Dead Wizards Design Log 03

Almost all my game designs include some form of "meta currency". Luck points. I got the idea originally from the TSR AD&D adventure module CB1: Conan Unchained. In that module, David "Zeb" Cook gives us a cool luck mechanic invented for the adventure to help mitigate the disparate outcomes of a typical AD&D game vs. what you see on the big screen (the module cover is literally a photo of Arnold in the Conan movie). In other words, Conan does amazing feats that are difficult to simulate if you're just playing the game straight.

Cook's idea was simple. Each PC has a set number of Luck Points that only the DM knows. You as a player have no idea who many points you have. Here's a screenshot of the text. 

I actually adore this. I've tried to use it a couple of times in one-shots with mixed results. Players need to embrace the idea and you gotta remind them to use it or they just keep playing normally.

Anyway, for Dead Wizards, there is Sand. Sand is the meta currency. Players know how much they have and they can spend it to auto-succeed in tasks or to take over narrative control of the game for a very short time (kinda like The Pool).

The auto-succeed is called a Sand Storm. The idea is the Judge rolls a secret d6 to see how many actions you can get away with. You start describing your actions. You stop when you feel like it, but once you exceed the number of actions rolled by the Judge... you're run out of luck. If you exceed it, your excess action not only fails but it fails in a terrible way. So it's a gamble.

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.

 

Setting Survey 1

It's hard to write a good setting. I'm working on Dead Wizards and when I hit a struggle point, I like to grab books off my shelf and take a peek at how other people handle setting.

Random pulls...

Fever Swamp by Luke Gearing and Melsonian Arts Council is a thin little hardback that reminds me of a kid's book in how it feels to hold. I remember assuming this was a Troika! book since it was Melsonian, but no... this is OSR. And nowhere in the book does it ever explain what it is. There's no "use this with x game" statement. No... the inside covers are tables and the book just kicks off and never stops until it runs out of pages.

Only because I know OSR shit and I know D&D do I know this is that kind of book. I see little short stat lines for monsters with AC, HD, ATK, etc. There are two new character classes and their HD, XP, and saves are based on other classes. They mention Specialist as one. The game this is probably originally written for is Lamentations of the Flame Princess, which has the Specialist instead of the Thief.

Anyway, the setting is presented in little bursts and in tables and hex descriptions. It is a hex crawl kind of thing. There are not walls of text explaining the history of the region. Little bit here, little bit there, mostly delivered through tables and hex descriptions.

Takeaway: Getting straight to the meat of it is pretty nice. 

Yoon-Suin by Noisms is a table-heavy setting. Most of the setting is implied through copious amounts of writing written from the perspectives of people in the world. And the rest is mostly random tables. But it's a lot. The book kicks off with The Journal of Laxmi Guptra Dahl, a 28 page affair written in first person as the author explored the region. Now... I'm not a fan of prose-heavy RPG books. The reason I haven't knocked myself out trying to collect all the D&D Gazetteer series is because they're just too god damn heavy handed on the writing (we went from the minimalist X1 setting info to the maximalist Gaz series!).

But Yoon-Suin is very special. I'll happily take notes from how it is arranged. Mainly the way it uses random tables to do most of the work... an approach I took with GOZR.

Takeaway: Random tables build setting more evocatively than descriptions, in my opinion.

Anomalous Subsurface Environment ASEI by Patrick Wetmore is a self-described "gonzo" adventure location set in a kind of future post-apocalypse with all the trappings of Mad Max meets Waterdeep. This sucker is at once weird and sci-fantasy and also OSR as all hell. It's set up and presented in the classic way that old TSR modules were done. You get an overview to explain what it is, then he just goes straight into a X1 Isle of Dread style Gazetteer-lite, 40 page setting description. It's a beefy but compact read. This is a whole ass setting laid out just so you can have a place for PCs to be before they go down into the megadungeon.

Takeaway: You can just tackle the setting bit by bit, with short descriptions of what is needed and whatever history is necessary. You don't have to avoid all that shit if you don't want to.

Yeah... so what have I learned tonight? That I have a lot of game books written for old school D&D type games.

Also, just do it. Dead Wizards isn't a D&D game, but it is an adventure fantasy game. At minimum, I have to explain the overall setting, then drill down into the specific elements that are super important, then I can hand wave a bit and use random tables to give the Judge the tools necessary to flesh out the rest. That's how I like to do it. 

 

Dead Wizards Ground Zero

Going on 10 years ago I got inspired by various sword and sorcery things to create a game called Dead Wizards. It's set in a sandy desert city. Very much a "sand and sorcery" idea inspired by mummy movies as well as Lankhmar and Conan and a bit of Al-Qadim.

My first pass at it was a hack of Swords & Wizardry where I think the main difference was that spells were cast by burning hit points. I ran that a couple of times.

A bit later I revised it and ran it again, briefly. Then I changed the whole system to be based on the image above, using the old to-hit matrix as the core mechanic of the game. Partly, this was a grognard response to anti-THAC0 folks. Just a bit of tongue in cheekiness.

I sometimes went hard to defend descending AC...

The idea shifted in 2020 and became a "let me see if I can make this a game based on those animalistic goons from the movie Heavy Metal." So I did. And it was called GOZR.

 

I say all this because I've been working on Dead Wizards again after a lot of years in limbo. I want back to the last and fullest draft of the game, which was pretty good, actually. The rules in that version are essentially GOZR.

