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ESOTERIC ENTERPRISES PART 1: OVERVIEW Hey FATAL and Friends. With the fate of the forums up in the air, there's no better time to start a new review. So let’s read Esoteric Enterprises!  Esoteric Enterprises is an urban fantasy dungeon crawler, released by Dying Stylishly Games in late 2019. There was a draft floating around several months before that just had the chargen rules, but this is the complete package. The setting is an Unknown Armies or World of Darkness style occult underground. Wizards and magical creatures exist, but they live in the sewers and cast spells using garbage. You’re a homeless supernatural criminal, here to get rich or die trying. The rules are a hack of a game called Lamentations of the Flame Princess, which is a hack of one of the super early D&D editions. It’s a perfectly serviceable “retroclone” and also a huge can of worms I’m not opening right now. Esoteric Enterprises makes a handful of cool changes, a handful of dumb ones, and a lot that just awkwardly crowbar the Lamentations mechanics into a new setting. Why do I continue to play this game, and why am I posting about it? The mechanics range from mediocre to bad, but the game’s world creation system is its killer app. The rules for generating and populating the occult underground make it worth sifting through the busted rules. After a couple sessions of play the game really comes alive. I’ve run about 20 session of Esoteric Enterprises, so I’ll be interspersing descriptions of the book with how they actually work out during play. PRESENTATION I’m using the PDF copy of the book I got off drivethroughrpg. There was also physical book that sold out pretty quickly. I hear the hardcover is pretty good. There are still a couple copies on the UK storefront that I actually considered buying, but I can’t justify dropping fifty dollars AND paying international shipping for a game I already have digitally. There isn’t much art to look at, and most of it is public domain photos or artfully fair-used images from other media properties. This is a shame, because there are a couple places in the book where a couple instructive illustrations would actually have been really helpful, and could have been easily generated by the author using nothing but a cell phone camera. On the plus side, the lack of relevant images makes editing these posts a lot easier.    I'd credit these if the book had annotations for them The book has proofreading problems that affect the usability. Words are spelled using the American spelling in one place and the Commonwealth spelling in another (mold vs mould) making it difficult to ctrl-f for things like monster stat blocks or spells. Tables are always referenced in the text by table number rather than page number, which is annoying for both a physical book and a PDF. INTRODUCTION The game gives us this descriptive text to tell us what it's about. Esoteric Enterprises, Pages 4 and 5 posted:This is a world much like our own. The nations and cities of the familiar world are all there. The mundane apparatus of modern society – Walmart, the police, hospitals, Google, churches, and the rest – do their normal jobs. Billions of people live their mundane lives just like anybody in the real world. Following this, we get the usual “what is an RPG” section that I’m not going to reproduce, along with a player advice section that reproduces a lot of “what is OSR” primers you can find on the internet. Don’t start fights you don’t think you can win, you’ll die if you’re not careful, you’ll die if you’re unlucky, use your brain, the world isn’t fair, etc. Then it’s off to character creation. See you there in part two! mellonbread fucked around with this message at 05:13 on Jun 28, 2020 |
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ESOTERIC ENTERPRISES PART 2: CHARGEN Chargen begins with random rolling ability scores. 3D6 in order for Strength, Dexterity, Constitution, Intelligence, Wisdom and Charisma. Then you apply your ability score modifiers using a table. Like most D20 games, you use these modifiers for everything, and only occasionally glance at the ability scores themselves. So far this could be any grog D&D game. The fashion now is to include some safety mechanism so you don’t end up with a character who’s totally useless. Esoteric Enterprises lets the player “invert” their ability scores by subtracting 21 from each and taking the absolute value. This makes your good scores bad and vice versa, so if you’ve got more bad scores than good, inverting is a good idea. Next you choose your class. Since this is old time D&D, you’re encouraged to choose a class that fits with the random ability scores the game gave you. This game does some stuff with the skill system that makes choosing a class that fits your stats more important than in other retroclones. More on that in a second. After this you roll Flesh and Grit, based on the class you chose. You might get anywhere between a D4 and a D10 of each. Flesh and Grit are a good design and we’ll talk about them once we get out of chargen. Next you copy down your saving throws. There’s five, all reskinned versions of the ones from Lamentations. Stunning, Poison, Hazards, Machines and Magic. Saves are D20 roll-over the value on your sheet, but the game also modifies them based on your ability scores. Then your skills. They all start at “1 in 6”, unless you’ve got a special class ability that sets them to a different value. Again, straight out of Lamentations, but there are a lot more skills, AND they’re modified by your ability score modifiers.
Now starting equipment. You get five items, plus or minus your INT modifier, plus any class bonuses. In a genre of games that prizes fast and simple character creation, equipment selection has always been the biggest pain in the rear end. Shopping through huge gear lists and price sheets, which the players are usually seeing for the first time. Starting equipment packages are an obvious antidote, and Esoteric Enterprises doesn’t have them. It at least dispenses with starting money and just asks the player to choose a flat number of items, while ensuring that no more than a certain number have the “rare” tag. In addition to physical items, you can also use your starting allotment to buy “social advantages” that give you always-on perks, like access to a safehouse or laboratory. These can’t be bought outside chargen, so like Eclipse Phase 1e there’s a tiny incentive to eschew physical items and load up on positive reputation modifiers. There are actually a couple other steps you have to take care of, but they’re not in the character creation section of the book.  CLASSES Let’s talk about the classes. I’m going to include a little editorializing with each one, based on how I’ve seen them shake out in play. BODYGUARDS Bodyguards are a combat class with decent saves, a bonus to Perception (most people start with none), big hit dice and a free CON bonus. They can carry twice as many items as everyone else (this is a LOT more important than you might think). They also get the ability to use “combat maneuvers” without taking any penalties, in essence giving them free positive modifiers during combat. The only downside is that they don’t actually have the ability to bodyguard people. The NPC bodyguard stat block includes the ability to step in front of an attack directed at an ally, but the player version of the class gets no such ability. By the author’s own admission, Bodyguards are a reskinned Dwarf from Lamentations. They have the same slightly-slower-than-a-fighter XP advancement rate, requiring 2,200 points to reach Level 2. Bodyguards are awesome. Play a bodyguard. CRIMINALS Criminals get 6 skill points to spend how they please, plus 4 more each level afterward. Esoteric Enterprises has an extremely punishing skill system, and the ability to reliably succeed at a couple important things should not be discounted. If you’ve got even a small positive modifier to something like CHA or INT, those 6 points can buy a skill up to 6 in 6 - an almost guaranteed chance of success. Criminals also get two extra starting items, but they MUST be taken from the “adventuring gear” list. Criminals are ok. Personally I think they should have made the skill system not-bullshit, rather than having one class that was good at anything.  DOCTORS Doctors get free points of healing that can be applied to a patient’s Flesh points (which are harder to recover than Grit). They start the game with 5 out of 6 medicine, meaning if you have a +1 INT modifier you can start with 6 in 6. They also get the “experimental medicine” ability, meaning they can use body parts taken from dungeon monsters to upgrade their allies via grafts and surgery. Having a Doctor makes a MASSIVE difference in the trajectory of the average group. First of all because half the results on the game’s death and dismemberment table include a “bleeding out” condition that’s fatal if not immediately treated with a Medicine roll. Second, because those results also include a bunch of permanent injuries that make your already-garbage character borderline useless. Injuries the doctor can rewrite out of existence in their lab. Finally, because they can give you special powers from the creatures you kill. The experimental medicine system is explained later but barely covered in any detail. Aside from a Medicine roll and a saving throw the book just tells the DM to wing it. EXPLORERS Explorers are movement machines. They start with 5 Athletics and 3 Stealth, allowing them to zip around the dungeon with relative ease compared to their 1 Athletics 1 Stealth brethren. They also get a free boost to DEX and AC, making them even harder to pin down. The downside is that they treat any weapon as one die-size smaller than it actually is when rolling for damage. It’s fluffed as the Explorer being a pacifist and unaccustomed to violence, but in reality it’s because the Explorer is a reskinned Halfling from D&D. The explorer is a weird inclusion and a little redundant. You can already make a guy with 5 Athletics and 3 Stealth at chargen by taking a Criminal and buying those skills, and you don’t get a penalty to weapons. AND the Explorer takes more XP to level up than the Criminal.  MERCENARY Take a Bodyguard, make the saves worse, take away the CON and perception bonuses, remove the ability to carry more items, but give them +1 to hit and a couple extra items that MUST Be taken from the weapons and armor list. Yes, mercenaries get +1 to hit every level, and yes they’re the only class in the game that does. Considering how often you actually level and how much +1 to hit is worth, I’d stick with the bodyguard. MYSTICS Charisma based casters who can cast a small number of spells a potentially infinite number of times, but must beseech a patron deity every time they do. How do they beseech that deity? By rolling Charm. What’s their base Charm? 1 in 6, same as everyone else. What happens if they fail the Charm roll? They have to roll on a miscast table to find out. But hey, once you reach level three, your Charm goes up to 2 IN 6! Wow! Mystics suck. They have a miniscule chance to cast spells because the game doesn’t give them a bonus to the thing they HAVE TO ROLL in order to do so. The miscast table ranges from “you don’t cast the spell” to “you don’t cast the spell and something bad happens to you”. I understand what they were going for here - a combination of warlock and wild-magic sorcerer that has all kinds of wacky cascading magical effects. But guess what? When death is a single round away, a 2 in 6 chance to cast the spell you need to survive isn’t an exciting opportunity for emergent gameplay, it’s a giant gently caress-you. They have the ability to “bless” other characters by giving them a prepackaged spell for use at a later time. What happens when the other character casts the spell? THEY have to roll Charm, and then the mystic rolls again on a DIFFERENT miscast table, even if the spell actually succeeds (it won’t). Don’t play a mystic.  OCCULTIST Your bog standard vancian caster, and better than the Mystic in basically every way. You’ve got your tiny spell list to start, but you can add more at chargen by buying tomes with your starting equipment. You have a small number of spell slots, but you can cast any spell you want from your spellbook without memorization, as many times as you want, as long as you spend a dungeon turn (10 minutes) doing so. You can even cast spells above your level, requiring a save and risking a roll on an admittedly much more dangerous miscast table than the Mystic one. The one downside to occultists is that once they’re out of chargen in-the-wild, they have to make a Translation roll to copy new spells into their spellbook, or get boned by ANOTHER miscast table. What’s their translation skill? 1 in 6. Even they aren’t immune to the awful skill system. Occultists are better than mystics in just about every way. If you want to cast spells, play an occultist. SPOOK The “monster” class. Choose a supernatural origin, then choose special powers from that origin’s theme. You’ve got garbage skills and mediocre saves, but your origin and the power you choose give you a suite of special strengths, weaknesses, and abilities. Be a goblin who erases people’s memories, or a vampire who climbs on walls, or a machine-man who ambushes people and slashes their throats. The Spook powers aren't listed in chagen. They're in a separate section of the book, like the magic user spells, and we'll cover them in another post. There are a lot of borderline-useless abilities and some pretty good ones. So far I haven’t seen anyone make a really broken character. So far the “fey” origin package has been most popular with my players. Overall Spooks are fun, and a good way to salvage a character whose ability scores are uninspiring even after inversion.  That's all the classes the game has to offer. After that comes the gear list. EQUIPMENT The equipment list isn’t huge, but I’ll stick to the high points anyway. To start, the game offers a spread of weapons. Hand weapons offer increasing damage in exchange for increasing encumbrance and decreasing concealability. Firearms offer a similar gradation. Pistols don’t take up an inventory slot, shotguns do high damage up close, and automatic rifles let you take the “covering fire” action. You’ve also got grenades and flamethrowers, which let you make an area attack without rolling to-hit. Unlike a lot of games, the tradeoff between weight and the benefits an item gives you is actually meaningful in EE. You don’t have many inventory slots, and encumbrance is actually simple and well integrated into the game, rather than being a pain in the rear end or irrelevant afterthought. Most players end up rocking pistols and light hand weapons if they want space for treasure. Armor similarly runs the gamut from light to heavy, with increasing protectivity along the way. The leather jacket doesn’t fill a slot, the flak vest takes one slot, and the riot armor increases your encumbrance by a whole level. Don’t take the riot armor unless you’re a bodyguard. Adventuring gear. You’ve got flashlights, night vision goggles, smart phones, smoke grenades, door spikes, etc. Some of the items have defined mechanical uses, like boosting skills. Some of them just have a text description. It’s not always clear what they do in-game, like the difference between a first aid kit and surgeon’s tools - neither of which have any effect on your Medicine skill, apparently. The most essential items are a light source of some kind, climbing gear and a gas mask. The dungeon is dark, full of holes filled with horrible things, and full of spores, gas and corrosive fumes. Then there’s a list of grimoires that Occultists can buy, to expand their starting spell list. I’m going to include this as a screencap, since I like it.  Lots of flavor, but notice that the spells aren’t listed by rank. The player has to open the game’s spell list to see what they can actually use at level one. After this, a list of “esoteric equipment”. Weapon modifiers like blessed bullets and silver plating, to deal bonus damage to different types of underworld creatures. Stuff to increase your saves when casting different types of dangerous magic. A holy symbol, required for the mystic to cast spells, which is NOT MENTIONED anywhere in their class description. A few vehicles. This depends on how much of the game you play on the surface, versus how much time you spend underground. In the first campaign I ran, almost nobody had a car. They took the bus and awkwardly stuffed their weapons in duffel bags when they needed to get around town above ground. One time they caused an outbreak of bubonic plague on the transit system. Finally, social advantages.  A lot of these interact with the game’s “resource level” mechanics. This isn’t explained in the character creation chapter, but in brief, wealth is abstracted based on experience level, which is used to calculate your ability to acquire gear. HOW DO I PLAY AS... This section lists different character archetypes the players might be interested in, and then how to create them using the game’s mechanics. I don’t know how effective the whole thing is when your attributes are randomly generated. Some of it definitely feels like a kludge, using the system to create stuff it isn’t really good at representing. Some examples of the advice given. Esoteric Enterprises, Pages 30 to 31 posted:...Drug Dealer? This section is far from perfect, but “here’s how you mechanically do X to create Y” is good advice, and more books should include it. TABLES TO FLESH OUT PCS A set of tables to roll interesting character details. You’ve got
EXAMPLE CHARACTER Let’s put together a character and see how all this fits together. First, we roll 3D6 six times. I did this at my desk and got an 11, an 8, an 11, a 17, a 16 and a 13. STR 11, DEX 8, CON 11, INT 17, WIS 16, CHA 13 Our modifiers are, respectively, 0, -1, 0, +2, +2, +1 I’ll be honest, this is a lot better than I was expecting. No need to flip these results, we’re doing quite well overall. With all that intelligence, let’s make an Occultist We’ve got a D4 of Flesh and a D4 of grit. I rolled again at my desk and got 4 Flesh and 3 Grit. Again, we’re ahead of the curve. We save versus Stunning on a 13+, versus Hazards on a 13+, Poison on a 16+, Machines on a 13+, and magic on a 14+. Remember also that when we actually roll these, they’ll be modified by an ability score modifier. Next we fill in our skills. They all start at 1, but get modified by ability scores.
Speaking of spells, we start with a single one, randomly determined from the first level list. We’ll cover the spell list in full over a later post, but right now a D20 roll of 12 gets us… Light. Not a show stopper, but nice to have in the back pocket. We have a +2 INT modifier, so we start with seven items instead of the usual five. I’m thinking
Just for fun, let’s give our Occultist some personality using the random roll tables. A roll of 3 for Social Class gets us skilled working class, a 4 for How the Occultist Learned Magic gets us Experimentation whilst taking like, so many drugs, man, a 4 for our tragic flaw is Overly curious about things best left unknown, and our criminal record roll of 8 is Worship of an interdicted inhuman being. So our wizard is an acid head who accidentally plugged into the dreaming mind of a minor deity through abuse of strange chemicals. This was a positive experience and she continued doing it until she got caught (for the first time) by the MIBs. She will try anything once and if I had known this is the kind of character I was working on, I’d probably have picked a different spellbook. Something with more mushrooms and astral projection in it. OVERALL How do I feel about character creation in Esoteric Enterprises? Full disclosure, I’ve run the game for a few months, but never actually experienced it as a player. Logistically, it’s in an annoying place: just barely too complicated to do quickly at the table, but it also doesn’t offer much customization outside a couple of the classes. Retro games have always annoyed me with their huge tables of saving throws and unnecessarily detailed equipment purchase lists, and Esoteric Enterprises manages to offend even more by requiring the players to factor their ability score modifiers into both their saves AND skills. I had a player describe it as “the worst possible combination of OSR and 5E” and I agree. There are some redundancies among the classes. Bodyguard and Mercenary are almost identical, and the Explorer is just a specific build for a Criminal. The Mystic is distinct from the Occultist, but also sucks and nobody should play them. In spite of all that, it works. It’s hacked together and I’ve further muddied the waters by houseruling the poo poo out of it in my own game, but it’s functional and even fun to make characters with. We’ll be covering other stuff in future segments that interacts with the character creation mechanics, but that’s it for now. See you in part three, when we dig into the base rules. Falconier111 posted:Looking forward to world creation and praying for random roll tables, since the .pdfs where those two combine usually end up in a sale for me.
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ESOTERIC ENTERPRISES PART 3: BASE RULES I assure you, they’re quite base. This section starts by explaining some of the stuff that just landed on your character sheet in the last chapter. First, your ability scores. Esoteric Enterprises, Page 34 posted:You have six attributes; strength, dexterity, constitution, intelligence, wisdom, and charisma. Each attribute starts with a rating between 3 and 18, with 3 being barely functional (3 dexterity is hardly able to move), and 18 being the peak of mortal capability. Attributes may fall below this value, or rise higher, based on events in play. FLESH AND GRIT You know how people debate whether HP in RPGs is “meat points” vs “not getting hit points”? Flesh is meat points and Grit is not getting hit points. Most damage targets your Grit first. When you run out of Grit, the damage rolls over to Flesh. When you run out of that, you start taking Horrible Wounds. Grit recovers quickly, as long as you have a single point of it you can get the whole pile back with just a ten minute rest. Flesh is slower to heal. You can recover it with magical healing or medical care from a doctor, but absent that it returns at a rate between one and three per day, depending on the conditions you find yourself in. Remember when I said the game made some positive changes from Lamentations? This is one of them. Good mechanic. TIME Going to let the game take point on this one, because this is important distinction. Esoteric Enterprises, Page 34 posted:During combat, time is measured in combat rounds, each lasting six seconds. During exploration over the course of the day, time is measured in exploration turns, each ten minutes long. Rounds vs turns. Remember it! DOING THINGS Where the game explains its core mechanics. We start with an admonition to not use dice rolls for anything and everything, reserving them only for cases where the result is both uncertain and interesting. Wherever possible, let the players get away with things by coming up with clever plans and describing their actions in a way that makes sense given the situation, rather than having to roll every time. I broadly agree with these instructions. Keep them in mind when you see how the game uses its own systems later. Now on to the mechanics themselves.  SKILLS Skills are rolled on a D6 versus a static target number equal to the skill value of the character attempting them. If you’ve got a 2 in 6 in Athletics, you succeed if you roll a 1 or 2. If you’ve got a 0 in 6 in a skill, you roll 2D6 and have to get 1 on both. If you’ve got a 6 in 6 in a skill, you roll 2D6 and can only fail if you roll 6 on both. This means that the average character will have a truly miserable chance to do anything that requires a skill roll. That’s fine if the rules let you find alternate solutions, right? Right.... Anyway, you’ve got these skills here:
The book doesn’t instruct you on whether characters are all supposed to be making their own skill rolls, or whether you’re supposed to take the highest, lowest, etc. There are cases where it’s obvious, like Drive is the person driving the car. Does everyone in a room get a Perception test to notice something? Does everyone need to roll Stealth to hide? There are examples that get addressed later on a case-by-case basis, but no general rule. SAVING THROWS Ah, saving throws. Roll a D20 and get over the number on your sheet for the thing the DM tells you to save against. The numbers get lower as you level up. Let’s let the game explain what each of the saves do. Esoteric Enterprises, Page 37 posted:Saves against stunning are used to resist things that prevent the character from being able to act due to overwhelming stimulus. Electric shocks, extreme cold, crippling pain, and sudden terror are good examples of the sort of thing that a Save vs Stunning might resist. They are modified by Constitution. ATTRIBUTE ROLLS What? Esoteric Enterprises, Page 37 posted:Attribute rolls are a catch-all system for when an action comes down to chance but isn‘t covered by a skill roll, a save, or attacking. Using the attribute which most fits the task in hand, roll a d20; if the result is equal to or less than the attribute, the task succeeds. ATTACK ROLLS Roll a D20 and add your STR modifier for hand to hand fighting, or your DEX modifier for ranged attacks. If you get equal or better than the target’s armor class (AC) you hit and deal damage. Easy. Let’s stop for a second and count the different resolution mechanics we’ve just been taught. How do I…
Four different systems. Some of them roll-over, some roll-under. Game designers, please, don’t do this! Modern incarnations of the D20 system are far from perfect, but there’s a certain appeal to using the same die-plus-modifier-versus-target-number system for everything. Alright, enough kvetching (for now), here’s something I actually like. ENCUMBRANCE This section starts with a descriptive text taken straight out of Lamentations. Esoteric Enterprises, Page 38 posted:Ideally, players would calculate the weight of all gear they carry and compare this to a weight limit to determine how much they can carry. In practice, nobody ever does this, so a simplified system is offered.  Punitive? Yes, absolutely. But it forces actual tradeoffs between better items that weigh more, and stuff that weighs less but gets the job done. The skill penalties mean your already garbage athletics and stealth are going to be nonexistent at the first encumbrance level. Which is overly strict, but those means nobody has to worry about those movement rates on the left. Which don’t really have any effect on gameplay because the dungeons the game’s generator creates aren’t built using a consistent ground scale anyway. Could this system be further fine tuned? Yes, absolutely. But I’ve been consistently surprised at how seriously the players take it, and how well they self police (because I’m sure as hell not auditing their inventories). GAINING EXPERIENCE How do I stop being a fragile Level 1 shitkid with a 5 in 6 chance to trip over my own dick? By leveling up. How do I level up? By collecting experience points. How do I collect experience points? By getting paid, son. 1 XP for 1 dollar, or whatever the base unit of currency is in your country. The game uses treasure-for-XP, which a lot of games in this genre do. You’re a criminal and you’re here to get paid, everything else is ancillary. XP is divided equally among the party, which is a natural balancing mechanism as old as D&D itself. The fewer people you bring, the tougher things will be, but the bigger your share. The XP advancement tables for the classes are copied from Lamentations, which are taken from some version of basic D&D. The difference is that the original game combined these advancement tables with extremely generous treasure tables. Esoteric Enterprises is much stingier, but still uses the same XP numbers. The result is advancement is absolutely glacial by rules-as-written. I think this might be deliberate, since a lot of grog gamers think the first level experience is the best part of the game. Which might be true, but then why have the huge tables of levels nobody will ever reach? I think it comes down to the mechanical part of the game not really being a huge focus for the author. Just port it over from Lamentations and call it good. We’ve got random tables to fill out, dammit! I like the treasure for XP model. It reinforces the game’s themes and takes the focus off killing things (though the game has a robust body looting system). The downside is that, combined with the game’s lethality, the players will pass on things that look dangerous and not immediately profitable. Which is smart, but not always a ton of fun. HORRIBLE WOUNDS OSR type games will now generally replace death at 0 HP with a death and dismemberment result at 0 HP. You look at the table and see what awful thing happened to your character. Stops you from getting oneshot by the first monster, applies more interesting consequences than just “make a new character” and encourages you to stop adventuring when you get into the danger zone.  Esoteric Enterprises has six horrible wounds tables for you to roll on when you get to 0 Flesh, based on the type of damage that did the deed. There’s ballistics, ripping, bludgeoning, burning, shocking and poisoning tables. All full of results ranging from temporary to permanent injury, to delayed death, to guaranteed delayed death, to instant death. How do the tables work in practice? They’re a mixed bag, with a couple problems that prevent them from living up to their full potential. First of all, take a look at this line here for how to use the table Esoteric Enterprises, Page 41 posted:When damage reduces you to 0 flesh or less, or you take any damage when you already had no flesh, look at the exact amount of damage dealt and get a result from the list below. It doesn't matter how far 'into the negatives' you are, just look at the result of the dice. Second, maybe a third of the table results inflict the “bleeding out” condition. What does this mean? Esoteric Enterprises, Page 41 posted:A character who starts bleeding out can survive for as many rounds as they have hit-dice, adjusted by their Constitution modifier. For example, a first level character (who therefore has two hit dice) with +2 constitution bleeds to death in 4 rounds. I like the horrible wounds tables. I think they’re both flavorful and an interesting way to soften the impact of rolling a character with like 3 total HP. But these two problems stop them living up to their full potential. ACTIVITIES AND PROBLEMS I’ll throw this section in since we can breeze through most of it and hit the highlights. Characters take no penalties for ageing until they reach 80, then everything except Charisma is halved. Ability score damage can be healed by anything that heals Flesh, though the player must choose to forego the Flesh healing in exchange for recovering the same number of ability score points. There’s also stuff that can permanently reduce your scores. Items break whenever the DM feels it makes sense, but the most likely circumstance is when the character rolls a critical failure while trying to do something. It’s more likely for equipment to be damaged than to break, with further damage causing it to stop working. We’ll meet some monsters, dungeon hazards and magic later that also damage equipment. Cave ins deal 2D6 damage and may require a Save vs Hazards to avoid being trapped in the rubble. Climbing difficult things takes an Athletics roll. Something I didn’t notice when I first read this section is that you actually get a second Athletics roll to avoid falling if you fail the first, softening the blow somewhat. Disguise is usually a matter of having the right costume and acting like you belong there. You only have to roll Charm under close inspection or when entering a secure area. Locked doors can be opened by picking them or forcing them open. Interestingly, Technology is the lockpicking skill in Esoteric Enterprises, rather than Stealth. Forcing a door open uses Vandalism, with bonuses depending on the method applied. If you try to Vandalize a door and fail, you can only try again with a higher Vandalism score, or with tools that do more damage (upgrading from your hands to a crowbar, and from a crowbar to a breaching charge). Electricity deals between 1 and 3D6 damage, and if you fail a Save vs Stunning you get stuck to the source of the damage and shocked again next round, and so on. Falling deals 1D6 damage for every 10 feet. This was higher in my head, but I think I’m confusing it with the falling rules for Delta Green (which are some of the deadliest rules in the game, next to car accidents) Taking fire damage requires a Save vs Hazards. Failure means you catch fire, and have to make another Save to avoid the fire getting worse, increasing from a D4 up to a D8 per turn. You’re supposed to roll for breakage every three hours to see if the batteries in the flashlights go out, reflecting how grog games always want you to track torches in the dungeon. If you get stuck in complete darkness with no way to see, you get a -3 penalty to all your D20 rolls, a -1 penalty to all your skills, and you essentially treat all failures as critical failures. There’s a lot of debate in OSR games about what actually happens when you run out of light, whether you have to painstakingly narrate the players feeling their way along the walls, whether you just kill them instantly (eaten by a grue). I think this numeric penalty is a good compromise, since it strongly discourages adventuring in the dark without being a total pain in the rear end to adjudicate. Hacking computers takes a Technology roll. The book encourages the DM to call for additional Technology rolls for different steps of the process. This is what the Alexandrian calls “rolling for failure” - when the guy with the already-obscure skill has to keep rolling it and rolling it because the DM considers each step of the task worthy of its own mechanical interaction, until they inevitably fail. On the other hand, the only people attempting to hack anything will probably be 6 in 6 Technology criminals, who have a 35/36 chance of success. The game has no sanity system, damage to the integrity of the mind is reflected by damage to the mental ability scores, which may be recoverable or permanent. There’s a paragraph about what happens if a character gets permanently transformed, such as by a magical disease like lycanthropy or vampirism. If you get transformed into an unintelligent animal, game over. If you become something intelligent, you change your character class to Spook and gain whatever powers and traits the thing you transformed into has. Narcotics inflict temporary penalties to your mental ability scores, and you risk getting addicted if you regularly use them and fail a Save vs Poison. Why would you use narcotics? Painkillers instantly restore one hit die of grit per dose, and hallucinogens give you a +3 to your Save vs Magic. Later we’ll encounter some magical drugs that have more interesting properties. Poison and Disease do bad things when you fail a Save vs Poison, getting progressively worse on failed saves and going away after you make enough successful ones. We’ll encounter some interesting diseases later on when we hit the DM section. Swimming is easy unless you’re heavily encumbered or in rough waters, then you need to make an Athletics test. Fail that, and you need to make another Athletics test with a penalty. The penalties get progressively worse. You get CON/2 rounds of air in your lungs before you start taking D6 damage to flesh per-round from drowning. Torture inflicts temporary CHA damage, with the victim breaking and “answering” the question once they hit 0. Weird that they use Charisma as the attribute that resists interrogation, rather than Wisdom, which is the “willpower” stat everywhere else in the game. The book tells us that finding traps is an exercise in critical thinking and smart play, rather than rolling dice. A nice thought, except the rules text has already told us Perception is for locating traps, and will later give us an example of play where it’s used for locating traps. Disarming traps is done with the Technology skill, or by obvious stuff like ripping the power cable out of a gun turret.  What’s my overall read on the rules in Esoteric Enterprises? There are too many skills, too many saving throw categories, too many different resolution mechanics, and too much stuff just ported over from Lamentations. The game tells you to use your brain instead of your character sheet, then sets up a million special cases where you have to roll a specific skill to accomplish something. It can’t decide if it wants to be Basic D&D or World of Darkness. When I finish the review, I’ll go into the way I run the game, and the changes I’ve made to mitigate these problems. Join me next time, when we take a look at combat and downtime, along with whatever else I can fit in the post.
