• “Human skill either completes what nature is incapable of completing or imitates nature” Aristotle, Physics

• “Life imitates art far more than art imitates life”, Oscar Wilde, The Decay of Lying

One thing I like to consider when creating scenarios or situations for play for TTRPGs, is to try to give them some sort of emotional truth. I want players to be invested in this fantasy space, to feel it as well as understand it. One of the most straightforward ways to achieve that is to give your scenarios or NPCs the appearance of the complexity of life, of multiple factors acting at once. You can get to this is by imitating life, by basing events on situations from the real world or NPCs on people from your life.

A scenario should be a space ripe with potential, a jumping off point for ideas and action, something that the players can get involved with rather than just watch unfold. Unfolding distant events are fine, obviously, to create the sense of a living world, but all events should at least imply that the players could intervene in some way. Player agency is at the heart of things for me. But when faced with having to devise scenarios, I often think about how events in our world play out. Refecting the real world, maybe not in appearence but at the level of structures and systems, is a way of building in cascading complications and unforseen circumstances. Life can influence how we construct events in our fantasy worlds. How does a community react to an powerful oppressive force? Often with small acts of resistance, the forming of secretive cells leading to larger acts of rebellion, as in the French resistance to the Nazi invasion in WW2 or Guy Fawkes, reacting to the repression of Catholicism, trying to blow up Parliament. So these halflings form a secret society, furtively echanging messages and material, building towards bringing down the Orcish temple.

The advantage of using a framework from “life” rather than just making stuff up (which is obviously always fun), is that real events are often incredibly messy, in ways that are hard to fathom from just following the obvious patterns. Chaos theory in action. Borrowing from life can give fantasy situations a sense of reality, of depth; This Goblin I’m writing can be like this guy I knew from school, obsessed by ancient texts but loving silly wordplay, always trying to measure up to his father’s legacy.

I was never really satisfied by the way Corpos impact the world in ECO MOFOS!! The Corpos always felt a bit passive. The Faction system that I cooked up works well over time, each faction slowly changing the situation in the world, but the Faction moves are much more about what the Faction wants to DO rather how they AFFECT the world around them. And in a low-communication setting, the disruptive ripples are what will be seen or felt first. I also wanted to play into the Punks’ role more, for them to act as a counter to the ecological devastation caused by so many of the processes of a culture of production, to help the players feel that they’re able to intervene and change the world.

So for Islands of Weirdhope, I wanted to insert all the various ramifications of extractive activities into encounters that the party of Punks have as they sail the world, and adapted Mythic Bastionland’s Omens system into Corpo Schemes. My main motivation was to turn the abstract effects of Corpo actions into lived-in events. Many of the Schemes are based around things that exist in our world; A military base, a safari, a coal mine, a holiday island (like the Maldives or Mauritius), an old nuclear site. Each impacts the world in their own way. With a little bit of research (yes, I can use search engines) I can find out what effect each of these activities has on the world, and use that as a springboard for a situation that the players can interact with. Maybe they solve the issue at hand, maybe they ignore it, or maybe they start to follow the lead to discover the larger Scheme, shutting it down before the next situation occurs.

My process

So here’s a little of example of my process for writing these. First I decided to tackle one of the activities; creating and maintaining a Mine. Researching the environmental impact of a Mine, I got this list:

Habitat destruction, deforestation, biodiversity loss, land degradation (erosion, subsidence), air pollution and major water pollution (acid mine drainage, heavy metals).

So for my escalating list of events for the Corpo Scheme, I started with the water pollution, thinking about how that would affect one specific area, and one specific person. Fish die from the pollution. Seagulls swarm around the easy meal. Anyone fishing around there no longer has their usual source of food:

A. A cloud of gulls. The stench of rotting fish. The gulls thrash in the water, fighting over the carpet of carcasses. A fisherwoman sits in her little skiff, crying.

My aim is to give enough detail for a meaningful encounter, some visceral details (an image, a smell), and an emotional hook, with a character to talk to, to gather more information or just help on their way.

The other thing you can do with this structure is create threads of a story. I started thinking about how, in a world without labour laws, child labour becomes something that the unscrupulous will turn to, and wrote these entries:

C. A fisherman is searching for his daughter. Several children have gone missing on local islands. Some people are saying it’s Pirates, and some that it’s Crablins.

D. A gang of kids are haphazardly piloting a skiff. They were press-ganged into working in a stinking mine, but now they’ve escaped. No idea where they’re going.

So maybe the players follow up on the fisherman’s story and track down his daughter and some other kids, ignoring the rumours. Or maybe they get caught up in other events, or even another Corpo Scheme, and find a bunch of the kids have made their own escape. But if they don’t track down the source of this trouble and shut the mine down, the Scheme culminates in this:

E. A great wave spreads across the sea. The mine has caused the collapse of a whole chunk of cliff, sending a small tsunami fanning out from the impact.

Maybe this affects many of the towns around, maybe it impacts some NPCs the Punks care about, but it’s certain that ignoring the issue leads to major problems in their world. Much like in real life.

Examples

Here are a few different instances of art reflecting life:

The Word for World Is Forest by Ursula K. Le Guin; a direct response to the Vietnam War and American imperialism, exploring ecological destruction and militarism, human colonists destroying an extraterrestrial forest world.

Jaws was loosely based on a real series of deaths attributed to a single shark in 1916.

The City We Became by N.K. Jemisin imagines the “soul” of cities as a living thing, mirroring the communities that live in them.

Kindred by Octavia Butler uses a time travel narrative to consider the visceral realities of slavery and its complex legacies.

And one instance of life reflecting art; as John McCroo (RiseUpComus) pointed out on Bluesky about Lord of the Rings, “That’s why they had to go through Moria. Isengard is a Strait of Hormuz situation”.

Other news

We currently have a Jam on, if you fancy writing something inspired by the Weirdhope world, run by symphonicStoryteller, who I’ve got to know through the Copy/Paste discord.

https://itch.io/jam/islands-islands-islands

And we’ve released a new Science Fantasy module by IsaacIsAfraid if you’d like to check it out, available in print and digital.

As you may have noticed, I love Chris McDowall’s elegant Into the Odd ruleset. I’ve been working within and around it now for three years, and I’ve lost count of the number of times I’ve tried changing something, then realised that its exactly like that for a reason- everything ties together in such a tight way. But when I was thinking about the setting for Islands of Weirdhope, I knew I wanted to introduce some really BIG things, Mecha and Kaiju, the huge entities seen in things like Godzilla films, the Forest Spirit in Princess of Mononoke, the God Warriors in Nausicaa or Mecha in Neon Genisis Evangelion. Something alluding to the powers of nature, mechanisation and Gods.

Chris introduced the idea of detachments in his blog, entities larger than a conventional creature or individual, from an entire unit of soldiers through to immense creatures like a dragon. It’s a clever switch of scale, where all attacks against the detachment by regular creatures are impaired (d4 damage) unless they have the blast property (can attack an area). And all attacks by a detachment against a regular creature are enhanced (d12) and have the blast property. Mausritter uses the scale, renamed to Warband scale, to denote the difference between Mice and Cats, making Cats truly terrifying. In ECO MOFOS!! I called detachments “Units”, to give a modern military twist, and created large creatures like the Tentacle Hell. But what if… there was something bigger?

I remember playing Battletech as a kid, realising that my best tactic was to stand in water and fire, to cool the heat sinks. And I knew I didn’t want to emulate that experience. Besides, Chris has already done that. But I did want huge entities to feel awe-inspiring, and totally terrifying, like encountering a human as an ant. So I decided to write up some rules where three units are combined into one entity. The three units act independently, but only one can move, and one is a vulnerable control unit, a head or cockpit. And the less vulnerable parts can attempt to protect the control unit, like arms flailing up to deflect a blow.

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I introduced the rules to our discord and people got pretty excited creating new weird huge monsters and machines. They’ve even set up a Jam for it. So make your own and share them around. Some of mine are at the end of this. There are going to be a whole bunch in Islands of Weirdhope too, the focus of some of the many factions in the watery world.

Anyway, here are the rules:

MECHA AND MONSTERS

Mecha and Monsters, collectively known as Titans, are vast moving entities in the Islands of Weirdhope. As tall as large buildings, they are lumbering but absurdly powerful.

A Titan consist of 3 Units: HEAD, HEART and LIMBS.

• Head is central control.

• Heart is the power system.

• Limbs are for action.

Each has its own Strength, Dexterity, Will, HP and Armour.

Actions

Titans always act last in a round. Each Unit of the Titan acts separately, and each Unit may act in a round, in any order.

Only the Limbs can Move. All in its path must roll a DEX save or take d12 Blast damage. Limbs can’t Move and use a ranged attack, but can make a melee attack.

Targeting & Damage

If the Head is targeted, the Limbs or Heart can attempt to shield the damage with a DEX save. If successful, they take the damage instead.

As an action, the Heart may reduce its Strength to allocate an equal amount of Strength to another Unit.

If a Unit fails a Critical Damage save or its Strength reaches 0, the Titan loses the capabilities of that Unit.

If any Unit is Down, the Titan can no longer move. If there is a pilot, the pilot may attempt to escape.

If the Head is Down, the Titan no longer functions, and the Titan will fall. The Titan will fall away from the last strike, all below taking d12 Blast damage.

Exhaustion Die

Special Manoeuvres are possible, at the risk of exhaustion. Each manoeuvre requires the action of two units.

• Moving twice

• Enhanced defence (2 turns of Hard Cover)

• Titan-Specific Special Manoeuvres

Complete the move and roll a WIL save using the Head’s stat. On a fail the Titan’s HP drops to 0 across all Units.

Monsters regain HP for one Unit by not making any action for a turn.

Mecha must cool heatsinks in water for a turn to recover HP for each Unit.

Battles between Titans

In a battle between Titans, each player chooses which Unit will act first for them in this turn, and rolls a DEX save to see which takes initiative. If both succeed, the lower roll goes first. If it’s a tie, the actions occur simultaneously.

EXAMPLE MECHA

Hercules 4000

HEART

10HP, 3 Armour, STR 18, DEX 10, WIL 10, Plasma Cannon d8 Blast

HEAD

10 HP, STR 12, DEX 10, WIL 10, Headbutt d6

LIMBS

8 HP, 3 Armour, STR 12, DEX 10, WIL 10, Punch d8, Canon d8

Special Manoeuvre

Hyper Turtle Requires functional Head, Heart and Arms. Creates a force field, adding 2 Armour to all Units until HP loss.

MUSKRAT 209

HEART

10 HP, 2 A, STR 10, DEX 8, WIL 10, Plasma Cannon d10 Blast

HEAD

4 HP, STR 9, DEX 12, WIL 16

LIMBS

8 HP, 1 A, STR 12, DEX 12, WIL 10, Punch d10, Canon d8

Special Manoeuvre

Core Overload Requires functional Head and Heart. Generates destructive tank-wide beam, d12 damage to all in one line.

NVOID Unit-03

HEART

10 HP, 2 Armour, STR 10, DEX 15, WIL 10, Plasma Cannon d10 Blast

HEAD

4 HP, STR 10, DEX 13, WIL 14, Mini Blasters d6

LIMBS

8 HP, 1 Armour, STR 12, DEX 14, WIL 10, Sword d10, Canon d8

Special Manoeuvre

Spining Blade Requires functional Head, Heart and Arms. Deals a Sword blow to all in range at once.

EXAMPLE MONSTERS

UR-MANTIS

HEART

10 HP, 2 Armour, STR 10, DEX 15, WIL 10, Paralyzing Screech (all that hear must make a WIL save or become paralysed. All affected make a further WIL save at the start of their turn, able to act if successful. STR damage causes each to regain action)

HEAD

4 HP, STR 10, DEX 14, WIL 14, Acid Mucus d8 blast

LIMBS

8 HP, 1 Armour, STR 12, DEX 14, WIL 10, blades d12

Special Manoeuvre

Fatal Blade Requires functional Head, Heart and Arms. Deals a double blade blow to a target.

LIZARD KING

HEART

10 HP, 2 Armour, STR 10, DEX 8, WIL 10, Throw Building/vehicle d10

HEAD

4 HP, STR 9, DEX 12, WIL 16, Eye Beams d10

LIMBS

8 HP, 1 Armour, STR 12, DEX 12, WIL 10, Punch d12

Special Manoeuvre

Plasma Beam Requires functional Head and Heart. Generates a destructive mouth-wide beam, dealing d12 damage to all in a direct line from the Monster to the horizon.