 

I've abandoned the THAC0 matrix, mostly. But there is a small "to hit" matrix on the character sheet. Much simplified, it has 4 categories of difficulty (Basic, Arduous, Grueling, and Epic) with target numbers for each of them for only 2 basic skill areas (Cunning and Prowess).

 

I think this is a really nice amalgam of GOZR's simple target number system and the old to-hit matrices. It's easy on the eyes and intuitive. You're trying to do a daring leap to grab a sacred relic off the giant demon's head? Sounds like an Arduous task, at least. You roll 1d20 vs. your Arduous Prowess target.

 

Once set, the targets never change. But you can pick up various benefits here and there and acquire situational boosts. The idea here is to keep it player-facing and as math-less as possible. Target is 9, you need to roll a 9. You have an advantage? +1 to the roll. Oh, the demon takes notice and now is actively protecting the sacred relic from your grasp? It's now a Grueling task.

 

So those are just some thoughts about the game in development. Clever observers will note that I still haven't produced that space fantasy game, ZSF. Hell's bells, West... you already playtested it, you already have Troika! based books about the same setting. What's the hold up? Yeah, I'll get to it. Inspiration is fickle, you know. 

Game Design Hoots 1

I love old school D&D, but I don't want to tie all my work to it. The setting implied or described in Black Pudding is important to me and I want it to have its own original RPG at some point. Of course the Black Pudding Play Book will always be around, but I'm probably going to do another game at some point for the world of Pan-Gea > Yria.

Here's a system I'm mucking around with right now. It's from 1998 or so, before I even got online. It's very basic, which is what appeals to me. I ran it many times back then and it was mostly GM rulings because there was almost no rules written down for it other than this:

Spend 20 points on any kind of traits you like. Roll 1d20 + Trait vs. a target number or an opposing roll. Each adventure you earn 1-3 points and you can spend them to add or improve Traits.

In recent times I've developed the idea further to give it more tooth and grit. I like it.

Of course it's also very possible that the game will use GOZR rules. Right now I'm torn between these two darlings of mine. Story of my life.

But both feature rolling 1d20 + mods vs. a target number so you can call me a basic bitch all you want. It's fine. I own that shit.

DCC RPG and TQB

Recently, Ben Milton of The Questing Beast made a video with this spicy thumbnail right here. There's usually a tagline like "we need to talk about Goodman Games" or something.

Ben looks like he tried to read a stereo manual from 1984.

I had to watch it. I love DCC! I ran several excellent campaigns years ago and have always found that game to be supremely entertaining, massively charming, and just a heller good time.

TL:DR: Ben feels DCC is too wordy, not useful at the table, and is stuck in the past. There's more to it, and Ben isn't entirely negative. Watch it yourself. Here's Ben responding to some of the criticisms.

EDIT: Ben frames his video in terms of the OSR. My diatribe below seems to ignore this fact. I don't think Ben is talking about all TTRPGs. But even within the OSR sphere only, I stand by these words.

 

Plenty of folks have responded to this video. Many have said things similar to what I'm about to say. But I wanted lay down my own take because Ben touches on some points that are pet peeves of mine, and I feel like there are some blind spots in his treatment.

1. THE TABLE ISN'T NECESSARILY THE ONLY PLAY SPACE

Ben's laser-focus has always been on an emergent, on-the-fly gaming style. I like this a lot. Many of my own game ideas are in this vein because I'm also an adult with other responsibilities and if I get a chance to run a game it's very nice to have something easy to just pull off the shelf and run with zero prep.

But zero prep is not the only way to play. And the prep phase of a game is still part of the game. Call it a pre-game if you want. It's not only a valid approach to game design, but one that many players strongly prefer.

If you have ever been a GM, then you remember what it felt like reading your first adventure module or scenario, understanding what the story was about, and then making plans for how to run it. For some, this is a chore they no longer savor. They want the bullet-point style. "Just give me the room contents in a list and shut up". I get it.

But for others... no. They want to read the adventure, then they want to sit with it, make notes, change some things, add new things... do the prep work. This, for them, is a fun part of playing the game.

2. THE LATEST WAY ISN'T THE BEST FOR EVERYONE

Ben assumes his gaming preference is - by default - the latest and greatest advancement in RPGs and older approaches are somehow outdated. I think it is because he is an educator and he absolutely loves emergent game play, not game prep. I really do understand this, and I enjoy that style too. But man I hate the attitude and the concept.

This isn't aimed at Ben... I enjoy his videos. They are super helpful and fun. He was very positive about my Black Pudding Heavy Helping and GOZR books, which was a big confidence boost for me.

No, this is aimed at the idea that old is badder and new is gooder that many in the RPG spaces seem to assume. I'm here to put into the public record that newer does not equal better. Innovation is super important, and new modes of play keep the fires burning. But unlike computer software, games from 1979 are still very playable, just as they always were. You might not enjoy them, but someone else damn sure does and they probably don't want you to bullet-point them.

Some GMs love to savor a meaty game text. Read it, understand it, then prepare to run it... that is fun for them.

If you don't enjoy prep work or reading wordier adventures... don't. It's fine. But if you do... then the advice that games should always embrace the bullet-point style is bad advice, isn't it?

3. THE SUGGESTED CHANGE COULD DESTROY DCC

Finally, I wanted to say that DCC RPG has a robust and rabid community of fans. If Goodman Games switched their approach to bullet-point adventures, I suspect no new players would give a shit and all the old fans would be turned off by it. Because that's not what DCC adventures are.