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Jun 27, 2020 18:39
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ESOTERIC ENTERPRISES PART 4: ENCOUNTERS, COMBAT, DOWNTIME AND MEDICAL EXPERIMENTS In 2020, I posted this: four. My most accomplished review yet. COMBAT AND ENCOUNTERS Remember when I said last post that whether everyone rolls skills or just one person is decided on a case by case basis throughout the book? Esoteric Enterprises, Page 52 posted:These rules refer to a party leader whose stats are used for various checks. This character will typically be the one coordinating their team-mates actions or else the one at the front of the marching order. It does not imply that the leader has any authority over the other PCs, merely that they’re taking point. SURPRISE The first thing to do when an encounter happens (random encounters and when/why they happen will be covered later) is check for surprise. The DM rolls Perception once for each side, using whichever character in the group’s skill is highest. If one side succeeds and the other fails, the winner detects the loser but the loser doesn’t detect the winner. The winner can decide if they want to avoid the encounter, hide, set an ambush, etc. If both sides succeed, they both become aware of the others’ presence. If they both fail, they run into each other and are both surprised. Since the game’s base perception score for both players and NPCs is 1 in 6, expect a lot of people to run into each other unexpectedly. Welcome to the Occult Underworld. There’s a paragraph on engagement distances. If you surprise the other guy, you have a chance to choose the engagement range, or creep closer using Stealth. If you both run into each other, the engagement distance is randomly determined if you’re above ground, or in the same room if you’re underground. REACTION ROLLS If it’s not immediately obvious how a group of NPCs you encounter would feel about the players, or what they would do, the DM rolls a D6 and adds/subtracts the party leader’s Charisma modifier. If the players are aware of the encounter and consciously trying to make a good impression, someone can make a Charm roll to add a positive modifier to the roll.  I like reaction rolls. I think they’re a good design and people misunderstand what they’re for. They exist so that every random encounter doesn’t immediately result in a gunfight, and the players don’t automatically get wiped when they encounter 2D6 elite cultists with machine guns or whatever. However, most games either use a larger die, or use 2D6 or something to generate the reaction roll. And they usually have a wider range of results than just hostile/unsure/friendly (though often the more granular results boil down to the same thing). Using a D6 means that if someone has good Charisma and a good charm score, it can be impossible to fail a reaction roll. That doesn’t mean you never get into fights, the reaction roll is only supposed to be used if it’s not obvious how the NPCs feel about the players. What I found is that reaction rolls were important early in the campaign, when the group was running into all the factions for the first time. They fell out of use later on, when they’d made friends and enemies in the underworld. Still, a use for your 6 in 6 Charm criminal. Make friends with all the creepy animals and gross wizards in the basement. INITIATIVE But let’s say the reaction roll went badly, or the dungeon dogs were hungry, or you started shooting before the death knight opened its mouth. The game uses group initiative, so roll a D6 and add the party leader’s DEX mod. Note that this makes the selection of the party leader an interesting choice, since both their DEX and CHA modifiers are used to determine outcomes for the party. Whoever rolled higher - the players or the monsters - goes first. Then the other side goes. I don’t like group initiative. It usually makes the first round of combat a curb stomp, which some people think is a feature but I don’t find very interesting. It also creates a specific out-of-character problem where I ask “ok did everyone go?”, hear no responses, and then start to narrate what the monsters do, only to have a player shout “WAIT! I haven’t gone yet”. Repeat depending on how many players weren’t listening. THINGS THAT CAN BE DONE IN A ROUND Combat is pretty simple. The action economy lets you move and do something, draw an item and do something, or just do something. Attacking is a D20+Modifiers roll versus the target’s armor class. In addition to the basic attack action, the game gives you a suite of combat maneuvers to choose from, which trade penalties for bonuses. Esoteric Enterprises, Page 54 posted:Go for the Kill There’s an action called covering fire, where you hold your action, but make a ranged attack against any target who moves in the open on their turn. You can target as many enemies in this fashion as you have hit-dice, so 2 for first level characters. Normally you need an automatic rifle to do covering fire, but Bodyguards and Mercenaries can do it with any firearm. Blast attacks don’t require a roll-to-hit, everyone in the radius just makes a Save vs Hazards to avoid damage. This makes grenades and flamethrowers a great choice for characters with garbage attributes. Wrestling is a quick and easy opposed D20+STR test, with some assorted modifiers for special circumstances. The winner can immobilize the loser or disarm them. If multiple people wrestle one person, roll for all of them and take the highest roll against the target’s one roll, applying a +1 per person. Wrestling rules because it ignores AC. Don’t bother trying to hit an armored target with your weapon, grapple them and kill them once they’re immobilized and helpless. Just like in real life. COMPLICATIONS IN COMBAT If you roll a 1 when using a firearm, it’s out of ammunition. You can’t use it again unless you have spare ammunition in your inventory. A lot of games have narrative ammunition rules and I think that’s a good shift, away from counting bullets. Cover gives either +3 or +6 versus ranged attacks, depending on how protective it is. This means that gunfights between two sides in cover get bogged down in ineffectual shooting pretty quickly. I’ve had this happen in-game and I consider it a feature rather than a bug. Don’t try to shoot someone behind cover, that’s what grenades are for. Shooting into melee gives you a -3 to your roll to hit. This encourages everyone to carry a hand-weapon so that they aren’t totally useless when the fighting gets close up. Finally, a very important rule that I’m going to bold: If you hit someone with a surprise attack, either from a failed Perception roll or from Stealth, the damage you deal ignores Grit and goes straight to Flesh. Why is this an important rule? Humans in Esoteric Enterprises never get more than a single die of Flesh. That means that an ambush is usually instantly lethal for the players, or for any human enemies they fight, no matter how powerful they are. On the other hand, there are also enemies that are all Flesh and no Grit, like Flesh Hulks and Shoggoths, which are totally pointless to ambush. Every player character in the game is a single failed Perception roll away from instant death. This is what I meant when I said earlier that the game is disingenuous, when it insists that you’re not supposed to be rolling skills all the time.  MORALE When NPCs take a beating, they roll morale. They do this when they lose half their numbers, or when a single tough NPC is reduced to half HP. They also might check morale when something scary they’re not used to happens, like when cavemen hear a gunshot for the first time, or when normal people see dangerous magic. Some things never check morale, like zombies or golems. A morale check is a D6, plus the party leader’s Charisma modifier.  Again, this is the kind of thing most games in the genre do with 2D6. If the player leading the party has a +2 Charisma modifier, it’s impossible for the enemy to pass morale. Player characters never have to check morale, it’s up to them if they want to keep fighting hopeless battles. FLEEING AND PURSUIT When someone wants to run away, you transition from the combat rules to the pursuit rules. First, everyone in hand to hand combat with a fleeing character gets a free attack against them. Then the actual pursuit begins. In the game’s own words, the first step is to eyeball whether one side is obviously faster than the other, making the pursuit a foregone conclusion. This would be a good use for those movement speeds we saw on the encumbrance table in the last section. Except for one problem: none of the NPCs or monsters in the book have movement speeds listed. So what happens when neither side has an obvious advantage? You make an Athletics roll. You roll your 1 in 6 chance to get away, and the other guy rolls his 1 in 6 (most NPCs don’t have an Athletics score) chance to catch you. This makes running away a comedy of errors, as one side stumbles and trips running away and the other side stumbles and trips trying to catch them. I do not like the pursuit rules. The free attack and the D6 roll versus your lovely Athletics score mean running away is a great way to get attacked over and over and fail to escape. This annoys me because the game’s player advice section specifically tells you to run away when a fight looks unwinnable. If standing and fighting requires a die roll, and running away requires an even less likely die roll, the players are going to stand and fight. (And note that this is yet another case where the game demands that you roll your lovely skill, which you were supposed to find a galaxy brain solution and avoid rolling) The funny thing is that this section is significantly dumbed down from the Lamentations rules, which had a robust system based on movement speed and the players enacting capers in order to fool or inconvenience their pursuers and get away.  DOWNTIME Downtime is used for two main purposes: recovering HP and shopping for items. Spellcasters might also use it to scribe scrolls or do other magical stuff, and Doctors might use it to do weird science. RESOURCES Every character in Esoteric Enterprises has a Resource Level. By default, that’s equal to the character’s level. Social traits bought at chargen can increase the resource level further, and Spooks don’t get additional resources from leveling up.  This… seems like something that should have been included in the chargen section. Anyway, the dollar amounts are a shorthand for what/how much stuff you can buy before you have to worry about impacting your budget. The game uses an abstracted wealth system, rather than counting dollars and cents. None of the items in the gear list have prices. If the players get a huge haul from a job, they might get a temporary boost to their resources score, but that’s it. I like abstracted wealth systems, most of the time. In this case, I think it was the wrong choice. We’re already counting dollars and cents for XP purposes, counting them for spending purposes isn’t a profound hardship. And I have another beef with how you actually use your resource level to acquire items. BUYING THINGS This section starts off by admonishing you that you don’t need game mechanics to buy basic stuff like food, or the internet connection in your house. Cool. Then we get into the mechanics for actually purchasing items. If you want to buy something, you first need to make a Contacts roll in order to find someone selling it. If you pass the Contacts roll, you then roll a D10 versus your resources level to see if you can afford it, trying to roll equal or lower. First of all, we’ve added yet ANOTHER resolution mechanic to the pile, D10 roll under. Couldn’t we just have had resource levels stop at 6? Second, how likely is the average first level character to be able to buy something? 1 in 6 in contacts times 1 in 10 in resources. A 1.7% chance to buy an item. Any item at all, be it a gas mask, a handful of caltrops, an automatic rifle, a grimoire or a pair of gloves. But wait. Esoteric Enterprises, Page 57 posted:With even a low Resources score, mundane equipment like spray-paint, cable-ties and so on can be purchased as well. The gear list does not have a tag “mundane item”. Thematically, I think I understand why the author set up the rules this way. You’re a hobo wizard who spends every spare nickel on cheap wine and magical child support payments. You’re lucky if you can scrape up enough money for a hotel stay, let alone a book of spells. In practice, these mechanics are extremely discouraging for the players. They risk their lives for money in the occult underworld, then the game tells them they don’t actually have the ability to spend that money on items. Until they hit level 2, all the cash they collected is worth jack poo poo after it becomes XP. You can also make Contacts and Resources rolls to find information, get clandestine medical treatment to cure horrible wounds, or get favors done. All with the same stellar chance of success as purchasing a pack of cigarettes. Unless that counts as a mundane item? There’s no way to be sure.  Whatever. Time to talk about a good mechanic. MEDICAL EXPERIMENTS This is the Doctor class’ other special ability. They can do two types of experimental medicine: Trivial and Risky. Either way, it takes a day of downtime and access to a laboratory, making that a good social advantage to pick if you roll a Doctor. Trivial medicine is mostly used to treat poison, disease, and the long term effects of horrible wounds. It takes a Medicine roll, meaning a doctor with a +1 INT modifier has a 35/36 chance to succeed. There’s a throwaway line about how you can transplant body parts, but a given body part harvested from a corpse has a random chance of being compatible with any given person. Which leads to doctors obsessively collecting body parts to maximize the likelihood of a match. But you didn’t become a doctor to reattach normal human limbs. You became a doctor so you could give people night vision by harvesting a fairy prince’s corneas, or acid spit by cutting up a dungeon dragon’s digestive glands. Risky medicine uses a Save vs Machines to determine whether the crazy procedure you’re undertaking succeeds, fails, or succeeds with horrible side effects. The Doctor’s save vs machines is pretty good, and is further improved by a good INT score, but there’s still a chance of repercussions here. The book is light on details about how exactly this should all work, but provides a list of sample consequences for failure. Esoteric Enterprises, Page 59 posted:• Organs being grafted in fail to take hold, and rapidly turn gangrenous. The area where the graft was going becomes useless; inconvenient for a leg, but potentially lethal (Save vs Poison or die, perhaps) when it’s the chest cavity or brain. Highlights from experimental medicine in my first campaign:
 Glad I could end this segment on a high note. Next post, we’ll go over the special powers available to the Spook class. Yup, we’re still working our way through chargen options. See you there. mellonbread fucked around with this message at 23:42 on Sep 23, 2021 |
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Jun 28, 2020 05:10
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ESOTERIC ENTERPRISES PART 5: SPOOKS & THEIR POWERS It’s not a chapter about archaic racial slurs and CIA agents. It’s a list of supernatural origins and special powers for the game's monster character class.  At first level, a Spook gets a supernatural origin that gives them a set of special strengths and weaknesses. Then they get a single monstrous power. This powers may be randomly rolled, or selected by the player. Each power is tagged with a few “themes”. Each time the Spook levels up, they gain a new power, but the power chosen must share at least one theme with at least one of their existing powers. ORIGINS There are eight origins to choose from. Each comes with a D10 table of example powers for that origin, but the rules say you can combine any power with any origin if the DM is cool with it. Human Variant You get a free feat at first level. Wait no, poo poo, gently caress. You’re a human with a weird bloodline, strange mutation or other source of innate power. You get no special strengths or weaknesses, your base hit die is lowered to a D4 (the normal Spook gets a D6 HD) and your resources level increases normally as you level, like every other class. Construct You’re an artificial being. You might be a robot, a golem or some other animate object. You’re immune to poison and disease, don’t need to eat or breathe, don’t take damage from cold, and can’t bleed out. But you also can’t heal Flesh points via Medicine, and you always fail saves vs mind controlling effects because you were built to obey commands. Fairies You’re a magical creature created from the dreams of humanity. Maybe nice dreams, but probably not. You’re immune to poison and disease, don’t need to eat or drink, but take double damage from cold iron. The Ghostly You’re a ghost. You can’t interact with physical objects, except magic ones, or by using magic. You know infomorphs in Eclipse Phase? It’s like that. Not great. I’ve never seen anyone play a ghost. The Living “subterranean morlocks, aquatic piscine undines, yeti, bigfoot, animals living among humans in disguise or one of any number of similar creatures” with “no special rules traits”. Not sure why this is a category. Maybe so you could roll on a D8 instead of a D7 for your origin? Minerals Rock people from deep beneath the earth’s surface. Immune to poison, cold, suffocation disease and bleeding. Take double damage from electricity, which damages the delicate crystal matrices of their silicon brains. Move as though they were one encumbrance level slower than they actually are. Plants Dryads, fungus people, swamp things, etc. Immune to bleeding and suffocation, and produce enough oxygen for one other person. Take double damage from fire. The Undead Zombies, revanents, ghouls, vampires, etc. Immune to suffocation, cold, poison and disease. Take double damage from Holy or Blessed weapons. Can’t recover HP from Medicine, can’t recover more than 1 Flesh at a time from any source. I like most of these origins. If this wasn’t a grog race-as-class game, I’d want these to be templates any class could take - like a Mineral Mercenary or a Ghoul Mystic.  MONSTROUS POWERS There are a lot of these, so I’m going to hit the ones that seem most interesting, and skip over predictable stuff like talking to animals or breathing underwater. Achilles Heel Take half damage from normal sources, but bonus damage versus one specific thing. Ambush Surgeon If your attack deals damage to Flesh through a sneak attack, the target takes extra damage and begins Bleeding Out. See how THEY like it. Animal Shape You can transform into an animal and back whenever you want. Animate Body Parts Animate chunks of bodies, up to the size of a human arm. You can animate an infinite amount as long as you maintain your concentration. Blood Drinking Feed on living targets to restore your HP and make them Bleed Out Creature of the Night Get bonuses to all your rolls in darkness, and penalties in the light. I think this would have worked better as an origin package, since it’s a bit of a double edged sword. Deepen Shadows Boost the entire team’s Stealth by 1 Detach Body Parts Rip pieces of yourself off, control them remotely and reattach them. Face Thief Take on the physical appearance of anyone you’ve touched. Flesh Sculptor THE FLESH IS FLUID! IT CAN BE CHANGED, RESHAPED, REMADE! Also, it gives you a +2 to Medicine. Fluid Form Change your shape, fit into any space water can fit through, wrestle slightly better. Gullet Storage You’re a pelican. Hope it was worth taking this as your one power. Haunter Heal every time you scare someone, and give enemies a penalty to morale. Healing Stigmata Heal other people by transferring the damage to yourself. You can do the same with horrible wounds. Wonder how long you last doing that. Hoard Your resources level increases normally instead of staying at 1. You know, like if you took the human origin. I’m including this to show how lame some of these “powers” are. Hypnotism Reprogram people to do what you want with a long conversation and a Charm roll. Imbue Power Temporarily give something/something else one of your Spook powers. Don’t take this at level 1, obviously. Immune to… There’s one of these for fire and one for electricity. Inhuman Beauty Get +1 to Charm and reaction rolls. I’m including this to show how lame some of these “powers” are. Intoxicating Blood Like hypnotism, but you feed people your blood to activate it. Leech Vitality Inflict the Fatigued condition when you deal damage to an enemy’s Flesh. Fatigued is one of those things that sucks for a player character but means nothing to an NPC, since it governs healing grit from sleeping. Mad Insight Boosts Forensics and Translation, and lets you use the Visual Calculus skill from Disco Elysium. Would be great if this game was a murder mystery game, instead of a murder… game. Magical Prodigy +1 to your chance to read scrolls and activate blessings given by Mystics. You still can’t cast spells yourself. Memory Worm Erase yourself from the memory of people who encounter you. Poltergeist Lets a ghost interact with the physical world. Putrefy Destroy living tissue through necrosis. Deals constant damage to grappled targets. Rusting Touch You’re a rust monster. You can delete people’s items by hitting them. Shadow Tentacle You can create a tentacle that slaps people around and manipulates objects. It has 1 HP and dies if anyone shines light on it. Silent Gives bonuses to stealth when sound is a factor, as opposed to the one that just gives straight bonuses to stealth. Smell Magic Detect magic, but with your nose. Vanish Turn invisible. Only gives a +2 to Stealth, putting it roughly on par with the other abilities that also do that. War Form Turn into something that does more damage than your regular form, but lacks fine dexterity and the power of speech. Webs You can shoot webs.  How do I feel about the Spook abilities? I think most of them are useless, or at best not enough to build a character around. I skipped a lot that just give you a breath attack or claws or teeth or other stuff that’s mechanically less useful than just carrying a gun. There are a few that could be super interesting, and a whole lot that might be cool if you combine them. By rules as written, you’re going to be level one for a long, long time. Better pick something good at first level. I’ve had a few Spook characters in my two campaigns of Esoteric Enterprises, and only a couple who ever made it past level one. Not because the rest died in droves, it's an open table and a lot of people only ever do one session. Both of my successful Spooks took the fairy origin package. One took memory worm and some movement powers, the other took ambush surgeon and a couple stealth abilities. Both were fun characters who contributed a lot to the group. Up next: Spellcasting, Miscasting, basic Cults and the Spell List (if I can fit it all in the same post!) PurpleXVI posted:I wish more games accounted for players being able to "lead" others at an action, like, say, Stealth, because having only one guy good at sneaking tends to mean that sneaking is almost always out unless you want to split the party a lot. Having some sort of explicit mechanics for leading/instructing others and thus letting them borrow your skill check(perhaps at an appropriate penalty) would be good, maybe even have it be something you could invest in being better at. (I do think having the stealthiest character scout ahead is an interesting solution to the possibility of an ambush. By having a picket who detects encounters before they detect you, the players can potentially negate the number one source of instant death in the game) PurpleXVI posted:Also, sometimes giving everyone a check at a thing makes it incredibly hard to gauge the probabilities. Like, I can effortlessly tell what the odds are of one guy rolling a D20 vs TN 15. But when four people are making the roll simultaneously and they all have somewhat different TN's, it's hard to adjust said TN's appropriately. On the other hand, if you go too hard on the "just the best guy rolls," then you end up with a situation where the more min/maxed party members are LITERALLY the only ones allowed to do things, and everyone else is just there for flavour text. In all seriousness, I think this also comes back to role protection as a design goal. Specific characters being good at specific things that everyone else isn't allowed to do is considered acceptable and even desirable by the people who write this genre of game. (Except then, the spell list includes stuff that lets magic users stomp all over other class' niches. Maybe it's not role protection at all, maybe the skill system is something else the designer just ported over from Lamentations and called good) When I run the game (I'll post my houserules and link play reports and so on at the end) I'm a lot more generous with the skills than the book recommends. I don't find it exciting when players immediately discount things as an option because they think they'll immediately fail.
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Jun 28, 2020 18:54
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ESOTERIC ENTERPRISES PART 6: MAGIC In this section, we’ll cover the basic spellcasting rules, specific rules for Occultists and Mystics, cults, and miscast tables.  GENERAL SPELLCASTING This section is pretty slim. There’s a paragraph about how writing scrolls uses magical reagents that have to be randomly determined, a paragraph about identifying spells other people cast (just eyeball it), and an admonishment that characters who aren’t Occultists or Mystics can’t cast spells, only activate blessings and read scrolls (with a Translation roll, so good luck with that).  OCCULTIST SPELLCASTING This section starts with a refresher on the basic concept of casting a spell from a spell slot, but also mentions that you can fill a spell slot with a higher level spell than the spell slot (eg put a level 3 spell in a level 1 slot) if you’re prepared to roll a Save vs Magic and risk rolling on a deadly miscast table. If an Occultist finds a spellbook in the wild, they can transcribe the spells from that book into their own personal grimoire for memorization/casting. Doing so requires a Translation roll, and if you fail that there’s a deadly miscast table. Do you see a trend here? Transcribing the spell also takes downtime and magical reagents, which are randomly determined on a Occultists can cast spells experimentally. Casting experimentally lets you do things like reverse a spell’s effect (enlarge becomes shrink, hold portal becomes knock, etc), change a spell’s area of effect, change the targeting conditions, affect the spell’s range, etc. When you cast experimentally, you roll a Save vs Magic. What happens if you fail? Can you say “deadly miscast table”? We get a more detailed description of how creating scrolls (prepackaged, single use spells) works. It takes a random magical reagent for each level of the spell being scribed to the scroll. There are also rules for creating entirely new spells. These essentially combine the rules for casting experimentally with the rules for transcribing new spells to your spellbook. Two rolls, two deadly miscast tables. So with all these deadly miscast tables floating around, why did I say in the character creation chapter that the Occultist was better than the Mystic in every way? Because the Occultist only rolls for miscast spells if they go outside the window of stuff they can reliably do without rolling. The Mystic can’t do ANYTHING without rolling.  MYSTIC SPELLS Mystics get a set spell list determined by what god they worship - either randomly generated by rolling spells during chargen, or chosen from a list of premade gods that appears later in the book. They can’t learn new spells from spellbooks, only by leveling up and getting more from their deity. Mystics don’t use spell slots. They can access their entire inventory of spells at any time as many times as they want. But each time they try to cast a spell, they have to roll Charm. If they succeed, the spell goes off. If not, they roll on a miscast table to see what happens instead. The base charm is 1/6 and the Mystic doesn’t get a bonus to it. Mystics can also cast experimentally, which suggests that maybe the experimental casting rules should have gone under the general spellcasting rules explanation rather than the Occultist rules explanation. But hey, are you tired of rolling your Charm skill and failing to cast any spells? Do you want to give someone else the ability to roll their Charm skill and fail to cast spells? Esoteric Enterprises, Page 74 posted:When the rite is completed, the mystic chooses a spell which their patron has granted them. The recipient of the blessing gains the ability to cast this spell once as if they were a mystic, requiring a successful Charm skill roll to do so. They do not need a holy symbol to do this. They cannot use experimental magic when casting in this way; the spell is cast exactly as normal. I am angry. ANGRY ABOUT MYSTICS. Let’s digress for a second into the next section of the Mystic rules, which is actually pretty cool and flavorful, and I’d like a lot if it wasn’t married to a class that sucked.  CULTS Mystics worship mysterious patrons that give them magic powers, right? So here are a handful of pre-built gods to choose from, if you don’t want to make your own or roll randomly. Each comes with a spell list, which replaces the first spell of each level you get (so you get one predetermined level 1 spell and roll for the other, then when you get your first level 2 spell it’s predetermined, etc). Non Mystics can choose to worship the same god as a Mystic in their party. This gives them a bonus to Charm rolls when activating blessings from that god’s followers, but renders them unable to use blessings from other gods. I’ve never seen a player cast a blessing, but it’s a nice touch from a flavor perspective. So what are our choices for gods? Esoteric Enterprises, Page 75 posted:Anassa But I promised you deadly miscast tables, so let’s see some deadly miscast tables!  MISCAST TABLES There are a lot of these. One for each type of spellcasting failure, and one cascading table that the other tables can send you to. They all use a D20. I’m going to give you three of them verbatim, because I think an undiluted dose of this book’s peculiar flavor will show you why I keep complaining about it, but also why it’s interesting enough to write up in the first place. First, the Fragility of mortal Minds. You roll on this one when the Occultist fails a Save vs Magic while casting a spell that’s too high for the spell slot it was memorized in The Fragility of Mortal Minds posted:1 Pressure builds in the magician’s cranium. They take d6 damage to Flesh. If this drops them to 0, their skull explodes, killing them and dealing another d6 damage to those nearby as shards of skull hit them (a Save vs Hazards negates this damage). The Fickle Whims of the Divine, for when the Mystic fails their Charm roll to cast a spell. If you are an Mystic you will roll on this table almost every time you cast a spell, so pay attention. The Fickle Whims of the Divine posted:1 The patron demands a sacrifice of blood; d4 flesh points either from the Mystic or other willing supplicants. The blood does not need to be drawn out all at once. When the sacrifice has been offered, the spell will take effect. And finally, the table you roll on when you roll badly on the other tables: And Hell Shall Follow. And Hell Shall Follow posted:1 A channel to the hungering Void between the stars opens up at the magicians feet. It’s an empty hole, black and sucking in everything. Save vs Hazards to avoid falling in. Everybody within ten feet loses a point of flesh every round. Everybody within one hundred feet loses a point of flesh every turn. Everybody within a thousand feet loses a point of flesh every day. The Void is there forever now. The area will start to spawn Paradox Beasts. Cultists of the Void start making pilgrimages to the area. There are four other tables I’m not reproducing here, each with twenty more possible results (all including one that sends you to the Hell Shall Follow table).
What do I think of them? They’re flavorful and some of them inflict interesting consequences for dangerous activities, while others end the game for the whole group because you had the temerity to read from a scroll, or cast a spell as a Mystic. All of the tables are too complex, too verbose, and there are too drat many of them. This isn’t a terrible thing, it’s not like you constantly have to reference this section of the book. Besides the Fickle Whims of the Divine, you’ll be rolling on them pretty rarely, meaning the more outlandish results are unlikely to come up. The reason why the Mystic table is so awful in practice is that most of the results gate you from being able to cast the spell until you do something inane and time consuming. So you can cast a spell after spending a turn doing some nonsense, but wait: so can the Occultist, by spending a turn casting a spell from their spellbook without memorization! I think you could fix this pretty easily by having the spell go off, and THEN charging the mystic the toll afterwards as penance. We’ll cover the spell list itself next post, which will finish off the player section of the book entirely.
