Analogue gaming in fevered times....
GLÅUGUST challenge 5, prompt 5: a capsule game. This is a narrative duelling game, though it should work with any number of players. It owes much to the highly entertaining blogpostgame SHIZZARDS , but is a bit more structured. I have not yet playtested this game. Numbers and mechanics are liable to be tweaked without warning. Domenico Pisano, ARCHMAGE (2022) Setup You and your fellow players are…
Technology is probably the single most popular scapegoat for the Tribulation War, beating out complacency, territorial greed, the "death of sound reason", Noskan or Kheshi interference, public immorality, aristocratic inbreeding, women, the primacy of treaties over genuine cordiality, and any number of evil shadow councils of war profiteers from various convenient ethnicities. It's not entirely…
GLÅUGUST challenge 4, prompt 1: non-Lovecraftian cosmic horror. Odilon Redon and Georges Aubert, ... Et Que Des Vuex Sans Tête Flottaient Comme Des Mollusques (illustration from Gustave Flaubert's La Tentation de Saint Antoine , 1874) In the beginning, there was the Word. Or a thunderous eruption from the formless earth. Or an immaculate primal song. Or the clangour of a divine anvil, or the…
GLÅUGUST challenge 1, prompt 2: review another's blog post. This was originally going to be a post comparing and assessing different GLOG iterations of the thief class, but somewhere along the line I realised I had much more to say about one of my subjects than the rest. Artist unknown, illustration from Frank Moss's The American Metropolis (1897) Deus Ex Parabola's Rogue is my favourite GLOG…
And some normal ones too. Iapheia overview post here . Prices are listed in Davellan lier (Ł), and are highly variable depending on location. Hands: Self-explanatory. Note that all firearms need both hands to reload, unless otherwise stated. Damage: See Iapheia's damage rules . Range: Shots beyond this range have -4 to hit and -2 damage. Shots beyond twice this range are ineffective. Shots:…
Iapheia overview post here . Jose Clemente Orozco, Combat (1927) Iapheia's basic rules framework is fairly vanilla GLOG: d20 roll-under, modular classes, skills mostly as permissions, etc., etc. One major omission is hit points. Here's how damage works instead. Pain Threshold, Damage Dice, and Grit Instead of hit points, characters have a Pain Threshold (PT). Human PT defaults to 6. Armour can…
Iapheia overview post here . It's 1048, seven years after the Armistice. Iapheia's wounds bleed and fester, untreated. Before the Tribulation War, the nations of Iapheia were bound together in countless subsets by a spiderweb of treaties, joint ventures, cultural and religious ties, and shared enemies. In fact, this web became so labyrinthine that even those responsible for it could no longer…
GLÅUGUST challenge 2, prompt 5: books as treasure. A not-terribly-serious character-based micro-module, set somewhere in a wooded region within a day's travel of a decent-sized settlement. It has not been edited, and probably needs to be. Background Three weeks ago, some novice adventurers stole a rare book called The Song of the Heights from the estate of a local noble. It was a dicey, poorly…
GLÅUGUST challenge 3, prompt 1: resurrection magic. When I devoured the 3.5e corebooks as a child, one of my favourite spells was reincarnate . I loved the idea of bringing back a dead ally and having them randomly roll into the body of a gnoll or troglodyte or something. (The exclusion of the fun monstrous options from the reincarnation table is yet another reason Mike Mearls will not see…
While the Iapheian Main has no shortage of ruins, anomalous Zones, and other opportunities for self-guided adventure, many expeditions are requested and backed by some sort of patron. This isn't a formal arrangement. There are no quest boards or freelancer agencies. Finding a gig is a matter of frequenting the right spots, knowing the right people, and scrutinising the small ads in the newspapers.…
Iapheia overview post here . The following taxonomy is a modified version of that used in Stanton Ecken's Index of All Creation . Ecken's categories predate the Tribulation War by over a decade, and were highly controversial even at the time, but they're clearly defined and easy to work with compared to the competition. Most serious teratologists, surveyors, and civic defence bodies use this list…