We have this baseline assumption that everything must evolve or die. I don't entirely agree. Change can be good, and necessary. But we're talking about hobby games here. This is comfort food for the soul for many, many people, myself included. I'm not into RPGs because I want to be on the cutting edge. I'm into them because they are part of my soul. And sometimes my soul wants to read flavor text and chunky adventures. DCC's style feeds that need. Sometimes I want something fast and emergent to run. OSE's style feeds that need, for example. We want both and all things in between.

GOZR Action Classes

In GOZR, you have three primary stats, which are called Action Classes: Cunning, Magic, and Prowess. All rolls are based on one of those stats. The lower your stat's number, the better. Why?

ORIGINS OF THE THREE STAT SCHEME

Because GOZR's system started its life as another game called Dead Wizards, a sword & sorcery RPG set in the city of Kanebok, which later was folded into the Black Pudding setting of Yria. (I have a lot of lore that only really matters in my head, but I gotta say it out loud.)

I dropped Dead Wizards but had already conceived of the rudimentary elements of the game's system. I thought about my favorite sword & sorcery characters and what kinds of things they got up to. I decided that they most often deal with situations by their wits (Cunning), strength and skill (Prowess), and their natural or supernatural reaction to sorcery (Magic).

I think this concept is well-supported in RPGs. Games like Into the Odd, GURPS, Tri-Stat, Big Eyes Small Mouth, and Barbarians of Lemuria have three or four stats. D&D can be boiled down to three basic types of characters: fighting, clever sneak, and wizard*. Daniel Sell, author of Troika!, has a blog post that looms large in my brain and has influenced my thinking on games ever since I read it many years ago. In that post, he proposes an OSR house rule where all PCs are "adventurers" and at each level of experience you pick one of three skill sets to improve. And yes, they are fighting, skill use, and magic.

My concept of the game is that everyone is a hero, in the S&S sense. Larger than life. A cut above. Not your run of the mill milksop. So when it comes to dice rolling, you really only deal with things by might, skill, or sorcery.

*Original D&D had fighter, cleric, and magic-user. This is fine... but in sword & sorcery (as I perceive it) you don't need a cleric. The wizard and the priest are often one and the same. But I do think it's a useful distinction to include a sneak along with a fighter. It's elegant.

WHY STATS ARE LOWER-IS-BETTER

So that explains why I went with three stats. But why are the stats low instead of high? A lot of folks struggle with this. But it's super simple.

They started out as D&D armor class or saving throws.

The first iteration of Dead Wizards was basically a hack of OD&D. But then I morphed it to use the original armor class system as the core mechanic. Then it was as short leap of logic to say "hey, every roll is a saving throw!" or "hey, this is just like rolling to hit an AC in old D&D.".

And that meant the stats needed to get lower as they got better, exactly like a saving throw. I called them Action Classes because that makes sense to me and I thought the acronym "AC" was easy. Yeah I know... this is confusing to some folks because it's not really armor class. But just think of it like this... "what the AC of this action?"... and suddenly it'll make perfect sense to you, I promise.

The great benefit of this is that you know your target number already. It's right there on your character sheet. Since all rolls are player-facing, that means you know exactly what to roll. "My AC for smacking that wizard in the face is 10. I need to roll 10+ on a d20 to ring his stupid bell."

The GM can impose "unluck" to give you a -2 or worse penalty on that d20 roll to give some tooth to more dangerous tasks. And enemies have "threat", which allows them to do unexpected rules-breaking things like taking half damage or resisting magic.

WHY NO STAT-GETS-GOODER RULES?

The reason GOZR has no built-in method for improving those basic stats is also really simple. I didn't want power bloat. I didn't want to have a clunky system for improving a stat too much since you would end up with various modifiers anyway. If you start the game with an 8 in Prowess, then your fighting skill is 65% right out of the gate even if you have nothing to modify it. Finding a weird sword might get you some +1 or something. Being Lucky gets you +2. You can quickly approach 80% or better.

Your ACs can change, but they will do so organically, through play. For example, my friend Andy ran a wonderful GOZR adventure for our Monday night group and my gooz's Prowess was improved by 1 due to messing around with a magical (or super science?) dolmen of some sort. That's how you do it.

SUMMARY

• GOZR has three stats because those are the three things that S&S adventurers tend to muck around with.

• GOZR stats are lower-is-better because the stat itself is the target to roll.

• GOZR doesn't have built-in stat improvement rules because you don't need them.

ZSF Update

I've posted many times about this game and I've changed my mind almost every single time. Last time I talked about the game system, it was based on the idea of getting "successes" on rolls. Same concept as used in games like Vampire: the Masquerade.

But I've since decided against that. The "final" playtest form is a simple 2d6 additive roll, with various conditions for adding more dice, getting doubles, and so on.

Other than that, things remain mostly the same. The character sheet elements, which I've been teasing for over 2 years now, remain the same.

Playtesting soon. The game is reaching a form that I'm comfortable with. I might have too much material going on. I don't know yet. It's a big world and I just keep having ideas to fill it up. Thankfully it's the whole damn galaxy so there's plenty of room for it.

 

Status and Doomslakers RPG Notes

What's going on with me right now?

Life is happening. Family life is pretty good. We're dealing with the dystopia of the United States one day at a time. How fucking hard it is to get rid of an obvious existential threat to your own nation? Pretty god damn hard, it seems.

But I digress.