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Jun 29, 2020 04:09
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ESOTERIC ENTERPRISES PART 7: SPELL LIST The Esoteric Enterprises spell list is a mixture of Basic D&D standbys, spells from Basic awkwardly hacked into a present-day setting, and new spells. There’s a single spell list for both Mystics and Occultists, no Cleric/Magic User divide. There are twenty spells at each level from 1 to 4, and twelve spells at each level from 5 to 8. I’m going to cover the highlights of this list since there are lots and lots of spells, and their descriptions aren’t as interesting as the big miscast tables in the last post. The game has all the spells you’d expect from a D&D clone. Invisibility, Fireball, Hold Portal, you get the picture.   RANK 1 Bleeding Curse Cut yourself for D4 damage, and a target within line of sight begins bleeding out. This is confusing because it uses the term “bleeding out” but the term bleeding out already has a specific meaning in the rules - instant death in rounds equal to HD plus con modifier. This spell specifically doesn’t do that. Instead, the target loses 1 point of HP from flesh per round. Which is small damage but actually pretty powerful, because human opponents never get more than a single die of flesh. Cure Wounds There’s no cleric spell list so this one’s just in the pile with everything else. Heals D6 damage to Flesh. Doesn’t restore Grit, but you can restore Grit by resting ten minutes anyway. Rather than go up if you cast it in a higher level spell slot, the HP healed increases by 1 per level of the caster. Expect a lot of spells to work this way. Freeze the Very Air Create objects from the moisture in the air. Takes longer in hot conditions, like the guy from the Incredibles. Doesn’t say how large the object can be - if you could make a bridge or a wall. Either way, whatever you make is brittle and has a 1 in 6 chance to break if handled roughly. Sleep Roll 2D8, that’s how many hit-dice worth of creatures can be affected with a single casting. They make a Save vs Magic or fall asleep. Then you run away, or you sneak up and bash their brains out. Loud noise or rough handling wakes them up, so be careful. This is a classic for a reason, and widely considered the most powerful Level 1 spell in Basic. Turn Away Undead A Cleric-specific ability converted to a general use magic spell. Roll D6 and add your caster level. That many hit-dice worth of undead beings fail morale and flee. Sentient undead get a Save vs Stunning to resist. RANK 2 Guess Password Gives you a 50% chance to guess someone’s password. After three failed attempts, you’re locked out. Remember a couple posts ago, when I said that some spells in the spell list were just duplicates of other people’s skills? This one is Technology. Why is this Level 2? Erase Data Creates an intelligent electromagnetic pulse that removes information from digital storage media. Yet another Level 2 spell that just duplicates the function of the Technology skill. Know Guilt Lets you know what someone feels bad about. Another ability that would be great if this was an investigative game. Potentially lends itself to creative uses I can’t think of right now. Doesn’t work on beings that have no shame. Techspeak Interrogate machines by giving them a magic mouth, forcing them to answer questions accurately about anything they know. Sentient machines get a save to avoid revealing their secrets. A reskin of the Level 1 spell Bookspeak, which does the same for books. Waking Dreams Removes the target’s need for sleep. Not that useful in its own right, but it also makes the target automatically fail saves vs mind control or illusions. And Waking Dreams itself can’t be saved against, making it a good debuff to apply to a hostile target before zapping them with something else.  RANK 3 Become the Sanctum Designate an area in which the caster will never again require food, water, or air. Subsequent castings let the caster spy on anything occurring within the sanctum by astrally projecting. Strikes me as a bit useless, unless you also give the sanctum some protection against detection/penetration against hostile NPCs. Then it would be a cool way to set up a base of operations in the underworld. Flay Instantly deal D12 damage to a single target’s Flesh. Plus an additional target per caster level. Remember that the average human has between 1 and 10 Flesh. A powerful and very scary spell. Howl of the Moon Paint the target with animal blood to make them into a killing machine Slightly increases their Athletics, Perception, to-hit and damage. Overall a thematically interesting spell that’s pretty underwhelming for Level 3. Octopus Flesh Turn your bones into rubber. Gives you 6 in 6 Athletics to slither around, and a +1 to Wrestling. Again, cool, but not really Rank 3 material. Senescence Ages the target with no saving throw. The kind of thing that really sucks to get hit with as a player, and has almost no mechanical impact when you use it on an NPC.  RANK 4 Dopethrone Get high, ignore negative modifiers from drugs, see into the future far enough to ignore the consequences of stupid mistakes by retroactively deciding not to do them. Host the Ophidian Sage Summon a little snake creature inside your body and feed it blood in exchange for information. “ It answers questions truthfully, but its knowledge is limited. It knows everything the PCs would know if they picked up on every clue, and always drew exactly the correct conclusions” Parasitic Infestation Fills the target’s body with gross bugs. Like Bleeding Curse, but deals D4 damage to Flesh per round instead of 1. Save Against Poison to negate the damage each turn. Remote Operation Operate a machine or piece of technology remotely. You know, like the Technology skill elts you do. Spoof Identity Assume the online and legal identity of a chosen victim. Again, this is what the Technology skill is supposed to do. Except this time it’s a Rank 4 Spell. Rank 4! A spell you get at Level 7! RANK 5 This level is almost entirely D&D spells RANK 6 Same  RANK 7 Animate Artwork Draw something and then bring it to life, giving it the stats of the genuine article. Or worse than the real thing, if you don’t take your time to draw it right. Or you could just animate someone else’s painting. Flatten Sweetie, it’s time for your Rank 7 Wizard flattening. It turns you two dimensional, allowing you to slide under doors. It also triples the damage you take from physical attacks. Essentially it’s like mist form, but worse in every way. Paradoxical Revelation Speak a great secret of the universe that banishes anything not native to the material world, nukes low HD beings out of existence and paralyzes higher level ones. Remote Surveillance Enchant an item that lets you see through the eyes and senses of anyone who carries it. We’re at Rank 7, and we’re still using magic spells to do what the Technology skill did at level 1. Sculpt Flesh You know all that experimental medicine stuff that the Doctor does at first level? You get a spell that does that. At Rank 7. RANK 8 Anti-Technological Shell Create a temporary area of effect where anything more complex than bronze age technology doesn’t work. Call Down the Void Deal massive Charisma damage to everything in an area of effect by opening a portal to another world. Anything reduced to 0 Charisma is deleted from existence. Anything that survives is reduced to a soulless husk. The blast area is rendered hostile to life and deals continuing damage to anyone who remains inside it. Mind Blank Makes your mind completely invisible to detection and control, from both magical and technological means. Time Stop Stop time for everyone else, giving yourself a few seconds to do whatever you want while they stand there totally defenseless and unaware. This is a D&D standby, I call it out here because there are a LOT of NPCs and monsters we’ll run into later who have it in their back pocket. Zombie Plague You know that example consequence of failing experimental medicine, like the Doctor does at level 1? Here’s a highest-rank-in-the-game spell that also does that.  What’s my overall read on the Esoteric Enterprises spell list? Most of the additions it makes are just… not that interesting. They’re either duplicates of things other classes can already do with their skills, or they’re seriously underpowered given their level requirements. There’s not much here that really captures the grimy weirdness of something like Unknown Armies’ postmodern magic. There are a few exceptions to this. Bleeding Curse and Parasitic Infestation are cool because they deal small amounts of damage, but do so directly to Flesh, making them extremely dangerous. Dopethrone is great, and Flay is absolutely terrifying. But for the most part, the spells the players really want are the ones from the D&D list. Cure Wounds, Sleep, Invisibility, Silence, Fireball. So what’s the good news? We’re finished with the player facing rules. The next section is all DM facing, and it’s where I gradually stop saying “this is bad” and start saying “this is why I keep coming back to this game”. 90s Cringe Rock posted:Esoteric Enterprises has a lot of issues, but it's got so much heart I can't not overlook them. Oh god Emmy put that away there's blood everywhere where did you even get it, etc. PurpleXVI posted:What is it with these Modern Occult games and making spellcasting as dogshit useless as possible? It A) completely undermines the idea that arcane threats are a danger and B) it makes it completely unrewarding for the players to engage with the subsystem at all. Nessus posted:I would probably blame mindless aping of Mage: the Ascension and Unknown Armies. However, as flawed as those games may be, their magic systems being difficult had a reason, it wasn't just hard like a basic subject at a Catholic university. Falconier111 posted:Also, the allure of over-the-top crit failure tables means OSR devs often look for opportunities to shove them in, and a miscast table has great potential for cartoonish results given how heavily they associate magic with overwhelming, potentially game-breaking power (see: DnD wizards). Realism helps them justify it. The trouble is that most of the mystic miscasts are "no you can't do it". The Occultist miscasts remind me of Discworld. Magic can "do anything", but if you use it for more than pushing the lunch trolley, you tear open a portal to the Dungeon Dimensions that does 20D6 damage to everyone in the Unseen University.
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Jun 29, 2020 18:02
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Love that cover, very Kill Six Billion Demons. Interested to see how it shakes out mechanically. I'm a bit concerned that PBTA might be in the same place now that the D20 system was 15, 20 years ago - the default engine you drop into your game when you don't want to come up with your own mechanics. Not that every game needs to reinvent the wheel.
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Jun 29, 2020 20:05
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ESOTERIC ENTERPRISES PART 8: RUNNING THE GAME I’ve been very hard on Esoteric Enterprises up to this point, because I don’t think the game’s mechanics live up to what it’s trying to accomplish. The DM section (everything from this point onward) is where we turn the corner into things that make this book good. The procedural rules for running the game range from acceptable to great. And once we get to the actual content, that’s where the real magic happens. In this section, we’ll cover the game’s basic DM advice, rules for NPCs and Monsters (though not the bestiary), Reputation Mechanics, Exploring the Undercity, Encounters, and Rumors & Events. AN INTRODUCTION TO RUNNING RPGS This section begins by outlining the basic steps to get your game up and running. You use the underworld creation rules (which we haven’t encountered yet) to generate the megadungeon under the city where your game takes place, some factions to populate it, and some story hooks that let the players insert themselves into the action. Next comes a short essay on the role of the DM in Esoteric Enterprises. It doubles as a little primer on what grog D&D is supposed to be about, minus the edition war horseshit you usually get in these conversations.
RUNNING COMBAT The three takeaways from this section of the advice are
 TRAPS AND ENVIRONMENTAL HAZARDS The underworld is a dangerous place. It’s full of bullshit that makes it difficult and hazardous to navigate, and that’s before people start setting up traps. But if exploring it were easy, it wouldn’t be any fun. Traps should be placed in important areas, such as the entrance to an underworld complex or an area where valuables are kept. The fun part isn’t rolling to find a trap, or rolling to disarm it. The DM should be giving out clues that something’s not right, allowing the players to use deductive reasoning to locate, avoid or disable it. I also agree with this advice, but I wish the book was more consistent about applying it. There’s an example of play in the introduction to RPGs section where a character needed a Perception test to spot a tripwire. And the deliberate placement of traps kind of goes out the window once you get to the random dungeon generation tables, which obviously can’t arrange the traps and entrances according to a grand philosophy of game design. There will still be traps in individual rooms that hold valuables, but it’ll be more slapshod than the text implies here. Here’s one paragraph that caught my attention: Esoteric Enterprises, Page 107 posted:Once your players are experienced with traps, you can start subverting things to mess with their expectations. A classic example is a pressure plate that sets off a trap a few feet back, to get the smartass with the ten-foot-pole. Really, though, you only want to do this sort of thing once your players have proved that they’re good at spotting and dealing with traps. Before then, it will seem arbitrary and unfair. CAMPAIGNS AND EMERGENT NARRATIVES We get another page of advice on running games in the long run, and how the game world should respond to the actions of the players. Just about every example of play I’ve seen on the internet of Esoteric Enterprises has been a oneshot, where the players gen characters and do a single mission. I think this is a real shame. The best part of this game is how the world comes to life over repeat sessions, and how the players discover more of the underworld through exploration.  TONE There’s an essay on what kind of game this is supposed to be. It’s supposed to be gritty and weird, and then there’s a paragraph or two about what “weirdness” means. I like the tone of Esoteric Enterprises, with its Unknown Armies style occult underground combined with wacky fantasy elements played completely straight. Yeah, we’ve got Morlocks and Fairies and Rock People. What are you going to do about it? There’s a couple paragraphs about knowing when to ease up on something, if it’s making your players genuinely uncomfortable or upset. And if it’s something that’s core to your campaign, you might just need to play something else. Better to find a new game than play one that makes people miserable. Then there’s a page on how to bring new characters into the game when the old ones die. A lot of OSR books demand that you start every new character at level 1. This one gives instructions for how to create higher level starting characters (take a level 1 character and level them up), with a caveat that you probably don’t need to do this. I think the author underestimated the survivability difference between someone with 3 flesh and 6 grit and someone with 4 flesh and 10 grit. NPC AND MONSTER STATISTICS No, we’re not at the bestiary yet. These are general instructions for creating NPC stat blocks. Monsters and NPCs don’t get a full spread of 6 attributes, they just get specific ones called out when they’re higher or lower than average. Everything else is assumed to be 10. The base monster hit die is a D6 for both Flesh and Grit, though some monsters might have a different one. The game’s base unarmed AC is 10 (I should have mentioned this earlier, I think ti’s a good change from Lamentations) and goes up in proportion to how tough or agile a creature is. Rather than five saving throws, monsters use a single value for all saves. This is immediately followed by a table showing monsters with two different values for saves, Natural and Unnatural. When we actually get to the monster stat blocks in the back of the book, they only save. So the two save table was either copied from another book, or leftover from an earlier stage of the game’s development.  Skills are assumed to be 1 in 6, unless otherwise stated. This is important, because it means that as lovely as your characters’ stealth, perception and athletics is, the other guy is rolling at the same base rating. In the land of the clumsy, oblivious and slow, the 3 in 6 man is king. REPUTATION AND UNWANTED ATTENTION Now we’re getting into what makes the game tick! Esoteric Enterprises has a faction creation system that we’ll cover in a future chapter, and a system to track how all the factions feel about the player characters. Esoteric Enterprises, Page 112[/quote posted:The party’s reputation score for each faction is calculated as follows.  One thing you’ll notice if you crunch the numbers is that it takes a while to get a faction to really care about anything you do. If a group of level 1 players takes a job to kill members of a faction, that’s 1 for “acted hostilely”, 1 for “violence breaks out” and 1 for “completes a job that directly attacks the faction’s interests”. That’s a total of -3, which is still “uninterested”. You may have shot up our safehouse and killed one of our lieutenants, but eh, fuggedaboutit. I’m not sure if this is a bug or a feature. It seems silly, but it also addresses a real problem that games with reputation systems have: the first job or the first encounter or whatever permanently locks you into being hostile or friendly with specific factions, basically predetermining the rest of the game for you. By blunting the impact of a single job, the game slows down the snowball effect and leaves more options open for the players. You want a table that snowballs like crazy? LEGAL ATTENTION SCORES Inevitably, your psychotic behavior will attract the attention of the authorities. How much attention? There’s a table for that too. Esoteric Enterprises, Page 113 posted:It starts out at a base of 0. What do all these numbers mean in practice?  Unless your players are trying very hard not to make waves, law enforcement interest is going to continually ratchet up over the course of the campaign. And that means your chance of running into these captains of industry goes up.  The die size you use for this table is determined by how much legal heat you’ve drawn down. The high end results are really nasty. One thing I would have liked here is an acknowledgement that the NPCs you run into are also thinking about this table. Criminals and cultists are people like anyone else, and the risk of discovery is just as serious for them as it is for you. Magical creatures don’t fear the police like normal people do, but they’ve got the Men in Black to worry about. Oh yeah, there are Men in Black in Esoteric Enterprises. They’re like Delta Green or MAJESTIC 12 or whatever. We’ll talk about them when we get into the bestiary, but in brief they’re here to stop you from violating the masquerade.  EXPLORING THE UNDERCITY We start this section with an explanation of what the undercity is: a megadungeon made up of interconnected nodes, each node made of up of interconnected rooms, al linked to the surface via dungeon entrances embedded in mundane areas, the accessing of which could be an adventure in its own right. There’s a little descriptive text about rooms and what they might have in them. Monsters, treasure, traps, miscellaneous flavor details, or nothing at all. Empty rooms are important because they add breathing room that makes exploration more interesting. If every chamber is packed with danger, then which-way-to-go stops being a meaningful choice. There’s a couple sentences explaining the difference between keyed and wandering monsters. The term “keyed” is a leftover from the old days when dungeon maps had a numeric key that explained what was in each room on the map image. In this case, it’s a generic term for an NPC or monster that lives in a specific room. Wandering monsters are monsters that come from random encounters. Esoteric Enterprises, Page 114 posted:These represent the inhabitants of the undercity who might be exploring themselves, or attracted by the commotion made by the PCs. When wandering monsters might show up, roll a d6. On a roll of 1, something encounters the PCs. If the PCs have been noisy, left signs of their passing or otherwise advertised their presence, something instead shows up on a roll of 1 or 2. If the PCs are intentionally trying to draw attention - leaving bait, making loud tempting noises, etc - then an encounter arrives on 1 to 3. A roll for wandering monsters is made at the following points: RUNNING HEISTS Oh yeah, there’s heists. You’re a criminal, and not all the crimes you commit will be committed in the underworld. This section lays out basic procedures for playing out heists. Surveillance, plan, execution, complications. Then there’s a set of example challenges you’ll likely encounter on different types of heist. They start with a gas station robbery, mob bosses, wizards, museums and banks, then proceed all the way up to breaking someone out of a Men in Black facility. Then there’s a little table of police response times for when you gently caress up and the alarm is raised. I still prefer the Blades in the Dark method of running heists, where you start at the most fun part and do all the planning retroactively using your character’s special powers. But I also get how that type of fiction-first approach wouldn’t work in a grog game.  RUMORS AND EVENTS This here is the good poo poo. Every in-game week, you’ roll a couple D8s on the Underworld Events table to see what’s happening in your city. That will direct you to another table of random events. Maybe it targets a character in your group, maybe it’s a citywide event. Then there’s a final table for where the players are and what they’re doing when it happens. Put that all together, and you’re ready to go. This is something the game will do a lot from this point onward: use a group of tables as a seed for adventures. This is a tradition that goes back all the way to the earliest D&D books, the original Traveller, etc. Throw down some world creation rules and a few plot elements, and let the DM come up with the rest.         I don’t use these tables religiously. I’m in my second campaign now, and I find it’s most useful at the beginning of the game, when the wheels haven’t been set in motion yet. Once you’re a couple sessions in, the factions will be bouncing off each other and the players enough that you don’t always need a random generator. I still use table 66 because it sets the scene when events in the underworld boil over and spill out into the characters’ lives in unexpected ways. I like all these tables though. Sometimes, your faction and map generator is going to spit out a result that doesn’t have any immediate obvious hooks. This chapter is a superb “what now”. Coming up next: Hazards and Treasures of the Undercity, a section I'm really looking forward to. Leraika posted:I'm reminded of the cast/miscast in Ctech, where it's 'you cast a spell to make people heal slightly faster' versus 'you miscast to rip a screaming tear in the world and your entire party dies instantly'. BinaryDoubts posted:I was curious to see how Silent Legions, another modern-day occult-horror OSR game handled spellcasting when compared to the multifarious ways it can go wrong in Esoteric Enterprises. The short answer is, being a wizard is a lot nicer in Silent Legions. Although it's harder to acquire magic than in Esoteric Enterprises (you can't start with it, and have to learn spells or traditions from trainers/grimoires, with a skill roll needed), the worst thing that can happen is the spell failing. You can even cast spells or use disciplines that are at your level or lower without having to roll - it just costs Expertise (a recharging pool of points all characters have access to) or Madness if you can't afford it.
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Jun 30, 2020 00:49
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Falconier111 posted:An OSR game that prioritizes player comfort? I'm not going into this in the text of the review because I want to stick to the book and its contents as an artifact, without pulling in lots of twitter or blog posts. But if you're interested in Cavegirl's position on RPG safety tools, try this article.
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Jun 30, 2020 02:39
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It’s probably just my limited experience in the genre, but most of the OSR stuff I’ve encountered either ignores that concept or tries to spin it as challenging players on multiple levels. Isn’t that the sort of thing Lamentations gets accused of disregarding?
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Falconier111 posted:I need magical girl (and equivalent) character concepts STAT. I see a big hairy guy on the cover of the book. How about Carl Brutananadilewski. WHAT HAPPENED TO MY FREAKIN' STAR WAND? (I have only the vaguest idea what a magical girl is and would not be offering this if the situation weren't so dire)
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Jun 30, 2020 03:46
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ESOTERIC ENTERPRISES PART 9: HAZARDS OF THE UNDERCITY The real Esoteric Enterprises start here. In the spell list section, I complained that the spell list wasn’t particularly interesting because it was mostly D&D content, plus a few hasty reskins. This section is the antithesis of that. (almost) everything here oozes flavor and hammers home that you’re crawling around in the trash beneath the city. HAZARDS OF THE UNDERCITY Welcome to the Occult Underground, motherfucker. We’ve got:
How about… GASSES Remember when I said every character one hundred percent needs a gas mask? Turns out, the undercity is full of…
Speaking of things that can be defeated by gas masks: SPORES These are fungus monsters in the bestiary later, but this section covers the fungi that act as environmental hazards.
Good thing the next item on our agenda couldn’t care less about gas masks. SLIMES This section covers slimes that aren’t motile enough to be considered monsters. Did you know that the term “slime mold” refers to a wide variety of taxonomically unrelated single celled creatures, which can join together to form complex biological structures in times of great food scarcity? What if I told you that the food was you?
WATER This section starts off with a reminder that you’re underground beneath a city. Storm drains and sewers mean that rain above ground means flooding underground, and some tunnels might instantaneously become dangerous if the weather shifts. This will come up later when we examine the types of passage that connect dungeon nodes built using the underworld creation rules. In addition to flooding tunnels, there are several types of spicy water to be aware of in the underworld.
SICKNESS Were the slime and mushrooms not gross enough for you? This is where things get really nasty.
Diseases are yet another reason you bring a Doctor into the underworld with you. CURSES Like diseases, but magic. Inflicted by defiling things you shouldn’t touch, stealing things you’re not meant to have, and upsetting underworld creatures with magic powers. Can be removed by the Remove Curse spell, or by reversing whatever bad thing you did.
 DANGEROUS CONSTRUCTION More environmental hazards, this time manmade. Watch out for…
TRAPS Deliberately placed dungeon hazards. We’ve kvetched about perception tests and pontificated about the philosophy enough in previous posts, so let’s jump right in.
RAILWAY LINES Some of the connectors the Underworld Creation table spits out are subway lines. Subway lines are dangerous, with trains coming through every 10 minutes and niches to hide from them every 200 feet. At normal exploration speed, you aren’t going to make it, but if you dash at exploration speed you just might survive. Dual track subways are a little easier to fit down, since you can leap aside onto the alternate track if you’re paying attention (and there’s no train coming the other way). Getting hit by a train deals 3D10 damage on impact, and an additional D10 damage per round from being pushed/flattened/dragged by the train. Don’t walk along subway tracks. Just remove them from your dungeon travel calculus entirely, except as a neat place to lure NPCs and kill them, by running into the safety alcoves and then not letting them in when they chase you.  This section was a lot of fun. I'll to cover the treasure tables in the next post, since this is longer than I expected and I want to give them enough room to breathe on their own. mellonbread fucked around with this message at 23:14 on Jun 30, 2020 |
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Jun 30, 2020 22:43
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ESOTERIC ENTERPRISES PART 10: TREASURE I’m naht lootin! The reason why you’re in the undercity is to get paid. There are no big piles of GP, SP and assorted gems in Esoteric Enterprises, outside a couple entries in cursed tombs and fairy enclaves that we might cover later. The treasure tables are filled with specific entries like “Holy relics from a saint ($500)” and “Propaganda for terrorist organisations ($100)”. This treasure is distributed in three forms: rooms that are generated with a specific prewritten treasure, rooms that tell you to to roll on a specific table, and generic tables. We’ll cover the generic tables first, since they’re apt to send you to a specific table. LOOTING BODIES AND ROOMS Esoteric Enterprises has a D100 table for looting rooms, and a D100 table for looting bodies. Each of these has three categories to roll under: Civilian, Criminal and Occult. The room looting table is used for rooms that don’t mention a specific treasure table when they’re generated. There’s a 35% chance to find 1 to 35 dollars in loose money, a 25% chance to be sent to one of the other treasure tables, and a 40% chance to find a random trinket. The random trinket changes based on whether the room is Respectable, Criminal or Underworld, but is probably useless. Rubber bands, matches, a used pregnancy test. Lots of personality, at least. The body looting table is used when you kill humanoid or intelligent foes that carry items on their person. Each roll has a 25% chance to turn up 1 to 25 dollars in cash, a 20% chance to turn up a smart phone worth 100 dollars, a 19% chance of credit and debit cards worth 100 dollars, and a 36% chance of a random trinket. Like the room looting table, the body looting table trinkets are broken out into three lists depending on if the stiff was Respectable, a Criminal or an Occult Weirdo. And like the room looting table, most of the trinkets are useless crap, with a few useful or valuable items mixed in. The body looting table can’t send you to one of the better tables. TREASURE TABLES Esoteric Enterprises has four specific treasure tables, all rolled on a D30. Treasure in the Undercity The treasure table you get sent to most often. Antiques and oddities, like religious paintings or ornate dueling pistols. Value ranges from 100 to 1,500 dollars. Small chance of magic weapons. Contraband The criminal treasure table. Illegal stuff. Firearms, drugs, pornography, counterfit money, stolen credit cards. Entries range in value from 100 to a maximum of 4,800 dollars. This table can send you to the Random Narcotics table. Occult Treasure Like the Treasure in the Undercity table, but more weird, mysterious and gross. Vampire teeth, candles made of human fat, dangerous monster eggs, scrolls with random spells, footage of the Men In Black. Entries range in value from 100 to 1000 dollars. This table can send you to the Magic Weapons, Magic Items, or Random Grimoire tables. Things to Burgle Normal items you’d find if you robbed a house. Computers, appliances, wedding rings, alcohol. Entries range in value from 1 to 800 dollars. Something missing from all the treasure tables is whether the items on them are encumbering or not. Often it’s easy to determine. Pistols and smart phones aren’t encumbering when bought from the gear list, so they’re not going to weigh you down when you take them off a body. A gaming PC or a gilded skull is obviously going to take up a slot. But what about something in-between, like a tablet computer? A ring doesn’t encumber you, but does a whole jewelry box? In a game where you have five slots before you start taking penalties, this stuff matters! MAGIC WEAPONS Magic weapons are created using 3D20. The first die determines the weapon’s to-hit and damage bonuses, the second die determines what kind of weapon it is, and the third D20 determines its additional special properties. The bonuses range from +0 to +5 hit and damage, but the highest rated ones all have some special property, like “+5 to hit and damage versus entirely subterranean creatures” or “vs the forces of law and order” The weapons are a mix of modern equipment like shotguns and archaisms like two handed swords and axes. I would have liked a few more contemporary items on here - a magic stop sign or sock full of pennies or something. A magic billhook is fine if you find it in an ancient crypt under the city, I guess. The special properties have your usual D&D standbys. Talks and wants you to kill people, deals fire or electric damage, you get the picture. Then there are also some results which use unique Esoteric Enterprises mechanics. The “mutilator” result always inflicts a horrible wound on hit in addition to damage, meaning it can end fights with a single blow. Then there’s the “slaughterer” which gives you a single attack roll when you die, and if that attack roll kills something, you come back to life. I had a player with a slaughtering sledgehammer who deliberately made his last stand in the most trash filled alleyway he could find, so that when he died, he was able to smash the biggest rat within arm’s reach and survive. Let’s make a couple example magic weapons. First result of 3D20 is 5, 5, 3. That creates a crossbow ith +1 to hit, and an extra D6 fire damage. Sounds familiar. The text says “can be suppressed” and I’m not sure if that means the damage can be resisted, or if you can put a silencer on the weapon. Next roll gives us 8, 2, 4. That gives us a rifle with +2 chance to hit and an extra D6 electric damage on hit. I think Cap’n Nemo had one of these. It can also “be suppressed” according to the special power description. Final roll is 20, 19, 19. That’s a two handed sword that gives +5 to hit and damage, but only versus armed opponents. It also makes combat totally silent, with neither the user or the target making any noise. MAGIC ITEMS Magic items are also generated using 3D20. This gets you a use-case for the item, the form the item takes, and the type of magic the item does. The use-case ranges from single-use, limited charges, always-on, activates-automatically in relevant circumstances, permanent transformation, etc. The form the magic item takes can be anything from clothing and jewelry to a set of tools, to a prosthetic limb, to a camera or mask. There’s an entry for “ammunition” which overlaps a little with magic weapons. The types of magic suggest what the item might do when the activation conditions are met. They aren’t very descriptive, just words like “time”, “electricity”, “emotional manipulation”, etc. It’s up to the DM to spin it into a mechanical effect. Let’s make some magic items. First try gives us a 17, 15 and 7. A lantern with a personality that activates its emotional manipulation powers of its own accord. Two possibilities here. First is that it uses its powers to cast Suggestion (which modifies the target’s beliefs to make them more favorable) to protect the person carrying it. Second is that it uses its powers of Suggestion to protect itself. Trying again gives us 15, 3, 5. Glasses whose powers of violence are triggered by a particular misfortune, one time and one time only. I’m thinking they activate in a truly desperate combat situation, shooting out a Cyclops-style eye beam for massive damage and disintegrating. Third result is 8, 7 and 15. A mask with 14 charges left of time powers, activated on use. Probably just pick a time-based spell from the spell list and toss it on there to be activated at-will. Activate the mask to get a single round of Haste - basically one extra action or attack per charge. Inevitably, you’re going to get an item that doesn’t have an obvious mechanical effect that the DM can just gin up out of nowhere. That’s the price of a random generator. If all else fails, roll again or pick something from the prebaked items list. GRIMOIRES Sometimes, you find tomes in the underworld. Unless you’re in a cult center where the choice of holy book is obvious, you roll a D100 on the Random Grimoire table to see what’s on offer. There’s a 2% chance for each of the grimoires from the gear list to show up (total chance of 52% for a chargen purchaseable grimoire), and a 48% chance of something you can’t buy on the open market. Results 69 through 100 on the table teach you spells, but also have other effects. For example
NARCOTICS Sweet, sweet drugs. You’ve got your cocaine, your ecstasy, your krokadil (which inflicts permanent instead of temporary ability score penalties), bunch of painkillers, standard stuff. Then you’ve got your magic drugs. These inflict your usual spread of temporary attribute penalties, but have more interesting effects.
SPECIFIC MAGIC ITEMS Prebaked magic items. If this was a roguelike, we’d call these “unrandarts” - un-randomly generated artifacts. There are a handful that are just straight out of D&D, like the necklace of fireballs (throw fireballs, or set the whole thing off like a grenade belt) and the aeon stones (lets you set up “contingency” spells to activate on a specific trigger) and the decanter of endles water (lets you wake up Ignus). The rest of the entries are new, and much more interesting. The ones that caught my eye: Animating Spike Drive it through the brain of a corpse and bring it to life as an obedient undead slave. Artificial Womb Leftover serpent-man tech. Clones any flesh inserted into the input hopper and creates a fetus based on its DNA. Can create chimerical monstrosities and shoggoths by blending different samples. Burned Coat A burned and melted red pleather coat. Makes you immune to fire damage (though not smoke inhalation). Flesh Stealer Hit people with it to reduce their Flesh and increase yours by an equivalent amount, shrinking them and making yourself larger in the process. Glitch Cassettes Playing these tapes causes a random miscast event from the And Hell Shall Follow table. Hand of Glory The hand of a hanged man, dipped in wax and used as a candle. Puts people to sleep and keeps them that way until the flame goes out. Hubcaps of Speed Magic hubcaps that can be attached to any wheeled vehicle, doubling its maximum speed. Guessing this was inspired by the magic chariot wheels that nobody ever finds in The God That Crawls. Named Bullet Bonus to-hit and damage versus whoever’s name is written on it, and kills them instantly on a failed Save vs Magic. Can be found pre-inscribed, or rarely, with the name field empty, waiting to be filled in. Panoply of the Ophidian Champion Serpent man armor. Grants 10 AC, increases encumbrance by 1 level, and can be further activated to temporarily grant the wearer serpent powers: bonus HP and double their usual number of actions per round. Martian Lamp Lets you talk to a martian in order to gain occult knowledge. Requires too many Translation and Charm rolls to actually be useful. Knock the lamp over while it’s lit and you get a miscast effect from And Hell Shall Follow. Nice to see the magic items follow the spellcasting rules’ trend of “useless when used correctly, nuclear bomb when misused”. Shape-changer’s Bane Deals double damage vs shapeshifters and forces them to assume their natural form. The Subtle Knife Severs limbs when it deals damage to Flesh. Casts the spell Rip Portal on a successful Vandalism roll. Warrants of Protection An ancient document that grants you protection from a specific category of magical being. Unfortunately, you need to roll Translation every round in order to use this protection. A bit like inscribing Elbereth to ward off monsters in Nethack, except worse in every way.  And that’s it for the treasure tables. Next post, we’ll be diving into the book’s killer app: the Underworld Creation rules. I’ll generate a sample megadungeon, and then let the thread choose which sections we do a more in-depth look at.
