This is a good thing!

Let’s Interact with the Mechanics

So, Huffa’s advice when it comes to travel is that, unless it is going to be interesting or important, skip it. I can get behind this approach. Recently, I have tended towards the idea of the journey being the game, but sometimes, when you know the next scene you need to play is across the city and its a relatively safe place, just skip to it, or montage it if there is something interesting to see along the way or if its a good opportunity for conversation between characters.

If and when you want to play the travel, though, Between the Skies presents you with two options, progress-based travel and route-based travel.

Route-based travel

Using this method, you use a map, just a basic one that includes routes and locations along them. You roll once on the Encounter die between locations and resolve that before arriving at the next place. Simple. The book includes several ways to generate route maps and destinations but I won’t concern myself with that here.

Your route map should have options, different ways of getting from A to B with more locations in between your starting point and the final destination depending on how long you want the journey to last.

This has the feeling of the caravan travel methods used in Ultraviolet Grasslands.

Progress-based travel

This gives me the impression of beating the resistance of a delve in Heart. Before the journey starts, determine the journey length. There is a helpful table that indicates the amount of Progress points required to reach the destination depending on how long the journey is. You record progress through the resolution of Encounter Die rolls.

The Encounter die works as follows:

Encounter
Something Approaches
Environmental hazard
Complication
Hint as to what is nearby
Progress/breakthrough/boon

So you only get progress points on a 6.

What I did

As with everything in Between the Skies, you can take it or leave it. I have used a combination of the two methods, where I decided that a spelljammer ship journey from the Rock of Bral to the First Home asteroid would take three days and I would have them roll on an encounter table once per day. So this is the table I used:

Wildspace encounter table d6

1-2 No encounter
3 Environmental/Ship Hazard
4 Ship Problem
5-6 Encounter

When you only have three days and so, three possible rolls on the table, I felt it was better to increase the chances of actual encounters/problems/hazards occurring. If it was a more exploratory journey, I would use the progress-based method as described in the book.

Now, using the tables in this book, of which there are many, you should be able to create a fascinating encounter on the fly, but, if you can, I think its nice to prepare a few beforehand, at least one of each kind. So let’s do that here.

I thought it would be a good idea to roll up some options on the spark tables in the book and add them to a d4 table for each encounter type (environmental/ship hazard, ship problem and ship travel encounter.)

Environmental/Ship Hazard

We’ll start with the hazards. For each hazard you want to prepare, you roll 1d6 to determine the hazard type and then d66 to generate a hazard keyword on the Environmental Hazards during ship travel table in Between the Skies.

I shared this table in the last post so lets use the results I rolled up on that.

3 Ship Hazards

Roll 1d4

Hazard 1 – Storm, Flood
Hazard 2 – Disorientation, Sphere
Hazard 3 – Obstruction, Cold
Hazard 4 – Trap, Haunting

I then go ahead and prepare a few details of the hazards. Here’s the first one as an example.

Hazard 1

A solar storm rolls in from the direction of the sun.

The gusts of solar winds batter the ship
The deck is flooded in light and other solar radiation
All those on deck risk blindness
There is also a chance of taking radiant damage
- All on deck must make a Dexterity save, DC 15 to avoid blindness
- If they are afflicted with blindness it lasts 1d4-1 days. If you roll a 1, Roll 2d12-1 for the number of hours it lasts
- Even if they saved against blindness they must make a Constitution save, DC 15, against radiant damage. If they fail they take 4d6 radiant damage. If they succeed they take none.
- This goes for the ship too, if the damage roll beats the damage threshold

You can see that I took the hazard type fairly literally but moved it into a wildspace context. A solar storm seemed obvious but also pretty cool. The keyword, “flood,” took me a little while to work out but I thought flooding the deck with light seemed both like a cool, spacey event and something that could present a real problem for the PCs.

Obviously, you can prepare the details for each entry in the table. They don’t have to involve a lot of work but putting a little extra preparation in at this stage can remove the need for it at the table.

Ship Problem

Similar to the hazards, you simply roll up a problem type and a problem keyword on the Ship Problems tables in Between the Skies. I did this four times and created the d4 table below.

4 Ship Problems

Roll 1d4

Problem 1 – Armament, Separation
Problem 2 – Quarters, Shrinkage
Problem 3 – Cargo, Disappearance
Problem 4 – Bridge (spelljammer helm), Error

Here’s the detail on one of these entries:

Problem 2

One of the crew has stowed something large and awkward in the crew quarters. It is limiting the amount of space available to sling hammocks and the rest of the NPC crew is unhappy about it.
This crew member refuses to be parted from their huge steamer chest as it contains something of extreme personal significance.
The PCs will need to resolve the interpersonal issue.