Find out more about Islands of Weirdhope

Dan and I have been gettting deep in the weeds with the new book, and part of that was turning ideas, prompts that I’ve written to inspire ideas for islands, into images. And something magical happens in that process, of transmitting an idea from one brain to another and seeing what comes out. And one of those things was an idea for maps, for visual cues for GMs that they can share at the table about what the players are about to encounter. Every picture tells a story, and this image, this isometric Hex of a skyscraper being impailed by an oil tanker (inspired by Fist of the North Star), really summed up the setting for me - A time after a cataclysm, after huge waves or unknown forces, but also a time of regrowth, the green growing around the ruins.

As a GM, sometimes it’s great to just be able to say - “it looks like this” and show a picture. That’s why bestiaries are so great, and I have a long-held ambition to make a huge one. But that’s for another day.

Anyway, I’ve got a little something special today, an interview I did with the creator Nate Whittington of Grinning Rat Publications who has a top-notch blog, and has written a module for Mothership that is funding right now, that I thought shares some sensibilities with things that we make- thinking about hope and survival after decay, the horrors of AI, and the failures of capitalism.

Certain Fathoms is a sci-fi horror module for Mothership, plunging players into the sludge-choked ruins of Welkin Campus—a long-forgotten AI research complex buried beneath Prospero’s Dream. Guided by Miranda, a rogue AI trapped in synthetic flesh, crews descend via the Black Elevator into a shifting labyrinth of experimental tech, corporate secrets, and unstable anomalies.

Back Certain Fathoms here

So, Nate, what attracts you to the Weird?

I think our media is really oversaturated with the more traditional forms of fantasy and fiction. Not that I dislike it (i love elves, evil liches, etc) but I think when you add a little something new to a potential setting or system— something someone hasn’t seen before or can’t help but read more of —that’s really cool

I see Certain Fathoms builds on Emmy Allen’s depth-crawl procedures. What draws you to procedural generation in your designs?

It comes from ultimately trying to make this thing replayable. When you have a game with high lethality, you get the opportunity for repeatability, but often not the structure. It’s frustrating rehashing the same ground as a player and having to pretend it’s all new as a character. So why not make it new every time?

Of course! So, what are a couple of your favourite modules?

Oh, this is hard. I think Gradient Descent for Mothership really rewired my brain for what megadungeons can be. I have a soft spot for Sailors on the Starless Sea for Dungeon Crawl Classics. I once played in a CoC module called A Love in Need that felt very, very good. I’d say I like most modules as long as they’re written in a way that allows for exploration - both on the GM and the player side. I don’t think it’s a surprise but what I like is when a module isn’t afraid to let you stumble into things you shouldn’t. I really don’t like when something holds you by the hand and says you have to take step 1, then 2, then 3… at that point I would prefer to just read the module as a book and move on!

OK, here’s a big one. TTTRPGs are dominated by medieval fantasy. Medieval fantasy dominates the hobby. What is there to gain by stepping out of that genre for RPGs?

Well for starters we don’t live in medieval times. It’s a frame of reference for a lot of us, but some out there don’t have the touch points for Tolkien or Game of Thrones or whatever. But nowadays almost everybody has used a phone, almost everybody knows something about space. I feel like medieval fantasy is great when you want to get into the fiction of humanity we tell ourselves (good vs evil, heroic vs villainous) but when you step out of that you get to tell much more grounded, personal stories. Alice is Missing, for example, wouldn’t work if you were all medieval wizard apprentices who could instantly communicate with one another. It works because we all know what it’s like to be in high school and have it be super ****ing sketch!

I totally agree! OK, finally, what’s been your biggest surprise in writing or playtesting this module?

It feels amazing stepping into Emmy Allen’s procedure for depth-crawls and having it just work for sci fi. They really crushed it with the Stygian Library (another fantastic module(?) that was a huge inspiration for Certain Fathoms) and ensuring a place is truly WEIRD.

Thanks Nate, that was great.

If anyone else fancies being interviewed, or would like to interview me (for some reason) just let me know.

I’ve been working away at the idea of multi-purpose maps for a while now. Initially, I started making them for my home games as I realised it was the one thing that I needed to run an adventure at short notice. Then that grew into the whole system for the games that I’m making now with Dan. Obviously, you can just create a simple point crawl in seconds- draw a few circles and join them up, hey presto. But that doesn’t give you a structure that will necessarily be interesting to play. By interesting to play, I mean have real choices for the PCs, to create a rich, layered experience. And the key to rich adventures is following the example of Jennell Jaquays and her dungeon design, as seen in Caverns of Thracia, Dark Tower, Griffin Mountain, and more, that have been dissected by the hobby and come to be known as Jaquaysing. Several key concepts were introduced-

• Non-linearity - This, for me is key. There should be interesting choices that have an impact on the player’s journey. Both the “railroad” (a straight line towards a set destination) and the “quantum ogre” (the ogre turns up no matter which route you take or dorr you open) diminish player agency, and add to a sense that what the players do don’t actually impact their experience of play. Meaningful choices are what ttrpgs are great at. It does require a certain style of GMing,, which is maleable and reactive, but I believe this ends up in the best experience for everyone.

• Loops - Loops make a place feel real and lived in. You caome back to the same place twice, and there’s a different situation - time has moved on, a bandit camp you saw before has left, leaving a smoldering fire, a door is open that was previously closed. Especially when you’re generating scenarios on the go, as I like to do, using tables to populate a space, having a loop so that the generated area now feels perminent is essential.

• Secret or unusual paths - These are here to keep players investigating the world. The more they look and poke around, the more often they’ll be rewarded by finding another way through, perhaps leading to a safer route, or one with interesting items. This obviously goes hand in hand with linearity, but the presence of secret routes also subtly encourages a certain attitude and style of play from the players, that questions their surroundings, making them more invested in play.

The original post (which unfortnately gives the process a different name) lists a few more. I mean I love non-Euclidean geometry, but that’s basically a fancy secret route, and multiple entrances are another form of non-linearity.

When mapping out an adventure, what’s important for me is creating meaningful choices, rewarding exploration, and generating the feeling of an organic, lived-in place. This applies whether you’re investigating a dungeon, a forest or an abandoned cloud city.

So I wanted to create a few maps that would cover these issues, and have a little “adventure structure” baked in. This is partly inspired by the five-room dungeon and by Marcis B.’s inspired dissection of old-school dungeon design.

In Marcia’s schema, a six room dungeon has:

• 1 monster room with treasure.

• 1 monster room without treasure.

• 1 unoccupied room with treasure.

• 3 “empty” rooms.

It’s important to remember that this whole schema relies on the extra layer of random encounters. Typically, you roll a d6 on entering any room, and on a 1 you roll an encounter. And with a reaction roll, that encounter is further complicated- maybe it’s a troop of friendly goblins, or a very angry pixie. So in 6 rooms, or spaces, you’re likely to have 1 random encounter to add into the mix.

But why 6 rooms? 6 rooms is pretty much the length of one session, if you include chit-chat, breaks, etc. The 5 room dungeon (sorry this is not the “original” but I can’t find that right now) idea was based on that premise, but baked in an idea of narrative, that there should be an arc to the session. I understand the compulsion, but, as you may have guessed, for me this lacks player agency:

• Room 1: Entrance And Guardian
• Room 2: Puzzle Or Roleplaying Challenge
• Room 3: Red Herring
• Room 4: Climax, Big Battle Or Conflict
• Room 5: Plot Twist

I prefer the joys of the smaller triumphs- cleverly sneaking around the dragon, swimming up the underground stream to enter the compound. But I also think it’s good to have a sense of reward for clever play and exploration, so for my maps I baked in Marcia B’s options, with an awareness of danger and reward, knowing that if those are present, stories will emerge.

So here are 12 seven room dungeons I made recently for my current project. I’ve added 1 room to Marcia’s 6, and in most cases one extra baked-in event, for a little more incident and need for decision-making. It also gives more variety, and fits in a satisfying hex shape. If I need one as I’m designing a session, or even during play as the players inevitably go off-piste, I roll a d12 and populate it from a suitable table.

Edit: Another key influence, as ever, was from Chris McDowall’s Mythic Bastionland (in my haste I forgot about this one!). Chris sets up a procedure for a 6 point map, with 6 points of a hex and a central point, then removing one to create irregularity. This is a great approach. I think by varying routes like in the 12 below, you get a similar outcome.

Now this is where it gets fun. These don’t just have to be dungeons. They don’t even just have to be structures or buildings. They can be maps of whole areas or worlds- you just have to adjust the sense of scale.

For an interior, like a dungeon, this is a series of rooms connected by corridors. But out on the waves, these are a series of islands connected by shipping lanes (defined by safe passage, currents and prevailing winds). See the little arrows? Those are the currents, circulating between the islands. Travel against the current is harder, but not impossible - so that creates more sets of interesting choices. But then this could also be a map of an area, with villages, cities and caverns marked by the different sets of symbols. Or a map of a solar system, with different routes between different types of planets.

So here’s a few different schemes:

Dungeon

• Every point is a new room, 1-in-6 chance of an encounter.

• Travelling between Rooms takes 10 mins at a careful pace.

• Lines are corridors.

• Dotted lines are secret ways.

• Arrows show elevation change.

• Every ! generate an encounter.

• Every $ generate a treasure.

Seas

• Every point is is an island.

• Travelling between Islands, the GM calculates the number of Watches it would take for the party to reach their destination. Roll a d8 for a simple journey through the Shallows, a d12 through the Deep, and a d20 through Abyssal waters. Each day is 6 Watches.

• Lines are routes through the Shallows

• Arrows show directions of currents

• Dotted lines are routes through the more dangerous Deep seas.

• If no line connects two points, travel can be made through the treacherous Abyssal seas.

• No symbol denotes a Natural Island

• $! or ! is a Volcanic Island

• !! is an Artificial Island

Wandering over Weeks

• At Week scale these maps are a series of overland locations connected by routes, showing the lie of the land. Moving between each point takes a number of Days (roll d3), adventuring through Terrain (roll d6 on the Terrain table).

• Locations are marked by symbols. Empty spaces are a local feature, such as a hill or clearing.

• Locations d3 - 1. Lair 2. Stronghold 3. Bunker

• Terrain d6

• 1-3. Wastelands

• 4-5. Wilderness

• 6. Ruins

In other news, here are some great Mothership campaigns coming up soon :

Certain Fathoms by Grinning Rat Productions, Explore Welkin Campus—a shifting, sprawling, drowned facility of rogue machines, failed clones, and paracausal tech—in this Mothership-compatible depth-crawl module.

FLATLINE ON THE BLOCKS: A dicey district for Mothership RPG- Eighteen Mothership veterans tear open the Spinal Crux District, a 52pg zine detailing the EYE and its twenty Blocks on Prospero’s Dream.

And then there’s:

Our very own Islands of Weirdhope that bakes these maps into a sea setting, with tables and tables of sites and strangeness to explore. Follow for a free pdf of the Quickstart.

Follow here

As you may have noticed, I’ve been thinking a lot about sea adventures recently. It’s come from a lot of things, as do all ideas, but fundamentally I think it’s from living in Brighton, on the edge of the English Channel. I grew up in London, and Brighton was always a place of escape, somewhere I’d go with my partner on New Year’s Day to mark a fresh new year, with the huge winter waves rolling in. But once I started living here, the sea took on a different quality, watching it changing in all conditions, the way the light caught it at sunset, the strange sea fog that drifts in on hot days. And that feeling of being in something immense when you enter the water, feeling connected to the waters all around the world, your head just bobbing above the horizon as you adjust to the cold.

Water is a connection and a barrier. A thing of beauty, and a terrible danger. So islands become isolated. This isolation creates the incredible biological variety of the Galapagos, but also makes islands really interesting adventure sites for TTRPGs. Just look at Luke Gearing’s The Isle or Zedeck Siew and Mun Kao’s 1000 1000 Islands (sadly no longer in print). It allows for each space to have its own identity, for there to be a logic to one site not really influencing another, because of the natural barrier of the water. In fact this was one of the kernels of Islands of Weirdhope - I had been building a big setting for ECO MOFOS!!, with lots of cool adventure sites linked together on a big hex map (you can see it in the Tears From Stone module), but as soon as I thought about it as a series of islands it somehow became far more interesting to me. I instantly had visions of sailing the sea like Link in Windwaker, and diving under the ocean to find submerged cities like in Waterworld. In a setting that thinks about the implications of climate change, it felt like the logical next step for the ECO MOFOS!! project. ECO MOFOS!! is utterly landlocked, moving between Wastelands, Wilderness and Ruins, so bringing the water into that felt freeing, somehow, a place to think up new ideas for this space.