Creatively: I'm in a weird place. I have not been drawing very much. I doodle here and there. But my main energy has been going into creating the Doomslakers RPG. That progress stalled a bit a few weeks ago as some drama creeped up, but I started running a playtest of the rules last Monday and I'm excited for that. I'm running The Gardens of Ynn by Emmy Allen using the Doomslakers rules. The setting is completely different, but this playtest kind of happened suddenly and I wasn't ready to run the full game with its own setting. Since I had been wanting to run Gardens for years, I seized the moment.

Here's a quick and dirty overview of the Doomslakers rules:

It's a d6 pool. Basic roll is an exploding 1d6 (1d6e). You add dice based on the skills you have, tools, and other factors. You need at least one success. A success is either 4, 5, or 6, based on difficulty and all that. It's a fairly standard success-based pool system.

Instead of hit points, you rack up damage. There's no upper limit for damage. If you take 6, you add 6 to your running total. At some intervals, you have to make an impact roll. This is a 1d20 roll + current damage. So if you have racked up 12 damage, you roll 1d20+12 on an impact table. The results range from minor hindrances (usually reduction of pool dice) to death.

So you can die in one roll from one blow.

There is a meta currency. Luck points are earned when you roll your lucky number in an action roll. Since the number is 1-6, it will come up pretty frequently. You will earn luck points multiple times per session. I hope that leads to players being willing to spend luck freely instead of hoarding it.

One of the things you can do with luck is defer your impact roll. Ultimately you must make the roll, but luck can put it off. There are other mechanics that can reduce damage. So the idea is you might be able to reduce your damage total before being forced to make an impact roll, thus giving you a better chance at not being killed or knocked out.

One of my concerns is that the impact rolls will be too frequent. I mitigated it by having thresholds for when they are made. You don't make one every time you get hit, unless you get hit pretty hard. But there are triggers that force the roll no matter what.

At the end of a fight, if you have any damage, you have to make that impact roll. Luck can't prevent it.

Anyway, that's the core mechanic of the game at the moment. It applies to all actions, not just fighting.

But I am toying with the idea of changing it to a d12 pool. The only reason for doing that is to get some granularity out of the numbers, which is just another tool in the kit. But that also makes luck points less frequent, so it might not be worth the trouble. I need those luck points flowing because they do a lot of heavy lifting.

The Doomslakers RPG itself is based on the setting (implied and explicit) of Black Pudding. It is an original system and has no direct basis in D&D... so it isn't a Black Pudding RPG, directly. Black Pudding zine remains a classic D&D based zine, at least for the first 8 issues. This game is a riff on the ideas within where you play the role of an agent of the Doomslakers Adventure Company, taking nasty, dangerous jobs in the seedy city of Seapath. If you see it in Black Pudding, you will probably see it in Doomslakers in one form or another.

Doomslakers RPG 02

A brief note about adventures and "game support".

I like making game books, then moving on to the next thing. I never made a GOZR expansion or source book partially because of this and partially because holy shit that game was labor-intensive. Hand-writing an entire RPG is kind of fucking hard. I am proud of the work. It's probably my favorite single book I've ever created. But I'm not likely to do a follow-up any time soon.

My biggest regret with GOZR is that I didn't include an adventure. In my mind, I was including tons and tons of adventure ideas and resources. Hell, the whole book is a toolkit. But I think including a fleshed out example would have been good.

Anyway... this is one area where I hope to do a better job with Doomslakers. It's still very early in the process, but I'm hoping to create at least 1 or 2 adventures for the book and another couple of adventures to publish as follow-ups.

But also, I know me. Once I finish this game and publish it, I will likely want to work on anything else OTHER than this project. I'll need some space from it. So the goal, right now, is to finish the book and some adventures at the same time rather than try to circle back and do the adventures after the fact.

Doomslakers RPG 01

Maybe I'll start blogging about my process for writing this game. It can't hurt.

Very brief background: Doomslakers RPG is the Black Pudding RPG. But it's not based on D&D. Instead, I'm taking the game mechanics from GOZR and hacking them to fit the Black Pudding implied setting of Yria. So... Doomslakers is an original game about the world of Black Pudding whereas Black Pudding zine itself is explicitly catered to old school D&D play ala Labyrinth Lord, Old School Essentials, or Basic Fantasy RPG.

To be even more clear: Doomslakers RPG is not a D&D game nor does it attempt to be compatible with those games. The Black Pudding OSR Play Book still exists in issue 4 of the zine, but I don't have any plans to publish an expanded version of that at this time (though I'll be honest and tell you I spend MANY hours working on one, so don't count it out completely).

Enough of my head canon.

WHAT YOU DO

The game is highly structured in terms of "what you do". It's an adventure game. You play the role of an Agent working for an Adventuring Company (Doomslakers Adventuring Company) to do dangerous jobs for those who can pay. It's a simple conceit. It's a very easy way to frame an adventure. The answer to the question "why are you going on an adventure?" is already delivered. Because it's how you get paid.

There's more to it, and room for Company intrigue and all that.

BACKGROUNDS

I would say the biggest influence on character creation is Troika's Backgrounds. I love that concept so much that Doomslakers is more or less the same exact thing. I even have 36 Backgrounds, such is my love of that character creation system. Most of them are Black Pudding character classes converted to Doomslakers Backgrounds.

CORE STATS

The game's core is characters with 3 basic stats rolling d20s to do things. I like it when the dice numbers go high, so one of the design principles is that it is always better to roll high. I'm trying very hard to never have a situation where a low roll is beneficial.

