Author: Justin Hamilton

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.

Nausicaä FKR Setup & Session 1

Since FKR style play is getting more attention I thought it would be a good time to pitch an open table game using my Primeval 2D6 system over on one of the Discord servers devoted to the style.

I met up with other members and pitched a few games – running a West Marches style game, an investigative horror game, an Ars Magica-alike, as well as a game set in Hayao Miyazaki’s setting where the Nausicaä manga takes place.

Almost everyone immediately expressed interest in Nausicaä being their top pick, so we started discussing the game, potential places to play, character ideas, and we landed on playing somewhere out “off the map” so to speak in our own corner of the world, making it easier for players to drop in and out without knowing the plot, as well as letting us handwave a lot of details.

I should preface this and probably every session that I am notoriously anti-canon. I want to draw on the imagery, themes, and broad-level assumptions of any source I’m using – Nausicaä included. So if something contradicts established lore – that’s the canon of our game. This is by no means to disrespect the source material, the creators, or the fans, but rather to allow our table to celebrate the world in the way that’s the most fun for us.

chargen and session follows

Barrowmaze Open Table Session 10

Summary

The party explores a number of tombs over the Barrowmaze, and take heavy losses.

Player characters

  • Donnie the Bard, played by Malley
  • Grick the Half-Orc, played by Modest Mace
  • Sky the Druid, played by Captain Caveman
  • Ulrik Ironsworn the Paladin, played by Isaiah
  • Uriel the Ranger, played by Dante

Hirelings

  • Arnd the Dwarf
  • Bran the failed magician
  • Garbash, Cleric of Crom
  • Irya the Archer
  • Manks, Cleric of Hathor
report follows

Less Rules To Do More: Advancement

Advancement rules are another aspect of roleplaying that sees heavy mechanization. Which I totally get – I agree that games are about what they reward. How these rewards are illustrated, handed out, and utilized, however, has a variety of methods they can be handled with – and like everything else in this series I think you can get away having a fully featured and rich set of rewards without explicitly mechanizing them.

continue reading

Failed Career: Magician

You get

A pointed hat, a set of trick rings.

Why did you quit magic?

  1. Prosecuted: A series of witch hunters swore to have you drowned.
  2. Debt: While performing a routine stage show, a being born from the shadows cast by your candles offered you power for your soul, mistaking it as a potential part of your act you obliged.
  3. Loss: You mastered the ability to make things disappear, but you could never find where they went, eventually every pet you ever had was lost to the ether.
  4. Heckler: One especially insensitive lay-about child always snuck into your shows and would shout just the worst jibes, to the enjoyment of your measly crowd.
  5. Sabotage: Someone snuck into your storage and ruined your saw box, leading to your on-stage dismemberment of an audience participant.
  6. Thievery: The look-alike you used for tricks stole your entire routine and has completely drawn your crowd away from you, painting you as the fraud.

What trick was your specialty?

  1. Mentalism: You have a significant chance of being able to guess a card drawn by another being from a deck in your control.
  2. Escapery: A few classes of knots pose only a moderate threat to your freedom. You can also probably regurgitate a swallowed key or small item with repulsive frequency.
  3. Death Defiance: Surviving being submerged for several minutes was something you routinely practiced, or at least you are able to suppress panicking before losing consciousness .
  4. Levitation: Floating a stationary target weighing no more than 12 stones was a trick you received the least lukewarm applause for.
  5. Iron Jaws: You’ve discovered the correct technique of eating glass and a variety of other traditionally inedible substances.
  6. Spiritualism: With a bit of setup, smoke and mirrors, you have a very minor chance of convincing someone that a partner of yours is their deceased loved one.

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

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

Barrowmaze Open Table Session 9

Summary

The party attends a Winter Elf play and enters into a living myth to retrieve a magical harp from a paranoid Frost Giant.

Player Characters

  • Barkface the Druid, played by EvilTables
  • Donnie the Bard, played by Malley
  • Uriel the Ranger, played by Dante

Hirelings

  • Arnd the Dwarf
  • Bran the failed magician
  • Garbash, Cleric of Crom
  • Irya the Archer
  • Manks, Cleric of Hathor
report follows