You can see that the details here are left deliberately vague. You Ould ask the players to decide which member of the crew is the problem, what’s in the chest that’s so important and, most importantly, how the resolve the issue.

Encounters

And finally we have encounters.
There are a lot of different encounter tables in the book. You can choose the one that best describes the surroundings of the PCs at the time. There are two space encounter tables, one for known space and one for wildspace. They are d66 tables. Once you have done rolled on them, you can get some more inspiration by rolling on the encounter keyword, detail and related entities tables.
Once you have rolled on the Encounter distance and awareness tables in Between the Skies to determine how far away the encounter is and how much attention they are paying to the PCs you can roll on the d4 table below.

You’ll note that the results on the table below are not all similar. For instance, encounter 2 doesn’t have a related entity. In general, such entities, as generated by the tables in Between the Skies, are sentient NPCs so I didn’t think it necessary for the parasite I rolled up. But mostly each of them includes an encounter keyword, a related entity, and two encounter details.

5-6 Encounters

Isolationists – Confusion, Related Entity – Unknown NPC, Glittering, Prayers
Ship Parasite – Loss, Scales, Experiments
Ruins, Ancient – Mourning, Related Entity – Petty God, Knots, Miscommunications
Stowaway – Battle, Related Entity – Creature, Eggs, Blindspots

Stowaway

Size, substance and form table: Very small biota, piecemeal.
Weakness: True name
Needs: Brains
Characteristics and details: Pacifist, stalks
Behaviour: Social: Family: 5 appearing
Demeanor and current behaviour: Protective, healing
Attacks: Blast – teleporting

For the final example, I’m using the creature generation tables in the Entities chapter of Between the Skies. You can see all the details and keywords that I rolled up above.

Along with the keywords, battle, eggs and blindspots, that came from the original encounter detail rolls, these will make for a fascinating encounter with some sort of very small fungal entity that has escaped a battle to find refuge aboard the PCs’ ship. The mushroom creature has a desperate need for brains to help heal its young but will not take them by force. Perhaps they only consume the brains of dead beings. Perhaps they have a blindspot that means they cannot sense constructs. And maybe, also, they have crawled into the ship’s stores to try to feed on the eggs, mistaking them for heads containing brains. I like the idea of them lashing out with a teleporting blast to deposit attackers some way off the deck of the ship, leaving them to perish in wildspace. If the PCs can figure out the creatures’ true names, they’ll be able to get them off the ship, but how?

Conclusion

I think you can see the fun you can have preparing encounters and encounter tables using Between the Skies. Once again, dear reader, I can only urge you to go and purchase it. It’s so useful and you won’t regret it!

Between the Ultraviolet Skies

Armadilloid Encounter

At the end of the last post I wrote about my current Ultraviolet Grasslands campaign, I noted that the caravaners were on the cusp of an encounter with some Armadilloids. The section of the book describing the Steppe of the Lime Nomads has a list of random encounters just like all the other sections do. And, just like the other ones, the detail you get about an encounter is minimal, to say the very least. You might get a level for the creatures or NPCs encountered, and maybe a word or two of description. This leaves quite a lot in the hands of the GM and, potentially, the other players at the table. Perhaps the characteristics of the encountered entity would emerge organically in play. Maybe the GM will have prepared specifics for each potential encounter, with regards to physical descriptions, motivations, weaknesses and strengths for instance. In the case of this encounter. I knew I did not want it to be an automatically violent one. I wanted the Armadilloids to be sentient but different enough as to be inscrutable. I could probably have just written a description, but I have Between the Skies, so why should I?

I took to the Entities chapter of the book and started rolling. I started with a roll on the Size, substance and form table. I rolled a 7 for size. That gave me Very large (giant-size.) I liked this. It immediately brought to mind the Armadillo super villain first encountered way back in Marvel Secret Wars II some time in the 80s. So I had a picture in my mind.

Next, I rolled a 6 on the Substance table, meaning they were Animal. That corresponded with my general idea so far, which was cool. On the Form table, I got a 13 on the d66 roll. That made them Bipedal (which is a word, that, when you say it out loud, sounds weird, we discovered.) It was still matching the picture I had in my head at this stage, except for the fact that these bipeds also had wings. For my purposes I thought it best that they be stubby vestigial wings. It’s the Grasslands, it’s not safe to fly there.