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Jul 1, 2020 19:26
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ESOTERIC ENTERPRISES PART 11: ROLLING UP THE UNDERCITY Post Theme This is it, the moment I’ve been waiting for. We’re going to generate the goddamned Occult Underworld. As in, I’m going to generate an example undercity. I’ll talk at the end about the merits and flaws of the system as-written, and how I altered it once I had a better feel for the game. Take it away, book! Esoteric Enterprises, Page 148 posted:To create the undercity, take a piece of paper, roughly A3 sized (or two A pages next to one another). The top of the page is ‘north’, the left ‘east’ and so on. This roughly corresponds to positions on the surface. Then take a big handful of dice – of all different sizes and types, the more variety and weird dice in there the better – and drop them onto this page so that they scatter randomly across the page.   I tried to take these in direct sunlight, but the weather wasn't being cooperative. Right click view image if you're having trouble reading them Esoteric Enterprises, Page 148 posted:The lines between each complex is a long connecting tunnel. Look at the size of dice at each end of the tunnel, and check the table below to determine what form this tunnel takes. For the purposes of this table, treat dice with an unusual number of sides as d8s…  That’s… a lot of sewers. Esoteric Enterprises, Page 148 posted:Each dice itself is a complex. To determine which type, look up the number rolled on the table below. Most complexes will need to have their specific details rolled up when the party encounters them...  I’ve annotated the complexes for future reference. We’ve got: 1: Entrance 2: Reliquary 3: Cult Stronghold 4: Derelict Subway 5: Church Crypt 6: Morlock Lair 7: Shoggoth Lair 8: Cult Stronghold 9: Underworld Frontier 10: Gang Stronghold 11: Sewer Cluster 12: Cistern 13: Derelict Subway Station 14: Entrance 15: Cult Stronghold Esoteric Enterprises, Page 148 posted:Finally, work out how many complexes have an entrance from the surface. If the result is less than 4, drop enough markers (such as coins) onto the map to bring the number up to 4. Each marker represents an entrance.  This kind of bones our numbering system, but whatever. Two more entrances at 16 and 17. We need to know what kind of entrances to the surface our undercity has. Esoteric Enterprises, Page 150 posted:Rather than an entire complex, this is one simple chamber accessed from the surface in some way. How you get to the entrance chamber is determined by the dice that rolled it What’s my big issue with the map creation system? The tunnels between the complexes. There are a wide variety of sewer tunnels, storm drains and other infrastructure connecting these complexes, and they are all boring as gently caress. According to the ground scale, these tunnels go on for kilometers, meaning that traversing them at the movement speeds given in the encumbrance section is going to take hours. And with random encounters rolled every half hour, that means a virtual guarantee of an encounter in a tunnel. And that means running into monsters, NPCs, etc in the most tactically uninteresting terrain possible: a straight line, which stretches out for literal miles. After a few sessions of this, I got tired of it and just eliminated the giant rear end tunnels. Dungeon complexes connect directly to other dungeon complexes through doors, short passages or knocked down walls. If that robs the players of the thrilling experience of hiking through a historic storm drain, so be it. After this, the book lists tables for all the actual underworld complexes that go in our map nodes. We’ll let those simmer for now. It’s time to populate our underworld with factions. THE SOCIAL UNDERWORLD Creating factions and determining how they feel about one another uses the same system as the map: toss dice on a page, draw lines between them. We’ll use 2 each of D4s, D6s, D8s, D10s, D12s and D20s for this.  Esoteric Enterprises, Page 172 posted:Each dice represents a single power in the occult underworld; an organisation or particularly powerful entity. The number rolled determines what the power is, as listed on table 126.  Esoteric Enterprises, Page 172 posted:Once you’ve mapped out the different factions and powers, you’ll want to do a little creative work to pull this together into a distinct picture. Look at the commonalities between different members of a faction to work out what probably unites them. Perhaps one power is a strong leader that has united them, or they’re brought together for practical purposes, or they share an ideology. Similarly, look at the powers at each end of a line, and the relationship between them; the exact nature of their relationship can be determined. Esoteric Enterprises, Page 172 posted:Lastly, drop a final marker (a coin perhaps) into the middle of the page. Link it to a few neighbouring powers. The marker represents the PCs group as the campaign begins. They start out very familiar with those powers they’re linked to, although the relationship between them is neutral. Events once the game begins will probably alter this relationship as things progress.  The players begin the game knowing an Avatar Cult, a Street Gang, and some Vampires. Class act. Esoteric Enterprises, Page 172 posted:You’ll find that the undercity likely has a few locations such as ‘cult strongholds’, ‘surgeon’s laboratories’ and ‘gang strongholds’ that obviously have residents. Pick an appropriate power from those active in the underworld to occupy these locations (IE some sort of cult in a cult stronghold, etc). If no suitable power exists (no morlock packs to occupy a morlock lair, for example), then the residents can be assumed not to be active participants in the underworld’s politics, and instead keep to themselves. Oh, the rules say a faction that appears in the dungeon map but not the social underworld map are isolationists. So our morlock lair complex is occupied by some isolationist morlocks. But what’s my big issue with both the faction generator and the map generator? DUPLICATE RESULTS If you use a mix of low and high numbered dice, your results are going to be weighted toward the lower numbers, since the high die sizes can roll low values, but the low value dice can’t roll high values. That means your underworld will have lots of cult strongholds, sewer clusters, and too many loving bomb shelters to count. Seriously, my first undercity had enough bomb shelters that I got sick of it after the players found the second one, and surreptitiously changed all the remaining shelters they hadn’t visited to more interesting results. You’ll only see a handful of the higher numbered table results. Which is a shame, because those are some of the coolest entries. Notice we didn’t get any Fairy Grottoes or Lithic Embassies in our underworld. Hell, there are 8 results that can only be rolled on a D10 with the tens place. Fortunately, there’s an easy fix for this: only use higher numbered dice when creating the underworld map. Yes, you rob yourself of the fascinating variety of sewer tunnels the different die results can generate, but that’s a price I’m willing to pay for a more exciting undercity. Granted, you might view the weighting toward the more mundane results as a feature, especially if you’re trying not to use all the content in the book on your first campaign. But I say bring on the good poo poo first. You never know how many sessions you’re going to get out of a game, start with the fun stuff! (There are individual complexes that use the propensity for duplicates in interesting ways, by having the low level results be common empty rooms and the high numbers be interesting stuff, thereby ensuring that there’s a diversity of alternate routes through the area, around all the monsters and hazards) CREATING THE SURFACE I lied, there are no rules for creating the surface. The only details that imply anything about the surface world are the dungeon entrances. I think the game assumes you’re going to use a real-life city you’re familiar with, and throw the underworld beneath that. That’s what all the examples of play I’ve seen on the internet do. I think this is a missed opportunity. There are a lot of entries on the random event table that strongly imply the surface world is supposed to reflect events in the underworld. It would have been great to have even a little bit of advice for assigning gang territory, above-ground hideouts for factions, etc. So I drew my own surface map to go along with the underworld we’re building.  The dungeon entrances are delineated by those big “down” arrows. There are a couple locations which roughly match up to their underworld counterparts. The church is over the crypt and the cemetery is over the reliquary. The two abandoned subway stations have closed up surface counterparts. The waste outflow pipe from the storm drain implies a river, so I tossed one in there as well. TIME TO CHOOSE Complex generation is how the individual dungeon areas within the underworld are created, and is best illustrated with an example. So I’m polling the thread. DO YOU WANT TO SEE
Similarly, the underworld factions each have their own section in the back of the book that explains who they are, what they’re up to, and how to fill out their numbers. DO YOU WANT TO KNOW MORE ABOUT
Night10194 posted:A 2-handed sword of massive bonuses but only against someone else arrayed for battle is a pretty sweet magic item idea. Leraika posted:Subtle Knife seems to be a reference to the book of the same name. mellonbread fucked around with this message at 02:31 on Jul 2, 2020 |
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Jul 2, 2020 01:28
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ESOTERIC ENTERPRISES PART 12: COMPLEXES, CULTS, AND OCCULT BLOODLINES In our last post, we created the big underworld map and some factions for The Spit, our imaginary Esoteric Enterprises city. Now we’ll look at the generation process for some individual dungeon complexes that make up the larger map, and get an in-depth look at a couple factions. We’ll handle the complexes first. COMPLEX CREATION Esoteric Enterprises, Page 150 posted:There’s a simple method for creating a randomly generated underground complex map for player characters to explore. We’ll make two complexes to demonstrate how the rules work. Underworld Frontier Falconier111 posted:The hell is an Underworld Frontier? Our underworld frontier is map location 9 on the big dungeon map. We’ll use 2 each of D4s, D6s, D8s, D10s, D12s and D20s for this, along with a single coin to make the chambers.  Like with the big underworld map, the passages between the rooms in the Underworld Frontier are determined by the size of the dice on either side. Esoteric Enterprises, Page 159 posted:The connecting tunnels in this sort of complex vary wildly. By default, a tunnel between rooms is a now-dry sewer tunnel, four feet in diameter. Look at the dice-size of the chamber at either end for variations on this.  Now I’ll add the chambers from the big table, corresponding to the numbers rolled on the dice.  I’ll post the descriptions from the table here. Esoteric Enterprises, Page 159, Table 98 posted:1: Empty save for ankle-deep water. Also look up the dice size on the table below for appearance… Esoteric Enterprises Page 159, Table 99 posted:D4: Dead fish scattered about. Finally, we need to add passages to the other dungeon areas. Our Underworld Frontier connects to the abandoned subway station to the North, the gang stronghold to the East, and the underground parking garage to the Southeast.  So, how did we do? I definitely see the logic in where the trapped rooms ended up - surrounding the entrance to the gang stronghold on the East side of the map, and the path into the area from the South. We can revisit our faction map and figure out whose graffiti that is, or just assign it to the gang that lives to the Southeast. Same with the impaled bodies, though I don’t know that a criminal gang would be dumb enough to dump their kills three rooms away from their own doorstep. What could be improved? Well to put it simply, this Underworld Frontier is boring. By using a mix of dice, we didn’t get higher than an 8 on any die. We missed out on several much more interesting chambers. Esoteric Enterprises, Page 159, Table 98 posted:14: Infested with some sort of fast-growing fungus or slime. A line of harsh chemicals painted in a ring across the wall, floor and ceiling of each entrance provides a barrier the slime can’t grow across, but if this line is broken, the fungus will be able to spread, taking over other rooms in a matter of days. Esoteric Enterprises, Page 159, Table 98 posted:3: Two sets of corpses , from two different factions, dead from the outbreak of violence between them. Roll on table 77 (I loot the bodies) a few times for what’s on them, and check the dice-size on the table below for the room’s appearance This is a bit harder to fix than the underworld creation section, because in this case you do lose something if you go to all D20s. The passages connecting the rooms are much more interesting on the micro scale of a single dungeon node, rather than the miles of identical sewers the overword map produces. Similarly, the chamber descriptors also rely on the size of the die that generated the room, and they matter for gameplay as well. You could always dice for the passages and room properties, but then you’re rolling a bunch more dice to get the same result. Let’s make another complex, and see if the rules-as-written don’t treat us better this time. Reliquaries Falconier111 posted:I'd like to see how you make a Reliquary an entire complex. I’ll use the same dice as last time. There are complexes in the book that have results from 30 to 00, requiring a D10 with a tens place, but not this one. Since I did the procedure step by step for the last complex, I’m going to skip documenting each stage and show you the finished map that our rules generated. Here are the corridor and chamber descriptors we’ll be working with. Esoteric Enterprises, Page 171 posted:The corridors in reliquaries are sturdy, skilfully constructed tunnels lined with brick or stone. Each is five feet wide, seven feet high with an arched roof. There are sconces every twenty yards or so to hold a torch or candle, but these are unlit when the PCs enter the complex. Esoteric Enterprises, Page 171, Table 124 posted:D4: Bare brick  What’s going on in our reliquary? Esoteric Enterprises, Page 171, Table 123 posted:1: Totally empty, save for dust… (I promise when we get to the bestiary, we’ll go over cave barnacles and shoggoths and angry fossils and all these other underworld inhabitants) Misc Thoughts on Complex Creation Despite all the rocks I just threw at them, I like the complex creation rules. I respect the attempt to use a single “overloaded” die to generate both a single room, a descriptive text for that room, and the passages leading out of that room. Compared to something like Castle Gargantua (a dungeon generator with a different philosophy that I might review some other time), the result is a lot faster to put together at the table, requiring a third as many die rolls. But, the Castle Gargantua results are much more evocative. The complexes will take some manual fine-tuning if you want them to make sense. It’s easy to end up with a cult stronghold where all the checkpoints and traps are stuck in a corner, with all the treasure stored by the entrance. You can easily end up with a route through a complex completely blocked by a room with an impassible hazard. While this can set up some cool metroidvania style “come back with fire immunity to pass through” interactions, you might also be stuck wondering how the smugglers get to the black market through the room filled with instant death spores. I’ll go over this in more detail when we get to the bestiary, but in brief: the game has different random encounter tables for different dungeon areas. Encounters in ruins, encounters in sewers, flooded places, holy places, abandoned infrastructure, the list goes on. You roll on whichever one is the most appropriate for the area you’re in. One thing the rules don’t tell you is how to populate dungeon areas that are owned by a specific faction. We have a gang stronghold on our map, how many gangsters from the gang go in the gang stronghold? All of them? Half? How do I distribute them throughout the rooms? In my home games, one thing I did when I got rid of the endless sewer tunnels between complexes is I switched over from one passage between complexes to two. A connecting line on the big underworld map means that there are two chambers in that complex that lead to the other complex, rather than one. The other way I cheat is to just set duplicate values to something else if I don’t like them. Obviously I didn’t do that with either of our examples. Keep in mind that we’ve barely scratched the surface of all the possible dungeon areas in EE. There are 29 different complex templates, although a few of those are variations on other (ex Shoggoth Lairs, Lich Sanctums and Morlock Pits are made from the same template as Underworld Frontiers, Sewer Clusters or Buried Ruins) EXAMPLE FACTIONS Enough shoggoths and sewers, let’s flesh out some of the factions who live in the Spit. The book has a list of faction types, some descriptive text for each, and some dice to roll to see how many of each NPC type there are in the faction. Sometimes they have a table or generator for additional information, like what powers a vampire has, or what God a cult worships. Speaking of cults... Avatar Cults Falconier111 posted:I'd love to see what an Avatar Cult is LeSquide posted:I'd also like to see an Avatar cult! We’ll cover this in the bestiary in more detail, but to summarize: cults in Esoteric Enterprises are generated using a random roll table laid over a generic template. The table has 30 Gods, each with associated aspects, associated NPCs or monsters, and a spell list that the NPC cultists gain access to as they increase in power. So in order to make our Avatar Cult, we first have to figure out what God they worship. A single D30 gets us a result of 13. That’s The Idea of Thorns, God/Goddess(?) of Plants, wounds, insanity, the green world, and the fall of civilization. First, let’s pick the avatar. The list says “various plant-monsters/Murder Children”. I’m going to skip ahead to the plant bestiary and make it an intelligent Shambling Mound, because Swamp Thing is cool. An 18 INT murder child would also be kind of cool, like Alia Atreides as a druid. But on the other hand, Swamp Thing! The rest of the cult is stratified by rank. Higher ranked cultists have bigger HP pools, better saves, and access to more spells. Esoteric Enterprises, Page 176 posted:There are only d6 each of Cult Novices, Lay Cultists and Cult Fanatics. However, there are a full 2d10 each of Inner Circle Initiates, as well as d6 each of the cult’s associated NPCs, and Magisters. 2 Cult Novices 1 Lay Cultist 6 Cult Fanatics 15(!) Inner Circle Initiates 6 Associated NPCs 4 Magisters I’m going to say the Associated NPCs are Murder Children - stealthy, amoral, knife wielding kids from the “Occult Weirdos” section of the bestiary. Maybe the avatar had them all specially created as potential messiahs, like in that weird Constantine/Swamp Thing crossover. (Something we’ll see later in the bestiary is that there’s a massive power gap between some of the cults’ associated NPCs. The Dionysis cult’s associated NPCs are assorted crackheads. The Leviathan cult’s associated NPC is a loving aboleth) If I was prepping this for use at the table, I’d copy down the cultist templates and fill in their spells from the Idea of Thorns list. The Magisters get Command, Speak with Animals, Silence, Howl of the Moon, Awaken Plants, Create Illusion. The ranks leading up to that get pieces of the list, with everyone being able to cast Command. NPC cultist spellcasting uses a variant of the mystic spellcasting rules that we’ll get into when we hit the monster manual, but a room full of people casting Command at you is a force to be reckoned with. Revisiting our social underworld map from last week, the Avatar Cult is engaged in all-out war with one street gang, controls another, and is being slowly infiltrated by spies from a local corrupt business, who probably views their insane insights and magic powers as a precursor to a marketable product. They’ve got a good relationship with another minor cult, but they rarely interact. I like this result. It wasn’t hard to take the random generators and come up with some narrative backing for the dice results. Let’s see if the tainted bloodline keeps it up. Tainted Bloodline Falconier111 posted:I'm also curious about how the game treats Tainted Bloodlines. To determine the nature of our Tainted Bloodline, we roll a D20, which tells us both the elders, and what monstrous creatures their descendents resemble. A 9 gives us two Death Knights, and their descendents, which have the powers of Vengeful Wights. Death Knights are intelligent, plate-armored skeletons who wander around the undercity looking for quests and challenges. If you engage one in hand to hand combat, you both become immune to damage from anyone else until the duel is over. Death Knights rule. How do they reproduce? Absolutely no idea. A Vengeful Wight is an intelligent undead animated by a burning desire to avenge its own death. Aside from the usual undead immunities and weaknesses it doesn’t really have any special properties, other than healing HP every time it scares someone. The trick to getting away from these guys is to climb to a high place and pull the ladder up behind you. Everyone knows wight men can’t jump. So our tainted bloodline has a pair of Death Knights, and 3D6 of their first generation descendents, Vengeful Wights. The rules text mentions that the “pure blood” monster people might not actually have the full stat block of the associated creature, but some abilities copied over. I think Vengeful Wights are plain vanilla enough that there’s really nothing to strip-out, so let’s just use their statline as-is. Maybe give them guns like normal people, instead of improvised bludgeons. In addition to the progenitors and inner circle, the corrupt bloodline also has 4D10 of of thugs and normal people, created by the dilution of their monstrous heritage through interbreeding with mundane humanity. Again, not sure how that works with Wights. Our total is 2 Death Knights 9 Vengeful Wights 13 Thugs 14 Useless Civilians A bloodline of undead beings, motivated by honor, chivalry and revenge. Sounds like someone sinned against their ancestors some time in the ancient past, and they’ve been searching for vengeance ever since. Kind of like House Montressor, with the snake biting the dude stepping on it and the motto “NO ONE WOUNDS ME WITH IMPUNITY” Who are they trying to get revenge on? Our faction table says they’re currently fighting the Corrupt Business in the streets, so the company is probably owned by a descendent of the bloodline’s original enemy. Or stole an ancestral magic item, or refuses to give back their estate, or something. I’ll admit the logistics of this one are a bit fuzzy, but I still like it. UP NEXT In the next post, we’ll dig into the random encounter tables and the game’s NPC list and bestiary. This is going to be another content rich section that will probably take a few posts to get through, even just hitting the highlights. We haven’t explored any of my favorite factions in the game, because neither of them showed up when we created our underworld. Thankfully, they’ll show up in monster manual. Their dungeon areas are also some of the coolest in the game, so maybe we’ll talk about those too when the time comes. Nemo2342 posted:So far, it feels like you would need to rip out and/or modify so much of Esoteric Empires that I don't know that much of the original would remain. BinaryDoubts posted:My feeling is that I'd just rip out most of the random tables and use them with Silent Legions, which, while not exciting, is at least functional. Plus combining the dungeon generation with the Cthulhu generation (from Silent Legions) could result in some interesting results. Looking forward to hearing more about Silent Legions. I had a couple players bring it up in contrast to EE, but I don’t think they themselves had ever actually read it. Xiahou Dun posted:...why is East on the left, against how all actual maps in the West work? Speleothing posted:That was my first thought, too. Midjack posted:I'm betting typo since e and w are adjacent on most English keyboards and both words will pass a spell check and brain out to lunch level of proofreading.
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Jul 3, 2020 04:17
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Into the Odd is a neat game. I don't love it, but I think it's a step in the right direction from the D20 system. Half the ability scores, no ability score modifiers. I don't love the combat system, but I at least appreciate the effort to streamline all the tedious rolling-to-hit. Trouble is that once every attack automatically deals damage, any action that doesn't deal damage is a waste of a precious opportunity to end the fight sooner - which ends up undermining all the creativity and player innovation and so on that the game tries to foster. I played a little Agents of ODD, a hack for running the game in the BPRD, SCP or Delta Green settings. I think it had a rule that when multiple characters or NPCs attacked the same target, only the highest damage roll counted - maybe an attempt to mitigate this problem. The other issue I remember is that advancement is primarily through finding magic items. Which is fun because it means you have more options without necessarily just becoming more powerful. But also means progression depends entirely on the DM continually thinking up wacky artifacts that aren't boring but don't totally break the game.
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Jul 3, 2020 05:42
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Archimedes "Arch" Brabrand, lawyer with a gun
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Jul 3, 2020 19:02
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BinaryDoubts posted:The final section (before we hit the actual rules) reminds the reader to focus on making “characters that work”: no lone wolves, no traitors, and no characters who display an “obstinate refusal to learn” the truth of the occult world (especially when they are joining a campaign in progress). Now that I think of it, some OSR games have the same problem. Think of how many Lamentations modules are packed full of cursed treasures that delete your character when you pick them up. How many of those can you throw into a game before the players just refuse to touch anything? How much fun is that?
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Jul 3, 2020 19:38
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ESOTERIC ENTERPRISES PART 13: ENCOUNTERS, COPS, CRIMINALS AND CIVILIANS In this update, I’m going to tackle the encounter tables, along with the beginnings of the monster manual. Esoteric Enterprises’ base wandering monster chance is 1 in 6 every 3 turns, that is every 30 minutes. This chance is also rolled when the players do something noisy, or when they enter an area likely to be populated, like a gang or cult stronghold. The chance of an encounter goes up to 2 in 6 if the players are noisy and leave evidence of their presence, and 3 in 6 if they’re deliberately attracting attention. LOCATION BASED TABLES When this D6 roll calls for an encounter, the DM rolls on one of the encounter tables appropriate for the locale. All these tables use a D12, and can send you to other tables that have specific themes. There are ten location based tables.
THEMED TABLES There are 16 of these and many them use a D20 instead of a D12, so I’m going to hit the highlights instead of giving them in exhaustive detail. Some of them include a little descriptive text for what the people and monsters are doing when you encounter them.
The flaw with these tables is that some of the results are themselves things that have to be randomly generated. Paradox Beasts, Chimeras and Dragons are all creatures that Esoteric Enterprises creates by slapping random roll tables onto basic templates. Fine if you’ve got one in a keyed room, prepared in advance. Less so when you have to generate it on-the-fly in the middle of the game. That’s something I’ve found about Esoteric Enterprises in general, though. Sometimes the players just have to wait while the DM creates some part of the world that sprang into being because they decided to visit it today. I keep a playlist of Loading Screen music in the Roll20 I use for this game. Speaking of delaying while you come up with stuff on the fly, time for the moment I’ve been teasing for this entire review: the actual NPCs and monsters themselves. These are broken out into sections, so we’ll chew through them one at a time. LAW ENFORCEMENT Remember that big table of law enforcement encounters in the rules section? Note that under their protective layer of Grit, all the regular old police officers in the book have a scant 3 Flesh, because they’re mundane humans. If you get a surprise round on them, you can kill them with a stiff breeze. Otherwise, be ready for a tough fight. Security Guards have a “stab vest” (the author is from the UK, where these are more common) and a nightstick, but the greatest threat they pose is their radio, which they use to call the actual police. The game says they’re poorly armed, but their nightstick deals the same damage (D8) as a handgun. Police Officers are your regular old beat cops. They have WIS and STR 13, meaning they get a +1 above the base Athletics, Forensics, Perception and Vandalism. The text notes that depending on which country your game is set in, the cops might have stunguns and batons, or actual handguns. Plain Clothes Officers also include undercover police, although the two concepts aren’t quite the same in real life. They wear a stab vest and concealed carry pistol under their clothes, giving them the same armor and attack as a beat cop, but trade their STR bonus for CHA instead. Police Dogs have 4 in 6 Perception and a bite attack for D8 damage, giving them the same damage output as an armed officer. Riot Cops wear heavy armor and carry shields and stun batons. They get a STR and DEX bonus (both of which should be negated by the riot armor) and wear gas masks, but interestingly the game doesn’t give them tear gas grenades or launchers. Or have any rules for those at all. Firearms Officers are what we in the US call SWAT teams - guys with heavy armor and military style firearms, called in to deal with armed suspects. They’ve got long guns (though in the US so do beat police, kept in the patrol car) and heavy armor. If they’re armed with the automatic rifle, their four hit dice allow them to potentially spray four targets with the covering fire action. Again absent are flashbangs and tear gas grenades, the two things most associated with police raids. Police Marksmen are snipers. The same stat block as a firearms officer with a different weapon. They have a rifle that gives them massive accuracy bonuses if they use an aim action before firing, or a massive penalty if they don’t, so they effectively shoot every other round. The other thing missing from the Law Enforcement list is a Detective of some kind - a police officer who pursues the player characters based on the specific crimes they commit. Probably with high Forensics and Perception, as well as above-base INT. Then you could give the detective a personality, making them a rival or nemesis for the players.  MEN IN BLACK The Men in Black show up when the occult underworld spills out into the real world. They’re here to maintain the masquerade, by arresting, containing, coopting or destroying the supernatural when it attracts too much attention. Like the police, they have a scaling response that spits out more powerful foes the more trouble the players cause. Men In Black Field Agents are 5 hit-die badasses who show up in suits, shades and earpieces to take command when the normal cops see something they shouldn’t. They have 13 in every stat, a pistol that does as much damage as a shotgun, their attacks ignore supernatural damage resistance and deal double damage to undead, and each turn they spend brandishing their badge, they have a 3 in 6 chance to cast Command, Sleep, Silence, Dispel Magic, or Antimagic Shell. Even a couple of MIBs is cause for alarm. Oh and their single die of Flesh gives them 6 points, because not all hit dice are created equal. Men In Black Paladins wear masks over their scarred faces and speak in a whisper. They do everything a field agent does, but their spellcasting chance is upped to 5 in 6, and their spell list includes Suggestion, Dispel Magic, Protection from Weapons, Spectral Step, Spell Immunity, and Time Stop. If they spot you and start casting, you’re in some real loving trouble. Drop time stop, use the extra few seconds to apply all the buffs, then drop a time stop again and kick your rear end while you’re frozen. They have 2 dice of Flesh, indicating they’re no longer human. Men In Black Abominations wear black glass masks, crackle with electricity, and never speak. Looking at them for the first time has a chance to stun you for D4 rounds, and they can provoke that again whenever they want by taking off their mask. They have a touch attack that wipes your memory of the last 5 minutes. And that’s it. Honestly these guys are less scary than the Paladins, despite their ability to disable the entire group by looking at them. CAREER CRIMINALS These loveable rascals come in two categories: petty criminals and mobsters. Their stat blocks get used for a lot of factions. Everything from street gangs and crime families, to mercenaries and tainted bloodlines. Thugs are the generic low level criminal statline. They carry a pistol or a knife. They get 5 HP from their one die of Flesh, but only 2 from their one die of Grit. I guess they have a D10 for one and a D4 for the other? Anyway they’re only two hit dice total, so not exactly the Napoleon of Crime. Drug Pushers are one HD criminals, one step above “useless civilians” in their stats. The only thing to note here is their selection of drugs, rolled on a D6. Chance of weed, acid, salvia, opium, mushrooms, or cocaine Smugglers lack the staying power of Thugs, but have 3 in 6 for Stealth, Perception and Athletics. If rolled as part of the Smuggler faction, you’ll have already figured out what goods they’re interested in transporting. If you just got them from a random encounter table, you roll a D6 to see what they’re carrying. Chance of 2,000 dollars in cash, LSD, d4 random spell scrolls, a random grimoire, PCP, or d4+1 cold iron rapiers. Muggers are almost identical to Thugs, and I’m not sure why they’re in the game as their own stat block. The Thug stat block specifically says That thugs commit muggings. Organ Harvesters have a +1 to Dexterity and a 5 in 6 in Medicine, which they use to cut spare parts out of living or freshly dead victims. Mobsters are the criminals you worry about. They’ve got 16 STR and DEX, giving them good Athletics and Stealth, and they get +5 to hit with both guns and hand weapons. There are also stats for Mob Lieutenants and Mob Bosses which are just upgraded mobsters with better chance to hit, hit dice, saves, etc. Hitmen have the same stat block as mobsters, but the book calls out their more expansive equipment list, including scope rifles, night vision goggles, caltrops and “other tools of the trade” as necessary for the job. Bodyguards are tanky hoodlums here to protect their clients from harm. Like the player character class, they get a boost to Perception. Unlike player Bodyguards, NPC Bodyguards get the ability to step in front of attacks that would hit their client, eating the damage in their place. For all the emphasis the game’s spell list puts on hacking, there isn’t a cybercriminal template. I don’t know what you would actually do with an NPC that specialized in that, but the game seems to think it’s important. MUNDANE CIVILIANS Regular people, misfits and troublemakers who don’t count as career criminals. Some are vaguely aware of the occult underworld, others aren’t even supposed to be here. Junkies have garbage stats, the only reason they get their own stat block is that every time they shoot up, they have a 1 in 6 chance to manifest one of the following powers from the Spook powers list: Ambush Surgeon, Lie Detector, No Reflection, Tremor Sense, Slippery Mind, Mesmerizing Gaze, Smell Magic, or Mental Communication. I think this list could be better chosen, half this stuff would never actually come up in play if you rolled it in an encounter. Exploring Kids are teenagers wandering the undercity on a dare, leaving empty cider bottles and crisp packets as they go. They get a bonus to save versus traps and environmental hazards. Exploring Kids show up as hangers-on to the Exploration Project faction. Urban Explorers are exploring kids all growed up, with better stats but nothing else worthy of note. They make up the bulk of an exploration project faction. Hoboes are the Useless Civilian stat block with slightly more Flesh and a knife. They don’t want trouble and will only defend themselves as a last resort. Graffiti Artists are Useless Civilians with a spray-can flamethrower as an area attack. Don’t try this at home, kids. They can show up in an exploration project or occult artists’ collective. Repair Crews are here to maintain and repair the city’s infrastructure. I really like the book’s descriptive text here: Esoteric Enterprises, Page 191 posted:The crews that deal with the deep underground quickly learn that there are things down there that their employers won’t talk about. They become insular, superstitious little teams; each repair task treated like a dangerous mission. Emergency Responders are firefighters and paramedics. They don’t check morale for anything non-supernatural, and are the least likely of any Mundane Civilians to panic when something horrible happens, but also the most likely to die horribly. They have a 4 in 6 in Perception, Drive, Athletics and Medicine, and get a bonus to saves vs traps and hazards. Professional Doctors have 5 in 6 medicine and a pool of 10 “healing points” they can use to repair Flesh injuries. They aren’t afraid of blood and gore, but most have never been shot at. Professional Doctors show up as retainers for factions like Corrupt Businesses, Crime Families and Mercenaries. Useless Civilians are the catch-all for mundane humans not covered by any other entry in this section. They’ve got 2 HP and no attacks, and they respond to danger by running away or hiding. What would I add to this section? I think we’re missing a sleazy business executive type, someone with high Charisma and Contacts who doesn’t know much about the occult underworld, but is very good at turning unexpected opportunities into profitable business ventures. That’s going to do it for this post. Coming up next: Occult Weirdos, Cults, Undead and Constructs. Falconier111 posted:I was worried “tainted bloodline” would mean “isolated poor people commit incest until they stop being human” since that’s something even some woke people fall victim to Ultiville posted:That tainted bloodline rules. Night10194 posted:Yeah, Death Knight family is cool. The Tainted Bloodline just being cool monsters and their magically powered kids and buddies is better than a lot of the places it could have gone. Speleothing posted:The classic tainted bloodlines are almost always Lovecraft stuff or sometimes vampires, so it's cool to see other options on the random table.