This means something important. It means there's no roll-under mechanics. This is only important to the most jaded nerds among you as no one else in their right minds would care.

So those 3 basic stats I mentioned... those are your target numbers. If they are high, you need to roll higher. Therefore having a low stat is better than having a high stat. This is outlined in GOZR as well.

The 3 stats are called Action Roll Targets (ARTs)*. Cunning is for thiefy things, Magic is for thinky things, and Prowess is for fighty things. These 3 stats go back to sometime around 2018 when I was working on a game called Dead Wizards, a sword and sorcery thing. That concept morphed into GOZR in 2020. But it is fitting that I return to the original idea since it was also based on the Black Pudding setting.

Sorry... more head canon stuff.

PLAYER-FACING MECHANICS

All rolls are player-facing. I must have picked up this idea from The Black Hack because I was playing various Hacks of that game by 2018. Then I found Into the Odd and was solidly in the player-facing rules camp. To do a thing in this game, you roll 1d20 vs. the ART that makes sense, as outlined above.

BEING OLD AND USING SKILLS

I'm also old. I'm 54 as of this writing**. I like old games. I like some game design styles that might be thought of as clunky or outdated today. I'll dig my heels in and say that a tabletop game cannot technically be outdated because it relies on brains, not computers. That isn't to say its content can't be outdated, but the mechanics... are timeless, my friend.

That being said... Doomslakers includes Skills, which are a bit 90s if you think about it. And they are simply +1 or +2 or whatever. So when you want to punch a bastard, you roll 1d20 + Punching Skill (if that's a thing) vs. Prowess. If you make it, you punch 'em. Intuitive, right?

HIT POINTS VS. LUCK (POINTS)

GOZR uses Hit Points. I like HP. They are simple and direct. But I wanted to challenge myself to avoid HP for Doomslakers. I made this fateful decision a mere week or two ago and it has vexed and thrilled me ever since. And while I did avoid a straight HP system, I do include something like it.

In the current iteration, players have Luck. This acts as both hit points and meta-currency luck points. Attacks against you can be absorbed by spending Luck or you can take a risk on a sort of wounds table roll. It's up to you. You can spend Luck to do cool things, avoid damage, etc. When you run out of Luck, you are dead. Or, as in GOZR, you can choose to survive and be Debased... taking some kind of permanent setback.

I like this approach. There's still risk. You still LOSE something if you run out of Luck. But death isn't the only end game for running out of Luck.

And so on. More later.

*Nothing is set in stone. All the terms discussed herein are working titles and subject to change. But Action Roll Target is literally what they are and so I'm rolling with that for now. In GOZR, they are called Action Classes, or ACs. Which seems to confuse some folks because of AC being Armor Class in other games. But it's the same principle, right? Like a Saving Throw. You're trying to roll a target number.

**Jeez. Best not to think about it.

Lugs and Snow

When I got back into gaming and dived into doing OSR stuff around 2012, I leaned into it pretty hard. I wrote Howler and Winds of the Ice Forest and other bits with a nod to old school modules and a careful eye toward the rules written in Labyrinth Lord. I started a series in Black Pudding called "Adventures in the North", which started in issue 5 and has a bit in issue 6. But it is incomplete and try as I might I cannot bring myself to finish it.

Why?

There's a character class I wrote and turned into a mini-zine for a Gary Con I attended. It was called The Lug. It's basically a big, dumb brute of a guy who has a heart of gold. Essentially Fezzik from Princess Bride. You know the trope. I have often thought I should give The Lug a rendering in Black Pudding, but I can't seem to do it.

Why?

It seems to be because these are relics of a decade ago when I was in a very different mindset. I was just discovering the beauty of revisiting old school D&D and it was shiny and new again. And I wanted to put on the aesthetics of that era. I did work. Then I changed and moved on. I have other ideas now and my approach is very different. I can't put myself back into that mindset.

It was a mistake to start Adventures in the North as a multi-part series. I've never been good at maintaining that sort of thing because my inspirations drift over time. It would have been wise of me to do it as a one-shot adventure location instead of an 11-point mini-setting.

The Lug has the same problem. It was a cool idea at the time, but now I think about it... it feels very liming. Your character would be a one trick pony. You bop people on the head and smash things. 

Captain Vista

This post is a nerdy dive into some ZSF rules about character creation. Proceed at your own risk.

I've been drawing a lot of ZSF art lately. I don't know how much of it will end up in the game book, and I'm not even thinking about it. I'm just having a great old time drawing.

As I was doodling last night, I drew this sketch of a character who I named Captain Vista. So I thought I'd go ahead and give him game stats. I wanted to write a little bit about it because I can discuss the character creation system a bit.

Here's the Captain:

 He's a beefy lad! A real space hero. But he is not an example of a starting character. His stats are more beefy than a new PC would be. Of course, like any game, you could tweak the chargen rules to allow for more beefy starting PCs. That's fine. But let me break down how this guy is put together and how it differs from the chargen rules.

Basic Skills

Every PC has six Basic Skills: Explore, Drive, Fight, Operate, Shoot, and Talk.

A new PC has a rank of 1 in each skill and you can distribute 9 additional points between them for a total of 15 ranks. The Captain has a total of 19, not 15.

As you play the game, the GM will hand out Space Points, which are like XP. You spend them on your character to make changes. One of the changes you can make is bumping up your skills. It costs 3 SP to increase a skill by 1 rank. So the Captain has spent 12 SP on skills.

Life Points

Every PC starts with LP equal to their Explore + Fight ranks + 20. Cap's E+F+20 equals 29, but he has 35 LPs.

