Dead Wizards Design Log 02

Last post was about Cunning and Prowess, which are the stats PCs roll against to accomplish almost everything. But that's not the first part of character creation.

First, you come up with two Marks, or "specials". There's a list of 20 fleshed-out examples to build from. Here are a few to give you an idea what I'm talking about.

"2. You have a silver flute that was given to you “for luck” by an old woman on her deathbed. Playing it clears your mind and lets you focus. Sometimes playing the flute allows you to see solutions to problems or divine facts you could not otherwise have known."

"17. A vicious vulture plucked out one of your eyes. You know its name and nature. A desert devil, it is. A supernatural monster with part of your soul inside it. When you close your good eye and concentrate, you can see through the evil old vulture’s eyes. You can often make it fly where you like so you can see distant places. One day it may find you and try to finish the job."

Marks don't include game mechanics. The way they work is to be sorted out between player and Judge, but usually comes down a modifier to an Action Roll (Prowess or Cunning) or an Oracle (1d6)... the two mechanics used in the game.

I'm trying to keep this focused on the setting's theme, on characters, and the stuff that develops naturally through play. The mechanics underpin it, but I wouldn't call this a crunchy or fiddly system at all. 

Dead Wizards Design Log 01

Dead Wizards is a sword and sorcery RPG set in a sandy land. A bit of sand and sorcery, if you will.

The idea came up about ten years ago as an OD&D hack inspired by Corben, Howard, and Tanith Lee. Revamped it later and it changed into something completely different, becoming GOZR.

But now I'm back to the original concept. I started with GOZR mechanics as a base and I've been working from there. I stripped a few things away, added other things.

I'll try to do this as a series of posts over time, just talking about one aspect of the game or another. If you read this, feedback is greatly appreciated.

First up, the core character "stats": Prowess and Cunning. Prowess for all things physical and Cunning for everything else. Why just these two? Because in all the sword and sorcery tales I enjoy, characters deal with their world through only these two modes. I don't think any more are needed.

You roll for your stats. But like GOZR, lower is better because the stat is the target number to meet or beat on a 1d20 roll.

The roll to set the stat is 1d4+2 for each, so you can only get 3-6. A very narrow range, which is extremely on purpose and I spent a lot of time thinking about it, running simulations, and all that. It means the guy who gets a 3 and the guy who gets a 6 are still fully compatible in terms of skill.

The rolled target number is for a Basic level of difficulty. Then each level higher adds 3 to that target number. The difficulties are Basic, Arduous, Grueling, and Epic.

So if your Basic Prowess is 5, then you'd have a spread like this:

Basic 5
Arduous 8
Grueling 11
Epic 14

As with GOZR, this simply means you look at your sheet to see what your target number is. Quick and dirty. But here the Judge has options for increasing difficulty. The Judge can decide case-by-case how difficult a task is.

Bonuses to rolls are low. In most cases, you're not getting one. But you can get a +1 for some things and maybe even +2. That makes those target numbers more challenging, but not daunting. You are playing heroic, capable sword and sorcery characters... not farmers and zeroes.

Once your target numbers are set, they do not easily change. There's a way you can swap points between adventures, making Prowess 1 better and Cunning 1 worse, for example. But 3 is the hard limit. Nobody has a stat target lower than 3.

Characters are more differentiated by their histories and their special traits. More on that later. 

Setting Survey 2

Continuing from this thread, here's a few more random RPG pulls and my off-the-cuff thoughts on how they handle setting.

The Black Sword Hack by Kobayashi is a sword and sorcery RPG based on David Black's The Black Hack and is essentially Elric the RPG. It's fantastic. The majestic art of Goran Gligović makes the book shine.

Anyway... setting. In this book, the setting is strongly implied by the tone and themes with the names of locations and kingdoms scattered in random tables, such as a list of languages. There is no default map or specific setting details. Instead, you invent the setting as a group, using the setting elements of the game. For example, there's a "dusty, crumbling empire" called Askavian and a little set of events that could happen in relation to it. But that's about it. The rest is up to you.

The book includes a nice little example setting by Evlyn Moreau.

It's a good approach. If I remember correctly, Orkworld did a similar thing. In that game there is a map without names and you put the various setting locations wherever you want. Either way, these approaches are a hybrid between a written setting and tools for creating your own setting.

Heavy Metal Thunder Mouse by Derek A. Kamal with illustrations by Jacob Hunt is a game about mice and rats in motorcycle clubs. I think this is a FATE-based game and is explicitly called a storytelling game by the author. The way it handles setting is very simple: the game is set in Thunder City, a fictional city on the west coast (of the USA, I think). It's a commerce town, a young town, a place to seek your fortune. The first page of the game is a little map of Thunder City.

So that's a pretty straightforward way of handling setting. But since this is a storytelling game, they aren't overly concerned with laying out every street and dive bar. It's pretty open ended, I think. There's a lot of descriptions of motorcycle gangs, clubhouses, and so forth. Fun.