This next bit was so good. On the Weaknesses and Needs tables, I started to see the situation emerge. I rolled a 34 on the Weakness table, which meant they were Confined. Now in the previous session the players had rolled on the encounter tables in UVG and we had established already that there were ten or so of them and they were merely silhouettes on the horizon. They could see the Armadilloids so they were not obscured by any sort of physical trap. But a pretty cool phenomenon in UVG is “stuck-force.” These are invisible barriers and shapes and containers of nothing but force. They litter mainly the skies of the UVG, left over from a time long gone, when fantascience and magic dominated and their practitioners left these eternal artefacts dotted all over, making flying an incredibly dangerous prospect (as I hinted at above.) So, I came up with the situation where the Armadilloids had been trapped in a sphere of this stuck-force and had been unable to free themselves. The next table was Needs. I rolled a 62 on that, which gave me Directions. But I didn’t like this one so I opted for 26 instead, Escape. Perfect.

Next was Characteristics and details. These tables round out the looks and important idiosynchacies of these creatures. First I rolled a 21 on the Notable characteristics table. You know those big ol’ Armadilloids are rolling around like Sonic (I know Sonic is a hedgehog, ok? Just roll with it.) On the detail table, I got a 34, Tatooed. Adding a little more to this, we see that they are tattooed all over with the pictographic stories of their lives. I love this detail.

Next come a pair of Behaviour tables. I rolled on the Social behaviour table, which indicates their numbers, even though I already knew how many there were from our roll on the UVG tables. Why? Well, it also suggests the type of groups they habitually congregate in: Couple, Family, Herd, etc. I rolled a 6 and got Pack. This fit perfectly as well. I actually skipped the behaviour and current demeanour tables because I already had a good idea that they would be eager to be freed, some of them going stir crazy, rolling around inside the sphere, some simply sitting in the grass, and one of them standing with his hands raised against the stuck-force sphere trying to will his way out.

This next one was fun: Attacks! I rolled a 6 on the Mechanism of attack table, making it a Blast. The Attack keyword I rolled up was 33, Draining. So, from these words, I decided they would have a Charisma Draining Psychic Blast power. It never came up in play, thankfully. Why? Because the PCs figured out how to free them and then were invited back to their mushroom growing burros where they were rewarded with three sacks of Regular Mushrooms.

They also spent the night there around the Armadilloids fire, despite the fact the big orange guys could only speak in some brand of “meep meep” language. They all consumed copious amounts of magic mushrooms and got high as fuck using the wonderful tables in the appendix of Fungi of the Far Realms.

Since I rarely get much time to prep sessions these days, this method was really valuable. It allowed me to do what I needed to do on the train on the way to work, using the pdf of Between the Skies, an online dice roller and the word processor on my phone. I have been using Between the Skies for some other games too in the last few months, most notably our Spelljammer campaign. It has made for enormously memorable and unique encounters in that case. I can’t recommend it highly enough. Go get it on itchio or on Exalted Funeral!

Final Plug: Shadows Return

I backed a project from Ian Hickey of Gravity Realms last year, The Price of Apocrypha. It was a really successful Kickstarter, especially for a small, indie, Irish creator, and it was fulfilled and delivered incredibly promptly.

Well, Ian has another great project in the works on Kickstarter right now, Shadows Return: House of the Wraith Queen. Its a mega dungeon style adventure for use with Ad&D 2nd Edition, D&D 5E and OSR games. It’s fully funded but there are only a couple of days left of the campaign and you could still help it reach some stretch goals! Go back it!

As a final note, I have recommended a lot of books and products recently and I like to think I always do here on the dice pool dot com. I do this purely because I believe in the books, the products, the creators, not for monetary or other rewards!

Between the Skies Part 3

How to begin

I’ve written about beginnings in RPGs before. I think they are crucial to establishing tone, theme, genre and expectations to the whole game, long or short. Many RPG books lay out pretty well, the genre and themes they explore, many providing starting adventures or scenarios to help you set the tone. Few do as good a job at helping you to begin as Between the Skies.

Now, as I’ve written in the previous entries in this series, Between the Skies by Huffa provides a whole lot of advice and options collected into a loosely defined game. It exists to help the players (including the GM) create the play-style and world they want. The text assumes that you will be using a set of rules that suits your table so, by necessity, the advice and tools it provides to help you begin playing are applicable in almost any game. Having read the Beginning Your Travels chapter, I can say it’s brimming with what is just plain good advice.

How and why

The why is an often overlooked element of an RPG character. What the hell are they doing any of this crazy shit for? Why are they travelling across the planes or through wild-space, in the specific example of Between the Skies. I wrote more about character motivation here. Obviously, this book has tables that help you to answer that question. They are wonderfully vague, as you might have come to expect. The vagueness allows your own imagination to combine with the generalities of the game already established by you and your group.

You will notice there are three sub-tables there.