You can add 1 LP by spending 1 Space Point, so the Cap has spent 6 SP.

Traits

Every PC starts with 2 special Traits. A Trait is really just anything at all about your character that isn't covered by other chargen rules. Rapid healing, a rich uncle, and a magic gun are all examples of Traits you could add to your PC.

Captain Vista has 6 things listed on his sheet that could be counted as Traits, though 2 of them are probably just gear.

• Animated Hair (definitely a Trait)

• Hyper Strong (definitely a Trait)

• .50 Cal gun (probably gear, not special)

• Katana (probably gear, not special)

• Captain of the Heroic Tortoise (definitely a Trait)

• Space Eyes (definitely a Trait)

The difference between what is a Trait and what isn't is that a Trait is something extra. All PCs can buy a laser pistol. If your character buys a pistol for $100 and it deals 5 DMG (damage), then that's just a standard thing. If you want it to be something special, you can spend 2 Space Point and turn it into a Trait. You might then say the laser pistol actually has modular parts and you had a super zapper module lying around. Now your laser pistol, a Trait, deals 9 DMG instead of 5. Or it can be set to scan mode or something.

The Captain started with 2 Traits at chargen. Assuming his weapons are not special, he currently has 4 Traits, so he has spent a minimum of 4 Space Points to add 2 new Traits. It is possible that he spent more, because you can improve your Traits by spending 2 SP on them. We don't really know the details of his abilities from what we're shown here. Let's just assume he spent 4 SP.

Money

Captain has $625. All PCs begin with $100, so he has probably spent and earned some money over time. He's not rich at all. He can't even buy a laser pistol with that kind of cash. So I don't think he has spent any Space Points to make himself richer (you can get a quick $500 for 1 SP).

Summary

In total, we know that Captain Vista has spent 12+6+4 = 22 Space Points. If the GM follows the guidelines given in the rules, they will award 1 SP per 1 hour of play. Adjusting for snack runs and Monty Python jokes, Captain Vista has been involved in at least 22 hours of game play, or about 5 or 6 typical game sessions. He's not a new character.

Of course it's possible the GM awards more points than normal or starts with more bennies for PCs. Every table is different, you know.

Last Thought: The Heroic Tortoise

Nobody starts with a ship in this game. At least not a ship worth a bent penny. Part of the game's theme is that you are poor outsiders working within or against a system that is inherently unfair and kind of ruthless (sound familiar?). Captain Vista would not have a ship like this one as a new PC.

The Heroic Tortoise

How did he come by it? Does he own it or just work for the owner? These are details that grew out of playing the game. He might have rescued the ship from a bad owner and now claims it himself. In that case, the player would add "Heroic Tortoise" as a Trait. They didn't spend points to get it because it was just a result of organic play, as most things will be.

Later, the player might want to improve the ship in some way or add details to it. They can do so by spending money on upgrades or spending Space Points to bump up the Trait's details. It isn't terribly precise or crunchy... this is more of a narrative element. But some game benefits should be imbued, which can be negotiated between player and GM.

Also, this ship might not belong only to the Captain. This is a RPG, after all. It is probably the case that the ship belongs to the team, so every player has ownership. In that case, players could spend money or SPs to improve the ship as well. They just won't have sole ownership of it.

ZSF Noodle Doodle Drop II

Following up on this post, more thoughts about ZSF: Zoa Space Fantasy!

ZSF is a work-in-progress space fantasy adventure game set in a wild galaxy where the Companies and the Law run the show. PCs are on the outside of mainstream society, and probably outlaws.

Since my last post, I refined the rules a bit.

• Instead of rolling for your Basic Skill ranks, you start with 1 in each and can add 6 more to them. The only rule is you can't dump all 6 into one Skill. So you could end up with a mix, as long as it all adds up to 12 total.

• Successes, called Hits, are on a 5 or 6 on d6.

• The difficulty of any task is called the Difficulty Level, or DL for short. The GM sets the DL for tasks. NPCs and creatures will have DLs so you know what you need to score to hit or otherwise oppose them.

• The DLs are very limited in range. Due to the nature of the dice mechanic, getting even 2 Hits is not easy. So a range of 1-4 is plenty wide.

• All action dice rolls are made by the players, just like in GOZR.

I've spent some time thinking about money and economy in the setting. Not much has changed on that front. PCs begin with $100 and some basic equipment. As I said before, if you really want to start with a badass weapon you can use one of your Traits to describe it. Because almost everything really cool is well beyond your $100 budget.

Right now I'm considering different ways to approach equipment. What I'm thinking is, similar to GOZR, there will be some short, simple lists with prices for relatively generic goods. But then also a fat section on very specific goods and services, name brand stuff like the PH22 blaster or Breathe-O-Matic cozmask (space mask, a kind of auto-fitting helmet). Since Companies are tied into the setting, it'll be fun and rewarding to lean into that and have a lot of branded merchandise that PCs can get their hands on. Why settle for a generic laser rifle when you can have the industry standard RIG 17?

SUPERCALLA

Of course much of this material was first introduced in my 2019 Troika! book, Supercalla, and the 2020 follow-up Cozmic Metal Heads. I'm super proud of those books. ZSF is essentially taking that same core setting idea and exploding into a full-blown RPG with an original system. Almost everything you saw in those books will land somewhere in ZSF in one form or another.