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Jul 3, 2020 20:17
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ESOTERIC ENTERPRISES PART 14: OCCULT WEIRDOS AND CULTISTS I've got the day off for 4th of July Weekend. The County now has double the Coronavirus cases we did in the first wave, and I'm sure as hell not going anywhere today. So gently caress it, more Esoteric Enterprises! We’re still working our way through the monster manual in the back of the book. We’ve got past most of our mundane humans. From this point onward we’ll be working with magicians, machines and monsters. I know I said last post that we'd cover constructs in this post, but I was mistaken. They're a ways away, and we'll have our hands full just with... OCCULT WEIRDOS This section starts with NPC Occultists, who cast from a memorized list and have a spellbook with spells in it. They have lots of hit dice but not much HP, since they use a D4 hit die (the game doesn’t actually tell us this, but we can infer it from the player version of the class, and from looking at their HP values). Underground Librarians are respectable, independently wealthy academics who moonlight as low level sorcerers. They’ve got Shield and Sleep memorized for self defense, and carry three scrolls around by default: Sleep, Bookspeak and a random third scroll. Despite being Occultists, the game doesn’t give them a Translation score, but does mention they’ve got 16 INT, so it has to be at least 3. They also get a bonus to Saves vs Magic, which all the other NPC casters also get. Occult Assistants are Occultists in training. They have no spells memorized, but can read from scrolls without rolling Translation, like an Occultist. They get a scroll of Sleep and a random Scroll, along with a baseball bat to hit things with. Reanimators are low level Necromancers, just beginning their corpse-raising careers. They have Turn Away Undead, Darkness, Animate Dead and Invisibility memorized, as well as Zombie Plague and Eyes of the Dead in their spellbook. The stat block specifically says Animate Dead is memorized dangerously, meaning that it’s too high level a spell for the Reanimator to cast normally, and they have to roll a Save vs Magic or risk a miscast if they use it. That would imply that Zombie Plague is also too high-level for them to cast safely. A lot of the NPC casters we’ll meet in this section will have spells memorized dangerously, so look out for that. Pyromancers are fire based casters, burn-scarred and stinking of brimstone as they plumb the secrets of elemental flame. Prepared spells are Create Fire (twice), Wall of Fire (memorized dangerously), and Resist Fire. Spellbook also has Fireball and Heat Metal. I think Fireball should have gone in a prepared slot, since it’s what you’d most associate with a fire wizard. They can also toss molotovs, which are area attack weapons that deal half the damage of a grenade. Illusionists are masters of manipulation, capable of altering perception and disguising themselves. They’ve got Command, Message, Create Illusion (memorized dangerously), and False Sound in their prepared slots, plus Mirror Image and Feeblemind in their spellbook. You may be noticing a trend of NPC spellcasters who can’t cast their most thematically appropriate spells without rolling for a miscast. Just like the player characters! Arachnophiles are spider obsessed magicians beginning to transform into spiders themselves, “with chitinous plates beneath their clothing, and glossy black chelicerae and pedipalps within their cheeks, ready to unfold.” They get Spider Climb, Message, Parasitic Infestation (memorized dangerously) and Web in their prepared slots, as well as Speak with Animals and Remote Surveillance in their spellbook. Personally I think Spider Climb should just be an innate ability if they’re transforming into a spider already. They also get a bite attack that does bonus poison damage. Chthonicists rock. They’re attuned to elemental earth, and can both sense and shape stone. They have Spider Climb, Shrink, Octopus Flesh (memorized dangerously), and Heat Vision (memorized dangerously) in their prepared slots, and Turn Rock To Mud and Shape Stone in their spellbook. I’d throw out Octopus Flesh and Heat Vision and just give them Rock to Mud and Shape Stone memorized, since both those are the entire point of being a rock wizard. Oh and Flesh to Stone, if you want to be nasty. Technomancers have all those stupid Technology skill duplicating spells from the spell list. Guess Password, Mending, Spoof Identity (memorized dangerously), Erase Data, plus Techspeak and Anti-technological Shell in their spellbook. They also have 5 in 6 Technology skill, which makes most of those spells obsolete. Hypnotists have a selection of mind altering magic, and are usually defended by a group of mentally dominated thralls. The book calls them “Supremely dangerous but rarely acted against”. Spells are Command, Suggestion, Sleep, Gease (memorized dangerously), plus Fear and Mental Network in the spellbook. Sleep is your crowd controller, and Suggestion and Gease can both remove a single target each from the fight. Vivimancers are masters of meaty magic. There are lots of NPC fleshsmiths in the book, but these are the ones who do so using the Occultist rules. They have better physical stats than the other caster and a couple claw attacks. They have Cure Wounds, Shrink, Regenerate (memorized dangerously) and Flay memorized, plus Sculpt Flesh and Clone in their spellbook. Flay is their real terror weapon, dealing D12 damage directly to Flesh and potentially deleting a character in one action. Puissant Sorcerers are your top level wizards, with a huge spell list. Darkness, Bleeding Curse, Unseen Servant, Spider Climb, Invisibility, Disintegrate (memorized dangerously), Suggestion, Animate Artwork (memorized dangerously), Senescence, Spell Immunity, Protection from Weapons. Spellbook contains all these, and additionally Clone, Magic Jar, Permanency, Contingency and Mist Form. Potential access to any other spell they might need, too. I don’t like NPCs with huge spell lists, they demand too much mental energy from the DM to figure out what they actually do in a fight. I don’t love Pathfinder, but I appreciate how it gives “tactics” sections for all its high level casters, to explain how they best use their abilities. That’s all the NPC Occultists. The rest of the Occult Weirdos use other rules for their special powers.  Fleshcrafters are fleshsmiths who use biotechnology instead of magic to sculpt meat, searching for unblemished human specimens and strange mutants to use in their experiments. In combat, they can choose between making four claw attacks, or by injecting the target with a syringe. The syringe is the real killer, with a choice of truly nasty effects on a failed Save vs Poison. Esoteric Enterprises, Page 194 posted:• Complete paralysis 2d4 rounds. Urban Shamans are Mystics that gain their power from petty spirits which infest the city, like the small gods from Discworld. In exchange, they must constantly converse with and propitiate these minor deities, which makes them look insane to people not plugged into the occult underworld. NPC Mystics have an X-in-6 chance to cast a spell each time they try, without having to roll on the Mystic miscast table if they fail. loving cheaters. Urban Shamans get a 2 in 6 chance to cast Bleeding Curse, Unseen Servant, or a random mystery spell. I don’t like this design, it doesn’t do anything cool with the petty spirits swarming around them. Like if you attack an Urban Shaman, the spirits respond aggressively and you suffer death from a thousand magic cuts. Missed opportunity. Speakers for the Dead are Mystics who see dead people, tormented by visions of the damned. What does that mean, mechanically? It means a a 2-in-6 chance to cast either Command, Turn Away Undead or a ~mystery spell~ (tildes straight out of the book). Again, a missed opportunity. The descriptive text is cool and evocative, and the mechanical implementation is a yawn. Slashers are affectless serial killers who wear perfect blank masks. They get two hatchet attacks per turn and automatically inflict the Bleeding Out condition if they deal damage to Flesh. I like them mechanically, but I really don’t like emotionless monsters that attack you on sight and can’t be reasoned with. I think they violate the social contract that OSR games revolve around, and need to be used sparingly. Death-cult Assassins are like Slashers, but they also have a 3-in-6 chance to cast Silence, Invisibility or Bleeding Curse. They’re silent, but communicate through sign language, which is kind of neat. Murder-children are little mini slashers, but unlike their grown up counterparts they’re loud, boisterous, and love what they’re doing. They can also be reasoned with “so long as your reasoning doesn’t rely on appeals to their conscience”, which makes them more interesting from a gameplay perspective. Making the monsters kids is a cheap shock, but whatever. Sometimes cheap tricks are the most effective kind. Wendigos are cannibals who hunt in packs, using stealth and traps to surprise and corner prey before feasting. They don’t have any supernatural abilities besides the ability to track people by scent. Their inventory is full of bear traps. Latent Psychics are psychonauts just beginning their transformation into posthumans. They still view their powers as mental illness and have trouble controlling them. They’ve got garbage stats, but also a maximum of three powers from the following list: Esoteric Enterprises, Page 195 posted:• Know instinctively when they’re being lied to. Posthumans are the next stage of a Latent Psychic’s transformation. They’re comfortable with their powers, and a little egotistical as a result. They have a different pick-list of abilities to choose from. Esoteric Enterprises, Page 195 posted:• Breath water and swim with perfect manoeuvrability. Prometheans are super-beings, randomly generated by genetic inheritance. Some of them pass as normal people and achieve greatness in real life. Others can’t fit in and descend into the occult underworld. A lot of them get picked up by the Men in Black, and become Paladins and Abominations. Either way, they’ve got superb physical stats, 25 grit, and the following pick list of abilities: Esoteric Enterprises, Page 195 posted:• Create fireballs at will: all in the blast radius must Save vs Hazards or take d6 damage. And that’s all our Occult Weirdos. The NPC Casters are likely to end up in your Experimental Ritualist and Occultist Cabal factions, and less likely to show up in your Occult Artist Collective or Exploration Project. Altered Medics and Fleshcrafters usually show up in the Mad Surgeon or Science Project factions. Posthumans, Psychics and Prometheans can show up in a Tainted Bloodline.  CULTS Cults are generated using a template and a roll table. There are 30 Gods in Esoteric Enterprises, each with theming, spell lists, and monsters/NPCs associated with them. There are stat blocks for all the cultist ranks, each of which gets better stats and more spells from the cult spell list. The cultist ranks are
Let’s get those thirty Gods out of the way.
I know people weren’t happy with the use of real-world Gods in the Manual of Planes review, but I like the spread of cultures, religions, fiction and nonfiction here. I think the author mashed up Sekhmet (Lion Headed Goddess of War) with Sobek (Crocodile Headed God of the Nile), and Google thinks some of the non-English names were spelled incorrectly. The bolding is mine. I wanted to highlight how some of these Gods have seriously powerful servitors, way in excess of the others. I like this list. Some of the entries are really evocative, like Voorm being the chief God of Morlocks, or Amanita cultists deliberately cultivating mycolid infestations. The problem is that there are too drat many Gods, a lot of which are duplicates of the same concept. The Black Goat and the Idea of Thorns are essentially the same Sex and Death nature Goddess, and both Yig and Jormagandr are Snake Gods. I know that real world pantheons usually included significant overlap in their deities’ aspects, but a smaller number of Gods here would have meant each could be developed a little more. Collapse some of them under the same title, say Idea of Thorns and Black Goat are two aspects of the same divine being. The cult spell lists make a dramatic difference in what fighting (or fighting alongside) them is like. Cthugha worshippers from Fanatic up get Fireball. Sekhmet cultists from Initiate upward get Flay. Leviathan cultists get Sleep as their first level spell. A single casting of Sleep can ensorcel enough hit dice to affect an entire party of characters, and low level cultists are often encountered in multiple D6s. Anyway, that’s it for cults. Up next: the Undead, Constructs and Ghosts. Night10194 posted:There was one Feng Shui PC possibility/NPC like the Repair Crew. A Hong Kong sewer worker who brained an Abomination with a steel pipe and realized all kinds of weird poo poo was getting up to trouble on his turf. So time to get an illegal shotgun, not tell his wife, and try to save the city. Maybe I'll come back to this one.
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Jul 4, 2020 00:20
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ESOTERIC ENTERPRISES PART 15: UNDEAD, CONSTRUCTS AND GHOSTS Welcome back to Esoteric Enterprises. We’re still chewing through the monster manual, one of the most content-dense sections of the book. Let’s jump right in, with the first entry on our docket. THE UNDEAD Esoteric Enterprises separates undead into two types: Feral and Intelligent. Feral undead are either mindless or act like animals, while the Intelligent flavor can be reasoned with. We’ll tackle the Feral type first. FERAL UNDEAD The Feral section of the monster manual begins with a descriptive text explaining what happens when you use Animate Dead to raise a corpse as a mindless undead creature Esoteric Enterprises, Page 200 posted:The creature loses all Grit Dice. Their Flesh Dice becomes a d12 (average roll 7).• They gain an extra Flesh Dice. Esoteric Enterprises, Page 200 posted:• Stealth increased to 4/6 for ambush predators. In addition to rules for creating your own undead (remember last post, when I said there were a lot of creatures in the book that required the DM to pile templates together?) there are a lot of pre-baked undead for us to throw into our undercity. Most of them have no Grit but a lot of Flesh, meaning sneak attacks and other stuff that ignores Grit aren't especially useful against them. Crawling Hands have a tiny bonus to grappling, 3 intelligence, and little else of note going on. Ghouls are almost sentient, but their ravenous hunger for human meat renders them bestial. They’ve got a melee attack that paralyzes you with no save, just like every other D&D knockoff. If a ghoul kills you, you get a Save vs Stunning to resurrect as a Level 1 Undead Spook. Husks are your absolutely bog standard mindless undead, with no special properties to speak of, except that they get two attacks per round: a claw and a bite. Half Zombies are either a torso dragging itself along the ground, or a pair of legs running around mindlessly. Like a husk, but sillier. Skeletons are basically like Husks. This game doesn’t give them resistance to non-blunt weapons, which I respect. Special damage resistance types just mean the fighter has to carry around a golf bag of different weapons, which is just another punishment for not being a Wizard. Flesh Hulks are tanky undead piles of meat, with a massive 25 Flesh, great saving throws, and three devastating melee attacks per round. Don't fight flesh hulks up close. Bloat-zombies claw at you until you kill them. Then they explode, splattering you with gore and potentially infecting you with a disease. Stubborn Foetuses are in the game for some reason, but are basically incapable of dealing damage, other than creeping you out. Rules text says they “Crave warmth, life, vitality.” Plague Zombies are like Husks, but they also have a chance give you a random disease when they hit you. Angry Fossils are animate dinosaur bones. They act like they did when they were alive, hunting for prey and making dinosaur noises. They have a lot of flesh, a lot of grit, and between 2 and 8(!) melee attacks per round at the discretion of the DM. That does it for unintelligent undead. These critters have a chance to show up as servitors to a Lich Sanctum on the faction generator, but mostly appear in random encounters. INTELLIGENT UNDEAD A living creature resurrected or converted into an intelligent undead creature is subject to basically the same set of modifiers as a feral undead creature, save that it retains its mind. They have a similar capacity to resurrect with the same list of monstrous powers as feral undead. Revenants are you standard intelligent undead, without much to comment on other than the standard set of undead resistances and vulnerabilities. They died a long time ago, so their behavior and speech are filled with archaisms. They have their own insular communities and society in the undercity. Mummified Saints are holy healers, gilded skeletons animated by a religious duty that transcends death itself. They have a 3 in 6 chance every time they try to cast Cure Wounds, Light, Dispel Magic, True Sight, Animate Dead, and loving Resurrection. If this NPC thinks you’re worthy, it can bring you back from the dead with a max level spell. There’s no spellbook in the game that teaches Resurrection, this is basically it. Vengeful Wights are like regular old Revenants, except they’re animated by a desire for revenge on their killer, and they recover HP every time they cause someone fear. Death Knights are plate armored skeletons with longswords, who wander around the underworld looking for chivalrous quests to go on. When they engage a target in melee, nobody can deal damage to them or the target for the duration of the duel. Remember when I said Death Knights were awesome? Well, I stand by it. The text describes them as “prone to epic romances and dark grudges”, so I guess that obliquely addresses our concerns earlier about corrupt bloodlines. Somehow, in defiance of all logic, Death Knights gently caress. Liches need no introduction. These powerful undead casters use the Occultist rules, and resurrect at their phylactery whenever you kill them. They have Bleeding Curse, Disintegrate, Create Illusion, Protection From Weapons, Spell Immunity, Protection From Fire, Invisibility, Dispel Magic, Hurl Through Time, True Sight and Fear memorized, and their spell ilst also includes Contingency, Permanency, Resurrection and any other spell they want. Liches are bad news. Recall also the problems I have with high level spell casters from the previous update, and apply them here. And that takes us through the end of the Intelligent Undead. The Lich is the centerpiece of the Lich Sanctum dungeon complex. The others such as Death Knights can show up in a Necromantic Circle faction, or peripherally in places like the head of a Tainted Bloodline. Have I mentioned I like Death Knights? I like the idea of revanents having their own undead societies in the undercity. There's no "revanent town" entry in the dungeon complex generator, but there really should be.  CONSTRUCTS Robots, golems, and other artificial beings. Some animated by mechanisms, others by magic. Maintenance Golems are maintenance robots, created using magic to single mindedly perform a specific task. They get two devastating swat attacks every round, but they only use them if someone gets in the way of their work. Because they’re magical constructs, they automatically fail saves vs mind control, and have a 50% chance to automatically ignore any other magic targeted at them. Clockwork Men are like golems, but made of metal, and given the curse of sentience. They don’t understand who they are or why they exist. They also get two slap attacks per turn. Their stat block says they’re “Immune to cold, poison, drowning and everything else constructs are immune to” but the book doesn’t actually say what that means, unless we go back and reference the player Spook construct origin. Clockwork Chrome Crabs are itty bitty robots. They’re fast, hard to hit, and have good Athletics. The descriptive text says “A compartment on its back carries a sealed envelope” and nothing else. Are they clockwork chrome crab couriers? There’s no way to be sure. Homunculi are little artificial people, made of blood, fat and clay. They’ve got the signature of their creator stamped on their foreheads, and they display a “blend of childlike earnestness and sinister understanding”. Trash Golems are like maintenance golems, but made of garbage. If they had a purpose in life, it’s long gone. Electricity damage heals rather than harms them. Animated Tools are trinkets made by bored wizards. They can attack you for minor damage, but their true desire is to help you do whatever they were designed to do. They have a 3 in 6 skill at whatever that is, or they can grant a living user a +2 to their skill roll instead. You should adopt them if you find them in the dungeon. Stone Guardians are immobile statues, immune to most forms of damage but basically imobile. They’ll clobber you if you step within reach though. Pain Engines are killer crabs, made by serpent men to track down and torture escaped slaves. Serpent men are dicks. In addition to getting three attacks per round (one probe and two claws) it also has 3 in 6 in both Medicine and Forensics. (One of the possible dungeon complexes is the Serpent Man ruins, where Pain Engines and other assorted trinkets can be found). Repair Drones are also serpent man machines, but made for the more benign purpose of maintaining and repairing serpent tech. They continue to do so, long after their masters have gone extinct. Like several monsters on this list, this one is mainly here for flavor and set dressing, rather than to seriously help or harm the players. Constructs don’t show up very often in the faction creation rules. Trash Golems appear on several of the encounter tables, the rest on fewer. What’s missing from this section? Trick question, if something’s missing, just make it yourself! CREATING ARTIFICIAL BEINGS THROUGH MAGIC Making a construct is an arduous process, requiring both skills and spells. First, the body must be created, using Technology to prepare it and Medicine to make it suitable for magical animation. Once you’ve got the shell figured out, you start stuffing spells into it to make it walk and talk and so on. Esoteric Enterprises, Page 205 posted:• Unseen Servant is required for the construct to be able to move about. Without this spell, the construct will be immobile (although it may be capable of speech and so forth if other spells are bound into it). The construct gets dice of Flesh equal to double the number shown on the Technology roll used to create it, and dice of Grit equal to the Medicine roll. Then you subtract the number of spells you bound into the construct from the number of Flesh dice. If what remains is a positive number, you can upgrade the construct’s stats and abilities that many times. You can raise its damage, skills, armor class, etc. Every spell stuffed into the construct costs two random magical reagents and a day’s work. Once the construct is complete, the caster has to make a Save vs Magic to bring it to life, or roll on the What Has Your Hubris Wrought miscast table if they fail. The book mentions that multiple people can collaborate to make a construct, which is good since I doubt an Occultist or Mystic is going to have enough Technology and Medicine to do the job. It also mentions that Doctors can use their Experimental Medicine ability in place of binding spells into the construct, as long as they build, steal or grow the appropriate body parts to make the creature. Once again: at level 1, the Doctor gets the same powers as some of the highest level magic user spells in the game. Play a Doctor! GHOSTLY THINGS Like with Undead and Occult Weirdos, this section of the book has some entries that start with a generic template, then give you a list of special abilities to slap onto it. Ghosts are, by default, unable to interact with the material world. They float around haunting things, passing through objects and ignoring any damage not dealt by a magic weapon. Then they have the following pick list of powers that makes them a bit more interesting: Esoteric Enterprises, Page 206 posted:• The ability to become invisible, at will.
Gestalt Spirits are hive-mind spirits, blended together by proximity or some commonality of origin. Aside from some slightly bigger numbers, they have the same stats as ghosts, and choose powers in the same way. I wish there was a little more information on these things. There are a couple places on the complex generation table with mass graves (particularly the Plague Pit area) and some more flavor or an additional special ability would add a lot here. Ghost Cars are environmental hazards, created by the psychic leftovers of a violent, high fatality car accident. They follow the same route on a loop, crashing and then reappearing at the beginning of their dance with death. Their crash attack deals 2D10 damage, but the vehicle takes the same amount of damage. Then it regenerates and does it all over again. Ghost Trains are cool. They occasionally show up in abandoned subway stations, running the routes they did in life, before they were retired by bombings, budget cuts, sarin gas attacks, etc. They deal 3D10 damage if they run you over and is immune to physical damage sometimes and blah blah blah. Who cares about fighting it when you can ride it. Toss the conductor two bits and you can ride it somewhere else in the undercity. Another abandoned rail station? A Lich Sanctum? The book says you can ride it to other worlds, like “Stygia, Dis, and the Earth’s Veins”. I know this is mostly a reference to other OSR splats, but I wish ghost train travel around the undercity was given a bit more detail. Currently it only shows up when you roll this specific result on the encounter table. Shadow Folk are beings made of darkness. These are the end times for the men of shadow - their underground homes are invaded by strange creatures of matter, bringing light that dissolves and destroys them. Yet they feel a strange jealousy for these flesh creatures, driving them to fight back with lethal force. They’re immune to regular damage, take damage from bright light, and attack by ripping away the target’s shadow, dealing damage to STR. Fog Sylphs are particle storms whose gaseous interminglings host an alien intelligence. Their primary goal is to make more fog, but they can also create illusions in any area with suspended water in the air, like a steam tunnel. They can also hide in your lungs, which doesn’t deal damage but inflicts the Fatigued condition. Genius Loci are the spirits of places, with an appearance and personality that reflects their surroundings. They can manipulate weather conditions, plants and animals, and when all else fails, pick up objects and throw them telekinetically. Hosts of Petty Spirits are colorful shimmers made of hundreds of tiny nature spirits acting together. They have a 4 in 6 chance per round to cast a spell, depending on the type of spirits that make up the cloud. Chance of create illusion, senescence, web, hurl through time, dispel magic, false sounds, lightning bolt, bleeding curse, slow, or heat metal. If you recall from the Urban Shaman section, these are the spirits those guys spend all their time talking to. Would be nice if the book specifically called out the relationship here, how the spirits will cast all those nasty spells on people who harm the shaman, etc. Prismatic Children of Vor Glaurung are the opposite of shadow people - beings of pure transcendent light. They can blind you with flashing lights and create visual illusions that take up whole rooms. Bright light damages them, magical darkness damages them even more. I wish there was a little more info here about their motivations and behavior - the text says they’re “fascinated by things that glow or give off radiation” but that doesn’t tell me what kind of illusions they’d create around a character carrying a flashlight. And that does it for ghosts. I remember not liking this section, but on repeat reading I kind of dig it. The main problem is that too many of the weird intangible spirits don’t have a strong hook for what they actually do when the players encounter them. They have a handful of abilities like creating illusions, but aside from maybe the regular ghosts and shadow men, none of them have a clear motivation for actually using them. Next post, we’ll go over were-creatures, vampires, and my personal favorite: the fairy courts. Saguaro PI posted:The Idea of Thorns is a direct reference to the author's previous work Gardens of Ynn (I'm assuming the Great Librarian is this for the Stygian Library as well) and is almost an entirely conceptual entity while the Black Goat appears to be an amalgamation of every goatlike bacchanal figure you see in mythology, when you drill down they're pretty different concepts but without that prior context or a more in-depth explanation I can see that being something that's missed.
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Jul 4, 2020 20:04
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I said at the start of the Glitter Hearts review that I was interested to see how it shook out mechanically, so thank you for crunching the numbers and delivering an interesting verdict on the strengths and weaknesses of the PTBA system as applied to this specific game.
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Jul 5, 2020 19:35
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ESOTERIC ENTERPRISES PART 16: FAIRIES, LYCANTHROPES AND VAMPIRES Today on Esoteric Enterprises, we’re still balls-deep in supernatural creatures. All three of the sections we tackle today will have some form of template application, and a couple will have random roll tables for generating special properties. Let’s begin with one of my favorite sections in the book: THE FAIRY COURTS In the world of Esoteric Enterprises, fairies are spawned by the collective imagination of humanity. In the underworld, the fey organize themselves into communities, divided into Seelie and Unseelie Courts based on whether they come from pleasant dreams or nightmares respectively. Mechanically, they’re immune to poison and disease due to their imaginary biology, but take double damage from “cold iron” weapons. Fairies are one of the possible underworld factions, which you create by rolling a few D20s on a table of both Seelie and Unseelie fairies. The Fairy Enclave always has a King and Queen, one of which is Seelie and the other Unseelie. They can also get their own themed dungeon area in the complex creation table, called the Fey Grotto, and it’s one of the most entertaining in the game. Maybe it’s just because I had so much fun with them in the first campaign I ran, but I really like these weird little bastards. Goblins are unseelie critters spawned by dreams of spite and resentment. They’re real dicks, but if you meet them in the Goblin Market (if you have a Fey Grotto it always has a Goblin Market in it) they’ll sell you all kinds of good poo poo. Mainly magic weapons, but also fey wine if you want to boost your Charm score and actually cast Mystic spells for once in your life. In return, they ask for things like years of your lifespan, attribute points, or payments of experience. Mechanically they’ve got good stealth and long knives to use with it, but otherwise aren’t anything to run home about. Redcaps are cutthroat unseelie fairies spawned by dreams of violence. They’re a recursive fairy, they go around killing people and spreading terror, so that the survivors will have nightmares and create more Red Caps. They not only have 4 in 6 Stealth, they automatically boost the Stealth of any allies accompanying them. If their attacks ignore Grit and go straight to Flesh (such as by a sneak attack) they deal bonus damage and automatically inflict the Bleeding Out condition. Red Caps are scary. Banshee Oracles are Unseelie Cassandras spawned by dreams of grief, who see only the worst possible future. Though their prognostications are usually wrong, they sometimes attract small cults of disciples. They have a scream that deals Charisma damage on a failed Save vs Magic, and instantly kills you (by predicting your death) if you roll a 1 on the save. They can also cast Augery and Divination, though there’s no description of how their only-pessimistic-predictions power interacts with the spell. Korred Scholars are goat-like Seelie gnomes, generated by dreams of curiosity and mystery. The text says their mannerisms “veer wildly between ‘eccentric German professor’ and ‘ruthless German interrogator’”. They have a 4 in 6 chance to know any secret you keep from them, a 1 in 6 chance to know the answer to your other questions, no matter how obscure, and can whisper the secrets of the universe to incapacitate everyone in earshot for D6 rounds on a failed Save vs Stunning. River Hags are Unseelie creatures created by dreams of drowning. Vindictive and territorial, but easily bribed for safe passage by canny adventurers. Automatically detects lies and broken oaths. Good Stealth, plus three attacks per round that can easily kill if they go directly to Flesh. Domovoi are Slavic Seelie spirits created by dreams of hearth and home. They look like tiny old men, wearing their enormous beards like clothing. If you find one in the undercity, you can adopt it with a payment of bread and milk. Which is a great idea because they’ve got 3 in 6 in Medicine, making them passable backup physicians if you don’t have a Doctor. Slaugh are undulating Unseelie abominations that arise from fear of the dark. They can barely defend themselves in a fight, but they’ve got good Stealth, Athletics, Perception, and can deform their body to fit through any gap. The Fairy Enclave uses them as spies and scouts. Trolls are enormous Seelie bruisers, spawned from humanity’s awe of nature. Lawful aligned, guileless, always keep their word. They hit hard in melee with three attacks per round and, because this is D&D, regenerate HP unless burned by fire or acid. Sprites are little butterfly Seelie, brought to life by dreams of flight. They treat everything like a game like little winged Kender, and didn’t everyone love those. They can turn invisible and fire sleep darts. Ogres are the Unseelie equivalent of trolls, generated by dreams of violence against people you care about. Tough, dumb as poo poo, smash things they don’t understand. Instead of regenerating per-turn, they recover their full HP if they eat someone they kill. The random encounter tables like to pair them with Trolls as an odd-couple comedy duo. Svartalfr are spawned by dreams of industry, and it’s not clear whether the game considers them Seelie or Unseelie (they appear on both tables when yo ucreate a FAiry Enclave). They’re black dwarves, like Duergar, obsessed with gems and industry and blah blah, you’ve heard this all before. Their mining tools deal a whopping D12 damage per hit. Sidhe are Seelie fairies that come from wet dreams. They’ve got 5 in 6 charm, fight with rapiers and dueling pistols, and can lock you in place on a failed Save vs Stunning by making eye contact. Bandersnatches are Unseelie bird-fairies who grow out of visions of greed. They fight by hiding in the dark, grabbing your items and then running away into the dungeon. They’ve got 5 in 6 “sleight of hand”, which isn’t a skill in Esoteric Enterprises. Thankfully it’s not hard to intuit from context what it means.  Now we get to the upper crust of Fey society. Fairy Nobles have four ranks, which get progressively better saves, HP, chance to hit, etc. Higher ranked fey can automatically command any fairy lower ranked than themselves. PC fairies get a save against this, except against the King or Queen.