Who are you Traveling for?
How do you travel?
Why are you traveling?

Once again, it is important that they are incredibly general. You will find yourself building your world as you fill in the gaps around the results of this table.

It’s telling, isn’t it, that the how is also considered here? And that it’s randomised? This is one of the most fundamental questions to answer in establishing the setting, and, in many ways, the type of game you’re preparing to play and it’s left up to random chance. If you think of it from the perspective of a D&D game, there are not too many tables who are rolling the dice on running a Planescape, Spelljammer, Dark Sun or Forgotten Realms campaign next. But using this table gives you all the power. It allows you and your group to put down roots in the world you are going to play together in, and grow whatever you want out of them. You’re going to need a lot more than just the single result from the table but Huffa trusts that you can come up with that, and not only that you can do that, but that you will enjoy doing it. Luckily there are also a butt-load more tables in here to fire the imagination and get you moving in a direction.

How about this for a situation?

The Starting Site Recipe list from Between the Skies. It has 7 points.

Huffa would like you to start your first session in media res. That’s also what I always say. Clearly, she’s a genius. The great thing about the advice as presented in the Starting Situation section is that, once again, the in media res beginning has been formalised into a procedure. You are presented here with a series of steps required to create your Starting Site, what is called the “Starting Site Recipe.” After that you have bevvy of tables to help you in sorting out what type of situation it’s to be, what or who precipitated it, what type of site it is, its inhabitants and a some more trickle down tables that allow you to flesh out the various site types.

The Starting Situation tables from between the Skies. There is a "Starting Situation Type" d6 table with "precipitated by" 2d6 table attached. There are also two more 2d6 tables, "PCs aligned with..." and "PCs antagonistic towards..." — The Starting Situation tables from between the Skies. There is a “Starting Situation Type” d6 table with “precipitated by” 2d6 table attached. There are also two more 2d6 tables, “PCs aligned with…” and “PCs antagonistic towards…”

It makes it feel like, if you used this method, you would have your starting situation and location prepared in minutes and only need to write a short description of a few of the items you rolled up. As usual, when I read any part of this book, it just makes me want to give it a go.

How it looks

Luckily, there is a great little example Starting Situation presented in this chapter as well. It has been generated using the method described earlier and it is called “The Godshambles.” The entire situation is described in only a few short paragraphs, a couple of handy tables, a route map and particularly evocative illustration by Coll Acopian.

If you wanted, you could just use the Godshambles as your own starting situation and no-one could blame you. But, I think one of the beautiful things about the Starting Site Recipe is that the prompts you roll up on the tables will help you to imagine a situation that is fitting for the kind of game you have conjured together when you were creating characters and rolling on the how and why tables before. So, it is likely to feel a little loose around the hips or too baggy around the ankles compared to one you generated yourselves.

How it goes

A full colour illustration from Between the Skies. It shows a star-shped being that seems to be made of an entaglement of vines and other plants floating through a multicoloured, psychadelic dreamscape.

Like I stated earlier, I am a big fan of the methods described in this chapter for beginning your game. I am excited to try it out and invite my players to be as big as part of the world building as I am, or bigger, from the very get-go.

Between the Skies has a lot more to offer. I have not even made it half way yet. But I think, for now, at least until I start actually playing it, I will pause this series of posts for now. I’ll bring them back when I have some more practical experience I think. See you then, dear reader!

Between the Skies, Part 2

Back to the skies

Between the Skies is such a beautiful and fascinating book that it is a pleasure just to read it. If anything, all this writing about it is just slowing me down! But I do feel the need to evangelise a bit more. So join me, dear reader in an exploration of the character generation options. Or, if you haven’t read the first of these posts, you can catch up here.

Character Generation

The “Approaches to Character Generation” section encourages you to decide on the approach you want to use and then to roll on the relevant tables to flesh out the description. It’s important to note that your interpretation of the table results is what’s important, rather than having a strict set of attributes or traits that have specific meanings in the game.

It also tells you to note all of the things you want known about your character. I love this point, actually. Rather than waiting till it comes up in play, when a GM might casually bring up an element of your character that you don’t want the other PCs to know, you make it clear at the outset the only parts of your character or background that others would be aware of. Or maybe it just means that there are things about your character that no-one knows and that will come up organically during play, at which point they will become a part of them. Either way, it is an important point.

Character sheet with character generation question page no.1. This is for a "Through the Looking Glass" type character. — Character sheet with character generation question page no.1. This is for a “Through the Looking Glass” type character.