Follow the project here

Then I went around an exhibition of the Japanese prints of Hiroshige. I’ve always loved his work, but I was suddenly seeing them in the context of ideas of the sea, adventure and storytelling. Every image is so full of detail and incident, and it instantly made me think of Dan’s work, with his strong lines, bold colours and his knack for creating a whole world in one image.

So a vision of a new book came into place, combining all these ideas into one thing, giving tools for creating watery adventures alongside offering some evocative adventures to play through, all brought to life by Dan’s art. But I wanted this to be a sailing game, set in a time after the invention of the motor… so I needed a reason, in lore and mechanically, for motorised ships to be rare and also a very bad idea. So I came up with the idea of Monsters of the Deep, and Deep Trouble:

Deep Trouble Die

Ever since Gaia woke, Monsters were released from the depths, ready to rid the world of the human follies of technology and war. They sense mechanical vibrations in the water, and seek them out like cat and a shaking piece of string.

The Deep Trouble Die is a d6, and all crafts start with Deep Trouble of 1.

Each time a craft uses a motor for travel, or an explosion occurs nearby, roll the Deep Trouble die. If you roll more than your current rating, nothing happens. If you roll equal to or less than your current rating, a Monster is sighted, inducing a Vision, communing with the Monster. The Monster may give a clue about the nearest Corpo Scheme, and you increase your Deep Trouble by 1.

If Deep Trouble ever reaches 6, the craft is consumed whole, and the crew must escape from the Monster’s belly, one way or the other.

This is followed by a map of the insides of a Monster’s body and a random generator for creating a short adventure inside this beast. The Monster becomes like the sea itself, increasingly terrifying, but also a site for wonder and exploration.

As you can tell, I’m deep in this project now, and really excited to finish it and get people playing within this world. If you’d like to play an early version, give the project a follow here and you can download the latest preview version. I’ll be updating it regularly as we get towards launch, and talking more about ideas and inspirations in posts to come. Hope you enjoy.

One thing that I felt was missing from ECO MOFOS!! was a sense of how the Corpos, the maleficent forces that represent the corporations of the old world, influence and change the world around them through their presence.

The Elegance of Omens

I’ve been reading through Chris McDowall’s Mythic Bastionland, and yet again, I realised that Chris has beaten me to it. The way that the Myths influence the world through a series of escalating events, as Omens, is just an incredibly elegant way of introducing a coherent but procedural narrative into an otherwise freeform game.

The engine of the mechanic is the Wilderness roll. If you move within the game, the Myths will inevitably advance.

The Roll is on a d6, rolled if the party ends their turn in Wilderness.

1. Encounter the next Omen from a Random Myth in this Realm.

2-3. Encounter the next Omen from the Nearest Myth.

4-6. Encounter the Hex’s Landmark. Otherwise All Clear.

Entering a hex that contains a Myth also triggers the next event for that Myth.

This is a form of Encounter die - the “standard” is rolling a 1 on a d6 when entering a new hex in wilderness will trigger a random encounter with a creature from the environment’s Encounter table. But here, like in the Overloaded Encounter Die, each result has the potential to change the situation in the game. Also, instead of the encounter being a simple meeting with a possibly hostile creature, instead the roll triggers the development of a situation - the Myth enters its next stage, through a human-scale event. For example, in The Plague, the PCs might encounter a family with the disease, then in a later stage a whole village will have succumbed, or they might meet someone seeking a cure. The world becomes organic, shifting with the changing state of impending problems.

Corpo Schemes

I think a system like this could work really well for ECO MOFOS!!, adding in linked narrateives to the individual situations that are created by the combination of the procedural Environment, Feature and Hazard rolls. If some of the Features were a trigger for the next event of a sequence, they would bleed into the game. I like the name of Corpo Schemes for these events. The Feature Roll is a d20, so 7 entries should be the Nearest Scheme, and 3 entries would be for a random Scheme. I like this mix, so that the PCs are never quite sure which Scheme they’re finding evidence for, or even if this event is evidence of a Scheme at all.

Example

Here’s an example of what one of these Schemes could look like. There is the overall threat, in this case a new Corpo Landing Pad for an incoming force from Mars, and how the building and presence of that new threat affects people and places in the world. I’m trying to make each Event in some way interactive, to give a situation that the PCs need to react to, while building the overall situation.

1. Landing pad

• Strange lights in the night sky off on the horizon. Members of a settlement saw them, say they’ve been happening for weeks. A teenager has gone off to investigate and not returned.

• A mass of dead fish, floating on the water. They’ve attracted sharks, and they’re gorging on them. A small trading skiff is caught in the turmoil.

• A family of Punks, lead by mum Shinead, have made a home in a strangely new piece of high tech salvage. They found it floating nearby.

• A settlement is being frightened by loud noises being heard accross the sea. Thilas says that it’s an omen of the end times, and some people believe him. Some think it’s roar of landing rockets, they’ve seen the lights.

• Invasion. The closest island to the Scheme is now under occupation. A resistance, lead by Silia Root, is underway.

Links

A few great crowdfunders are underway.

MAC ATTACK by Chris McDowall - a new awesome Mecha minis game.

Vaults of Vaarn by Leo Hunt - the new edition of one of the finest procedural settings out there.

A Perfect Wife a Southeast Asian vampire horror by Zedeck Siew has just been released on pdf (I did layout on this)

Summer Sale I’m hosting a little sale of Solo and ECO MOFOS!! modules to support the development of the next installment. Maybe there’s something fun for your table.

Tahitian sailing canoes by Henry Byam Martin

I’ve wanted to put together another one-page rpg for a while. I’m not a one-page maestro like Grant Howitt (I have a very soft spot for his Mechanical Oryx) but admire the form, how you can get the kernel of an idea into a pretty much playable form in such limited space. It really helps you as a designer to consider what is really necessary to play, and is also a great way to test ideas out. You can look at the final one page and think… is this actually a fun idea? I saw Chris McDowall’s One Page version of Into the Odd a few years ago and it totally blew my mind how much flavour and gameplay could fit into such a small space. [Chris has a very cool crowdfunder on at the moment, you should check it out] . And there’s a One Page TTRPG Jam on right now (organised by Ennie-nominated Unknown Dungeon) so I thought I’d have a stab at putting together a bunch of ideas that have been steadily perculating.

The main (simple) concept was that I wanted to take Eco mofos to the seas- somehow mix Legend of Zelda: Windwaker with Waterworld and scifi like Ballard’s Drowned Earth and Verne’s 20000 Leagues Under the Sea. There’s also Joan Slonczewski’s Door into Ocean which really made me think about the potential for storytelling in the sea.

The sea has so many facets. There’s the surface, that changes dramatically with the weather, from smooth like glass to ferociously deadly. There’s the whole world that exists under the sea, dark and mysterious, a secret other world. And then there are the possibilities of Islands, of each island having it’s own micro-world, like in Homer’s Odyssey or Kurtz in Heart of Darkness/Apolcalyse Now. And the sea is at the heart of the climate crisis, from pollution to sea rise to the impact of those changes on the movements of people. So yes, as you can probably tell, I’m into it as a place to explore.

So, the game.

So I have an A4 sheet to work with (slightly longer than US Letter), and know a few things. I want the rules on the left, as that’s the first place people read, and more reference material towards the right. I decided to try 5 columns across the page. I would have liked to have used 4, as then you can fold it in two, but I wouldn’t have been able to fit nearly as much words.

Now, this is obviously a Mark of the Odd joint- the chassis is the Into the Odd rules, with some of my Eco mofos twists like HP defining your Adaptation and Burdens (something Chris was trialling in early versions of the majestic Mythic Bastionland). So that’s column 1. It was most of 2 as well, but I trimmed and trimmed from the bookmark version of the rules I had already. One page RPGS require a ridiculous amount of concision, to the extent that you start implying things rather than explaining fully, and hope that the reader gives you some lee-way!

Which brings me on to the meat of what I wanted to include in this thing- the new rules I’ve been cooking (with the help of the Copy/Paste Discord and gestaltist in particular) around sea travel. Partly inspired by the wilderness travel rules in Emiel Boven’s The Electrum Archive, they turn travel into an Encounter roll, assuming the length of time of travel is roughly constant, but adding advantages to travel means that you’ll encounter less diffculty. It’s elegant, and worked really well for seafaring, as you could factor in things like wind-speed, rowing, currents, skill, all as things that tip the odds in your favour (or not).

The part I’m really proud of is the Wrestle with the Elements aspect, which takes advantage of Into the Odd’s unusual HP system (it is a cushion for damage that recharges when you take a little breather) to simulate the buffeting of the seas, and the bad luck of hitting a submerged rock. Your boat can withstand a certain amount, but taking her out in a storm is a fool’s errand- you’ll have to be lucky to make it to your destination in one piece.

But the system makes no sense without a map, so I knew I had to fit some map-making rules in too. I wanted to use point crawls, as I like them, but it seemed to feel wrong that a game all about freedom, about the infinite possibilities of the sea, was defined by lines on a map. So I decided on an open form of mapping. In the end I decided on squares rather than hexes as gridded paper is so easy to get hold of, and maritime maps are based on squares (as is Windwaker’s).

Beautiful work by chriee on Gamefaqs (apologies for spoilers of this 20-odd year old game).

It’s a dice drop system, mostly just using d6s, as that’s always fun and has a nice element of randomness. The seas being tied to the vicinity of islands felt simple and intuitive, and means that all Islands in the Deep seas will be Volcanic, which works.

Finally, I needed to add everything you’d need to actually play- tables of Quests (which imply a little Windwaker/Nausicaa community on your home island), Encounters at sea, different Corpo bases and random islands, so that each map and each adventure becomes unique, even within the scope of a one-pager. And the Adaptations, which are Character Classes by another name, I suppose, all themed around sea travel. In each case, I was borrowing from notes I’ve been woking on for an expanded setting, but trimmed everything down to just a flavoursome nugget, trying to give as much gameable ideas in as small a space as possible.

So there you have it, a One Page RPG. Hopefully see you in the Jam!

Cover of Babel original image by Bruegel

Solo games

I’ve been making solo TTRPGs for the last five years. They’re a very different beast to a group TTRPG. It’s not about creating a shared mental space with others, they’re more meditative, somewhere between exploring your own imaginative world and solving a series of puzzles left by the maker of the game. In many ways, solo games sit on a spectrum between a board game and journaling, and can even a way of generating free-form writing.

Board game

So to think about the extremes, a pure solo board game is a predetermined set of objects, representing your avatar in the world, and perhaps resources that go up and down. As a player you want to collect a set of objects, or reach a certain place on the game map. I suppose the card game Solitaire or playing something like Outer Rim by yourself could be seen as this end of the scale.

Journaling game

A journaling game, on the other hand, normally provides a lose framework to inspire your own writing. Often these take the form of table of prompts, a series of questions and some way to generate what gets asked next. There are some great examples like The Adventurer and Thousand Year Old Vampire. Lots of people use oracles (Perplexing Ruin’s fine oracle card used here as an example), as a way of playing group TTRPGs alone. Ironsworn is probably one of the most popular games to play this way, along with OD&D and its many variants.

The Middle way

But most solo TTRPGs fit somewhere in the middle of that, using board game elements as a frame for a session of journaling. The game that made me realise how powerful this was as a system was The Wretched by Chris Bissette. It draws you into the narrative in such a clever way, adding rising tension with the use of a Jenga tower, and implicates you in the story by asking you to record your entries into a dictaphone or other audio device. It forces you to confront your own voice, the obvious solitary nature of this game experience. The board game parts, the playing cards, the dice, the tower help give the journaling a structure, a beginning, middle and end.

I don’t think it’s an exaggeration that hundreds of games have now been made using the Wretched & Alone SRD , a document that talks you through how to make a game using The Wretched’s framework. Carta SRD also does a great job at making the act of creating a game like this accessible. I used the Wretched and Alone SRD for Babel back at the beginning of the pandemic, and it really opened things up for me.

Image from Hardcore Ecologist, flower by Daniel Locke

Making a Solo game

I’ve just released a new solo game, Hardcore Ecologist, and I thought I’d talk about the process of getting it into the world.

ECO MOFOS!! is already a solo game, but I know that it’s reasonably complex to get started, certainly compared to the stripped down structure of journaling games. I wanted to create something that was about the joy of discovery, the joy of seeing what’s around the next corner, but keep it in the weird dangerous future of the ECO MOFOS setting. So I decided to build a self-contained adventure that you could play without any of the character mechanics of the main game, that got you straight into the adventuring part.