Let’s roll up four of these weirdos and see how we do.
(In my first Esoteric Enterprises campaign, the Fairy Enclave was engaged in a profitable gin-for-children scheme with the local Smuggling outfit. The Unseelie Queen thought she was doing the right thing, selling magic liquor to buy kids from hopheads and raising them as sorcerers. The Royal Family got strong armed into letting the Men in Black use the Grotto as a dungeon entrance, during an operation to chase down some Paradox Beasts the players accidentally released into the dungeon. This made the Seelie King look weak, and he was eventually deposed and executed by a group of rebels, who nearly slaughtered the Queen and her adopted children, but were eventually foiled by a rival adventuring party while the players were out digging up corpses in the Necropolis for the Ponda Ray crime family. The Queen and her bastards escaped, and the remainder of the rebels were slaughtered by the Red Cap Gang)  LYCANTHROPES Esoteric Enterprises doesn’t use a generic template for were-creatures. It tries to, but ends up doing something more annoying and harder to use instead. It presents one form of were-monster, then for all the other entries it says “start with X but change A to B and Y to Z, and add C” and so on. It’s irritating enough that it’s stopped me from really digging into this section of the book. Were Rats are the base were-creature in Esoteric Enterprises, by virtue of being the most common. They can transform between rat, human and hybrid forms, but are always possessed by ravenous madness, though still capable of speech and reason. They’re also weak to silver. In human form, they’re an unremarkable normal person with a gun or knife. In rat form they’re a rat, and are probably trying to hide or run away. In hybrid form, they get a bite and two claw attacks that can infect the victim with the Were Rat syndrome on a failed Save vs Poison. If you catch the bug, it deals progressive CHA damage until you hit 0. Then the damage goes away and you reroll as a Level 1 Spook with were-rat powers. There’s also a Pack Leader template that raises the Were Rat’s stats numerically, and is intended to be transferable to other social Were Creatures. Were Wolves have the same hybrid form as rats, but become a wolf in their full animal form. I think the were-creature transformations are knocked off of Werewolf the Apocalypse, where you’ve got your human, animal and 50/50 transformations. Were Spiders get a poison bite in their hybrid form, and can choose between Spider Form (AC 16 but no attack) and Swarm of Spiders Form. The text says “The lair of a were-spider is a cunning maze of webs, snares, pitfalls and tripwires, with a larder of poisoned victims, comatose and wrapped in silk for the were-spider to feed on later, at their leisure” but they don’t actually have the ability to paralyze victims or shoot silk. Which is a shame, because that sounds way more interesting than the stat block we get. Were Bats are like Were Rats with wings, which means their hybrid form can fly, but loses its claw attacks. The curse makes them “alternate between enthusiasm and panic” because apparently that’s what bats do. Were Snakes get the same poisonous bite as Spiders when in hybrid or animal form. The text says Were Snakes are “manipulators able to shed their skin to take new forms” but they don’t actually have that ability either. The descriptions feel like they were written before the stat blocks, when the author had a bunch of more interesting ideas they didn’t end up implementing. Were Bulls get a tankier hybrid form and a tankier animal form, and always use the Pack Leader template due to their enormous bulk. Were Gulls are the other rats with wings. Almost identical to Were Bats, but the book gives them some interesting animal behavior at least: “ Hungry, pushy, never satisfied. Form huge raucous flocks. Think with their stomachs. Hair and plumage tend towards surprisingly beautiful patterns of white and grey. While gluttonous, they’re hardly greedy, and have a streak of generosity to them, happily sharing food and pretty things without really thinking about it.” Were Butterflies are obligate cowards, flying away or exploding into a swarm of butterflies at the first sign of danger. Like Were Spiders, but without the poison bite. This section closes with some alternate explanations for lycanthropy that would function differently than the listed mechanics. Esoteric Enterprises, Page 213 posted:• The descendants of previous generations of shapeshifters. These might naturally take Hybrid form, only taking human or animal form uncomfortably. Were Creatures can show up as associated NPCs for various cults in the pantheon. Some of them reference stat blocks that don’t exist in the book, like Were Bears. There aren’t any packs of Were Wolves or Were Gulls or what have you in the faction table, though they would be easy enough to throw together.  VAMPIRES The rules entry for vampires starts with a list of possible explanations for vampirism, along with mechanics for each: Esoteric Enterprises, Page 24 posted:• The walking dead. Immune to drowning, cold, poison, sickness. Double damage from holy things. Can’t be healed by normal medicine, and heal a maximum of 1 HP from any source. Esoteric Enterprises, Page 214 posted:• Lightning Speed, allowing them to go first in initiative and doubling their movement speed.
Finally, we get a 3D20 table of flairs for vampire bloodlines. Let’s give it a try and see what kind of vampires we create. A 19, a 16 and a 4 on the Mannerism, Appearance and Quirks tables respectively get us a Tasteful, Sensually Appealing Vampire Bloodline that can regenerate from even a single drop of blood. That’s a little played out. Let’s try again. A 9, 19 and 5 gets us Irrational, Transparent Skinned Vampires who are weak to Silver. The next step is to pick some powers that complement these quirks aesthetically. Let’s take the affinity for the darkness and weakness to the light as our first ability, to go with the transparent skin. That means all the vampires in the clan get those bonuses and penalties, no matter how young. The next logical step is probably seeing in total darkness, which young vampires and up will have. Then the ability to change their appearance to mimic their victims, which established vampires will have, and so on. All the way up to the oldest vampires in the bloodline, who will have all the powers their descendants have, and then some. I like the vampire creation mechanics a little better than the Were Creature rules. I think the powers could have been grouped together a little better rather than split into so many pieces. Again, though, having a creature on the random encounter tables that requires this many random rolls to generate is a bit of a pain. Some pre-baked vampires would have been nice, just like how we got pre-baked undead in the earlier chapters.  Up next: “Mundane” Animals, Chimeras, Bugs and other Weird Creatures. I’d estimate we’ve got four or five posts left in this series. Then maybe a wrapup with overall thoughts on the game, my personal experience running it, house rules to make it better, etc. Thanks for sticking with me this far.
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Jul 5, 2020 20:17
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RPPR did an Actual Play of the Wizard a week or two ago. They ran it in Monster of the Week, and the tone didn't really work at the start of the episode due to the power and level of resources available to the characters. It definitely fell into place once they actually began crawling the dungeon, though.
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Jul 5, 2020 22:04
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ESOTERIC ENTERPRISES PART 17: ANIMALS, CHIMERAS, BUGS, WEIRDNESS I wrote this post, looked over it and then edited it to remove some boring stuff from the animals chapter. If you aren’t interested in a bunch of mundane and slightly-above-mundane creatures, skip down to the Weirdness Inhabiting the Undercity section. ANIMALS The animals section is a mix of boring real world creatures, real-world creatures given moderately interesting new roles in the dungeon ecology, and gross dungeon animals. I’m only covering the highlights, since this is the longest section in the book. Angler-Turtles are giant snapping turtles with a hypnotic lure. The creature disguises itself as an environment object, and its magic lure looks like treasure. Try to pick it up, and the turtle bites you, dealing damage straight to Flesh. You can save vs the illusion, but only after the turtle tries to bite you. Angler turtles are no joke, they’re the reason why my players poke everything with a stick before interacting with it. Black Goats are mutant satyrs, capable only of nonsensical gurgling and laughter. A Black Goat can smack you around with its horns for minimal damage, but its real headliner is its 3 in 6 chance to cast bleeding curse, darkness, spider climb, or parasitic infestation. They aren’t exactly durable, so if you meet them in a group of other monsters and can’t escape, the best play is to focus them before they start casting. Cave Bears are the descendents of Ice Age predators, once worshipped as Gods by primitive humans. They didn’t go extinct, they moved underground. They know in their 5 INT bear skulls that they were once masters of all they surveyed, and long to see those days restored. They get three attacks per round, and if they hit they can pin the target for automatic damage each turn after. They also get a bonus to their save vs divine magic, because of their residual divinity. Ferret Hydras are seven foot ferrets with three heads, giving them three bite attacks per round. At the end of a round, if they’ve taken any damage to Flesh, they restore back to full Flesh and grow an additional head, giving them another attack. There’s nothing here about using fire attacks to cauterize the stumps, but I’d certainly allow it. Giant Frogs are amphibians the size of bulls. The bufotoxin coating their skin deals Wisdom damage from a bad trip on a failed Save vs Poison. Their bite attack has a chance to swallow the victim, dealing additional digestive damage per-round until they escape. Giant Tadpoles are horrifying frogspawn. Why are they horrifying? Because if they deal damage to Flesh, they burrow inside your body and deal continuous damage to Flesh on subsequent turns, like the scarabs from The Mummy. Lampreys are parasites that can latch on to you and deal damage directly to Flesh, healing themselves proportionally. Did you know that Lampreys are like salmon, making incredible journeys from the ocean into inland freshwater streams and lakes to spawn? Did you know that they’re pretty sensitive to water quality issues, meaning they can’t actually wriggle around in the sewers? Nightmares are horses that spread madness and terror throughout the dungeon with their burning eyes, which deal Wisdom damage to anyone who look at them. The book gives them a grapple attack, which is weird because they’re horses and it doesn’t say they have hands or anything like that. They sometimes lead packs of Dero around the dungeon, ensorceled by the Nightmare’s infectious madness. Rat Kings are balls of rats, connected by their tails knotted together. Like the Rat King in The Amazing Maurice and His Educated Rodents, the rats share a collective consciousness that makes them intelligent and lets them telepathically control other rats. 1 in 6 chance to summon a rat swarm every round. Rat Swarms are like bat swarms, or any other swarm in Esoteric Enterprises. They deal damage to things enveloped in them and take minimum damage from most attacks. No mention of Saving vs Poison to avoid catching the plague, which seems like the most natural place to put it. Salamanders are giant, fire breathing amphibians. The text says “where an axolotl has gill-like fronds extending from its neck, the salamander has a flickering ruff of condensed flame” which is adorable. Their bite deals fire damage, their fire breath attack also deals fire damage. Putting out their flames automatically reduces their Grit to 0. Surinam Toad Queens are another real life animal given special powers. You know those gross flat frogs from sudamerica which give birth out the holes in their back? Imagine one of those but a meter wide, and it spawns those horrible Flesh eating giant tadpoles from earlier. Which is bullshit, because froglings emerge from a Surinam Toad’s back well after they’ve completed their tadpole stage. The Black Dog is a terrible omen. The first time you see it, you get a choice: be stunned for one action by dread, or accept Doom. Doom means that the next time the DM says to themselves “no I can’t do that to the players, it would be unfair/bullshit/make no sense” they get to do it anyway. I like this mechanic, but I can see the DM just forgetting about it entirely, like everything else that takes effect after more than a couple rounds. Troglodytic Apes are cave dwelling orangutans that hunt in packs. They’ve got heat vision, and they know how to use simple tools and form simple ambushes. Basically just a White Ape from the B/X monster manual, ported to an urban fantasy setting. Venomous Snakes provoke a Save vs Poison if they deal damage to Flesh by biting you. On a failed save, take massive damage to Flesh. This is in contrast to how snakes worked in the old school edition, where you made a Save every time they hit you, and died instantly if you failed. Witch’s Cats are familiars, sent by their mistress to investigate strange occurrences in the undercity. There’s no “witch” stat block, so just use one of the other caster stat blocks from the Occult Weirdos section, I guess. They can cast Web, Darkness and Mist Form, all of which are useful for escaping a dangerous situation. A lot of these animals get multiple attacks per round, in an attempt to keep the players from just “action enonomying” them to death by weight of numbers. There’s also a bit of over reliance on “grapples you, then deals damage” which, again, is probably intended to stop the players from just immediately blasting the poor creature to smithereens with four/five attacks per round. Good luck shooting it when it’s wrapped around your legs. But what if instead of having separate stat blocks for all the animals, we tried to meld them all together, into a big superanimal?  CHIMERICAL MONSTROSITIES In-universe, Chimeras are created by mad science splicing animals together. In-game, Chimeras are created by taking a basic template and rolling D20s on a set of tables for body plan, head(s) and other features. Let’s create a couple example chimeras and see how they stack up. The text says 1D20 for body, 1D20 for head, and “a few” D20s for features, so let’s do 4D20 total. A 12, a 5, an 8 and a 16 get us a yak’s body (no special powers), a stag’s head (additional antler attack), axolotl gills (water breathing) and tusks (extra attack). Not too shabby. Let’s try again, with 5D20 this time. A 3, 8, 13, 20 and 5 get us the body of a vulture (grants flying), the head of a bat (echolocation), bat wings (can fly, again), a coating of slime (no mechanical effect), and the ability to grapple with its sinuous body in addition to any attacks it makes. Of note: the first four results on the features table grant the Chimera one to four extra heads respectively. That can increase the number of attacks it gets per round, as well as give it more special powers. What can I say about Chimeras that I haven’t said about every other monster creation system in the book? Cool, but do I want to do it on the fly when a random encounter table tells me to, in the middle of a game? It’s not that big of a deal, but it’s not exactly elegant. Speaking of doing everything with templates, BUGS The EE book uses the term “bugs” as a blanket for all arthropods. Entomologists beware. We get two “start with the template and apply special powers” stat blocks at the beginning of this chapter. Swarms of Bugs take the usual swarm rules we’ve seen with rats and bats, and load them up with one or more of the following special properties: Esoteric Enterprises, Page 220 posted:• Cockroaches are immune to poison, sickness and radiation. Next, we get a few invertebrates with their own unique stat blocks. Giant Spiders are Stealthy, and their venom deals DEX damage if any of their attacks hit Flesh. They don’t have any web shooting or other stuff you might associate with giant spiders. Did you know that spiders generally have poor eyesight? The main exception is Jumping Spiders, which use a visual trick to achieve better depth perception than their arachnid brethren. Each pair of jumping spider eyes sees a different color range of the visual spectrum. Because different colors of light blur and focus at different distances, the jumping spider is able to use the visual feed from its four pairs of eyes to determine how far away objects are from itself. Terrible Wurms are non-product identity versions of Purple Worms, which you might recognize from the last fifty years of D&D. Giant Cave Barnacles are creepy carnivorous crustaceans, which fix themselves to walls and ceilings, dangling tentacles and pulling food up into its maw. Like the ones from Half Life, but with an armored shell that makes them harder to damage. Swarms That Walk are insect swarms that work together to imitate human beings. They puppet a suit of “skin” that’s either made from silk or actual human skin, depending on the bugs that make up the swarm. They aren’t intelligent, but they can mimic humans surprisingly well. Their slam attack deals minimal damage, but deposits bugs on the target that deal damage over time. They take minimum damage from non-area attacks, like every other swarm monster in the book.  WEIRDNESS INHABITING THE UNDERCITY This section is a grab bag of intelligent but inhuman creatures, things that are probably intelligent but impossible to communicate with, and gross monsters that don’t fit elsewhere. Concrete Nymphs are mangled living statues that speak in impossibly beautiful voices. They love the ugly but functional elements of the city - the enormous flood control tunnels, the battered seawalls and concrete edifices that tip the rain into the whirling bay. They can cast Suggestion by singing, and shatter glass and other hard materials by screaming. If you’re wearing anything on your face, you get a Save vs Hazards to avoid being blinded. Lurking Lamps are like the little Pixar logo with arms. Other lights go out in their presence, and their flashbulb-eye can blind anything that looks at it for a round, or a whole ten minute turn on a failed Save vs Stunning. They like to collect trash and other meaningless objects. They’re intelligent and capable of language, one of the random encounter tables has one communicating with another monster using sign language. Mimics are nasty because they deal damage directly to Flesh when they bite you unexpectedly. In addition to treasure and containers for treasure, they can disguise themselves as random dungeon objects like doors, if the DM wants to really gently caress with people. Collectors of Eyeballs are hairless, blind mole rat people that collect eyeballs. If their claw attack deals damage to Flesh, they pluck out one of the target’s eyes, unless it’s protected by a mask or goggles. Also capable of language - they’re the monster that talks to the Lurking Lamp on the encounter table. Radioactive Vampires are nightmare monsters from the deep lithosphere, with ten foot limbs and a cerenkov blue skeleton that glows inside its translucent body. In addition to the standard vampire stuff, they also have a chance to give you radiation sickness every round you spend in their presence. Children of the Abyss are sort of like giant olms, swum up from the deep biosphere to hunt in the upper undercity. They don’t do much mechanically other than grapple and bite things, but I’m including them anyway, because olms are cool. Hopping Mouths are giant spherical creatures, basically a stomach on a pair of frog legs that let it leap up to 60 feet. Their modus operandi is to ambush a target, swallow it whole, then hop away as fast as possible before the victim’s friends can hack it to pieces. Chronological Aberrations are beings just barely outside the time stream, detectable only through the distortions they create in local spacetime. Their one attack deals no damage but ages the target D20 years. They’re immune to damage from most attacks, but any temporal magic is enough to ruin their day. The book provides a huge list of special cases for what happens when each temporal spell is cast on or around the Aberration, all of which seem super unlikely to ever happen in play. Rust Monsters are just straight up Rust Monsters from D&D, ported to Esoteric Enterprises. They break your items and eat metal. Magma Children are enormous ten foot lava creatures with near-human intelligence. Kept as pets and war animals by the Lithic Courts - mineral people we’ll meet in a future bestiary entry. Playful in a way that surface worlders find disconcerting, when the hundred ton magma dog wants you to rub its molten belly. There are some other weirdness creatures that I skipped because they didn’t have any interesting mechanical effects. Giant Olms and Giant Bat-Things that sound cool, but don’t do much other than echolocate you and then pounce on you in the dark. The book has a lot of monsters like that. Comin’ Up: Three Kingdoms of Life, Dragons, and Three Types of Cavemen
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Jul 6, 2020 05:13
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ESOTERIC ENTERPRISES PART 18: OOZES, PLANTS, MYCELIDS, DRAGONS, AND THREE TYPES OF CAVEMEN The next few sections of the monster manual are pretty short. We’ll clear out three kingdoms of life in this post: plants, fungi and protists (what do you mean that’s a “wastebasket taxa”?) and meet some intelligent underworld creatures again. OOZES The dungeon hazards section, way back at the beginning of the DM section, covers slimes and molds that are too sedentary to be considered monsters. This section covers ambulatory slime creatures. The chapter starts with (you guessed it) a generic template and some special abilities to throw on top of it. I’m not going to go over the abilities though, because this section has example oozes that use all of them. Giant Amoebas take half damage from physical attacks, but double from fire and electricity. An attack that breaks their nucleus kills them instantly, which is a nice touch. Grey Molds are Oozes that deal CON damage on hit. Shoggoths are huge, angry balls of protoplasm that get a massive damage slam attack versus everything in range each turn, regenerate HP, take double damage versus fire, and can sense vibrations and heat of living things. Neural Slimes are like Grey Molds that deal INT instead of CON damage. Gelatinous Cubes are straight out of D&D. If you’ll recall, our underworld map had a Shoggoth Lair on it. To make one of those, you take an abbreviated version of a Sewer Cluster, Buried Ruins or other dungeon area and slap a Shoggoth spawning chamber in the center. The rest of the rooms are covered with slime and filled with lesser oozes. PLANT MONSTERS This section starts with a primer on the ecology of carnivorous plants. They usually grow in oxygen and nutrient-poor soil with a high acid content, like the kind found in sphagnum bogs. The underworld has some of those qualities, and also no sunlight. Carnivorous plants are basically a trap or environmental hazard, rooted to a particular spot and unable to move. They get - are you ready for this - two pick lists of special properties to slap onto their generic template. Esoteric Enterprises, Page 225 posted:• 1-6 Flytrap Jaws (+4, d8). Each must attack a different victim. On a hit, the jaws latch onto prey, dealing 1 additional damage each round thereafter as the flytrap begins digestion, rather than attacking again. There are only two other plant creatures. Root Dryads are gardeners of the undercity, tending to lichen and roots that grow in the dark. They can swim through soil like it was water. They can cast Awaken Plants and Suggestion at-will. Every Root Dryad has a root-mass where she lives. If the root mass is dug up and destroyed, she dies. Shambling Mounds are another D&D import. There’s the plant kingdom. How about fungi? MYCELID COLONIES Mycelids are an infectious fungus that enslaves victims, turning them into zombies that serve a colonial hive mind. A bit like the things from Last of Us, or the fungus guys in the Weald from Darkest Dungeon. Mycelid Spawn are little mushroom people, spawned by Mycelid Hulks and Queens. They can slap you around with a low damage attack, shoot toxic spores everywhere, or merge together to make Hulks. Mycelid Hulks are bruisers with multiple high-damage smash attacks per round, more spores, and the ability to bud off Mycelid Spawn by spending Flesh. Mycelid Queens are the center of the hive mind. They’re immobile, they can spawn lower level Mycelids (or heal by absorbing them), and their spores have the ability to inflict a variety of effects besides just infestation with the mycelid poison. The spores can stun their enemies and deal damage to WIS, or heal the Queen’s allies. Mycelid Husks are fungal zombies created by infection with mycelid spores. They can infect you by hitting you with their melee attacks, and like undead they get a spread of other special abilities depending on what they were before they died. A mycelid spore infestation deals progressive DEX and INT damage as the fungal hyphae penetrate the patient’s nervous system, reducing them to mindless zombies once they hit zero and reanimating them as Mycelid Husks. Mycelids have their own area in the underworld creation table. Unlike Shoggoth Pits and other such areas, Mycelid Blights get a full size complex creation table. I’ve never had a player go inside a Mycelid Bllight, because they’re such obviously horrible places. DRACONIC BEASTS In the world of Esoteric Enterprises, dragons are the true descendants of dinosaurs, which survived in caves while the surface world choked and died after the KT impact. They aren't intelligent, unless rolled as an avatar of a God, worshiped by a cult. Then they have 18 INT, can speak, can cast spells, etc. Like Chimeras, dragons start with a template and roll for special powers on a D20 table. Let’s give it a try. 1D20 for body plan, 1D20 for skin/scales, and “a few D20s” for special powers. 4D20 get us 14, 1, 11, and 1 again. That’s an amphisbaena (serpentine body with a head at each end) with no scales, a fire breathing attack, and an acid attack that gets one spit per round per head. Now let’s try it with 5D20. A 5, 15, 7, 12 and 2 get us a four headed hydra with mottled green brown scales, petrifying gaze, a “thagomizer” tail attack like a stegosaurus (this is a real paleontological term, after the late Thag Simmons), and a frost breath attack. Mechanically, Dragons are a lot like Chimeras - a boss monster with a lot of attacks that you create by rolling D20s on a big table. Ctrl F Ctrl V all my commentary on them to this section. DERO Dero originate from the writings and ravings of American pulp author and artist Richard Sharpe Shaver, who believed a race of technologically advanced Lawful Evil cavemen who were the source of all humanity’s misfortunes. The Dero in Esoteric Enterprises are an inversion of that. Rather than being the nightmare beings at the heart of a conspiracy against the human race, the Dero are a subspecies of paranoid cave-dwelling humanoid that believes they are the victims of conspiracies by everyone else. Because the Dero are weakly psychic, these collective delusions do actually affect reality in the long term, causing things to happen by predicting them. And if they don’t, the Dero will make sure they do, because they’ve got plans of their own. Your basic Dero is a garden variety humanoid with a 2 in 6 chance per round to cast Sleep or Suggestion, the second of which allows it to alter the target’s worldview and make their weird paranoia more believable. They also get a 50/50 chance of resisting mind altering magic, though by doing so they have to make a morale test. Dero Geniuses take the base Dero stat block, bump up the numbers and and tack on Invisibility and True Sight to the spell list. They’re also immune to any mind altering magic used by their arch enemies, the Men in Black. As mentioned in the diseases section, Dero are also asymptomatic carriers of memetic viruses. Talking to them is a good way to catch something. Dero Conspiracies are one of the factions in the social underworld table. The book gives some tables here for both the beliefs of individual Dero, and what the Conspiracy is working on. Let’s roll up a couple Dero and see what they’re up to.