This section also directs you to go and take a look at the character sheets in the back of the book. There are three types, which I will get into below. But, notably, on the page before each actual character sheet, you’ve got a few questions printed in large font, taking up an entire page, to build a basis for your character. For the Lifepath and Spark procedures these are:

“Who are you?”
“What can you do?”
“What do you have?”
“What do you want?”
“Who do you know?”

And for the Through the Looking Glass procedure they are:

“Who are you?”
“What can you do?”
“How did you get here?”
“What are you searching for?”
“What have you brought with you?”

It’s almost as if their significance cannot be over-stated. It feels like these big old questions and the spaces for you to fill with your own answers to them on these pages could act as the character sheets themselves. Perhaps, if you don’t want to be too bothered with specifics, if you don’t want to use numbers and die types and the like to describe your character, you could just write a few answers to the best of your ability beneath each of the questions. That would be a good basis for a character in a fictional story. Would it be a good character in an RPG? In the very loosest of story-games, I feel like that’s more-or-less the approach and it works well, but it does depend on the type of story you and your table are trying to tell. In a space-pirate, treasure-seeking, swashbuckling adventure game, it might not hold up. But if your aim is to tell the story of a group of people caught in a difficult situation, informed by their backgrounds and desires, complicated by their relationships and inner lives, and their development as people over the course of the game, sure, it would be perfect. Writing about this makes me want to try it…

So, next to each question page is a “Worksheet.” Even the word-choice here is significant. It indicates that this is where you will be performing the admin for your character. Filling it in will be an exercise that you may find tedious or satisfying, very much depending on the type of person you, the player, are.

Each worksheet helps us to encapsulate a character designed according to one of three (four, kind of) procedures.

I mentioned in the last Between the Skies post that the procedure you use here is related to your approach to weirdness. So, if you have decided to go with “All the Weird” you can probably use any of the methods described, but if you are going with a “Venturing Out Into the Weird” approach, and you want mundane characters, you should think about going with the Spark character creation procedure (with a few modifications.) Once again, it’s important to note, all of this is advice, none of it is mandated. Choose and use what you like and discard the rest.

Lifepath character generation

I have never played it but I have heard about this character creation method being used in Traveller. Essentially, you map out your character’s life up to the point of the start of the game and this process creates the PC. You roll on the tables provided for this character generation method to establish events in your character’s life that lead to the accumulation of “Skills, allies, enemies, Mutations and Debt, among other things.”

Let’s take a look at some of the tables used for Lifepath character creation.

You have a Type table that contains a pretty wide array of permutations. I rolled up a Swimming Avian. I’m thinking seagull.

The Descriptor tables are d66 so have a lot of options in them too. You might be described as Huge, Transformed, Dead, Nomadic, Staunch or Minimal. These single adjectives should ignite the imagination and lead you down paths to fill in the blanks on your character sheet, or just in your mind.

You roll twice on the Aptitude table (also d66) and take the adverb form first and then the adjective form. So a roll of 54 and 45 (which I genuinely just rolled) would be Inspiringly Commanding.

After this you enter the Life Events section. It explains the basics of using this method and then tells you to go and roll on the Life Events tables. There are three tables to roll on depending on whether you want have your major life events on a Surface (I guess like a planet or something similar,) in Space or out in the Planes. You can switch between them and sometimes have to depending on the events you roll.
A sampling:

Quest for NPC completed, harmed – Roll powerful NPC for patron; Gain problem related to injury suffered by PC
Death, became undead – Create one Extraordinary Ability related to undeath; Create one Problem related to undeath; If already undead when this result is rolled, PC is destroyed, create new PC who has dead PC’s possessions.
Joined heresy – Joined heretical religious organisation; Gained ire of opposed religious organisation; Gained skill related to heresy
Became Hermit – Cannot roll any further life events; Gain skill related to hermeticism
Lost in the Planes – Cannot roll further life events
Became petty god – Roll or describe Focus; Gain Extraordinary Ability related to petty godhood; Petty gods are not necessarily more powerful than mortals

After this you have a bunch of tables to help you determine your Extraordinary Abilities, Skills, Mutations and Problems all of which will help to round out your character. There are some great entries in these tables but this blog post has already gotten away from me so I am going to have to skip on to the next method of character creation.

Spark character generation

ANother black and white illustration from Between the Skies. It shows a creepy person with no face except for two blank, white eyes. They open theirlong black coat as though they were selling hot watches, but inside are only toothy grins and gaping maws.