After some experimenting, using hexes and point crawls, I decided to use cards for travel, where you create your map as you go. It felt satisfying and clear- three of the suits could act as the three biomes, The Wastes, WIlderness and Ruins.

I wanted to track time, to create a sense of urgency. I had a spare suit from the pack of cards, so thought that could be a marker of time- a new card for every day. And you’d know all the time what day you were on if you had that card face up. ECO MOFOS uses 6 Watches in a day, and that maps nicely on a d6, so that became the timer for the action economy. You can do one thing in a Watch- move onto another Card or search for specimens.

Spread for rolling up Creatures in Hardcore Ecologist. Butterfly by Daniel Locke

For the discovery of plants and creatures, I was thinking of games like the original Pokemon or Final Fantasy videogames where you grind going across certain areas to find different rare instances. So for this part I used a dice drop, something used extensively in The Black Hack - it’s always fun to roll up a bunch of dice and let them fall, with each seperate dice type refering to a different table. I tackled the idea of rarity by assigning it to one particular die, the d10, so that you can instantly see if you’ve got something unusual. On a 10 it’s a rare specimen, so hopefully during one playthrough people will get a few rare specimens, alongside a lot of other strange things.

So you’re building the map, a bit like a freeform Carta game, and rolling for surprising things like Black Hack, but I needed a narrative reason for the time to be limited - You’re part of a community who are leaving in ten days - you’re trying to help them with your discoveries. Coming up with this made me think that it’d be nice if you could actually find the goal of the main ECO MOFOS game, The Glade, a safe space for a new community. So I added the Queen of Hearts into the deck - a 1-in-40 chance to find the Glade, another satisfying sub-goal in the game.

As you can see, the narrative and the mechanics fed each other- certain ideas arise because a mechanic is possible, and sometimes the narrative itself inspires mechanics within the game. Creation is an organic process. Follow where it leads. And then test and iterate. When it feels right, it’s probably done. But show it to a few friends first. Sometimes they spot things, especially lack of clarity of instructions, that you just become blind to.

Making your own Solo game

Both Wretched & Alone SRD and Carta SRD are great starting points, but if you want to use Hardcore Ecologist as a base, this is what you need to do-

Assign a different type of place or type of action to each of 3 Suits.

Write 13 evocative entries for each of the 3 suits. This is the heart of the setting of the game, what the player will picture as they play.

Use one Suit to track time- maybe it’s minutes, hours, days, weeks, years, millenia.

Write some dice drop tables-

• d4 - Large categories of things (Animal/vegetable/mineral/other)

• d6 - A general feature (I used appearance, furry/spikey/shiny etc)

• d8 - Another general feature (I used Taste spicy/sour/sweet…)

• d10 - Rarity. I set it for 1-6 Common, 7-9 Unusual, 10 Rare)

• d12- Another feature - (I used Colour, with entries for combining)

• d20 - The real individual flavour. 20 entries that add spice to the description, and maybe some mechanical benefit, like getting rid of fatigue or healing.

Try it out and see how it works. Iterate and then let someone else play it. Or just share it with me, I’d love to try it out.

Astronomy: sailing under the midnight sun. Engraving, 1825. Wellcome Collection.

Procedures

In this post I wanted to outline how I go about starting to think about new procedures for a game. I’ve been wanting to make a sailing game, so I thought I’d try to think through how sailing could work as a central part of that, creating the feeling of travel by water.

Why sailing?

As a method of travel, sailing is both romantic, with images of sailing into the sunset and the vast distances covered by the Polynesians and Vikings, and deeply rooted in natural processes, harnessing the wind and the currents to move. In a post-oil world (ineveitable with Oil being a finite resource) it’s likely sail will return as a common form of transportation.

But primarily, I want to create a feeling of freedom in this game, a satisfying sensation of getting the calculations just right to speed from one location to another. To create that feeling however, you have to bake in the opposite, the difficult slog through adverse conditions, the bad luck of the wind changing at just the wrong time.

I want the sea itself to be a character in the game, not just a flat expanse to be crossed. I want speed to feel fast and cool, and crazy crossings in little coracles possible but full of drama.

So, I’m approaching sea travel like wilderness travel in traditional dungeon games, with encounter rolls at every Watch. I’m using ECO MOFOS!! rules on Watches, with 6 segments to a day:

1. Dawn

2. Morning

3. Afternoon

4. Twilight

5. Night

6. Dead of night

ECO MOFOS!! specifies rolling for Encounters at every point on a pointcrawl, but I feel like sea travel should be more organic than that, so my instinct is that we should be rolling for Encounters once every Watch. 4 hours between possible Encounters feels about right in the expanse of the ocean.

As the length of time at sea determines the number of times an Encounter is rolled for- being out at sea becomes dangerous. As each Watch you also check to see if the weather has shifted, it means that the more time you’re out at sea the more likely the wind will change. This should make travel dramatic and unpredictable.

Image of circular currents in the Pacific Ocean

I like point crawls in TTRPGs. They make navigation straightforward, are simple to set up and improvise for the GM (I’ll go more into this in another post). But pointcrawls across the Sea feels a bit strange. You don;t really sail in straight lines. And looking at the diagram above of all the circular currents, it made me think, maybe we could have circular routes that the players can hop on and off of, like the London Underground (ridiculous, I know, but I grew up in London and the tube map is seared in my brain).

Image of a Circle Crawl/Knot Crawl Map of a watery environment

So how about something more like this. As a GM, youd draw a number of islands (maybe from a dice drop [something for anothe post]) and then draw circles connecting them, and around the outside of all of the islands. This gives dlexibility and choice. Let’s say you can hop between the circles at their closest point, like changeing lines on the underground.

But what are the dots, I hear you ask? The dots are Knots, a real measurement of speed in nautical terms, but here abstracted into a marker.

So, some rules:

Sailing the seas

Sailing the seas is a balance between currents and the wind. The currents set the sea lanes, and the wind will help or hinder on that journey.

Your speed at sea is measured in Knots per Watch. There are 6 watches in 24 hours, 3 during the day, 3 at night. If at sea at the start of a watch, roll the encounter die. Setting off to sea counts as being at sea.

For your ship’s speed, add up the variables at your current position. If the direction of travel and wind direction is uncertain, the GM makes a ruling, perhaps adjusting the d3 wind speed roll.

Variables

• +1 if the current is with you

• +2 if sailing

• +d3 if the wind is with you

• +1 if someone is rowing (add a Burden/Fatigue for each watch of rowing. Max rowing bonus +1)

• -d3 if the wind is against you.

Examples

• Sailing, Wind and current with you, rowing +5

• Rowing, against the current, against the wind 0

• Sailing, with the wind, against the current +2

• Rowing with the current +2

• Drifting with the current +1

• Sailing against the wind, against the current +1

Next steps

So that’s my first stab at this. I’m not expecting it to be finished, or even something that works at all at this stage. This is a sketch to test, to get the ball rolling on the process. So. Now I test. If you have a moment you could test it too if you like, and let me know how it feels.

(Sketch by Daniel Locke)

How to make a TTRPG

There are as many ways to get started as there are types of TTRPGs, but I’m going to take you through how to make a rules-light standard D&D-type game with a GM/DM/Referee and 2-5 players using a little SRD I put together a while ago. It’s based on a few other (excellent) SRDs, particularly Jason Tocci’s 24XX, a document that continues to inspire me with its simplicity and design advice.

I thought I’d start by going the “art-first” route- to take some art that I have access to, and base the game on that, rather than the more usual other way around. This has several advantages. It’s fun, you know for certain the art will be good, and you can really riff off the detail in the images. Babel was made this way, as was Laurie O’Connel’s Hieronymus. Take some art that says something to you (from a permissive Patreon [like Evlyn Moreau’s] or Public Domain [here’s Yochai Gal’s fine collection to rifle through]) and use that as the core of your new game.

Dan, my fellow-passenger at Copy/Paste, just sent me a bunch of sketches, so I’m going to use those for this example.

Setting

The first thing the SRD helps you to do is to create a setting. Not so much “how many continents are there”, more what does it feel like, what kind of world are the players going to play in. It does this through asking you to roll to answer 8 different questions -

• What is it? (terrain)

• When is it? (Time period)

• Who lives here? (PC characters)

• What is beautiful? (Why live here?)

• What is difficult? (A complication)

• Where is adventure? (Where is dangerous yet exciting?)

• What is dominant? (A quirk of culture)

• What is hoped for? (What could PCs strive towards)

So looking at Dan’s drawing, I’m drawn to combining Wide Ocean (they look a bit piratey) and salvaged junk (there’s a patchwork quality to them). The Time period goes from the beginning of time all the way through to the very end, but I think this is in the near future, the Time of Change. The people are humans, maybe slightly altered, and the community is what’s beautiful. Or maybe the wide open sky. Both is fine.

Greed is what’s difficult, people not sharing as they could, stealing off each other or exploiting each other, and the adventure happens at sea. I’m not sure what’s dominant, so I’ll roll. A 12. A Beast. Maybe there’s a great beast in the sea that means that only small adventurous crews can cross the oceans- if a craft is too big it just gets consumed. I like that. But what is hoped for? 2. A new beginning. So maybe everyone’s looking for something that will kickstart a change, maybe a way to work with this beast in the deep, or a way to satiate them. Maybe some even want to kill them. I can see factions working that way, relating to this overwhelming power in the world in different ways, some worshiping the beast while others revile it, seeking its destruction. And maybe a third group wants to control the beast, use them for their own ends.

So it’s essentially a game of salvage-pirates and mega-monsters. Sounds good to me.

I designed the whole SRD so that everything can be played with just a d6, to make it super-accessible. The full set of polyhedrals is really fun to play with and design for, but not everyone has access to them. A six-sided die is a part of so many games, from backgammon to monopoly, so most people have at least one in their house. Which is why the default system in included in this is 2d6, rolling to reach a target number (8 or over), adding one to your roll for every Skill, piece of equipment or advantage (I’d like to tell previous me to add in the caveat “up to a maximum of +3” to put a limit on player’s adding infinite bonuses shenanigans. Maybe I’ll update the pdf).

Roles

So, we have a setting. Great. But how to players actually interact with this world, and what do they do? This is the fundamental question of game design I think. What are the players there for. If your game doesn’t have a clear role for the players, it’s going to be difficult for them to get involved. So the player options must give them a sense of their character’s place in the world, and will inevitably tell them something about the world itself. At the very least the Roles tell the player - this type of role or class exists in this world. A “Peasant” implies an agrarian society, with a feudal system. Having a Peasant class implies a Lord, maybe even Royalty, and the concept of money and wealth. Just as a “Cleric” implies a system of belief- not only that there are Gods but that there is a hierarchical system of worship, and that there is a priestly class, people who’s only job is to minister the will of God/s. I could go on, but that’s another blog, I guess.

So yes, I need to choose at least 3 roles for this game (to give some choice), that say something about the world. It’s adventure at sea, so let’s make them broadly nautical.

(Daniel Locke just can’t stop sketching. A Pirate, maybe?)

Pirate is a cliche, but it’s a powerful one, that gives images of the sea, living on your wits, fighting against authority, and violence. It’s useful to have as an option as it says a lot about the world, that it’s chaotic and unsafe, but also that there’s a form of freedom. Somewhere between a Thief and a Fighter in traditional D&D.

Navigator is more esoteric, but implies that it’s difficult to traverse this world, and implies secret skills or banks of knowledge that only certain people have access to. We could make this a more technical class, like a Ranger, able to track things and way-find, maybe a bit mystical.

Seer is a bit of a wildcard, to imply some sort of magic in the world. Maybe they can communicate with the great Beasts, maybe they can summon elemental forces. It brings mystery and otherworldiy-ness to the setting.

Of the three, I think that most players will move towards Pirate, but giving the other options is important to communicate to the players what else is possible, and what to expect from the game.

So let’s write them up, according to the SRD. I have to give each Role two skills and a few items to paint a picture of their possibilities and proficiencies.

• Pirate brawling, climbing cutlass (d6), rope, lantern, bottle of rum

• Navigator wayfinding, tracking, sextant, telescope, padded coat (1 Armour), rifle (d6), pipe and weed

• Seer divining, atmokinesis, Staff (d6), patchwork cloak (1 armour), cauldron, pot of mushrooms

I tried to add a bit more flavour with each item, a bare-bones characterisation that the player can add to. The skills, in italics, indicate the kinds of things that the characters might be good at. The Pirate is practical and physical, the Navigator more cerebral and concerning logistics, and the Seer can do weird stuff. I try to keep everything in everyday language, but adding the more esoteric divining and even more unusual atmokinesis seemed important to add flavour to both the character role and the world.