I’m… not sure how I feel about the Dero. Esoteric Enterprises is one of those settings like Delta Green or Unknown Armies, where all the old 90s conspiracy theories are true, and madness is reframed as a disconcerting but ultimately accurate look at the bigger picture. The treatment Dero get here veers between an interesting examination of the nature of paranoia in a world where wizards and aliens really are out to get you, and kicking some schizophrenics while they’re down. ELEMENTALS In Esoteric Enterprises, elementals can be made of any material and any state of matter. Fire, water, sure. But also ceramic, plastic, oil, latex, lead, chrome, paper, fat, the list goes on. Like so many other sections of the book, you start with a few generic templates that scale up in size and power, along with a few abilities common to all elementals: they can’t be poisoned, they can telekinetically control matter made of their element, etc. Then we get some guidance on how to stat different materials. Esoteric Enterprises, Page 229 posted:Gaseous elementals cannot touch or be touched, do no damage when they attack normally and are immune to physical attacks. Their best method of attacking is to suffocate their victims. They can re-shape their form to be whatever they want, flow through gaps, expand to fill spaces, and so on. A powerful fan or vacuum cleaner directed at them does d12 damage a round. MORLOCK PACKS Morlocks are taken from HG Wells’ The Time Machine, which hypothesizes a future where the working class has been reduced by eugenics into cave dwelling, cannibalistic animal people, who feed on the intelligent but hedonistic and oblivious Eloi, descended from the gentry. In Esoteric Enterprises, Morlocks are australopithecines, selectively bred as slaves by the ancient Serpent Man empire that ruled earth a million years ago. The Serpent Men are long gone, the Morlocks remain. They cast spells by tattooing and branding them on their skin, then reading them off at the opportune moment. They trade with surface worlders and other underworld inhabitants, swapping magic and secrets (Morlock Packs always know the layout of the entire undercity) in exchange for technology and trinkets. Your basic Morlock is a humanoid with all your classic underground senses (fluffed as tremorsense here) and the spells Sleep, Spider Climb and Suggestion tattooed on their body, each for a single use. Because they were specifically bred to be sacrificed to the Serpent Man Gods, the heart of a Morlock can be used in place of any magical reagent. Unscrupulous sorcerers and organleggers hunt Morlocks for this purpose, making them suspicious of magic users. Unlike some of the other scaling humanoid creatures, Morlocks don’t just go up in power, they come in a couple different subclasses. They all have at least 13 INT, making them smarter than the average player character. Crawling Killers get Silence, Invisibility and Spectral Step as tattoos. They also get the same ambush surgeon power as Red Caps, dealing bonus damage and inflicting Bleeding Out on a sneak attack. They don’t actually have a Stealth score, which I think was an oversight, although the Invisibility spell sort of makes up for it. Whispering Elders get Suggestion, Mirror Image and Create Illusion. They automatically detect any lies told to them. Eloi are a Morlock subclass, in defiance of the original source material. They’re savants, the other Morlocks care for them because they’re no longer aware that they even need to care for themselves. Their spell list includes Dispel Magic, Magic Blade, Animate Artwork, Antimagic Shell, Time Stop and Zombie Plague. The book says they can cast experimentally and invent new spells like Occultists, so you can really give them any spell the Morlock Pack needs. Morlocks can appear both as a their own complex in the undercity, and as their own faction. A Morlock Lair is a reskinned Sewer Cluster or Limestone Cave, with the rooms refluffed with Morlock stuff in them. The faction section for Morlock Packs says they’re friendly, trusting and love to trade, but use their knowledge of the undercity to make life hell for anyone who upsets them. TROGLODYTES Troglodytes are yet another cave dwelling offshoot of humanity, but one that never developed language or tool use. The Morlocks hate them and try to exterminate them wherever they can. The only thing the poor cavemen have going for them is their crude bicameral brains, which let them cast divine spells by talking to God in their heads. A regular old Troglodyte is a low level melee bruiser without any spellcasting ability, or weapons beyond their fist and thrown rocks. Troglodyte Mystics are Troglodytes with a 3 in 6 chance to cast Darkness, Erase Tracks, Shield or Silence. Troglodytes don’t show up in complex creation or faction creation. They appear keyed to rooms in some complexes like the limestone caves and the underworld frontier, or occasionally on random encounter tables. To be honest, I think their inclusion in the game at all is redundant. We already have a couple human offshoot caveman species that are more interesting, and we already have rock throwing cave apes in the mundane animals section.  We’re going to finish the bestiary sooner than I thought. I was counting remaining sections based on the headings, but most of them are only a page or two in length. We’ll cover lithic courts, aboleths and paradox beasts next post, and that should finish off the Monster Manual. PurpleXVI posted:Are there any rules for adopting a giant olm as a pet, though? PurpleXVI posted:"yes these creatures are intelligent but UNFATHOMABLE so their UNFATHOMABLE INTELLECT always makes them attack on sight rather than interact with the players in a more interesting way." The Goblin Punch guy suggested giving every NPC in an RPG book at least a single line of motivation, clearly labeled as such, on top of any other flavor text. I think this would massively improve not only Esoteric Enterprises, but most games. Granted, motivations are sometimes implied by a result on the random encounter table, which describes what the monster is doing when you meet it, but you can’t count on an NPC always being used in that context. mellonbread fucked around with this message at 23:12 on Jan 7, 2021 |
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Jul 6, 2020 17:45
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ESOTERIC ENTERPRISES PART 19: LITHIC COURTS, ABOLETHS AND PARADOX BEASTS We’re in the home stretch, this is going to be the last monster manual entry for Esoteric Enterprises. It’ll be short, but we’ll meet my other favorite faction in the game, besides the Fairy Enclave. REPRESENTATIVES OF THE LITHIC COURTS The Lithic Courts are rock people who live beneath the earth’s surface. There are whole civilizations of geologic creatures at the Mohorovičić discontinuity. The actions of the tectonic plates are the result of their underground wars, subduction zones and faults their front lines, volcanic hotspots their foundries and fortresses. The rock people of the Lithic Courts maintain embassies in the Undercity, populated by diplomats and low ranking lithic nobility - the only ones small and light enough to even move around without a cushion of supporting stone or magma. Envoys of the Lithic Courts are diplomats, in the undercity to deliver important news or have important meetings. They look like giant squids made of crystal, lit by a great heat that burns inside them. They’re hard to hurt and will slap you to pieces in melee with powerful slam attacks, but are weak to electricity, a trait all Lithic creatures share. Flint Songbirds are animate shards of sharp rock, which flit around in gilded cages carried by Lithic Envoys. In a fight, each songbird can shoot a spray of D4+1 shards, each of which gets its own attack roll, so a flock of them get a whole lot of dice. Seismic Knights are Lawful Neutral sandworms made of magma, with mouths like powerful augers filled with magma. Being bit by one does a whopping 3D8 damage, and anyone near them takes 1 point of damage per round automatically from the enormous heat radiating from their bodies. They can challenge a single target, granting them +5 to hit that target and the target +5 to hit them. At least they’re slow moving, and unlikely to be hostile by default. Igneous Peons are little basalt starfish, the lowest ranking rock people. Not terribly bright, they’ll automatically obey any order from any being made of metal or rock - including a player Spook with the Construct or Mineral origin. Lithic Nobles look like jellyfish made from interlocking gems. The fact that they’re this close to the surface indicates a low position in the Lithic domesday book, but they’ll never tell you that. They get three tentacle attacks per round, but they can forego those and cast Shape Stone instead. Like Fairy royalty can command lower ranked fey creatures, Lithic Nobles can command any being made out of stone, including player Spooks with the mineral background package. Lithic creatures are Esoteric Enterprises at its best. Evocative, fun, weird, and I don’t have to roll a bunch of dice and copy values from a table to make the drat things. The Lithic Courts have their own entry in both the faction table and the complex creation table, and the Lithic Embassy is one of the most fun dungeon areas to generate and explore. Gamma ray gardens of radiotrophic echinoderms. Black smokers supporting complex silicon ecologies. Birthing chambers where new rock creatures bubble up to the surface of superheated magma spawning pools. Science labs where stone scientists experiment with vats of fatty acids, trying to reproduce the conditions that led to surface life. The Lithic Courts rock. ABOLETHS Yup, there’s Aboleths in Esoteric Enterprises. The text gives the usual ancient-seafaring-empire speech, but an alternate spin on why they initially died out: their enormous lifespans and perfect understanding of reality eventually led to a species-wide malaise that led most of them to take their own lives or enter a state of torpor, awaiting heat death of the universe. If you encounter an aboleth awake, it means you hosed up, or the random encounter table hates you. They get four tentacle attacks per round, but that’s the last of your worries. They can sub any number of tentacle attacks for casting spells from a couple spell lists. They can cast Command, False Sounds or False Images up to four times a round, and Flay, Break Curse, Water Breathing, Gease or Sculpt Flesh once per round. Gease and Flay are the real killers here. Gease can instantly remove a character from the fight on a failed Save vs Magic, while Flay can potentially delete one character per round by dealing D12 damage straight to Flesh. Or potentially more. See, Esoteric Enterprises gives spells scaling power based on caster level, but it’s never clear what level the NPCs are supposed to be casting spells at. Based on the spell description, is the Aboleth supposed to get Flay targets equal to its hit dice? If so, it can delete nine characters per turn. We’ll never know how this is supposed to work (or how it works with any other NPC caster) because the NPC stat blocks in Esoteric Enterprises are so rules light that sometimes they don’t have any rules at all. Aboleths also have a unique disease that they spread in an area around them, and by slapping things with their tentacles. The victim’s skin sloughs off, replaced by a thin layer of mucous underneath that dissolves and kills them if not constantly immersed in water. Gross! Then there’s some descriptive text about how Aboleths will biomechanically engineer servitors for themselves, and are often worshipped by cultists as Gods. PARADOX BEASTS The game’s miscast tables, encounter tables and a host of other rules references have been teasing these things for 200 pages now. These things appear when someone fucks around with magic and accidentally damages the weft of reality. Some people think they’re intruders from another dimension, always lurking in wait for an opportunity to enter our world. Others say they’re reality’s defense mechanism, deployed to exterminate sorcerers who tamper with forces that could endanger creation. What we know for sure is that Paradox Beasts are the mother of all randomly generated creatures, with tables for hit dice, forms, special powers and special effects - all of which have the potential to be very, very nasty. They have a short list of common features, like weakness to Dispel Magic, Antimagic Shell, and other forms of antimagic. Then we get a set of tables and it’s off to the races. First off, we’ll generate our Paradox Beast’s hit dice. Most sources of Paradox Beasts in the game will tell you how many hit dice to give them, but if you don’t have a number, you roll a D12. That gets us 8 hit dice. Next, we roll a D10 to see how many of those dice are flesh, and get a 7. The number of hit dice tells us that our Paradox Beast rolls +8 to hit, does D10 damage on a hit, and Saves against everything on a D20 roll of 7 or higher. The number of Flesh dice tells us it’s the size of a truck. Next, we roll up some a body plan using 2D20. A result of 12 and 16 gets us a manta ray with sticky skin, granting it a bonus to grappling. Next, we roll for special abilities. The book just says to keep rolling until you feel you’ve picked enough abilities, but if you can’t decide how many to give it, just roll a D6 and then roll that many D20s. A D6 roll of 4 gives us 4D20. A 5, an 8, a 9 and a 19 give us corrosive acid drool that increases the beast’s damage and Vandalism skill, a 2-in-6 chance cast Time Stop, Hurl Through Time or Senescence each turn, a breath attack (rolled on a further D6 for what) that shoots glass shards, and the ability to heal any time it deals damage to Flesh. Finally, we have to roll for what happens to the environment around the creature. Again, the book says to either keep rolling until you decide to stop, or roll a D6. Our D6 says to roll four times, again. A 20, a 4, a 7 and a 9 get us a swirling fog, an acceleration of entropy, an increase in humidity, and the stink of ”ozone/tar/paper/blood/sulphur/brine” So our paradox beast is a giant sticky manta ray that lurks outside line of sight as the air fills with damp fog that smells like mold, until it successfully casts time stop. Then swoops in and beats the poo poo out of you with a combination of acid spit and shards of glass. A pretty cool Kaiju, but maybe a bit too many special properties to keep track of at the table. Let’s try to generate a more minimalist Paradox Beast. Our D12 roll gives it 10 hit dice, and our D10 says 1 of those is Flesh and 9 are Grit. It gets +10 to hit, does D12 damage and saves on a 5 or better, but is small enough to fit inside a shoe box. Its body type is a giant bleeding stomach, which halves its speed but upgrades its damage die to a goddamned D20. Let’s just roll 2D20 for powers this time. A 17 and a 14 give it the ability to walk on walls or water, and (with an additional D6 to see what special senses it has), sense gravity. Finally, we roll 2D20 for what happens to the environment around it as it approaches. With a 12 and a 15, there’s a constant sound on the edge of hearing, and liquids increase in volume subtly, causing vessels to overflow and blood pressure to rise to comical levels. So this minimalist Paradox Beast is a stomach that oozes slowly around the dungeon, making squelching noises wherever it goes. It has incredible dodging abilities but you can kill it in one shot if you surprise it. And you had better, because if it gets a shot off it instantly removes you from existence. I like Paradox Beasts. I think these tables are weird and nonsensical in exactly the right way for the role of these creatures in the game. But there are a lot of ways to make Paradox Beasts, from miscast effects to accidentally releasing them from containment in dungeon rooms. And they have to be laboriously generated using all these roll tables. A DM rolling and writing, rolling and writing behind the screen when you roll your miscast on Hell Shall Follow could increase suspense dramatically, or totally murder the game’s pacing depending on your table.  Anyway, that does it for the Monster Manual. Up next: we’ll finish off the book with the inspirations and backwards compatibility sections. Bieeanshee posted:Pardon me while I make off with the concrete nymph. PurpleXVI posted:It took me a while to realize you meant making off with the idea of it and was imagining a party of adventurers just legging it with one of them on a dolly. Bieeanshee posted:Let's be honest, both is good. Falconier111 posted:I just thought that meant you were really into statues, tbh
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Jul 6, 2020 22:52
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ESOTERIC ENTERPRISES PART 20: INSPIRATIONS AND BACKWARDS COMPATIBILITY This is going to be a short post, since it’s just cleanup from the back of the book. You can skip it unless you’re interested in media inspirations or fine grained differences between grog games. APPENDIX N - MEDIA The author was probably inspired to write this section by the inclusion of Appendix N in the original D&D book, which had suggested reading. The inspirations are broken out by medium, and listed in no particular order. Comics posted:Ghosted, which provided the initial inspiration for the game all things considered. Movies posted:The Descent, basically dungeon crawling on cellulose and bloody brilliant. TV Shows posted:The X Files. Music posted:I was mostly listening to a mixture of doom metal, under-ground hiphop, black metal and classic triphop when I wrote this stuff. In particular, Electric Wizard, Dopethrone and Batoushka set the tone pretty nicely. Games posted:Dungeons & Dragons while TSR was still in charge, and the broader OSR thing in general. Books posted:The various works of HP Lovecraft, references to which are all over this game. APPENDIX 0 - COMPATIBILITY This part of the book tells you how to transfer content between Esoteric Enterprises and other D20 games based on the TSR editions of D&D. I’m going to give this section a brief treatment, because I think some of the mechanical differences from other games are interesting. Hit Points and Hit Dice Esoteric Enterprises divides HP into Flesh and Grit, something most other OSR games don’t do - save for other games by the same author, like Wolf Packs and Winter Snow, I think. Humans shouldn’t get more than one die of Flesh, the rest being moved to Grit. Monsters can have between one and half of their hit dice as Flesh, but no more. Undead and other creatures with no vital organs can have all their dice as Flesh. Damage Esoteric Enterprises uses a higher base damage die than most other games knocked off Basic D&D. A knife usually does D4, here it’s a D6. A sword that does D8 damage does a D10 in EE. This has the effect of making fights slightly faster, but also increasing the likelihood that low level characters get oneshot. Saves The EE saves are just the Lamentations saves reskinned, which are just the Basic saves reskinned. Armour Class Esoteric Enterprises assumes a base 10 AC, while the game it’s based on, Lamentations of the Flame Princess, uses a base 12 AC. This isn’t a trivial distinction, it has real impacts on gameplay. Reducing the base unarmored AC makes combat much faster and reduces the game’s whiff factor much more than you’d think, based on a numeric change of only two points. (I don’t love Lamentations if that’s not obvious. It’s a competent retroclone but I personally find it slow and boring, which is funny considering all the modules for it are grindhouse horror) Morale In Basic and related games, most enemies get a morale score that they check against a 2D6 roll when things get tough. Esoteric Enterprises just uses a D6 for all enemies, and counts on the DM to adjudicate if and when characters check or ignore morale. To Hit In Esoteric Enterprises, the Mercenary is the only class that gets to-hit bonuses. Personally I think this is irrelevant, since +1 per level is likely to equal +1 flat when nobody ever lives long enough to level up, given the game’s stingy-rear end treasure tables. But if you’re converting between EE and other games, just give everyone the to-hit bonus of the closest equivalent class. Classes This section tells us what we already discovered in the character creation section.
Skills Basic used percentile skills, and a D6 is basically just a D100 in increments of 17%. Converting one to the other is easy enough, as long as you don’t mind a little rounding. Spellcasting Occultists cast like Magic Users. Mystics cast like Clerics. Just add remove stuff like turn undead, experimental magic as necessary. This part of the book doesn’t mention the other big change from typical OSR games: giving the Occultist the ability to cast spells for free by spending a dungeon turn. This dramatically changes the dungeon resource management game, and is one of the biggest reasons why the Occultist is more powerful than the Mystic, even though the Mystic gets “infinite spells”. XP Most OSR games use either gold or silver for XP, which translates 1 to 1 into Esoteric Enterprises’ dollars/euros/pounds/rubles for XP rules. Multiclassing ...is not allowed in D&D. The author says that “AD&D multiclassing makes my head hurt, and other versions are minmax-friendly silliness.” PARTING WORDS I'll let the book speak for itself here. Esoteric Enterprises, Page 247 posted:Well Then. That’s the end of the book. Next post, I’ll collect my overall thoughts on Esoteric Enterprises, list some of the house rules that I think make the game better, and quickly survey how people actually run and play the game in practice. wiegieman posted:You're supposed to Bieeanshee posted:Yeah, but with a shopping cart you can do Jackass stunts. Joe Slowboat posted:Ultraviolet Grasslands, because it's Oregon Trail, has carrying capacities for different vehicles measured in 'sacks' and 'stones' - and when you find treasure, it's sometimes specific valuable objects but sometimes weird materials that can be valued at, say, '10 cash per sack.' Nessus posted:Ryuutama addresses the "toting poo poo around" system pretty well, although the focus there is more "carrying rations, plus a submechanic for the Merchant character class."
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Jul 7, 2020 05:22
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the loot around, because
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Loving these Silent Legions characters already. I hope they show up in handcrafted examples of play in future posts.BinaryDoubts posted:As you can tell, the Tough’s abilities are entirely combat-focused. The game hasn’t explained what Slaughter damage is yet, but it sure sounds nasty. After seeing all the fun possibilities with the Socialite’s abilities, it’s a bit of a letdown that the fighter equivalent is… just another boring fighter, especially in a modern-day occult game that emphasizes how rarely you want to be fighting. Interested to see when we get to the game's bestiary whether having a dedicated negotiator/social character is enough to get you out of trouble, or whether the investigators will be facing lots of monsters that can't be reasoned with and have to be shot.
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Jul 7, 2020 16:55
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ESOTERIC ENTERPRISES PART 21: WRAPUP, HOUSE RULES AND EXAMPLES OF PLAY End of the line. Let’s get this thing wrapped up. OVERALL THOUGHTS Esoteric Enterprises is a real pain in the rear end. I know the game well enough that going back and re-reading the rules was an uncomfortable reminder of how many of its flaws I just accept or ignore now. But I can’t just straight up say it’s a bad game, because that wouldn’t be fair either. I told all my players that it was unfinished and they shouldn’t buy it, but they did it anyway. Now a couple of them are running their own campaigns. Let’s see how it stacks up. Pros
WHAT’S MISSING There are no rules for creating the surface of the city, other than the dungeon entrances. The random event tables strongly suggest that surface city play is intended to be part of the campaign, but the book provides no help for making it happen. I never thought I’d say this, but I found myself wanting rules for domain level play, and the game doesn’t have any. The pitch given in the first chapter is that the player characters are going to increase in power and become significant players in the underworld, but at no point are rules ever given for hiring even a single goon, let alone an entire criminal organization. For a game called Esoteric Enterprises, there is precisely zero mechanical support given for the enterprises part of the title. HOUSE RULES These are the rules that I use in my home game of Esoteric Enterprises. They’re based on about twenty sessions of experience with the game, most of them implemented much earlier than that. Skill Changes Everyone starts with 1 extra point in Athletics, meaning average characters have a 2 in 6 base chance. If this takes you to 7 in 6, you must put the extra point somewhere else. (This is a small change, but it makes it noticeably easier for characters to run away from a losing battle, something I want to encourage rather than punish) Class Changes The Bodyguard class has the option to take damage in lieu of someone else taking it. This is subject to narrative plausibility at the discretion of the DM. You can dive in front of a knife or bullet, you can't take the damage from poison if someone else drinks it. (This makes the Bodyguard even more powerful than the Mercenary than it already is and I don’t care. The Mercenary is redundant and the Bodyguard is more fun) The Mystic now starts with 3 in 6 Charm. Blessings do not require a roll on the Cost of Holiness table if the recipient of the blessing passes their Charm roll. (Mystics suck and need all the help they can get. This is an interim step that stops short of actually redoing the whole class to more successfully execute on the theme of beseeching divinity for spells, but I’m not interested in doing a full rework) The Explorer no longer takes a penalty to their damage die size in combat. (Explorers are already a worse version of the Criminal, the last thing they need is the damage penalty just because Basic Halflings had it) Advancement Changes Multiply experience gained from treasure by 5. (This results in the awkward expedient of dividing job rewards by 2 (since they give half XP), dividing that by the number of party members, then multiplying by 5. But it makes advancement fast enough to matter, instead of glacial. And it doesn't disrupt "balance", because the game has none and doesn't care) Your character's Resources value functions rules as written during character creation. After character creation, buying items is done with cash. It's up to the DM to come up with cash prices for items, but the book has some guidelines (ex pg 134 lists 300 for a handgun, 600 for a heavy weapon, etc). In addition to money from adventuring, you get a weekly influx of money equal to the "budget" for your Resources level on page 56. The Contacts skill is still used to find people willing to sell rare items. (The resources rules as written are bad because they don’t allow the players to actually spend their dungeon cash on goodies. The game already counts dollars and cents for XP purposes, counting them for spending money isn’t a huge stretch. It even gives weekly dollar amounts for each resource level.) Underworld Creation When rolling the map of the whole city, use only large dice, such as D20s and D10s marked with the 10s place. When connecting these complexes, ignore the miles and miles of identical sewer tunnels the game tells you are connecting them. Instead, each underworld complex is directly connected to its neighbors. When rolling up an individual complex, increase the portion of large dice, such as D20s and D10s marked with the 10s place (if the complex’s table uses such dice). If the complex has rules for passages connecting rooms based on the die size, ignore those rules and roll randomly to see which of those passages connect the rooms. Each complex connects directly to its neighbors by at least one door, passage, tunnel, hallway, etc, but usually two. Just draw two lines off the page in the direction of the other complex, and two lines coming onto the page from that direction on the connecting complex. When rolling the social underworld, use a smaller number of dice than you have complexes in your underworld. Add complexes to the underworld to accommodate factions generated in this phase that have their own unique complexes (such as Fairy Enclaves, Morlock Packs and Lithic Courts) but did not have those complexes generated during the dungeon creation phase. Domain Level Play This barely counts as a houserule, since it’s more like a new mechanic, but in brief: once you hit Level 3, you get a Crew. You can choose what NPCs make up your Crew, as long as their total hit dice is equal to or less than your Level plus your Contacts score. You can always pick mundane humans, like Professional Doctors, Mobsters, etc. If you know how to contact Wizards, Fairies, Morlocks, etc and they aren’t hostile to you, you can recruit from those factions. They come with whatever equipment is in their stat block, and you can give them whatever weapons items you want in addition to that. You can also have a tame monstrous creature that obeys your orders, if you know where to find it. When in doubt, you can use a Contacts roll to see if you know a guy. You don’t have to worry about paying wages for your crew, that’s handled in your weekly budget from your resources level. You can send your Crew to do errands during downtime, expanding the amount of stuff you can accomplish in a day. You can also bring your Crew with you into the dungeon or on other adventures. They generally do what you say and don’t have to test morale unless something really horrible happens. If a Crew member dies, you can replace them, but it depends on the circumstances of their death. If it was obviously your fault, or especially if you deliberately killed them, you have to make a Contacts roll or jump through some other hoop to find someone willing to work for you. (I’m toying with giving them a share of the XP, though I don’t know how much. Probably Half or One-Quarter of the XP earned by the player they work for, that way it doesn’t subtract from any of the other group members’ payouts) EXAMPLES OF PLAY There aren’t many out there. Here’s what I was able to find by searching the internet. If you know of more, don’t hesitate to post them.
For completeness’ and self aggrandizement’s sakes, here are my own Esoteric Enterprises play reports:
As aggravating as the game can be, I really enjoyed running it. It was a real eye opener to the reasons why people return to OSR games, despite the many things that suck about D&D. I'm going to put it back on the shelf soon, though. I've used basically every faction and complex now. And once you've squeezed all the content out of Esoteric Enterprises, you're left with nothing but a rind of not-particularly-appealing mechanics. Thanks for sticking with me for 21 posts. Keep being awesome, FATAL and Friends.
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Jul 7, 2020 21:11
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BinaryDoubts posted:At first level, Parker gets Deep Gnosis, which lets Parker spend an Expertise point to gain an automatic success at any knowledge-based skill he possesses. Unfortunately, it doesn’t apply to the Occult skill, and can only be used once per day. Looking forward to the rules explanation.
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Jul 8, 2020 17:06
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Nessus posted:Wow! That's a great module. Now I do want to adapt it to Call of Cthulhu though I am not sure exactly how. I'm thinking a 1970s genre piece, perhaps with a suggestion that the wizard is some kind of New Age guy who's really twigging to the True Magic. BinaryDoubts posted:Thoughts so far: I've made my feelings on having half-complete versions of the rules scattered throughout the character creation chapter clear. As for the rules overall? They're decently straightforward, but man just use 2d6 or 1d20 for everything! Stop wasting our lives on fiddling with different dice!! Galaxy Brain: Using both a D20 and a D6, and a combination of Roll-Over and Roll-Under Universe Brain: Roll-Over, but with 2D6, a D20 and a D8
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Jul 9, 2020 00:36
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Nessus posted:I'd say that would make a good adventure great but I got Opinions on Delta Green and they aren't super friendly. But it could turn something from a Bug Hunt, tm, into something really memorably bizarre. Especially if someone says yes. Nessus posted:I would not connect it, I think, to any of the established monsters, although if the party had access to one of the hoarier Mythos tomes of All Ghastly Knowledge I might allow them to glean some helpful factoids like the examples above from the doctor stuff. But I would not just spell it out, either.
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Jul 9, 2020 04:52
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BinaryDoubts posted:The game uses a basic geometric sequence for levelling: you need 2k XP, then 4k, then 8k, then 16k, and so on. I never use XP, and I’m not even sure how it’s supposed to work here without a focus on treasure collection or direct combat. 
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Jul 11, 2020 17:13
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BinaryDoubts posted:Players can never acquire or use black magic, as the evil required would both make you unsuitable as a protagonist and transform you into something both less and more than human.
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Jul 16, 2020 00:49
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BinaryDoubts posted:First off, Kelipot is the plural for Kelipah. I plan to forget this within the next two sentences. Secondly, the term Kelipot (sometimes written as Qliphoth in English) is taken from various Kabbalistic traditions. I’m the wrong person to discuss the religious significance of the term, so I’ll just say that while it does have a real-world origin, the concept in Silent Legions is so different as to make any comparison pretty much moot. Really digging the aircraft carrier city. The kelp god feels like an evil mirror universe version of the Pattern Jugglers. The whole thing is a neat contrast to the plane creation rules from the Manual of the Planes. Seems like there's more of a focus on creating something immediately usable for the GM, with all the flavor and faction rules. Which leads me to my next question: how much of the game is actually focused on adventures in these alternate alien realms? They seem pretty cool, but also tonally at odds with the rest of the game. I'd be pretty annoyed if I built a scholarly investigative character, and then the campaign was about fighting cyberbarbarians on the boiling glass planet.
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Jul 16, 2020 07:38
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CASTLE GARGANTUA PART 1: INTRODUCTION, RUMORS AND RULES A grotesque gothic horror megadungeon that's never the same twice Castle Gargantua is a set of megadungeon creation and stocking procedures by Patrice 'Kabuki Kaiser' Crespy. It’s advertised as “system agnostic” but the book recommends Labyrinth Lord as the best fit, or Lamentations of the Flame Princess as a backup. Both of these are “retroclones” of Basic D&D. Why am I posting about this? Because I think dungeon generators are cool, and because the content was evocative enough that I tried to run it - for just long enough to discover that it’s not nearly as table-ready as the author claims. PRESENTATION The typography is serviceable. The font is readable and the book makes economical use of bold and colored text to call out specific information. The one area where I had trouble was the premade dungeon areas in the back, which had massive pages of text that really would have benefited from some paragraph spacing. The art is all full page illustrations that range from acceptable to meh, in my opinion. Some of them fit the tone and theme of the game, while others look like they’re straight off someone’s deviantart (though it could be argued that this also fits the tone of the game)  The table of contents is missing an entry for one of the themed dungeon areas, but I didn’t notice any other proofreading errors flipping through the text. Oh and it’s got off-white backgrounds behind the text that suck up printer ink even when you choose greyscale, which I hate hate hate. INTRODUCTION I’ll let the book speak for itself here. Castle Gargantua, Page 4 posted:This adventure is both a megadungeon and a grotesque, weird, gothic horror campaign. It's not about killing monsters, looting treasure, and gaining experience as you delve deeper into some mad archmage's architectural folly. It's about surviving in a loathsome, terrifying environment where nothing is quite as expected. It's about atmosphere, gloom, and despair. It's a thriller. Sometimes, there's just an empty complex of rooms and corridors with a dripping noise at a distance to keep your players on their toes. Sometimes, it's a goddamn bloodbath. The characters' 10' poles shall be broken, their ropes cut, and their rations spoiled. They will die, many of them, many times. There's no happy end when it's over. It's never over. Now, on to some actual mechanics. Castle Gargantua, Page 5 posted:Castle Gargantua is about the same height as the Empire State Building—1,250 feet—and the same size as Ceausescu's Palatul Poporului in Bucharest, a little bit below four million square feet—floor area, the same size as the entire old city of Venice. Its rooms and corridors are so huge that clouds hover within them. Sometimes, it rains inside. There are miniature tornadoes in the spiral stairs and strong drafts of wind where the corridors are sloped. If a curtain fell, its weight alone would smash a dozen men to a pulp. Next, we get a paragraph about how the aforementioned weather systems make flying up the castle impossible, and it’s been enchanted to prevent teleportation or any other form of magical travel. I think this is totally unnecessary fun-killing, since as we’ll see in the upcoming rules section, being able to “skip” areas of the castle doesn’t actually short-circuit any interesting gameplay. After that, we get some rules for choosing a location for the castle. The book says slap it down anywhere, but then offers a D10 table if you don’t have an existing campaign/setting, or just want to run CG as a standalone. I rolled on the table and got a 4 Castle Gargantua, Page 7 posted:ON TOP OF A HILL ABOVE A CITY THAT WASN'T THERE AN HOUR AGO. ALL THE INHABITANTS ARE GONE, AS IF THEY HAD LEFT IN GREAT HURRY THE DAY BEFORE. Other options offered by the book include “IN THE DEPTHS OF AN OCEANIC ABYSS”, “ON A BEACH OF BLACK SAND WHERE WHITE PALM TREES SWAY IN NO BREEZE”, and “IN A PLANE OF MIST THAT'S BEHIND A GOLDEN DOOR IN BABA YAGA'S TINY HUT”. You may already see the problem here. These are very evocative descriptions, but they don’t exactly lend themselves toward obvious setting or gameplay details. How do I get to the bottom of the ocean? What happens when the players leave the castle and end up back inside Baba Yaga’s hut? These might be fun challenges or adventure hooks, but they also create a lot of work for the DM to actually implement. Which is the exact thing a pre-baked module is supposed to do instead. SCALING THE ADVENTURE Castle Gargantua scales encounters to the level of the adventurers. It does so through a set of global rules, and through specific scaling mechanics in the encounter and room creation tables. Humans are either “rabble” or “bosses”. Rabble have the same hit-dice as the average party level. Bosses have HD equal to the average level plus three. Rather than scaling linearly like humans, monsters increase in size at specific average party level breakpoints. They go from Normal to Huge to Enormous to Gargantuan. Huge monsters are twice the normal size, and have twice the normal hit dice. Enormous and Gargantuan monsters get even more HD, more damage, higher speed and better morale, but they start taking penalties to hit human sized targets. I love the idea of the giant creatures, but I don’t like this kind of global scaling. Part of the fun of the megadungeon concept is that it’s a little world that exists even when the players aren’t looking, rather than existing entirely to react to them. Plus, global scaling difficulty removes an element of choice in dungeon exploration. If all the areas present the same challenge, the players have no reason to explore one over the other. As we’ll see later, though, most of the “choices” presented by Castle Gargantua’s dungeon creation rules are meaningless. I also think the scaling rules are moot because it’s unlikely that anyone playing this module will ever level up. Labyrinth Lord and Lamentations use the B/X experience tables for leveling, meaning that the average character will need about 2,000 XP to go from level one to two. That means a party of five will need to collect 10,000 XP for everyone to get there. To put it bluntly, the stinginess of the treasure tables in the generator means this will not happen. The only way the players will encounter the giant monsters is if they come into the dungeon already at a higher level, or if you use some other game that has more generous advancement. RUMORS The book gives us a few tables to roll on for each class, to see what they “know” about Castle Gargantua. Every character starts with two rumors, except those with 13 or higher Intelligence, who know three. The book says it’s up to the DM to decide which rumors are true. Which is a cop-out, because some of them are explicitly references to stuff that exists later in the text, while others are totally made up. So what they really mean is that it’s up to the DM to add content to the game if they want the bogus rumors to be not-bogus. Let’s roll a couple times for each class and see what we know. Clerics THE GOD BACCHUS, LORD OF WINE AND KING OF GRAPES, WANDERS THE CASTLE (true) THE TRIDENT OF THE MARIANAS TRENCH, A POWERFUL ARTIFACT OF THE SEA GODS, IS HIDDEN WITHIN THE CASTLE (true) Fighters MONGKE KHAN, A FIERCE WARRIOR PRINCE OF THE EASTERLINGS, ENTERED THE CASTLE AND NEVER RETURNED. HIS TWELVE ELITE SOLDIERS WILL OFFER TO BECOME RETAINERS AND FOLLOWERS OF THE CHARACTERS IF THEY FIND HIM (false) THE BIGGEST OCTOPUS IN THE WORLD, A SEA MONSTER, ROAMS THE CASTLE. IF SOMEONE KILLS IT, HE WILL BECOME FAMOUS AS THE "BEASTSLAYER" (true) Magic Users THE WITCH CIRCE, A POWERFUL SORCERESS SKILLED IN SENSUAL MAGIC AND TRANSFORMATIONS, HAS TAKEN OVER THE CASTLE (false) THERE IS A GREAT CAVE INTO THE CASTLE WHICH LEADS TO THE UNDERGROUND TUNNELS OF THE DREAMLAND WHERE THE GUGS WRITHE ETERNALLY (borderline. There are Gugs but no Dreamlands tunnels) Specialists (this is OSRspeak for “thief” or “rogue") THERE IS A HUGE LABORATORY DEEP INSIDE THE CASTLE WHERE ONE CAN FIND AQUAFORTIS AND ALGAROTH, TWO ALCHEMICAL POISONS THAT THE ASSASSIN'S GUILD WANTS TO STUDY. THEY ARE OFFERING 3,000SP FOR EACH POISON (true) THERE ARE GIANT WASPS INSIDE THE CASTLE WHICH GUARD A FANTASTIC TREASURE (true) Dwarves THE PRINCESS OF THE FIRE GIANTS, A NOBLE SOUL, LIVES IN THE CASTLE (false) THERE'S A GEMSTONE BIG AS A MAN'S HEAD AT THE HEART OF THE CASTLE (borderline. There are a lot of gemstones but we don’t get size descriptors for most of them) Elves WHAT PEOPLE CALL GARGANTUA IS ACTUALLY THE PHYSICAL MANIFESTATION OF A GIGANTIC AND BLIND PRIMEVAL POWER, HALF STONE, HALF TREE, THAT WAS HERE LONG BEFORE THE GIANTS CAME TO THIS WORLD (borderline/irrelevant, the book gives multiple origin stories and explicitly says they don’t matter) THERE IS A MIRROR INSIDE THE CASTLE THAT WILL SHOW YOU WHO YOU REALLY ARE (false but in an amusing way we’ll see later) Halflings THERE ARE BOTTLES OF THE FINEST WINE, THE CHABLIS ROCAMADOUR, INSIDE THE CASTLE (true) GARGANTUA MIGHT BE GONE BUT HIS DAUGHTER REMAINS. THE RUMOR HAS IT THAT SHE LOVES SMALL GUYS AND ISN'T MARRIED YET (false) Ducks (the book includes a link to a drivethroughrpg page with a PDF of an “advanced class” guide for ducks) THE FAMOUS MAGICIAN DROSSELMEYER LIVES IN THE CASTLE (false) THERE IS AN EBONY GATE WHICH LEADS TO A LAND OF BLISS AND ARCANE RICHES IN THE CASTLE (true) Generally, the rumors present distorted versions of stuff that’s actually in the castle, although the random generation system means the players are unlikely to see any specific one they’re looking for. Most of them work well enough if you need a reason for the characters to be there, beyond just "it's a dungeon, we explore dungeons".  Next post, we’ll tackle the rules of room creation, keying us up to dig into the content itself.