This is an entirely table based method, but, as the title suggests, the results you get from the tables should be used to spark the imagination of the player. As Huffa takes pains to point out more than once in the characters creation section, the tables might give you powers and abilities and they might even describe what you can do but they don’t tell you how your character does it. I think most of us assume this point without thinking about it in our games most of the time (my Magic Missile looks like three paper planes that explode when they hit!) but it’s a good thing to have it called out here formally. So the tables used for this method are very much based around the questions I listed above. Under the “Who are you?” section we have table after d666 table of descriptors to roll or choose from.
Here are a few nice ones:

Sickle mender – fixing what cuts
Messmaker – joyous entropy
False smile – feelings turned inside out
Babysitter

For “What can you do?” you can go back and use the tables under the Lifepath method for Abilities, Aptitudes and Skills.

“What do you want?” – There are a couple of tables here. You are encouraged to use these to “inspire a few sentences describing what your character wants.”
Examples:

Objects of Desire – Redemption, Surprise, More
Related to… – past self, rulers, daemons

When it comes to “Who do you know?” we have another trio of tables. These can be used to make two or three entities with whom you have a relationship of some kind. For instance:

Entity type – Creature
Relationship type – Debt holder
Relationship detail – Yearning

Once again, use these results as prompts to describe these relationships in a little more detail.

Finally, in the “What do you have?” section, you use the Starting Resources procedure with some changes. Generally this involves you having an alright weapon and some semi-decent armour, equipment needed for skills and maybe even a ship if that’s the sort of game you’ll be playing. You get to roll up an interesting object too! You will also possibly have some Assets or Debt to start with. There is, unsurprisingly, a table for that. Assets, Debt and Petty Cash are all rather abstracted in Between the Skies. You measure them in units where a unit of Petty Cash might buy you a nice meal and a unit of Asset or Debt would be the equivalent value of a house. I appreciate a system like this as counting gold pieces holds little or no interest for me. Also, Debt implies a Debt-holder and that could be an important relationship and could be used as motivation at some point.

Through the Looking Glass character generation

A full colour illustration from Between the Skies. The picture is of some strange characters, drawn in a deliberately childish style with funny hats heading towards some circus tents and away from a colourful bu threatening forest in the foreground.

Your character has done a full Alice and is now in a freaky other-world. Why are they there? What sort of personal disaster has led them to this point? What are they looking for in this isekai nightmare/dream realm? These are things you need to know about your Through the Looking Glass character.

Once again we have some tables to roll on. But interestingly,

It is assumed that Through the Looking Glass characters are mundane people from a world like our own, and that results are interpreted accordingly

A few sample descriptors from the tables:

Vengeful
Loopy
Ostentatious
Firefighter
Hack
Paparazzi
Avante Garde Hobby
Entrancing Dancing

On the “You (were) recently…” table we have a little more to shape your mundane character. You can roll on the d66 table to get these sorts of results:

Retired
Transitioned
Canceled

Under the “What can you do?” section, the abilities are a lot more “normal” than some of those in the previous character generation methods. They include stuff like:

Untapped Scholarly Education
Precocious Performative Love
Charming Spiritual Profession

One of the different questions belonging to this character generation method is “How did you get here?” This is, of course, of utmost importance to this type of character. Maybe you were trapped by an entity from another world. Perhaps you stumbled into it while intoxicated, seeking pleasure. Or was it that you were reincarnated after dying by a catastrophic event?

Even just reading the entries in these tables has my imagination all aglow with possibilities. They make me want to run this sort of game. I don’t think I have ever done that, not for such mundane PCs, at least. I want to see how such characters would be changed by such an impossible journey! Yum yum.

Another question that is specific to this character generation method is, “What are you searching for?” Ruby slippers? Aslan? That damned white rabbit? I suppose it could be any of those but why not roll on some tables instead?

The tables, interestingly, do not tell you exactly what you are looking for, just the type of thing you might be looking for (knowledge, person, object etc,) what that thing will provide (relief, comfort, affirmation) and what complicates it as a goal (explosive, famous, moving.) You should then get together and discuss the precise nature of the thing. The text suggests that, if you are all of a similar type of character, you should maybe all be striving for the same object but that you might each have a different motivation. This sounds like a wonderfully interesting potential grenade to throw into the works whenever the characters finally find the item they have wanted all this time. It smells like interpersonal conflict. Yum yum yum.

Lastly, for the Through the Looking Glass method, we are looking at the “What have you brought with you?” question. This is different to the “What do you have?” question common to the other two methods because your character is assumed to have been yoinked out of their own reality with only the items on their person. So they don’t get to have any Assets or Debt or any of the other starting equipment other types of characters might begin with, which is totally fair. Instead, they get a few basic items and maybe one Special Item. There is, as you might have guessed, a set of tables for that. Once again, these provide inspiration rather than outright answers to what that Special Item might be. So you might have an Alien Secret or a Mythical Key… This idea of only having what you had on you makes the prospect of the first few hours in a new world particularly enticing from a game perspective. How does one survive in a desert otherworld with nothing but a mobile phone, a wallet full of loyalty cards and used tissue? The answer could be that the locals are enchanted by the Spectral Device that you were handed just before being shoved through a portal.

