Month: October 2020

Barrowmaze Open Table Session 14

Summary

Finding their way into an old noble’s tomb, a wizard is possessed by the spirit of an ancient squire and joins forces with their liege wraith. The party’s courageous self-proclaimed knight is cursed with ghostly undeath by the lord’s blade, and the oddly-friendly skeleton swears fealty to him as he fades from the mortal realm. A thief is found wandering the tomb, having fallen into a portal trap elsewhere, and the party enters into combat with the approaching death cultists and their zombie horde.

details follow

Odd ReDuel – Techniques

A few years ago I made a post about a dueling system I was using to run a less abstract, tactical version of Torchbearer/MouseGuard’s rock-paper-scissors conflict resolution. So very much not in line with the stuff I have been posting about recently, but if you find a set of rules that add fun to your game, include it. This is definitely verbose, but sometimes I have fun with very crunchy mechanisms once and a while. While at the time I wrote this “for” Into the Odd (because thats what I was running) this could obviously be used in many old school or adjacent systems.

So while I still would run a majority of combats closer to freeform, sometimes its fun to have the suspense of flipping over a card to find out your opponent has blocked when you feinted. This can be a fun minigame for knightly duels between a player character and their hated rival, or even maybe a system to throw into a small miniatures game to play out a fencing bout between generals. I definitely wouldn’t break this out for every single combat (if you could model them with roughly Into the Odd stats).

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Failed Career: Mariner

You get

A heavily knotted rope, a hooked push pole.

Why is it hard to get you to step on a boat?

  1. Abandonment: The deal you made with the merfolk to marry one of their own in exchange for sea-riches turned out to be a double disaster – the riches was just a decade supply of pungent kelp, and your betrothed was a ravenous deep one. Leaving a fish beast at the alter is slight the sea shan’t soon forgive.
  2. Disfigurement: Deciding that two peg legs are enough, you’ll try your lot on land.
  3. Fired: Your cantankerous shanties were decreed a nuisance, and your constant chugging of rum despite your penchant for sea sickness had fired from your position on the ship – literally, as your captain stuffed you into the cannon and launched you onto the nearest shore.
  4. Cursed: Ever since you decided to use gulls as target practice you’ve felt that the sea itself had it out for you. Constantly toss overboard by storm, harassed by sharks, even once an octopus climbed aboard simply to attempt strangling you, you feel keeping your distance from water is for the best.
  5. Jonahesque: Your ship smashed and you swallowed whole by a leviathan, you became accustomed to the horrors of the dark as you traversed the belly of the beast. Only by joining a party of a wood golem, a miniature thri-keen and a wizened craftsman were you able to make your escape.
  6. Change: You just found yourself tired of the constant rocking of waves, fish, and the salty air, you decided stable ground would be far more adventurous than long months on a urchin-crusted vessel.

What memento do you carry with you?

  1. Clam of Devouring: A small mollusk with a serious appetite, this shelled creature will clamp down on anything you it can get its shell around. It will then, extremely slowly, begin to digest whatever it has caught.
  2. Sea Monkey: Despite appearing as a flask of salt-water, when splashed the watery contents transforms into an only moderately-disobedient monkey, who desperately doesn’t not want to be reconfined to its vessel.
  3. Boat Terrorizing Flag: A black flag you stole off of a notorious pirate ship, this flag allows you to turn boats as a cleric turns undead.
  4. Eye-Patch of Night Seeing: This mystical eyepiece gifts you minor low-light vision, at the cost of your depth-perception.
  5. Land Remora: Not entirely clear how this fish survives outside of water, this being wriggles all around your body nibbling at crumbs, flakes of dried skin, loose threads that you have.
  6. First Mate: A not particularly bright sailor from your marine days follows you around as long as they are fed, providing low quality manual labor and high quality commentary on all of your mistakes.

Inspired by Electric Bastionland, Knave, and Ten Foot Polemic.

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.