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Jul 16, 2020 20:58
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CASTLE GARGANTUA PART 2: CREATING THE CASTLE Navigating the big picture Castle Gargantua is a megadungeon generator, but has a very different philosophy to Esoteric Enterprises, the last one of those I reviewed. Rather than generate a full map and then create the individual areas as the players explore them, Gargantua takes the opposite approach. Rooms are generated as the players encounter them, and once they explore a certain number of rooms, you dice to see what the next set of rooms is. There’s no rules for generating the spatial relationships between the rooms, and the book encourages you not to try. Unless the players do, in which case you’re supposed to lean into whatever map they create. More on that in a second. Castle Gargantua has five themed areas, four of which correspond to a unique room generator.
So how do we fit our generated rooms into this larger framework of themed areas and special premade maps? With a Snakes and Ladders board. No, seriously.  Red spaces are Blood, Pink spaces are Lust, Blue spaces are Stone, Purple spaces are Wine, Yellow spaces are Gold. Every time you clear four rooms of whatever themed dungeon area you’re in, the DM secretly rolls a D6 to see how many spaces they advance. The exit from the last area connects to the first room of the next. Then the players advance four more rooms, and you repeat the process. Unless there’s a snake (or chute) in the space you’re in. Then instead of rolling a D6, you just go directly to the space at the end for the next area. If that takes you back to a square the players have already passed through, there’s a chance of new traps, monsters and treasure, but the layout remains the same. Or it might not. It’s not super clear how the roll-and-move rules on the board interact with dungeon rooms that have multiple exits. If the last of the four rooms has two exits and I take a different one, does it lead to a different new board square, or just the same one? There’s also suggestion that if you want the dungeon to be even longer, you can roll for a new space every six or eight rooms, rather than four. And if you want a real meat grinder, just advance across the board in a straight line from 1 to 35, without rolling or using the chutes. How do you justify all these weird looping connections and rooms interconnecting each other? You don’t. You blame it on teleporters, parts of the castle that move on their own, strange mist that takes you back where you started or sends you rocketing forward. How do I feel about this? I think it’s an interesting idea, but I don’t love it in practice. The snakes and ladders board is a cute mechanic that nobody but the DM will ever see. It’s probably going to bewilder or just piss off the players once they find they went in a big circle and that none of their choices about where to go actually matter. I find that player mapping is one of the most arduous tasks in OSR games, and I hate the idea that the players would go through all that trouble for something that just doesn’t matter - that the DM is just pulling off a random generator with no actual spatial relationship. The underworld creation rules in Esoteric Enterprises were flawed and sometimes illogical, but they created a living and permanent shared world that the players could explore and map. Having all your progress disappear when you aren’t looking at it just sucks. The one bright spot is that there’s a random chance each time you pass between two spaces that you’ll find a hidden shortcut leading out of the castle. That means every time you move forward, you have a chance to “lock in” your progress, rather than just having to start from scratch every time. It creates this press-your-luck minigame where the further the players go, the more likely they are to find an alternate exit, but also the harder it gets to retreat if they don’t find one. SQUARES Creating a room in a themed dungeon area uses a full set of polyhedral dice. Castle Gargantua, Page 18 posted:D4 is for the number and the type of exits. Ordinarily I think empty rooms are good. They add tactical diversity to the dungeon by providing alternate routes around monsters and traps, new avenues of retreat and advance. It’s also thematically appropriate because Castle Gargantua is a ruin that’s been pillaged over and over. But “tactical diversity” is a sham when the dungeon is essentially a straight line of totally random things. There’s no choice of an empty room or a room with danger/treasure because it’s all random. A string of empty rooms can build atmosphere, or it can just waste everyone’s time. Or maybe that’s not how this all works. You saw that we roll a D4 for number of exits from a room, right? So if I go through one, don’t like what I find on the other side, go back and then choose another door, I assume I roll a different room. But then, does that count as another room out of the four cleared? Do I have to go through four rooms consecutively, or just explore a total of four? The book offers no help here. CASTLE GUARDS In addition to the monsters generated by the room creation system, the castle also has a global 1 in 6 chance every hour that 2D4 patrolling guards enter the room the players are in (except in Gold areas, where the guards don’t patrol). The guards are 5 foot tall magical constructs, armed with spears and shields. They’re monsters, so their size scales based on player level. They’re always hostile and have perfect morale, which is 2 out of 3 for uninteresting D&D monsters (3 is “faster than the players” and these guys move at normal speed). Their primary purpose is to apply time pressure on the players and encourage them not to loiter in the dungeon, or to hide themselves if they’re going to camp out (such as on top of the aforementioned giant table). It’s not all boring, though. There’s a D8 table for what material the guards are made of, and a D20 table for an interesting detail about them. Let’s roll a couple squads up and see how they treat us.
Tune in next post, when we tackle the first of the themed dungeon areas: Blood! Night10194 posted:Man, what is with OSR stuff and never loving leveling up? If your system/game doesn't work with its assumptions at high levels, rewrite your leveling system goddamnit. Don't just never give PCs EXP. El Spamo posted:something something earn your fun something 90s Cringe Rock posted:Bryce Lynch has that complaint in a lot of his OSR module reviews, especially in lazy conversions from other editions. You have to hand out the loot, people. wiegieman posted:A lot of rpg writers have a pretty high opinion of themselves, but no, your story is not enough to activate the reward pathways in my brain on its own. I want a sense of progression, and then I want to have a good send-off for my high level character. Night10194 posted:I play loving WHFRP! A lot! I like earning my fun sometimes, I just like the fun to actually come out after the earning, goddamnit.
Joe Slowboat posted:...are these Glorantha ducks, or is that Duck from Princess Tutu? The Drosselmeyer reference makes me think it's a reference to Princess Tutu. But I see references to that show more often than they actually exist. Nemo2342 posted:None of that sounded like Glorantha ducks to me, but I agree that Drosselmeyer makes me think it’s a nod to Princess Tutu. mellonbread fucked around with this message at 23:13 on Jul 16, 2020 |
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Jul 16, 2020 22:59
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CASTLE GARGANTUA PART 3: BLOOD In this post, we’ll explore the first of Castle Gargantua’s four dungeon generation tables: Blood. Castle Gargantua, Page 23 posted:Blood environments are dripping blood, literally. They're all about rage, war, and violence, usually haunted with grotesque monsters and fanatical humans. Their rooms, chambers, and corridors are built with a reddish marble-like smooth stone. There are dents and charred bloody stains on the walls and broken pieces of weapons and splintered shields here and there. When there's furniture, it's either sturdy and practical or antique bronze. Places here are warmer than the rest of the castle and the ceilings are 80' high, often painted with war scenes of forgotten battles. The rooms may be lit with blazing torches, braziers, and fire pits when inhabited. We’ll go over the room creation rules from the last section again, both as a refresher and because they didn’t give a complete picture of how the system works. You need a coin and a full set of polyhedral dice.
We’ll go over each table in detail for this post, to show how the system works. ROOMS & CHAMBERS The pick list for room types gives us the following options: Castle Gargantua, Pages 23 and 24 posted:ARENA NUMBER AND TYPE OF EXITS This is what our D4 does. Castle Gargantua, Page 24 posted:1 A single rusted grate, raised Are the exits human size or giant size based on the result of the coin toss? The book doesn’t say. I like to think they are, because it means you can have people running through a giant size portcullis, or climbing through the keyhole of a giant size door. But then, what happens when the next room is human size? Does the hallway narrow down? ROOM & CHAMBER SIZE AND TYPE This is what our D6 tells us. Castle Gargantua, Page 24 posted:1 Small room (2 squares x 2 squares) ROOM & CHAMBER CONTENTS Our D8 tells us what’s in the room. There’s a 4 in 8 chance of nothing, a 1 in 8 chance of a monster/trap and a treasure, a 2 in 8 chance of just a monster/trap, and a 1 in 8 chance of just a treasure. Other themed areas will have slightly different ratios but not depart significantly from this formula. TREASURES There are D10 possible treasure results. The most valuable potential item is a sack of 5D100 electrum pieces, each of which is worth 10 SP (meaning they have the same value as GP in most game systems). The least valuable is a pouch of 3D100 copper pieces. The most common value for a treasure is D100 SP. In addition to the mundane lucre, there are three magical treasures available in this treasure table. Magical tarot cards always start face down. When you pick one up, it has a 2 in 6 chance of stripping you naked and beating the poo poo out of you with clubs, a 3 in 6 chance to turn every NPC in your party hostile, and a 1 in 6 chance to raise your Strength to 18. Magic manacles reduce anyone bound by them to a mindless state, automatically obeying any orders given to them. There’s a 1 in 6 chance every day of continuous use that they break. Ghost weapons ignore supernatural damage resistance, hitting ethereal beings and other magic creatures like normal. They have a small penalty to hit, and age the user 10 years on a natural 20 to hit. Magic items in Castle Gargantua are like the ones in The God That Crawls. They will gently caress you up or kill you dead. Stuff them in your sack, flip them for XP when you get out of the dungeon, and do not under any circumstances use them. And these are far from the worst we’ll see. MONSTERS, WEIRDNESS AND TRAPS This is a D12 table of horrible poo poo. Entries have their armor listed in generic terms, IE “as chain, shield only”, etc. Morale and speed are likewise given in system agnostic descriptors, like “slow” or “superb”. Angry mobs on rye ergot are peasants hosed up on fungi. They’re rabble, meaning they have the same number of hit dice as the average party level, but attack with improvised weapons with a malus to-hit. I like this entry, I think it’s got exactly the right flavor for an are themed on endless war. It’s a serious threat to the characters regardless of level, but not one they necessarily have to fight directly. The peasants can’t exactly be reasoned with, but they can be tricked and outsmarted, or avoided outright. Antique warriors are tough fighters who entered the castle in a bygone era. They are “violent but might be appeased and befriended” and there are D4+1 of them per average party level, and a boss for every 10 warriors. I don’t like this entry, because it scales both the number and the strength of the warriors based on the party level. It’s also not unusual/interesting in the way some of the other entries are. A little information on their motivations would help me decide how they could be appeased and befriended. Bloodthirsty berserkers are battle crazed Norsemen who entered the castle to pillage it, and have been wandering ever since. They’re like Antique warriors with worse armor and better morale. Again, some more personality would have gone a long way here. Caputs decamort are grotesque masses of tentacles, on which dangle human heads. They get up to ten attacks per round, equal to the number of heads still alive. They’re slow and vulnerable to holy stuff, due to being undead. Once more, I would have appreciated a little more info on the ecology of these things. Do they pluck those heads off the people they kill? Do they attack on sight? Flat caps are two dimensional goblins in blood soaked caps. They’re cowardly, stealthy and don’t do much damage, but they hunt in packs. I assume they’re intelligent, since they wear clothes. Hybrid golems are taxidermized monstrosities made from the carcasses of different animals. They get multiple attacks, they’re immune to all physical damage except fire, and they can cast Enfeeblement as a 12th level wizard by screaming. I don’t know how a creature like this even behaves, other than roll around screeching and flailing at anyone who comes near them. Oversized lice are ten feet long. Their bite inflicts a neurodegenerative disease that “affects all abilities at once”, though we aren’t told how. They also deal D6 damage per round once they sink their proboscis into you, and that damage continues after they die because their nervous system is “iron hard”. The only way to get rid of them is fire or immersion in water. I like the idea of a giant louse in an area themed around meat and blood, but I wonder if the degenerative disease is really necessary. D6 damage per round until you solve the puzzle is going to kill most low level characters outright anyway. Stirges are mosquito-pterodactyls. The book doesn’t explain this, it just expects you to know it from D&D. If they drink too much blood they get too fat to fly and become easy targets. Other than that, I’m not a fan. Iron maidens are traps that look like a set of double doors. When someone goes to open them, they swing shut and deal D10 damage per average party level. This is an example of how traps have built-in scaling versus party level. I didn’t like it when it was explained in the first chapter, and I don’t like it here. Rusty spikes shoot out of the walls/floor with poor accuracy and minimal damage due to corroding rust, but also have a chance to inflict “super-tetanus” that deals rapid progressive Dexterity damage. The book explicitly says the spikes “have no telltale sign”, which is bullshit if you ask me. Bloodstone megaliths are traps that endlessly spawn blood blob creatures if any blood is shed on them. The text specifically calls out that this includes atmospheric blood drizzles or other room descriptors. The only way to stop it spawning the blobs is to smash it to pieces, and that has a good chance of breaking your weapons when you try it. Overall this is a cool puzzle/environmental hazard rather than a combat encounter or trap. Vampire magic mouths are mouths painted on the wall in blood. They cast Charm Person to get you to approach them, then bite you and drain you one level. If they roll a natural 20 they transport you to the vampire dimension and kill you instantly. Ah, level draining undead. Does anyone miss you? I didn’t think so. Overall, these aren’t my favorite dungeon hazards in Castle Gargantua. Those will come in later posts. A lot of them are underspecific about what the NPCs actually do, which is a pattern we’ll see in other entries. ATMOSPHERIC DETAILS Our D20 gives us an additional detail about the room, taken from a table of flavor text. I won’t give these for every dungeon area, but I’ll post this one in full so you can see what we’re working with. Castle Gargantua, Page 25 posted:1 A fountain of blood PASSAGES Oh remember how I said we were done rolling dice for this room? ...I didn’t say that? Good, because we’re not done. You need another D6 to determine what the passage the players take out of the room looks like. There’s a chance the door leads right into the next room, a chance of a short corridor, a chance of a winding corridor, and a chance of a flight of stairs. I imagine it all sounds more exciting when you’re being chased. There’s also a small (about 1/24 if you crunch all the if/thens) chance that each transition includes a secret exit leading out of the dungeon. This allows players to “save” their progress on future runs, entering at that point instead of the beginning of the Snakes and Ladders board. EXAMPLES Let’s roll us some rooms. Our first room is a giant sized meat locker, 240 by 360 feet in size, with three grates leading out, only one of which is raised. There are hooks hanging from the ceiling, on which dangle giant size sides of beef, pork, or possibly some less wholesome creature. Next, the human size battlefield stinks of carrion across its 120 by 120 foot floor. A swarm of stirges hovers overhead, eager to feed on living prey who make a run for the four iron banded doors leading out. This open air court is built to human scale, but covers a massive 120 by 180 feet. A hybrid golem rolls and flops among the benches and seats, shrieking at nothing and biting itself with its excess heads. Four bodies lie dead, enfeebled and clouted to death by the thing’s many limbs. A pair of magic manacles sit in the defendant’s box, awaiting a prisoner to attach themselves to. Two smashed wooden doors lead onward. A platoon of antique warriors have made their camp in this giant taxidermy laboratory, defending a fortified position among the enormous chemical bottles on the massive table that stretches most of the room’s 180 foot length. Only a single one of the hides tacked up in the room is worth anything to visiting adventurers. Something wails in agony from the broken doors that serve as exits  How are we doing so far? I think these individual rooms are much more evocative than the ones the Esoteric Enterprises generator spits out. They’re more memorable and have a much wider variety of descriptors attached to them. However, we also had to roll a lot more dice per-room to get there. And the connections between the rooms are totally arbitrary and don’t matter. We aren’t creating a living, interconnected megadungeon here, we’re just stringing tables together in a row. So far, the level scaling mechanics are not great. People like to complain about HP or stat bloat bloat in later editions, but this is basically the same thing - cranking up all the numbers in concert in an endless red-queen race that ensures fights feel the same at all levels, but take longer. That’s going to do it for Blood. Next post is the second themed area: Lust. E: I keep referring to "Lust" as "Flesh" in my head, because there's a pre-baked minidungeon called Flesh later in the module and it's loving with me. mellonbread fucked around with this message at 18:02 on Jul 17, 2020 |
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Jul 17, 2020 17:58
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CASTLE GARGANTUA PART 4: LUST Today in Castle Gargantua, we’ll be exploring our second themed dungeon generator: Lust. Castle Gargantua, Page 31 posted:The true horror of the rooms and chambers found in the Lust environments isn't immediately visible. There are lovely pieces of furniture in the corners and heaps of coins, gems, and jewels in lofty lounges pervaded by the scent of delicate perfumes. In reality, the furniture is shoddy and poor, the coins made of tin, the gems of glass, and the perfume barely covers the stench of body fluids and decay. The stained rooms, chambers, and corridors are built with a whitish claylike smooth stone. They are damper than the rest of the castle, and their ceilings are 60' high. They are lit with lanterns and oil lamps when inhabited. I’m going to go slightly out of order here because this section offers a disclaimer at the end of the monster/trap list. It suggests that if you aren’t interested in any weird sex poo poo in your dungeon, you can just replace Lust areas on your Snakes and Ladders board with Stone areas or some other room type. I support clearly signposting things like this, and giving people an option to sidestep it. Unfortunately, this specific example is a loving lie. Why? We’ll get to that when we do the Wine area. I’m going to do an abbreviated version of the room generation rules, since a lot of them are similar to Blood. Then we’ll create some examples. ROOMS & CHAMBERS The pick list for room types gives us the following options: Castle Gargantua, Page 31 posted:ANTECHAMBER NUMBER AND TYPE OF EXITS Same as in Blood, the number shown on the D4 is the number of exits from the room. In this case, we’ve got tin doors painted to look like brass, wood doors painted to look like wood, and leather doors. TREASURES The treasure list for Lust rooms matches the descriptive text we got at the beginning. Most of the items are fugazi, only worth a few copper pieces but disguised as items 500 times their real value. Glass beads disguised as sapphires, copper coins painted gold, a fake pearl necklace, you get the idea. There are also three magical treasures. The Magical Picture Book has a chance to teach Magic Users one of three spells:
The Magical gold tiara "permanently changes the wearer’s gender", and boosts their charisma. I can only assume this is a riff on the “Girdle of Femininity/Masculinity” from 1E. Or was it AD&D? Anyway, the original item lived on as a meme about the “cursed belt of gender change”, except its actual effect was what we’d call a sex change today. So I genuinely don’t know if the tiara is intended to change the character’s physical sex, or their gender presentation. I think I’m putting more thought into this than the author did. Speaking of belts, the Cursed Chastity belt not only requires a remove-curse spell to take off, it also stabs you with iron spikes every time you take damage, dealing an additional D6 damage and making it impossible for you to move. The book calls putting it on a “very, very stupid idea” and I have to agree - though I’m beginning to wonder if reviewing this module was also a stupid idea. Magic items: still largely useless, and now tasteless as well. Remember kids, sell it to a wizard first chance you get! Let him put it on! MONSTERS The monster selection ranges from interesting, to boring, to grotesque, to grotesque but interesting, to grotesque but boring. Bloated giants are ten foot tall masses of flesh, covered in “mouth-like orifices”. They’re almost immobile and get four low-damage attacks per turn (biting with the mouths), but they’re more interested in sex with anyone who passes by. The reason being, they’ve got a “1 in 6 chance per partner” to turn into a normal person. If denied this, they attack, but being largely immobile there’s not much they can do if you choose to walk away. Rating: grotesque but boring. Bluebeard ghouls are the giant Bluebeard’s wives, who came back from the dead and ate him. As a result, they’ve got long blue beards of their own. They wander the castle, looking for men to take revenge on. Thematically pretty interesting, mechanically boring: they’re just undead fighters who slap you with an axe. They also have good morale and are faster than you, which as I mentioned earlier does not an interesting monster make. Houris are a creature I had to look up. Wikipedia says they’re the women who reward the faithful in paradise according to the Koran, but apparently they also appear in the early D&D editions in the encounter tables. This is something that would have been helpful to include here, because the book doesn’t explain what they are. It just says they’re here to manipulate you into going on missions for them. What missions? No idea, book doesn’t say. They ensorcel you by kissing you. I rate as boring because there’s not enough detail to do anything with. Libertine tribesmen are “naive, friendly and uninhibited” and that’s all the detail we get about who they are and what they do. The book gives us a paragraph of text about how their fingers grant a +1 to all die rolls if chopped off and worn as amulets. If that information were somehow communicated to the players (do Magic Users know this? Clerics? Thieves?) it would make them grotesque but interesting, since it offers the players a chance to flip the script and turn hostile toward the NPCs apropos of nothing, rather than the other way around. Monstrous angora cats like to torment creatures smaller than themselves for hours before killing them. Since they’re four feet tall, I think that only applies to halflings, and maybe dwarves. I would make them a bit bigger and let them hunt normal size people. Rating: interesting. Monstrous pink toads are uninterested in eating the players, but the rubies set in their pink skin make the players interested in killing them. When fighting in self defense, they secrete a neurotoxin with powerful emetic, diuretic and laxative effects, rendering the victim unable to act for one round. This was my players’ favorite monster, because it was gross but also totally believable and not obviously included for shock value. Also because it was their own fault for chasing the toad into his furniture pile and trying to kill him. Rating: grotesque but interesting. Organ treants are seven feet of “flesh, sinewy muscles, and throbbing organs”. I don’t know if the book wants the reader to imagine these as giant dongs. Every player at my table immediately did, and so did I. There’s a 1% chance they’re “in bloom” - covered with fruits that kill you on a failed save vs poison, but raise your ability scores by 1 if you succeed. Why do game designers do this? First of all, the risk/reward is totally opaque to the players unless one of the characters is a botanist or something. Second, the risk/reward is probably irrelevant because the thing only has a 1 in 100 chance to appear. Rating: grotesque and boring. Porcelain golems are 5 foot tall dolls. They’re immune to damage except blunt silver weapons and cleric magic, but move as though they’re severely encumbered. Their attack forces the target to reroll all their hit dice, and take the result if it’s lower than their present total. When I ran the game, the players realized the golem was “invincible” and pushed it into a reflecting pond, which it couldn’t flounder out of. Rating: interesting. Porcine orcs are orcs that look like pigs. They want “women to capture and riches to plunder”. Sidestepping the present “are orcs racist” debate for the even juicier “are orcs a bad hentai cliche” debate. At least they have a recognizable motivation. Grotesque and boring. Slavers are mercenaries, exploring the castle in search of slaves. They’re rabble (equal to your level) led by a boss (your level+3) and they’ve got slaves with them, which the book says are random classes but also level 0. I like this encounter because these guys are basically in the dungeon for the same reason as you: to find things to sell. They just happen to be selling people. It also makes for an interesting encounter, because there are more of them than you want to take in a straight fight, but if you’re clever you might be able to get the slaves to fight or start casting or something (can a level 0 Cleric cast spells? Is there even such a thing?). Rating: interesting. TRAPS There are only two. Mushroom thickets fill the air with hallucinogenic spores. When the players inhale them, they pass out. Then you run another module to see what they dream about. I’m not going to list the ones the book recommends because it’s not my job to advertise for them. When the module is over (because you won or everyone died) you dice to see how many of the bonuses and maluses you accumulated over the course of the adventure also happen to your character “in real life”. This is stupid. This isn’t a first party Lamentations module but it’s duplicating all the cutesy game-within-a-game mail-your-character-sheet-to-yourself horseshit we’ve come to expect from those. Scarlet Scazarin is a pox that disguises itself as a collection of glittering gems, embedded in a bunch of corpses you find on the dungeon floor. The gems are contagious pustules, which damage your Strength and Charisma once they start growing from you. The book says that “Curing the disease requires a remove curse spell”, which I dislike because it arbitrarily short-circuits the cure disease spell. Still, I’m prepared to call it grotesque but interesting. EXAMPLES Let’s roll up four rooms and see what the damage is. A giant sized 120 by 240 foot rectangular boudoir, accessible via a single tin door. A group of five porcine orcs have made their home in the drawer of an enormous vanity set. Their undisputed leader is an orc chieftainess, who wears a beautiful gem studded tiara. The whole room has a sweet, acrid smell, like paint thinner mixed with melted fat. A fishpond occupies the larger part of this 360 foot circular room, accessible via three leather doors arranged in a triangular pattern. The only sign of life are 3 colorful feathers, floating on the scummy water of the pool. A band of seven slavers uses this 120 by 60 foot human-scale asylum as a base of operation for raids further into the castle. They’ve locked their eleven captured slaves in the patient cells, and retrieved three precious sapphires (actually worthless glass beads) from the already pillaged visiting area. They’ve locked the two tin doors leading out, using the leather and wood ones for egress. The whole space is red-lit by sunlight streaming in through the crimson velvet curtains covering the windows. The giant size harem is terraced halfway through its 300 foot length, with a massive set of stairs leading up to the second tier. The enormous couches and lounges sit empty, except for the largest seat on the top level, where an organ treant lies quiescent, secured to the armrest by a sturdy copper collar and chain. The floor of the lower level is slick with grease. When you put it that way, it almost doesn’t seem so bad.  I didn’t notice the heels until I copied this to imgur This section is worse than I remember it being, and I already thought it was the weakest of the four areas. Obviously you’ve got the thematic thing going on here, where everything wants to sucker the characters in with sex, treasure, etc, and then backstab them. I don’t see any players actually falling for it though, unless they’re really committed to roleplaying a Falstaff style buffoon who can’t resist a good time. The players are going to notice a pattern. They’re going to say “I’m not risking my life for another dick scratcher worth 4 copper pieces” and move on. Which is great, except the Lust area can show up again on the Snakes and Ladders board. And again. It’s a shame it’s not better executed, because I do like the concept of “the orgy is over, nobody cleaned up, and the people who didn’t go home at the end got seriously weird”. Instead, we get a few good encounters, a few just there for shock, and a lot that are forgettable. There’s something here that could form the seed of a better adventure if it was more intentionally designed. But then we wouldn’t be reviewing a megadungeon generator, we’d just be reviewing a… dungeon. Anyway, that’ll do it for Lust. Next post, we dig into Stone. Night10194 posted:So they're playing the level drain card, but you're level 1 and likely to stay there forever so...aren't those just one-hit kills? wiegieman posted:Waiting for the module where you're a playing a bunch of wights and roll 8d6 for the number of modules you went through without leveling before you stepped into that negative energy drain trap. But yeah, if you're level 1 it just kills you dead. Night10194 posted:At that point, why bother having mechanics rather than just admit you're playing a Sierra Adventure Game and replace any instance of 'had to use mechanics' with 'player dies in a hilarious way'? megane posted:Roll to instantly die any time anything happens, like in KAMB Falconier111 posted:You're asking a level of self-awareness these folks just don't have.
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Jul 18, 2020 00:48
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