Character generation using other games

There is a very interesting and useful section near the end of the Character Generation chapter. It provides a loose guide to using another system’s character creation method to make your Between the Skies character. Essentially, if you use this procedure, you will end up with a blended character. They will still consider the questions from the first two character generation methods but you will do your best to apply the answers to the character you have created using the other system. In some cases, this will mean that you are adding bits entirely from the question answering method as many systems do not consider things like what you want and who you know at the character creation step.

I am a big fan of Troika! so I am happy to see the practical example of using a Troika! background as the basis for a Between the Skies character here too. It makes it easier for me to picture using this method and elucidates the process in a practical way.

Character generation conclusions

All in all, I am impressed with the breadth of options presented in the chapter. You have no fewer than four different ways of making your character (and many more if you consider you could technically use the fourth method to use any other game’s mechanics to do it) a plethora of interesting tables to create some really weird or terribly mundane characters and a whole bunch of world-building before you have ever started playing the game in anger. The results you are likely to roll on things like the Life Events tables are going to haunt your game if the GM is paying any attention at all. You’re likely to establish the existence of certain NPCs, gods and demons, places, objects and catastrophic events that effect the whole world while rolling up your PC. I love this! It starts the whole table off with so many potential plots, grudges, vendettas, desires, loves, hates and motivations that the game should practically run itself from the moment you finish character creation.

As a process(es) it makes me excited to take part in it and even more excited to play the game, either as a GM or as a player.

What do you think, dear reader? Does this make you interested in Between the Skies? If not, perhaps I will continue to pursue this subject in another post in the near future so I can convince you. If so, maybe I’ll keep entertaining you with details and opinions of a subject you clearly enjoy! It’s a win-win!

Between the Skies Part 1

Formalising the informal

We introduce informal rules on the fly in our games all the time. You need to figure out if someone can find a newspaper stand around here somewhere? Sure: odds, you find one, evens, you’re out of luck. Oh, you rolled a nat 20 on your investigation check? Well, that means you also get advantage on your next Thieves’ Tools check. You know what I’m saying. It’s not unusual. So, is it unusual to formalise this informality? Maybe, I suppose. But that is exactly what Huffa has done in her new book, Between the Skies.

I heard about this game from the Yes Indie’d podcast from Thomas Manuel. On the episode I linked above, you can hear him interviewing the writer and creator of Between the Skies, Huffa. You can get most of the background of the game from the podcast, if you’re interested, but if you need a TLDR, it started off as a digital release and then a series of zines you could get on itch.io until Exalted Funeral got involved and made it into a book. You can still get those there in free PDF format, by the way.

A couple of things struck me while listening to Huffa talk about her work. First was the subject matter of the game, which seemed rather Planescapey to me, the nineties one. Maybe cross that with some AD&D Spelljammer, a wee sprinkling of Troika! and just a little bit of Black Sword Hack. Strangeness in the spheres and across the planes of existence is the overall theme. It sounded both very old school and incredibly fresh at the same time. Where does the freshness come from, I hear you cry, dear reader! Well, that would be from the other thing that struck me about the interview; the ideas Huffa espouses when it comes to rules.

Why restrict yourself to one ruleset when there are so many out there to choose from?

A badly taken photo of the double-page spread before the At Play Between the Skies chapter of Between the Skies. There is an abstract monochrome picture in it.

So, like my very wordy sub-heading says, why go full Forged in the Dark all the time when certain situations might call for a Resistance System style roll with pre-established fallouts to hit them with? Why limit your game to using only Powered by the Apocalypse rules when you might also want to use adversity tokens sometimes? The point is, you should be able to play almost any game you want, using almost any rules that suit, not just the game but any given situation within a game. Is this dangerously anarchist? Maybe, but it also sounds like excellent fun. If you have been around here for a few months you’ll know that I like a good ludicrous mash-up. See my various attempts to introduce new and exciting elements to my D&D 5E game here and here. You might also remember me going on and on about how cool it was to use other games to establish the world and the city in a Blades in the Dark campaign I recently took part in.

If you’re interested in games and the rules of games and how they interact with the players, the setting, the events, this is an approach I think you might be able to appreciate.

Now, I will say that Huffa is not necessarily suggesting that you should abandon a single ruleset play style, but that you should open your mind to the idea of using the ruleset that most appeals to you when you pick up Between the Skies to play it.