Origins

(Another fine sketch by Daniel Locke)

This is a way to both spice up options, creating more individuality, and also introduce major factions in the setting. I’m going to introduce three: Sea Dog, Mermon, Human. Sea Dog was a term I thought of when brainstorming the Pirate Role, and it just made me laugh when I thought about it literally, so I put it aside for Origins. Then I saw Dan’s image and thought, hmm, Sea Rat. Great swimmer, can maybe communicate with other animals, bit of a weird prankster.

The Mermon is from Eco mofos, and is a mer-person like Kevin Costner’s character in Waterworld- Gills, webbed hands, that kind of stuff. Human is the vanilla, but representative of the dominant culture. Maybe the best in human social situations, good at trading, persuading. But we could go with Landlubber to give it some flavour.

So to write it up, with skills-

• Sea Rat swimming, acrobatics

• Mermon diving, underwater breathing

• Landlubber trading, charming

That’s a good starting point. Maybe a list of setting specific names would be useful to set the scene some more. But we’re going to skip ahead to Jobs/Quests/Missions. We need to give the GM some tools to create adventure in this world, to give impetus to a session.

Jobs

From the SRD:

Jobs/Quests/Missions/Situations

Make a list of Jobs. Tailor these to your setting and the implied tasks that characters are built to perform. These tasks act as "gameable lore", fragments of stories that hint at a setting, a living place, but also designed for use in play. Here are some archetypes. Use a mix.

1. Someone needs something

2. Someone needs a thing from a place.

3. Deal with an unusual threat

4. Investigate something strange

5. Get a thing from a dangerous place

6. Someone/something has gone missing. It/They were last seen somewhere

This is a chance to actually get some specifics in there, name some places, create some intrigue.

• Laila, the Braundale baker, needs a new sail for her windmill from the commune at Greystone.

(A simple fetch quest that encourages the players to sail, explore, find out about the world on the way)

• The currents have become strange, out to the East. Supplies aren’t getting through.

(Investigation of a weird phenomenon that’ll get the players involved in some problems).

• Zoan, the Engineer, has heard about a powerful energy source that could help the village. They want you to retrieve a power cell from the Dark Tower, 3 days sailing East.

(A journey into the dangerous unknown)

At this point I think I need a map. But that’s something for another blog.

Anyway. If I take all that, the setting, the character options, the missions and copy/paste the rules, I’ve got a workable game.

Why don’t you try making a game for yourself?

There are great resources gathered here:

• Diogo Nogueira’s Just Make Shit has just about every resource you would need. And it’s a sentiment I throughly agree with.

Coincidentlally, Graham Walmsley’s Cosmic Dark, one of the inspirations for World Engine, is fundraising right now. Why not check it out.

Also funding is Going Rogue, a great TTRPG of IP-redacted rebellion.

And CBR+PNK: OVERLOAD a rules-lite Cyberpunk oneshot system, based on Forged in the Dark

Image by Daniel Locke from ECO MOFOS!!

Tables not Lore dumps

One thing I wish I’d been told years ago as a ttrpg writer: Write tables. Not lore, not stories. Richly written tables. Tables of things that can happen, people (human & otherwise) that can be met, threats and treasures. The stories are what happens at the table along the way.

What this does is it turns ideas about the setting into something gameable, into events, objects and characters that the players can interact with. After all, what’s more useful during play? A page of text outlining the complications of a royal lineage over the last 500 years, or finding a ring engraved with the words “the bearer of this ring is the true heir”? An object that’s loaded with meaning or an NPC with a compelling story will do all the work of the page of lore, but from within the game space itself. More importantly, the players are instantly implicated and invested in this lore, it touches them directly, rather than being something abstract that doesn’t impact their characters’ lives.

Lore in tables works particularly well in area-wide encounter tables. Encounter tables are not just a list of creatures to fight or flee from. They’re an opportunity to let the life of the world bleed into the player’s game space.

A conventional list of creatures, when combined with rolling for reaction, already fries a lot of work- it implies the ecosystem of the area being travelled through, can set up factions and food-chains. But add in an entry for a Wandering NPC (which can then prompt a roll on a seperate “wandering NPC table”), and the world is instantly richer.

The stories of the local world become embodied, the NPC telling the party how they’ve been exiled, or hunted, or lost, or looking for a loved one, and the players have an emotional stake in that story that a sign on a tavern notice board could never convey. The NPC becomes a hook, potential ally or foe, a way of introducing and describing what could be a complicated political situation, and introducing or adding complexity to a site on the map. All that from an entry on an Encounter table.

An example

So let’s make an encounter table for an area I’m building. It’s a watery archipelago of islands, traversed by small boats (because giant undersea monsters, known locally as Giants, attack bigger boats). A 2d6 table is nice, as the bell-curve lets you have more common encounters in the middle numbers (6,7,8) and rare ones on the two extremes, 2 and 12. So 12 has to be a Giant. And 2 can be a Huge shark. Everybody loves Jaws. Then there’s a change in the winds - winds are important as everyone’s sailing, but winds changing is relatively rare, so lets make that 3. So that leaves 9 entries. The NPC table (below) has a lot of entries, so that can be in the middle somewhere. Maybe 5. And the rest are creatures to build the world.

The most common creature- Dolphins. It’s a broadly hopeful setting and Dolphins are fun, and can have complex interactions. But the most common occurance will be Flotsam- things floating on the surface of the water. I made 6 and 8 a choice of 2 each, for variation. These are broadly scene-setting entries, but could lead to interaction depending on the players and the situation. If one of the players is overboard in a bloom of Jellyfish, that could be pretty interesting.

Then we have the last few entries that introduce factions from the world. The Mermon, people who are adapted to live in the water; the Bandits, people who prey on others to survive; The Corpo Scout Drone, a foreshadowing of a larger menace, like the Scout robot at the beginning of Empire Strike Back.

Finally I’ve put in Large Squid. Depending on the reaction roll that can be a rare sighting or a terrifying encounter with tentacles wrapping around the bough.

And so you have the seeds of a campaign, in a couple of simple tables.

Encounter Table 2d6

2. Huge Shark

3. The Wind changes

4. d6 Mermon

5. Roll on the NPC Table

6. Bloom of Jellyfish/Shoal of fish

7. Flotsam (roll on the Flotsam table)

8. d6 Dolphins/School of Mantarays

9. d6 Bandits in a makeshift boat

10. Corpo Scout Drone

11. Large Squid

12. A Giant rises from the deep

NPC table d12

1. Yage, the travelling mask salesman, on his skiff.

2. Mika, woodswoman on her overloaded boat.

3. Samben the musician with their homemade lute, on a little raft.

4. Barbara Shay “Sparks” jovial engineer from Brundale, in a sturdy sailboat, mechanic and tinker, with gossip and trade

5. A punk gang, Xena, their face-tattooed leader, Blink, Chasea and Merew. “No we don’t believe in hierarchies, we just do what she says”. Lost, looking for the Commune. They have a message from their Glade that a former member’s mother is dying.

6. Lushtah the Seer sailing alone- lonely waif of a Punk, spikey black hair and a white stripe of makeup across her gaunt black face and shimmering light blue eyes. If spoken to she will have a vision of that character’s future. And then run off.

7. d4 Corpos, on sleek catamaran, stealthy and cunning, from a recently-landed dropship.

8. d4 Bandits, raiders from Dinoland, on a slow Junk, wary thieves

9. d6 Ratlins in a hollowed out canoe, seeking out the root of the “sad water”

10. d3 replicants, newly escaped from a Corpo dropship, swimming

11. d3 Wasters in a skiff, travelling to investigate (and lay claim to) the Dark Tower, cunning and suspicious

12. Jendo, exiled from Downfalls for heresy (wanting to use their Mecha for destructive purposes), seeks allies to raid Downfalls and steal the Mecha

Further reading

If you like this appoach, check out the Vaults of Vaarn series by Leo Hunt, 2400 by Jason Tocci and pretty much anything by Chris McDowall. The 2d6 approach here comes from lots of places, but I like how Nick LS Whelan talks about it on his blog

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But the images are unmemorable. They leave nothing to the imagination, and the imagination is the beating heart of ttrpgs. These unblemished images act to turn the art, the freedom of ttrpgs, into the product, the mass-consumer good that sells a million copies. This is obvious in the evolution of D&D edition covers, but also in the projects that get the most attention on crowdfunding platforms. And also in the interest in AI-generated images.

David’s Napoleon Crossing the Alps, a French Academy painting.

There’s a reason the French Academy of photorealistic art was left behind by the succession of art movements in the 20th century. It all looks the same. It is finished to the point of removing every ounce of soul.

The artist’s hand is removed entirely, and the viewer is left to wonder in awe at the clean surface, but is stuck there, at the surface, unable to enter this polished perfection.

Grande Riviere by Peter Doig

That’s why artists often prefer the sketch to the finished piece, the openness, the possibility, the way your mind is able to finish the details. In the Academy, art became artifice, a lie of perfection.

Basquiat’s Boy and dog in a Johnnypump

I want an art that is real, honest, raw, unmediated, able to talk about the things that mainstream society wants to forget. That gives you something to imagine through, not merely marvel at.

Raw art is dangerous. The fascists know this. We need more raw art.

Which is why you should consider making art yourself for your games. It may not be perfect, but it’ll be real. Or work with an artist that shares your vision, and give them the space to expore that idea. Let the artists you work with be artists, not illustrators. Your work will be all the more rich.

A TTRPG group that have always championed weird, real art, is the Melsonian Arts Council. If you want to support that continuing, they have a crowdfunder right now and they also have a really nice subscription service.

Image of a wiley character by Daniel Locke from ECO MOFOS!!

A good NPC is one that is both memorable and seems to have some sort of inner life, a life that the players can think about and turn to their own advantage in play. I always like to refresh myself about how other people handle this sort of thing, and systemetise it, to see if there’s anything that could make sense for my own writing.

The first blog I looked at was To Distant Lands, one that looks at trying to mimic the particular style of NPCs in Zelda games. This is something I have a particular fondness for, particularly with my love of Majora’s Mask, a game that is basically all about NPCs with very particular needs. As the blog says, Legend of Zelda NPCs are vivid and extremely into their bullshit. They’re ridiculously single-minded in what they’re interested in and what they hope the Player might help them with.

Zelda style NPCs

I like this approach very much, as it very quickly creates a memorable character with particular needs. They do, however, err on the side of caracature, which is fine in some more gonzo scenarios, but can be a bit distracting in others.

A little more subtle, perhaps, is Chris McDowall’s Mash-up Character Method. This recommends that you take recognisable archetypes or cliches, and add a twist by combining them with animal characteristics, to add flavour and nuance. This approach is great because it gives you a great key into how to portray them as a GM, even hinting at their voice or mannerisims. A travelling salesman combined with cat creates an instant image of a smiling sycophant who sidles around, trying to ingratiate themselves, then turning to snarls when things don;t go their way.

And then there’s Zedeck Siew’s approcah from the zine, A Perfect Wife. Here, an NPC is briefly described with one defining charactaristic (11 years old/One armed/heavy make-up), named, and given 3 “skills” which really help place them in play. You know what they’re good at. It’s like the Zelda-style approach but more flexible. Here are three of the local “Refugee” NPCs, that you roll for to add to any location in this close-knit city setting (Bolding is Zedeck’s own):

1. An eleven-year-old. Suki. Organising, hauling, shortcut-taking. With five siblings to support, she has stopped school. Is a gofer for most businesses. Has keys to most back doors. 

2. A one-armed man. Uncle Tin. Marksmanship, bushcraft, forgetting. His panther tattoo marks him as a former resistance fighter. Cheap rum in his pocket. An assault rifle in his flat. 

3. A woman, heavy makeup. Sanda. Dancing, drinking, scrimping. Go-go dancer. Annoyed that the the new girls at the club pinching her regulars. Uncle Day’s favourite niece.

So if we break it down, there’s 3 basic descriptors (gender, physical quirk, name), 3 things they’re good at or known for, then 3 extra background details, about their situation, place in society and something actionable, possibly key, in bold. All together they create a rich snapshot of an NPC that’s both easy to remember and embody. In Zedeck’s other work he often includes a line of speech from an NPC too, which is a great crutch when starting to voice the character at the table, at the same time as revealing a great deal about their personality. And taken together, reading all the entries gives you a real sense of the community that these characters will form during your game, creating a vivid picture, something that helps you to embody all of them as GM.