EDFOST

Ok, a little behind the scenes into how my brain works when I'm noodling ideas. I spent a ridiculous amount of time deciding on the core stats (the Basic Skills). My idea was that they MUST form a cool acronym. At least something that you could pronounce. I can't even remember what all I came up with. One idea involved these monosyllabic words like Oomph, Bam, Yak, etc. Which was cool, but I veered away and landed on EDFOST:

Explore, Drive, Fight, Operate, Shoot, Talk.

Having the acronym, which is now etched into my brain, helps me always remember the list. "E is Explore... what was F? Oh Fight!"

More later.

ZSF Noodle Doodle Drop

The original Zoa Space Fantasy logo, c. 2008.

A long, rambly post about a game I'm working on.

Since the oughts, I've had this crazy space idea zipping around my brain. It's space, but it's not "normal" space. There are planets, but also potato-shaped worlds, worlds that look like castles, worlds that are domed, etc. Really just an anything goes fantasyland where you have vast oceans of space ichors, empty space, and rivers of phlogiston instead of fields and roads and seas between interesting locations.

I did a comic about it called Zoa Space Fantasy. I think I did around 20 pages or so before I petered out. The story was about a little robot guy called N9 who wakes up on a garbage planet without his memories. He fights a garbage creature and is rescued by a space pirate/salvage ship called The Workhorse, captained by Tyrrany Flack, a medusa space captain. The ship was powered by a demon.

Later, I revived the idea and published a Troika! RPG book called Supercalla, then a follow-up called Cozmic Metal Heads, which was all about robot PCs. I am super proud of these books. I think they rock. I worked on a third book to be called Hellion Cross, which was a den of scum and villainy. I actually did a ton of work on that one and I believe I finished all 36 character backgrounds and most of the art. But I didn't finish it up.

More recently, I ran a game in my Monday night Doomslakers group called Heat Death. It was an original system and was set, loosely, in the same universe. But Heat Death was more grounded, scaled back, less fantastical. It was intended to be something like "in the past" of the ZSF universe. It was more about down-and-out Earthlings working out in the armpit of the galaxy because of crimes they committed or something. It was fun, but the system ultimately didn't quite work for me.

Which brings us up to current times. For many months, perhaps a year or more, I've been noodling an entirely new game based on this crazy space fantasy idea. The game will be called ZSF, Zoa Space Fantasy. Or Zoa Space Frontier, if you like that better.

To create this game, I started with a character sheet idea. I wanted to narrow it down to what you will always need in order to run wild space adventures. I decided you need the following elements.

FORM AND BACKGROUND

Fundamental to your PC... what kind of life form are you and what sort of job skills do you have? A list of these things will be given, with some minor detail. But making the shit up is an option. Monkey pirate? Blob scientist? Humanoid guru? You decide.

TRAITS

A Trait is any kind of characteristic that has any kind of mechanical impact on play, such as having a third arm or x-ray vision. You can make up some Traits when creating your PC and you can add more later. A Trait can also be an item. So if you really want to start the game with a kick ass laser rifle, make it a Trait. You damn sure won't be able to buy one with the skimpy funds you'll be starting with.

BASIC SKILLS

Everyone is a spacer, so they all should have some common basic skills. Not everyone is equally good at them, so the skills should have ranks. I decided you should randomly roll your ranks on a d6 per skill. It feels right. There are six skills. Not because six attributes is common, but because it makes sense. Trust me... I preferred to have less than six. But my image of how this game works just ended up requiring these six skills. I don't want more.

•Explore (perception, instinct, toughness, etc.)

•Drive (ships, cars, bikes, etc.)

•Fight (punch, kick, tackle, bash, etc.)

•Operate (machines, robots, computers, etc.)

•Shoot (load, aim, fire, reload, and duck)

•Talk (charisma, persuasion, negotiation, etc.)

The way I see it, every conceivable common task a fantasy spacer could engage in is covered by these six skills. Blasting robots, flying ships, kicking in teeth, negotiating with locals, etc. Now you may wonder immediately... this is a space fantasy game. There are wizards. So how does a PC interact with magic? There isn't a skill that is obviously magical. There are reasons for this. First, most things that appear to be magical may actually be tech. Super science! Sufficiently advanced, as it were.

If the PCs encounter a truly mystical, magical thing that is beyond technology... why would they have a skill for it? Those are special situations.

LIFE POINTS

I thought about not having hit points. I thought about a wound levels system, or just ignoring this altogether. But honestly... this is an adventure game wherein you'll likely have fights with monsters and shit. I like hit point systems. They are quite reliable. So ZSF will have one. They are called Life Points to reinforce the fact that when you run out of them, you die. Or... probably... I will do a player choice: death or some kind of permanent drawback, akin to Death or Debasement from GOZR.

DEFENSE

Lifted straight from GOZR, which came straight from Into the Odd and other similar systems. Defense is just armor, or anything that absorbs damage. By default, this is a zero. And having a point or two is a big deal.

EXPLODING DICE

I love exploding dice. I can't not have them. So in this game, under the current rule sketch, you roll a d6 to do shit and if you roll a 6, the die explodes. There's more to it than that, but there it is.

ACES

I also love meta points. In this game, they are Aces. I used that term because years ago I did a dry run for a space game and the term "aces" played into that system. Plus "space ace" is fun. Anyway, this is exactly like GOZR's GOOZ points. You spend Aces to make shit happen.