Playtime is the name Huffa uses for the set of procedures presented in the book to allow for the style of play it espouses. It’s all about the “shared understanding of a fictional world.” And really, however you achieve that is the way to do it, with the understanding that this might look different for literally every table. Here are a couple of relevant quotes from the introduction:
“Judgement based on shared common sense is the fundamental ‘rule.’”
“All rules, methods and procedures can be used or ignored.”
This type of play is related to the FKR or Free Kriegspiel Revolution. This is a movement that rejects the cumbersome mechanics prevalent in so many games, particularly from the war-game or “Kriegspiel” side of the hobby. In FKR, the game is very much a conversation, where a player may suggest a way of overcoming an obstacle and the referee or someone in a similar role will make a judgement, based very much on the table’s shared understanding of the world they are creating together, as to whether or not it would work. Dice rolls may occur but they will be minimal.

And yet, Huffa has provided here, in the At Play Between the Skies chapter, a plethora of potential rules. Here’s a brief collection of some of the suggestions.

All time is tracked by Turns but the time scale of the Turn is dependent on the situation, longer for travel and exploration, shorter for investigation and shorter still for combat.

The Occurrences table on page 46 feels like the most basic denomination of the tables in this book. It is incredibly general but its presence and usage suggests at the way the whole game is to be played.

The Occurences table from Between the Skies. It is a d6 table. The possibilities are "Encounter," "Complication," "Hint of what is nearby," "Environmental Change" and "Boon/opportunity/Progress." There is also a small illustration of a well dressed mouse with a rapier above the table. — The Occurences table from Between the Skies. It is a d6 table. The possibilities are “Encounter,” “Complication,” “Hint of what is nearby,” “Environmental Change” and “Boon/opportunity/Progress.” There is also a small illustration of a well dressed mouse with a rapier above the table.

Use tokens to succeed at risky actions or extraordinary actions. Or! Choose a dice rolling mechanic from any of the bunch described in the book (coming from games like Blades in the Dark, Apocalypse World, Traveller, Electric Bastionland etc.) and see if you succeed, or if you succeed with consequences or if you just fail.

Or you can just play without dice!

Give your characters Conditions when they should get them. Let these conditions affect the riskiness of actions.

Injuries! Roll on the Injury table to really fuck them up. It’s a 1d6 table and the 6 is death or fatal wounds… So use this sparingly, I guess!

The Injury Die table from Between the Skies. it is a d6 table. the potential injuries are: "Superficial, "Cosmetic," "Hindering," "Treatment required, not debilitating," "Treament required, partially debilitating," "Debilitating, mortal injury or death." — The Injury Die table from Between the Skies. it is a d6 table. the potential injuries are: “Superficial, “Cosmetic,” “Hindering,” “Treatment required, not debilitating,” “Treament required, partially debilitating,” “Debilitating, mortal injury or death.”

You can, as Huffa suggests, use all of these rules or none of them or you can add any other systems or subsystems you can think of where appropriate.

Approaches to Weirdness

In the Setting Up Your Worlds Chapter it is time to decide how strange you want this game to be.

“Between the Skies is filled with weirdness. Its tables, and its author, revel in the strange.”

Huffa provides some options here, broad categories of weirdness that will help to define exactly how weird things are likely to get. Of course, this might change during the course of play, depending on how you and your players get into it.

Go “All the Weird” for a setting and game where the characters are probably at home in a very strange and out-there place. The sky is not even the limit here.

With the “Venturing Out into the Weird” approach you play humans with a limited but very much real knowledge of other planes and spheres but who have never left their homes before. Everything will be new to them but high levels of weird are ok.

If you want to be the weird in everyone else’s world, take up the “Playing he Monsters” approach. Your characters will be the only magical, non-human, truly strange things in an otherwise normal world. You will probably be feared and hated.

In a “Through the Looking Glass” style game your characters will start the game having found themselves in a strange and magical new realm. But they themselves are relatively mundane and must figure things out as they go along.

The approach you decide on will also have an influence on the character creation method you use. So it is of primary importance to the type of game you are looking to play.

A photo of one of the black and white illustrations from Between the Skies. it depicts a forested land and a starry sky overwhelmed by a nebula of some sort.

This section of the book asks a lot of questions about how the planes and space work in the universe of your game. There are familiar touchstones here with Planescape and Spelljammer being the obvious ones. But it tries to get you to really think about important things like how PCs might travel through this weird space, how gravity works and the real difference between worlds, space and the planes, if any.

Next time, I am going to get into the Between the Skies approach to character generation, which is exactly as lassaiz faire as you might have come to expect by now.