The last model I’m going to look at here is the Cast List from the script for The Thing, which takes a very similar approach in a different medium. It’s obviously dated in places, but it does give you enough to play them at the table, and even sets up internal conflicts:

An image of a page from the script of John Carpenter’s The Thing (1982).

Reading them through, you know nothing of the plot of the film, but you do know that there’s a great deal of tension here in this space. Just the two lines of “Hates it here. Good at his job.” and “Hates it here. Lousy at his job.” gives a lot of juice for both roleplay and how they’re going to act in stressful situations. One’s going to fight for the community, the other is going to scarper at the earliest opportunity.

It was this approach that I was really trying to mimic in the d66 NPC list that I put into the ECO MOFOS!! book. A name, an agae, a salient detail, a motivation and something that can be discovered. This is something I learnt from making a bunch of GM-less games (Gathering Storm, Our Place No Place), that you could create a complex inner life with just two details- a Role in their community and a Secret that they hold. The tension between these two (randomly combined in those games) gets players to embody their characters in an interesting, nuanced way. They’re no longer just a Soldier, they’re a Soldier who has a secret lover. Not just an Archivist, an archivist who was once a collaborator.

I wrote these just so if the GM ever needed a reasonably fleshed-out NPC in the largely procedurally generated world, they could grab one from this table rather than rolling one up. If I was rewriting these, I think I’d give each a Burden, the emotional baggage that I added to Eco mofos instead of Cairn’s Fatigue. Players always lean into their Burdens in roleplay, so it would make sense for NPCs too- they are Weary, Arrogant, Shamed, Vain, Sad and Enraged. Each of them would certainly give instant flavour to any NPC.

A page of NPCs from ECO MOFOS!!

So if I was going to give a formula for creating strong NPCs with economical writing , I think I’d combine several of these approaches and write something like this:

Name, rough age, notable physical detail. Skill, Skill, Skill. One Obsession. One Secret. One Burden.

So:

Dillanger, late 40’s, thick pink glasses. Laughing, smoking, deducing. Needs New Things. Is ashamed of their past cowardice. Weary.

I can imagine Dillanger running a weird curios shop, getting friendly with the Players, and trying to pursuade them to gather new stock. They can’t get it themselves as they don’t trust themselves to follow through going to dangerous places. This constant tension between wanting new things to look at and being unable to procure things directly makes them Weary.

I think each style of setting needs a slightly different approach, but this feels like a solid starting point.

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Image: José Guadalupe Posada, A Woman Who Gave Birth to Three Children and Four Animals, ca. 1894 (A picture of a Table and a picture full of story!)

I’ve written several games where events are randomly generated, combining “sparks”, as Chris McDowall would say, into inspiration for what happens at the table. I like to expand these a bit for my tables. Obviously this means they’re less universally applicable, but it also means they have more specificity. You can use the table entries to more precisiely convay the setting, the table becoming a list of vingettes, short stories about the world you’re helping create at the table.

Here’s some pointers for writing these sorts of tables.

• Try to tell a story with every entry. In an item table “A love letter” tells a story, that people in the world have inner lives . “A box of matches” tells a story that this is an uncommon thing in this setting, and useful.

• For randomly created rooms, I’d try to combine several elements, 2 or 3 tables to create one room. Less and you get repetition, more and it becomes unwieldy.

• Each entry should tell a little story about the setting. A well written 7-10 words goes a very long way. Try to be evocative. Make each entry a mini adventure.

• A natural way to mix things is have one table for the environment “Cramped quarters, mildewed sheets are covered in bugs”, and one table for something happening in that space “A small creature runs into the vent as you enter”. That can be an NPC or two, a strange vision, a notable (and interactable) detail in the room- “a flashing control panel with a monitor showing panicked people”, or “A small fire hisses in an electrical socket”.

• Try to have everything fit in a similar space or scale, that way when they’re combined they have a better chance of working.

• To sum up, let your entries tell sparks of unresolved stories. The GM and players will do the rest.

Here’s a table for ECO MOFOS!! The GM rolls on the Environment and Feature and combines to create the next Location.

Writing a creature is a form of setting creation. Each creature you add to your game forms a new element of the setting in the players’ minds.

image by Daniel Locke

The ecology approach

To create creatures, monsters, or just plain weird stuff in your world, think about the space you’re creating. What is the ecosystem? What would feed on the resources there? What would feed on those things? What would the Apex predator be? And what would feed on the Apex predator’s carcass once they die? Thinking about these structures can give interesting ideas, and ways to reinforce a setting.

The inspiration approach

Sometimes you just have a great idea for something that just fits. Always roll with a great idea. They might be the basis for a whole new scenario within your game.

The reskin approach

Probably my favourite approach is to take a creature from mythology, another setting or genre, and think about how they would work in your setting. For ECO MOFOS!! I took the idea of the classic Zombie, and thought- what would this be in a technologically-tinged weird future? I was thinking a lot about Elon’s obsession with implanting chips in people’s brains, and the horrors of AI, and came up with this:

AI Rotting Body

6 HP, 12 STR 6 DEX, 3 WIL, rusty weapon (d8), in Unit of 6d6

• Slow, mindless disintegrating corpses. Controlled by a central Artificial Intelligence beyond death through a brain implant, acting as strategic hordes.

• Attacks anything that comes nearby. Groups will act to cut off exits.

• Cannot be affected by anything that targets the mind. Will collapse if the link to the central server’s severed.

Units are my reskin of Into the Odd’s Detachments - Large groups of similar combatants fighting together, or single huge threats, are treated as a single Unit. When a Unit takes Critical Damage, it is routed or significantly weakened. When it reaches 0 STR, it is destroyed.

• Attacks against Units by individuals are Impaired, except for attacks with the Blast effect.

• Attacks against individuals by Units are Enhanced and deal Blast Damage.

Creating Creatures for ECO MOFOS!!

Here’s a procedure to make new creatures for the ECO MOFOS!! setting:

Roll once on each of these tables to construct a new form. If you have an idea that’s better than your roll, run with that. This is a dice drop, so you can just roll one of every D&D die to get an instant creature. Then I’ll lay out some guidelines to stat it appropriately.

What’s the theme?! Roll d4

1. Hyper evolved - Creatures reformed by Essence, larger, stranger, with exaggerated properties, nature reimagined

2. Degraded - Creatures warped by a harsh environment or as biological weapons. Weird, wired and terrifying.

3. Solar tech - Repurposed and recycled technology, archaic, wind powered, solar powered, clockwork, wood, burnished steel

4. Future Tech - Corpo hi technology, nanobots, drones, mecha, white ceramic and chrome

What is this thing?! Roll d6

1. Droids - some form of construct, from Walking Teapot to Sentient Missile

2. Faction- A human group identity. Maybe they have a particular role or a particular Adaptation

3. Stalking Beasts- Creatures that will follow the party, keen to glean items, information or eat them for supper.

4. Crawlers - semi-sentient creatures that rely on instinct for their actions - Creeping thorny vines, large rats or weird Ooze.

5. Great Beast - an Apex predator. Something large that hunts, or is a large threat.

6. Denizen - Huge monstrous form, should inspire awe and probably fear. Often a Unit. Can be one large thing, or a hoard of smaller creatures.

What’s its general disposition?! d8

1. Vast intelligence

2. Cunning

3. Rabid

4. Ravenous

5. Instinctual

6. Protective

7. Inquisitive

8. Friendly

Whassit look like?! d10

1. Flesh

2. Fur

3. Scales

4. Metal

5. Feathers

6. Insectoid

7. Cloud

8. Plant

9. Rotting

10. Humanoid

What’s a funky detail?! d12

1. Multiple eyes

2. Tentacles

3. Antennae

4. Translucent

5. Iridescent

6. Pure Black

7. Pure white

8. Brightly coloured

9. Camouflaged

10. Strange voice

11. Weird smell

12. Gives off heat

How’s it defend itself?! Roll second time for critical Damage d20

1. Slash

2. Crush

3. Pierce

4. Bite

5. Sting

6. Shoot

7. Punch

8. Kick

9. Touch

10. Stab

11. Shield

12. Teleport

13. Infect

14. Freeze

15. Burn

16. Fire

17. Snipe

18. Emit

19. Blast of Gas

20. Blast of Fire

Name then Stat up your creature

Once you’ve collated your results, think about what kind of creature they might be. Try to give e them a simple descriptive name, one that will be useful for the GM so that they can explain this creature to their table. They may have a different name to some characters within the game itself.

Then think about how this creature’s stats might echo or reinforce their form and how they act in the world.

Creature Stat Block Format

? HP, ? Armour, ?? STR, ?? DEX, ?? WIL, Attack (d?, special items, qualities)

• A rich description of what the creature looks like, how it lives, maybe even how it sounds or smells.

• A weird detail or idea that makes this creature unique.

• List a special effect or consequence of Critical Damage.

Hurt Protection

A creature’s ability to avoid danger, whether through toughness, speed, or skill. Give average creatures 3 HP, rugged ones 6 HP, and major threats 10 or higher. If it is huge, like an armoured truck, mecha or kaiju, make them a Unit.

Armour

For some creatures this represents their hide, shell or scales; for others, it could be armour that they wear or the steel they’re made from. If a creature is able to withstand an attack without moving, raise this number.

Ability Score

3 is terrible, 6 is weak, 10 is average, 14 is significant, and 18 is extraordinary.

Strength

Tracks overall health, physical power, and resistance to poisons.

Dexterity

Start at 10 and if the creature is quick, agile, or nimble, increase the number. If it is slow-witted or ponderous lower the number.

Willpower

Determines a creature’s ability to withstand the influence of another, their determination to continue in the face of adversity as well as their influence over others. Also indicates their natural defence in magical or spiritual stuff.

Attacks

Typically a thing (e.g. blade or gun) or a part of the creature (e.g. laser eyes or self-destruct mechanism).

Abilities

A unique action or power the creature can utilise both in and out of combat.

• If an ability can be meaningfully avoided or defended against through traditional means, it is an Attack and interacts with HP.

• If an ability cannot be meaningfully avoided or defended against through traditional means, it is an Ability.

• If an ability only affects a single PC, it should generally have an immediate effect with no chance to Save in that round (possibly not at all).

• If an ability is capable of affecting a group of PCs, it should generally call for an immediate Save.

Example

I rolled all the dice and got:

Hyper evolved, Protective, Faction, Feathers, Strange Voice, Attack: Crush (Critical Damage: SNIPE).

Now, I see this as a faction of bird people who talk in squarks, but a language that can be interpreted. They’re highly defensive, and fly when attacked, dropping stones and other stuff (crush) then finishing off with an accurate spike or spear for Critical Damage. Pretty average, but very agile. Maybe a bit of light armour to survive in the wastes.

Birdos

3 HP, 1 Armour, 8 STR, 16 DEX, 10 WIL, Attack (d6 Rocks and up to d12 pieces of Debris)

• A faction of bird people, close-knit communities who roost high in the cliffs of the Wastes and Wilderness, or high towers in the ruins. Love music and dancing.

• Protect their roosts by bombarding invaders with loose debris.

• Critical Damage: Throws a sacred spear to impale their adversary.

Give it a go, and let me know about your creations.

Thanks

Thanks to Will Purves and @gestaltist on the Copy/Paste Discord for their advice when putting this together. Thanks to Yochai Gal for the Cairn Guide for Creating Monsters, and Chris McDowall for all his guides to the process for Mark of the Odd games.

In case you don’t know, it’s a way of playing TTRPGs that is asynchronous but fluid, where the person who’s running the game (let’s call them a GM for simplicity) posts a setup post, then responds to the players as they interact with the world described.

I set up a simple set of protocols to begin with. I think it helped that all the players are people that I’ve known through the server for a good while, and we seem to be on the same wavelength.

The rules were as follows:

We’re playing ECO MOFOS. I’ll post 1/day. Any player can post here 1/day. If there’s no response from any particular player, we’ll continue with that inaction as part of the narrative. Moments of high drama may be resolved over shorter time periods if all players are active.

I think it’s a really good idea to be straightforward with expectations. I wanted it to be low-stress for all involved, something that people could interact with or not, depending on how busy they were on that particular day. But I also wanted there to be a sense of momentum, and I hoped that me as GM posting at least once a day would achieve that. So far it seems to have worked.

I remember the first pbp I played, a band of vikings encountering Luke Gearing’s Gradient Descent, run by the inimitable Sean Smith. I was quite intimidated by quite how poetic and verbose other player’s posts were, but absolutley loved it. It’s such a different way of experiencing a game space. More literary, and more drawn out, but intense in its own way.

