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I Have No Maus, And I Must Scream

Here's how you can run a Mausritter/Harlan Ellison crossover game. It's more of a thought experiment than anything, so don't come tell me how it's broken. We're here to have a bad time. Remove all starting equipment. Mice may have a trinket from the bric-a-brac table . Give mice an Ironic Punishment based on their background. Take the Hungry condition. Use the random room stocking procedures to generate spaces. Roll only Room Types and Treasure, re-rolling whenever "Lair" comes up. Use the Treasure table below. Mice cannot escape and cannot kill themselves, but can take damage. Last mouse standing is turned into a gelatinous blob by AM. Ironic punishments Test subject. Born here, bred to be AM's plaything. Horribly disfigured. -1 WIL. Kitchen forager. Cannot stand the sight of food. WIL save to make yourself eat anything no matter how starved. Cage dweller. Deathly afraid of open spaces. Hedge witch.  Take the Drained condition. Leatherworker. Ski...

d20 Businesses

The Throne Room — Toiletries House of Shit on a Stick Petri's Culture Ribs Oceanic eStore Bateman & Gecko Capital Your One Stop Pot Shop Ningyō Automata Planet Babylon Cafe Abramelin Occultic Wares Hell & Back Travel Agency Totally Not A Front For Something Else Florist Carbon Self-Service Genomics Bateman & Gecko Capital Guy Llotine Couture Ad Nauseam Perfumery The Official Lawn Flamingo Store Exegetics Diagnostics Clinic VR Confessionary Booth The Epic Meme™ Store A Mighty Wind! Vapeware

The Algo Rider

So it was foretold: someone will come that can so freely surrender their conscious will to the fickle whims of the algorithm—that they shall become known as the Algo Rider. Whatever the machine feeds you, you lap up. You wouldn’t consume anything that didn't come out of a Facebook ad. Like & Subscribe? Yes, please. Recommended For You Based On Your Preferences? Don't mind if I do. Turn On Cookies? Om nom nom! You scrolled down to the ends of the internet and found Valhalla. The machine shows you the world for what it is: content all. In the beginning was it. Consume it, become it. Content in, content out. You're the algo's little bitch. Possessions  - A Smartphone, Smartwatch, Smart Ring, Smart Underpants - 30m of Jumbled Electric Cables and Chargers - An Extremely Online Cult Following - Staff Advanced Skills - 4 Search Engine Optimization - 3 Influencing Special You have a preternatural sense for what gets picked up by the algorithm. A single post from you can sen...

Cairnish Spelljammer

Once upon a time I ran a I Can't Believe It's Not Spelljammer!  campaign using a Cairn hack of my own device. The main thing was tweaking character creation to fit the setting (I drew from the AD&D ed. primarily). I also wanted to give players some customization options and hopefully strip it of some of the less savoury racial elements. The way I went about it was to decouple race/ancestry from ability, instead going for a ancestry/vocation match, with the former providing equipment (thus pointing at a cultural, not biological, background) and the latter some special ability. Now, I know what you're going to say: but Giff can't be spellcasters! Shut up. Of course they can. It's all made up. ANCESTRY  Krynnish Gnome - [Sword, Hammer, Grease Can, Jar of Pickled Spaham] Giff 1-2 Enlisted 3-4 Officer 5-6 Discharged - [Chest Plate, Arquebus, Fancy Uniform] Scro - [Studded Leather Armor, Handaxe, Pistol, Prize Skull Of A Vanquished Foe] Elf - [Longsword, Brigandin...

Hell Is Where The Heart Is

Pioneer! The Company has given you a once in a lifetime opportunity. To stake your claim on a rugged new world. To bring order to the great black yonder. To make a home for you and your own. Begin anew! Step up to the slipgate and make destiny manifest! Onward Unto the Breach When slipgate technology was first discovered, and we happened upon the Hell Dimension, there were some who feared that this would open Earth up for demonic takeover. The discovery that Hell natives cannot go through a slipgate without being annihilated put these fears to rest. The additional discovery of Lapis Infernicus, the long sought answer to the ‘free energy’ question, sealed the deal. Your travails are the scaffolding that shore up our utopia. Now you know! Paradise Found You have a great task ahead of you, pioneer. You are the advance party of a mass colonizing movement still in its infancy. You have the sacred honor to be spearheading humankind’s hellward expansion. And thanks to the tireless work of our...

Running John Carpenter's The Thing (1982) on a medieval abbey

I'm running a The Thing scenario (I expect it to be fairly short, 2-3 sessions) set in a medieval abbey, using Ruination Pilgrimage . Lazy GM that I am, I figured out a way to do it with as little prep as possible. First: Find your monastery I searched the webs for a suitable floorplan for my abbey. I went with the one on this site , complete with legend and all. As per the movie, set it in an isolated location (made it a river tidal island during heavy rain season). Make up a bunch of monks Instead of fleshing out each individual NPC, I made a bunch of tables to generate them on the fly 1d20 NAMES 2 Merrick 3 Kasper 4 Girald 5 Bertran 6 Nadal 7 Bidallac 8 Johannes 9 Helias 10 Andreas 11 Jacobus 12 Guido 13 Matheus 14 Alonso 15 Bernal 16 Amis 17 Enguerran 18 Giles 19 Guiscard 20 Agnolo 1d20 OCCUPATION 1 Butcher 2 Scribe 3 Scribe 4 Abbot 5 Prior 6 Cellarer 7 Cook 8 Brewer 9 Herbalist 10 Novice 11 Novice 12 Novice 13 Novice 14 Librarian 15 Physician 16 Blacksmith 17 Anchorite 18 Cook...

Veteran of the Flame Wars

You saw the best minds of your generation getting ratio'd by overseas bot farms. Sick burns off the creepypasta chans. Shitposting like you wouldn't believe. Part of you never left that battlefield, endlessly coming up with belated epic comebacks. You have the scars to prove it. Possessions   An Online Handle That Lives In Infamy And Strikes Fear In The Heart Of Your Enemies Discharge Papers From St. Peterson's Hospital For The Terminally Online Back Braces (counts as Light Armor) 1d3 Psychic Scar: 1 You are incapable of expressing emotions. You carry a pack of emoji cards for that purpose. 2 You cannot quite focus your eyesight beyond a couple of meters. Ranged attacks are done with Disadvantage. 3 Your thumbs still search the air constantly for a phantom cellphone. Rolls that require fine motor skills are done with a -4 penalty. Advanced Skills 4 Rhetoric 3 Close Quarters Combat 2 Memecraft Special You can use your Rhetoric Skill as a psychic weapon against someone you g...