It’d be nice to hear about other people’s experience of pbp. I’ve run this one straight out of the Eco mofos book, rolling up a random series of locations, then rolling to see what’s present in the next space. A rich world is emerging, as all the players poke about, ask about details, and search for clues. We’re in the tick of it right now, so I’m worried about spoiling it for any of the players, but I’ll write a report as soon as we get to natural “end of chapter”.

All I know is I look forward to every interaction.

So. The rules:

Set clear expectations.

Set a clear timeframe for posts.

Play and see what happens.

(An initial sketch for the cover of the D&D Red box by Larry Elmore)

Imagine a room. It’s cold and dark. Very dark. But there’s flickering light coming from a crack at bottom of a door. There’s a sudden knock at the door. What do you do?

With words, we’ve created a space together. There are hundreds of possibilities for what you could do. You could try to hide in a corner. You could open the door. You could ask what they want. You could scream. Anything that could be imagined, and seems consistent with the world we’re creating together, would be allowed to be suggested. Once agreed on by the table, that action becomes part of our shared world. It is an active process. It is Worlding.

Worlding is a term opposed to worldbuilding. Worldbuilding has connotations of imposing a structure on something, of creating a static lore, a static set of realities. Worlding is an active process, always in the act of happening, a process of giving meaning to the world through experiencing it. As the philosopher Heidegger says:

“[There is]…the wonder that this world is worlding around us at all, that there are beings rather than nothing, that things are and we ourselves are in their midst, that we ourselves are and yet barely know who we are, and barely know that we do not know all this.”

We are in a constant state of making the world. And Tabletop roleplay plays with this, lets us roll with this possibility, let’s us form worlds together through action and reaction, through a mutually bound imagining.

I discovered roleplay when I was around 10. Obviously I had played make-believe before, but there was something compellingly different about this possibility. I think it was the combination of a solid set of rules to play within, and a world to explore. But a large part of the lure was the feeling of agency, the feeling that I could make a difference in this world, that I had control over an avatar’s actions.

Of course, many of the bounds within that system I gradually found to be problematic. Gary Gygax, part-creator of the D&D system, was a biological determinist and had Manichaean tendencies, so that belief system underpinned the mechanics he devised. And when I started wanting to use something like D&D for an art project, I was struck by how embedded this was. As Donna Haraway says in Staying with the trouble:

"It matters what matters we use to think other matters with; it matters what stories we tell to tell other stories with; it matters what knots knot knots, what thoughts think thoughts, what descriptions describe descriptions, what ties tie ties."

So I set about looking for other ways to create that same shared imaginative space. I tried creating a new system, which brings its own issues, but then realised that 100s of people had tried to do the same thing, and that many of those attempts had undergone a lot of playtesting over the years, and were also open source. There is a culture within the scene of taking mechanics from a plethora of places to make a new combination that matches the space that you are trying to create.

Table top roleplay games, or TTRPGs as they’re often known, are both an analogue technology, a way of using language to create a shared interactive experience, and a worldwide culture that has been developing for over 50 years. It has factions, bad actors, controversies, disputes and feuds. But at the heart of it is the ritual of sitting together. So how do I, as an artist who wants to play with this space’s potential, make that accessible to the uninitiated? I have created a suite of games that approach different spaces, where the people playing are drawn through the rules as they play, as they build a world together, agreeing on their shared parameters, and setting their own boundaries. But the game helps them to discover what happens next, as it leads them through to an end. And one tool in creating that sense of openness and possibility, is to lean into sci fi, the scifi of Ursula Le Guin, Octavia Butler and Philip K Dick.

Haraway again: “SF is storytelling and fact telling; it is the patterning of possible worlds and possible times, material-semiotic worlds, gone, here, and yet to come.”

What this does is to move the gamespace away from a built world, from a pre-made world with lore and history that you have to learn, imposed from above, from World building, to a generative process of making, to Worlding.

Haraway for the final time. She really is great.

“Companion species are engaged in the old art of terraforming; they are the players in the sf equation that describes Terrapolis. Finished once and for all with Kantian globalizing cosmopolitics and grumpy human-exceptionalist Heideggerian worlding, Terrapolis is a mongrel word composted with a mycorrhiza of Greek and Latin rootlets and their symbionts. Never poor in world, Terrapolis exists in the sf web of always-too-much connection, where response-ability must be cobbled together, not in the existentialist and bond-less, lonely, Man-making gap theorized by Heidegger and his followers. Terrapolis is rich in world, inoculated against posthumanism but rich in com-post, inoculated against human exceptionalism but rich in humus, ripe for multispecies storytelling. This Terrapolis is not the home world for the human as Homo, that ever parabolic, re- and de-tumescing, phallic self-image of the same; but for the human that is transmogrified in etymological Indo-European sleight of tongue into guman, that worker of and in the soil.”

‘The World After’ was a film, installation and game.‘The World After’ is a fictional tale which imagines a world after the Anthropocene era, a time in which humanity’s activities had detrimental effect on earth’s climate and environment. In this future world, human influence on the planet has faded following a catastrophic man-made ecological crisis, with those who remain having to find new ways to survive and form kin. The project took inspiration from the unique post-industrial setting of Canvey Wick on Canvey Island, Essex. Formerly the site of an oil refinery that was only partially built in the early 1970s and never operational due to the oil crisis of 1973, Canvey Wick has for the past forty years been reclaimed by nature. I worked with a dedicated group of gamers from the area to create our own game, with our own stories about this mythic future. Inspired by nature’s return, we imagined returning to the surface as posthuman creatures, escaping vast underground silos to see this new world.

The book was beautiful, and was a good first attempt at working in this space, but I was dissatisfied by certain aspects of the game- primarily it was too difficult to learn, and the world was too static, too much based on lore.

So for my next collaborative project, LOST EONS, I wanted to try to make the game more open as a space, and simpler to play. Made in the middle of lockdown with the community around Cambridge, we thought about the consequences of climate change, particularly sea rise, everyone generating self-portraits projected into a far-distant time, where humans have adapted and merged with the area’s flora and fauna. These new characters then developed new myths, with maps, legendary figures and illustrations. The project will formed a future anthropology of the site, a site where our present became their archaeology. The game sits within the world of the independent TTRPG space, using lessons from FKR "Free Kriegspiel Renaissance/Revival/Roleplay" and freeform prompt-based play. But it still required an initiate to lead a group. And that’s what I wanted to solve with Gathering Storm.

Gathering Storm explored my familial link to colonial food production, and the legacy of agriculture as a tool to consolidate authority. My grandfather was involved in the Swynnerton Plan, a British colonial scheme initiated in the 1950s with the aim of creating an African middle class in Kenya: a form of social engineering through agriculture. I developed this tabletop game as a means to embark on a collaborative exploration of my research around the legacies of this era, looking into the archives and reading fiction from the era, particularly Ngugi Wa Thiongo’s A grain of Wheat. I was on a residency at Delfina Foundation, and used the time to test early prototypes with my co-residents and the public, which fed into the game’s development.

The game invites players to take it in turns to add elements to a map, imagining a post-colonial sci-fi world. They then creating a set of characters to inhabit this space. They then respond to prompts, coming to terms with hidden histories and present injustices. The colonial situation in Kenya is transposed to an alien planet, an indigenous people that the table creates having lived through life under a now-gone Authority.

A quote from the game:

“Our planet was occupied by an alien force, who brought their customs, rules and an alien fruit. After years of resistance, the occupation has ended, but they’ve left behind this fruit, and everyone holds a secret from those difficult times.”

Every player takes on a randomly assigned role and randomly assigned secret, and this generates surprisingly rounded characters, but more importantly brings each player psychically into the space, helps them invest in the fiction. Tabletop roleplay is very powerful when properly activated, helping people enter into other spaces. TTRPGs can help us understand other lives, and other ways of living, a speculative fiction we can enter into through the ritual of telling stories and rolling dice. The memories I’ve formed from campaigns feel just as emotionally real as things that have happened to me in life. And they’re memories that you share with everyone else around that table with you.

I tried adapting Gathering Storm, into another, more intimate space. Alien Pastoral: The Strain centres on a biological research station, run by an Authority, as the scientists try to engineer a new strain to solve an existential problem. This game explores the strange and often blurred spaces between agriculture, technology and capitalism. Players collaboratively design a research station complete with seedbeds, orchards and laboratories to experience how relationships change with their environments. Where Gathering Storm took you into a post-colonial community, trying to help you understand the psychological complexities of that space, of lives marked by history, The Strain uses the tropes of sci-fi horror to introduce the possibilities of non-human consciousness. What makes us human, and could we let it go?

Finally, I’ll talk about my most recent game DIACHRONIC: Salvage the Past. This game considers our relationship to the past and its stories, who has access to that past and who writes that history. You play as a time traveller, an Envoy, who has a mission to retrieve artefacts in time periods before a future Explorer has a chance to destroy or pillage them.
Through a series of prompts, the players construct a vivid world in flux, constantly under threat of collapse, as future catastrophe undermines this fragile time shift. Based on the history of Hisarlik and the city of Troy and the ultimately destructive archaeology of Heinrich Schliemann, the game asks the players to consider what has been lost, and how we build new narratives.

Diachronic is a linguistic term concerned with the way in which something, especially language, has developed and evolved through time, but I applied it here to the space of the site itself. Troy underwent a series of radical changes, layers of history lying on top of each other. And part of Schliemann’s legacy was his ignorance about these layers, his destruction of whole swathes as he tried to reach his grail, the Troy of the Homer.

The game uses Tarot, to play with the card’s associative possibilities, and invites players to enter into a generative exploration, seeking to discover aspects of the past, a ritualised act of creating memories, through writing and drawing. I wanted people to feel as though they had truly entered into another time for a moment, like the protagonist in Chris Marker’s La Jetee.

In many ways my games are essays, attempts, sketches about particular places and particular times. Recently I’ve become more and more interested in the possibilities of the adventure module, of a particular narrative seed that can go in all sorts of directions. I’ve been really inspired by Evey Lockhart’s Wet Grandpa and Luke Gearing’s The Isle. Modules are going to be my main focus this year. I want to delve further into the world of ECO MOFOS!!, the game that built on the ideas of LOST EONS through meshing that world with the systems of Into the Odd and Cairn.

Your Reputation

As your Punks wander the wilds and wastes, news travels about their triumphs, their interventions and their catastrophic disasters.

Create a d66 table, 6 rows of 6 entries. Mark Entry 11 and 12 as Nobodies, as there’s always a chance the Punks are Nobodies to a random NPC.  Now, each time the Punks make a difference in the world, like by rescuing a cat or destroying a Corpo base, add the event to the table, writing a short sentence describing the most important facts. For significant events (routing a Corpo spaceport, breaking a Bandit blockade), add them to the remaining 1X or 2X entries of the table. Add the most local events (such as finding a Waster’s child or delivering a special seed), to the rest of the table, with the most local events in 6X, down to the 3X entries which may be newsworthy to nearby areas. If events are especially noteworthy, on a worldwide or local scale, add them to the table 2 or 3 times. As Punks travel, keep adding to the table, replacing entries already there. The higher (5X, 6X) results are most likely to be replaced by new events, and major events can start to be entered further down the table, in 3X and 4X as renown grows.

The punks start off as nobodies, anonymous to the world. Each interaction with an NPC will be fresh. However, as Reputation grows, previous actions will start to have an effect.

Once there is an entry on the Reputation Table, each time the Punks interact with a new NPC roll on the table. If it comes up with nothing, then the NPC “Never heard of you lot”. If it comes up with an event, it produces a reaction, depending on the NPC’s relationship to that event. If a fellow punk has heard about your escapades at the Corpo Skyport, you might become an instant confidant, and they’ll want to bring you into their current schemes. If a Corpo NPC guard you’re trying to trick comes up with the same result, they recognise you from the newswires, and all hell could break loose.

The Reputation Phase

When playing with Factions, add another roll in addition to the Events- the Reputation Phase.

At the end of every session, or at the end of an in-game week, roll reputation. Whatever you roll creates a new actor in the world- people seeking you for good or ill. A bandit may send out a gang to track you down for revenge, or a Waster family may have heard of your prowess and are trying to seek you out to aid their commune. Try to think how the event rolled could have consequences.

So I was playing Blood Bowl, a big part of my youth, recently rediscovered, and I thought I’d have a stab at both making it smoother but also making it about, well, football, rather than Football. And i sketched out these rules. I’m going to make some little paper minis for it at some point. Anyway, my main thing was using step-dice for stats, and using a constant target number - 4. And combining tackles and injuries. Just making everything a bit cleaner basically. I’m testing this now, so yeah, a work in progress. But it feels fun.

But before we get into this nonsense, the Melsonian Arts Council are producing a beautiful new edition of their classic mycelial tome:

FUNGI OF THE FAR REALMS

Now back to the violence:

DEATHBALL

DEATHBALL is a game of two halves. Two halves of the pitch, one for each team to protect their goal, marked out by the centre line, and two halves of time, 10 minutes each way, where the two teams take turns to try to get the ball into the opponent’s goal. And the two halves of star striker Torgu Gleam, after Bullgron made an over-enthusiastic last-ditch tackle.

Whoever scores the most goals over the two halves wins. Once ten minutes has passed since Kickoff, you enter Injury Time and the next turn is the last. If both teams have the same score at Full Time, at the end of both halves, the match ends as a draw, unless both teams want to push on for a golden goal in 5 minutes of extra time, where the next goal wins the game.

A DEATHBALL pitch, concrete, grass, mud or sand, is rectangular, and can be any size, but the Association recommends 30 inch by 20 inch or thereabouts. The borders running along the length of the pitch are called touchlines, with goal-lines at either end. The goal is an 8-square-wide net placed in the middle of the end of each half. The four corners of the pitch are marked with corner flags.

In DEATHBALL there are 7 players on each team, including one goalkeeper. The goalkeepers are the only players on the pitch who are allowed to handle the ball.

How to play

At the start of the Turn, roll for the crowd reaction (see table below). During a Turn, every player on the pitch on a team can Run once, and perform one Action. Once all players have performed their Actions, the Turn passes over to the opponent.

If you ever roll a 1 on a check, the active player trips up, ending up in a heap on the floor, and the Turn passes over to the opponent.

If a player ever loses possession of the ball, or if a goal is scored, the team’s Turn is over, and play passes over to the opponent.

Distance

Distance is measured in one inch squares on a gridded pitch in any direction, including diagonals. So a shot could travel in a straight line directly outside the post of the goal, and move diagonally on the final square into the top corner. You curled it into top bins!

Kick off

At kickoff, both teams have to be within their own halves, defending their goal. To start the game, toss a coin. The winner decides who should kick off first, taking the first turn as Attacker, and which goal they want to attack in the first half. The teams swap direction in the second half. The player that Attacks first kicks off from the centre spot, the square at the centre of the pitch.

Abilities

Run – how far you can move in a turn

Sprint – Extra moves outside of Tackle Range

Tackle – Ability to tackle the opponent

Skill – Ability to avoid tackles

Kick – Ability to pass and shoot

Moving around the pitch

Each player can move 4 squares in their turn, modified by their Run Score. Once per Turn a single player on the team can Sprint in addition to their Run and Action, adding their Sprint to their Run. On a 1 they fall over.

Actions (attacker or defender)

• Tackle

• Intercept

Actions (attacker)

• Pass

• Shoot

Once per turn Actions

• Foul

• Last Ditch tackle

Tackles and Interceptions

Every player, no matter who’s turn it is, can attempt to tackle or intercept anything that moves within one square of their base, their Area.

• To intercept a ball, as it passes through their Area, roll the intercepting player’s Skill Die and get a 4 or more.

• To Tackle, the defending player rolls their Tackle Die and the attacking player rolls their Skill Die.

• On a draw, the attacker keeps the ball but can’t run any further.

• If the defending player wins by 1, they get the ball.

• If the defending player wins by 2 or more, they get the ball and the attacker is left in a heap

• If the attacker wins, they dodge the tackle and continue their turn.

Tackle injury severity

Lose by 2- roll a d4 on the injury table

Lose by 3 - roll a d6 on the injury table

Lose by 4 - roll a d8 on the injury table

Lose by 5 or more - roll a d10 on the injury table

Once per turn Actions

• Foul

Once per turn a single attacker and defender can commit a foul off the ball if an opponent is in range, rolling for a tackle, but there’s no ball involved. This counts as their Action.

• Last Ditch tackle

If a player is attempting a shot, the opponent can move one player up to their movement score towards that player and attempt a tackle. On a successful last ditch tackle, rather than gaining possession of the ball, the ball ricochets off the defender and goes over the line for a Corner. It remains the attacking player’s turn and all movement and actions are reset.

• Spectacular!

Once per goal scored, a single player on each team can perform a special action, rolling a check at advantage (roll twice, take the higher as the result). If it comes off, it’s spectacular.

Injuries

Innocuous d4, after tripping up or a light tackle. Get up, run it off!

hard tackle d6 Steady, don’t want to lose yer head

crunching tackle d8 Ooof that was a bit much

Brexit d10 two-footed, all ends up, I heard that from here.

1. Grazed knee - don’t be soft, run it off- minor

2. Sore wrist - minor

3. Bloodied mouth - minor

4. Tweaked hamstring - Niggle

5. Dead leg- Niggle

6. Torn tendon - Niggle

7. Cracked collarbone - Crunched

8. Bashed skull- Crunched

9. Protruding bone - Crunched

10. Snapped spine - Dead

Types of injury

Minor - run it off

Niggle - roll at disadvantage

Crocked - roll at disadvantage and can’t sprint

Crunched - Out of the game

Dead - They’re dead. Kaput. No more. Sayonara. An ex-footballer.

Passing and Shooting

Passing and Shooting success is determined by the player’s Kick Die. When kicking the ball, roll 4 or more to kick accurately. Fail, the player Shanks it, and the ball goes off-target.

When passing or shooting the ball, the ball travels as many squares as the number you roll. To receive it cleanly, the receiver has to roll 4+ with their Kick Die. Otherwise it’s Shanked.

First time shot

A player can attempt a shot even if they have moved and performed an action already this Turn, if they successfully receive the ball.

Shanks

When the ball goes off target, roll a d4

1. Up

2. right

3. Down

4. Left

When the ball goes off target, roll a d8

1. Up

2. Up-right

3. Right

4. Down-right

5. Down

6. Down-left

7. Left

8. Up-left

Starting at the target square, the ball travels in the direction rolled on the d4/d8, by as many squares as the roll failed by. So:

Roll 3 - 1 square

Roll 2- 2 squares

Roll 1 - 3 squares

If the ball is loose, any player moving over that square can automatically gain possession of the ball.

GOAL

If an attacker shoots towards goal, the defending Goalie must roll their Tackle Die above or equal to the attacker’s Kick Die result to save the shot. The The higher the roll, the more spectacular the save.

If the Goalie rolls equal to the attacker’s Kick Die result, the shot is deflected rather than caught. Roll for Shank to discover where it ends up- this can be inside the goal.

The Goalie

The goalie is the only player that can use their Tackle Die to intercept a ball, and can move and sprint in reaction to an opponent’s Shot. They can also use their Tackle Die for a Goal Kick.

Goal kick

If the goalie gains possession of the ball, or the ball goes off their end of the pitch, they can perform a goal kick. At this point, both teams can reset their players’ positions on the pitch. To perform a goal kick, roll the Tackle Die for accuracy. Then roll the Tackle die again and add the two rolls together to find the maximum distance for the goal kick. Fail the accuracy roll and the ball deviates from the target like a Shank, but the ball moves away from the target by the distance rolled on the second roll.

Corner kick

All players on both teams can be placed anywhere on the pitch. An attacking player kicks from the corner.

Referee!!

Any time a Foul is committed, or a player gains an injury from another player, roll for the Referee (typically a d6). On a 4 or above, they see the foul, and the player is sent off. Whenever play is reset they can attempt to sneak back onto the pitch. If they’re spotted (4 or above) they are sent off again.

Optional rule: Offside

Players cannot be closer to the opponent’s goal than two of the opponent’s players at the start of their turn if they don’t already have the ball. If they are, roll for the Referee. If the Ref spots it on 4 or more, offside is called.

On Offside, both teams can reset positions, and the Goalie can perform a Goal kick both teams are Reset and the Goalie performs a Goal kick.

Reset

Whenever play is reset, all players from both teams can be placed anywhere on the pitch. On Kickoff, all players from each team must be in their own half.

Typical Players

Goalie

Defender

• R- 4

• Sp- d4

• Ta – d8

• Sk – d4

• Ki- d4

Midfielder

• Run - 4

• SP- d4

• Ta d6

• Sk d6

• Ki d6

Winger

• Run - 5

• SP- d6

• Ta d4

• Sk d6

• Ki d6

Striker

• Run - 4

• SP- d4

• Ta d4

• Sk d6

• Ki d10

The Crowd (2d6)

2. Unconstrained riot. for each player roll d6. On a 1 roll d10 on the injury table. Match abandoned, with the final score noted as the present score.

3. Pitch invasion. for each player roll d8. On a 1 roll d8 on the injury table.

4. Throwing all sorts on the pitch, for each player roll d10. On a 1 roll d4 on the injury table.

5. The crowd turns. Jeers and boos with every touch. Every roll is at disadvantage.

6. “Yooooooooore crap!”Discouraging chants rain down on the players

7. The crowd is subdued. Bored. A Mexican wave starts up.

8. “Come on you scumbags!” Encouraging shouts and cheers

9. “You’ll never walk aloooone”. Crowd chants resonate around the pitch, rousing the players. Every roll is at advantage

10. Olé! The crowd celebrates every pass. All tackles and interceptions at disadvantage.

11. Wall of noise from the crowd. The team is energised- each player can Sprint this turn.

12. They’re in dreamland! A Wall of noise (see 11). If the team scores, a pitch invasion, where the scoring players are held aloft. If that team is winning, the Match is abandoned, with the final score noted as the present score.

Anyway, the process got me thinking about what the text was lacking and, for me, it was an emotional way into your character at character generation. I’ve built the entire game around quick character generation. I want people to be able to get playing within minutes. It’s part of the reason I decided to use the Into the Odd rules and some Cairn-ish adaptations, as it’s a ruleset that lends itself to fast yet immersive play. The tables I've created to help build the world contain lots of visceral elements, around the weather and sights and sounds, but the character creation, though fun and built to create initial complexity through gaining an emotional Burden straight away (a different Fatigue for Eco mofos!!) the process lacked a little personality. I thought I could add a little setting and, fundamentally, tone, through some flavour text for each starting Adaptation.

Adaptations are a special ability in ECO MOFOS!!, a pseudo-magic item that becomes a part of you, a way of building XP diagetically into the game structure. Your Punk starts with one, as an equivalent to Class in other games, which sets out your starting items and one starting ability, partially defined by your starting HP. High HP, and you have a more physical adaptation, towards fighting or salvaging, low HP and your adaptation is more weird, knowing spells or being able to change physical form. In order to learn new Adaptations, you find Key Items around the world that you fuse with (inducing a night of visions and weirdness) that grant you their powers.

So I’ve been adding Starting Backgrounds to each of the Adaptations, trying to relate how it might actually feel to live with this particular ability. The entries are terse, as I don’t want them to slow the character creation process down too much, but I’ve been trying to make them as evocative as possible.

So here are a couple:

HP2, 2. Technomancer

Starting Background Gadgets just seem to work for you, one glance and Essence sparks, helping the ancient engine to purr, or the door unlock.

Ability On fusing with the Skullcap, learn 2 spells. Risk a Burden to control one piece of visible Tech.

Starting Items

• Blaster (d8)

• Serrated Knife (d6)

• Kevlar jacket (+1 Armour)

• Scout Drone | 1 HP, 12 DEX, Laser (d6)

• Blackleaf

• A Game and Watch

HP2, 3. Biotech

Starting Background You taste the soil through your toes, trace mitochondrial networks in your mind, mapping the world as organic nodes.

Ability Risk a Burden to discover information on the local environment and recent history through the soil and plant network. Risk a Burden to calm or control plants.

Starting Items

• Staff (d6)

• Scalpel (d4)

• Padded camo (+1 Armour)

• Vial of spores

• Portable microscope

• A pipe and leaf

Combining the items, Background and Ability I think gives a nice flavour for the type of character you might have just rolled up. Add in the emotional burden and age of the character, and it all becomes quite nuanced and rounded. Hopefully.

This was partially inspired by Yochai Gal’s work on the already excellent Cairn 2e (go follow/back it right now, you won’t be sorry), but also by my previous work on Lost Eons, where each Archetype has a little flavour text like this.

So ECO MOFOS!! is almost there. The printer is all set up, and we’re still optimistic that the book will be in people’s hands in May.