GAMBLING

Way back in 2000, I wrote The Pool, which had a gambling element in the core mechanic. I wanted to bring that idea back because I do love the dynamic it provides. When players have a meaningful choice... to take a big risk and make big things happen. The idea here is you can literally roll as many dice as you want in any situation, thus increasing your chance of being wildly successful. But if you roll even a single 1, you have not only failed... you critically failed. I think this will be a fun game element.

MONEY AND GEAR

Mostly, I'm going to use The Black Hack's elegant usage dice for keeping track of bullets and stuff. But money, in the form of STDs (Standard Trade Dollars), will be tracked carefully. You'll shop and buy shit. You'll get ripped off. You'll rip people off. You start with a low amount of cash and things are expensive. I like it when players have to go buy things, haggle for them, and so forth. Plus if the PCs have to think about money, it underscores one of the game's core themes: corporate greed.

Gear is super important too. I think this is me showing my influences right on my sleeve because Star Frontiers was the second game I ever owned and I spent copious amounts of time pouring over the equipment descriptions. I love that shit. This game will have a lot of fun gear you can purchase, if you can get some money.

SETTING

I've already discussed this a bit. But to add to it, the galaxy is dominated by companies. Corporations have fully taken over as the real power. Governments exist, but are essentially fronts for corporations. Honestly... not very different than reality, huh?

The PCs will be adventuring mostly in the ZSF: the Zoa Space Frontier. This is basically the outer galaxy. Polite society is closer to the core of the galaxy, where streets are straight and the Law keeps things nice and neat. Out in the frontier it is a different story. Things are wild and wooly. Which can be good bad... the corporations reach out here to mine for resources, exploit natives, and so forth. The Law is their blunt tool. Many PCs may be outlaws. Fun.

Ok, so those are pretty much the important bits, in terms of what I wanted this game to emote. Let's talk system for a minute.

Currently, it's this:

•Roll a d6 to do a thing. A 6 explodes. Hit the Challenge Number and you succeed.

•Each skill level adds 1d6 to the roll. Traits can also add dice or add modifiers.

•Roll a 1 without a 6, and you failed. Roll the die again and if it's another 1, you crit fail. You describe what happens.

•Borrowing from GOZR, if you roll 1 under the target, you graze. Something beneficial might still happen.

•Spend Aces to do things like take extra actions, auto-explode a die, etc.

•Add dice to the roll as a gamble, as discussed above.

•Earn Space Points to build upon your character.

That's the gist of it. Work in progress, very much in the gestational phase. Even though, if you've seen any of my social media posts, I've been drawing tons of ZSF character sheets. I'm doing this because it's fun and because I want to lock myself into the bones of the system. I need to do this because I'm prone to change shit over and over and never get it done. How the fuck do you think I got GOZR finished? By literally drawing the rules I had a harder time changing them. If you knew how many iterations of Rabbits & Rangers exist and that game is still not written...

TONE

Holy fuck. This is a big deal. Because RPGs are for everyone, right? I want to be inclusive. I don't want to tell someone they can't play, either directly or indirectly. But at the same time, the tone of a work will invariably filter some people out. But this is a natural filter. It's ok.

For example, I don't line dance. Nobody tells me I can't do it. It's just not for me. In that respect, whatever tone this game ultimately strikes, it will filter out some players who just aren't into that tone. And that's a beautiful thing. Choice. Variety. The spice of life.

My inclination is to be a bit reckless and say naughty words. I could avoid that. I might avoid that. But I might just remove the training wheels on this one and let my raw imagination go nuts. It could be a galactic train wreck. We'll see.

An old Zoa banner, c. 2009.

Before GOZR... Sand

For years, since ye olde G+ days, I had this idea called Dead Wizards. It was to be a pure sword and sorcery RPG filtered through my own personal S&S lens. It was a desert setting, borrowing from some of the same well of ideas that Al Qadim borrowed from... but not too explicitly. I didn't describe it as "Arabic" or anything like that. I got my inspirations from those sources, but also many others across the world and throughout fantasy fiction. Eventually I changed the name Dead Wizards to Sand in the Bone because (what a shitty reason) I didn't want the "DW" to be confused with Dungeon World. No shade on Dungeon World, just wanted to be distinct.

Anyhow... the development of that game stalled multiple times and eventually I hit on a basic system I liked and wanted to test out. But I didn't want to run it in the Dead Wizards/Sand in the Bone setting. So I got some inspiration from watching Heavy Metal again and one day I scribbled "GOZR" on some paper and the rest is history.

So GOZR basically looted the corpse of Dead Wizards for its system and even its map. The DNA of this game shifted from a gritty S&S pulp style RPG to a post-apoc sci-fantasy romp.

Lately I've been revisiting Dead Wizards in my mind, allowing my brain to wander over it and feel out what was magical about the idea to begin with. Maybe it'll lead to something I can publish. Who knows?

Here are some ancient posts talking about Dead Wizards. Much of this info is probably no longer applicable, but perhaps you'll enjoy it anyway. You've read this far.

Gad'Juth

Kanebok

Big Swords

Initiative (and the origin of Threat from GOZR)

Game Design is Hard

Reflection on Dead Wizards

GOZR Adventures

Pookie did a review of GOZR and he brings up a point that's been raised before: GOZR doesn't have an example scenario. People always say that RPGs need a sample adventure so people can immediately get a feel for how the game works and what you do with it.

And I agree. It is always a benefit and rarely a detriment to have a sample scenario in a game. Hell, my first RPG, the D&D red box, was centered heavily on that opening scenario that held your hand to learn the rules. Very effective.

I didn't include one with GOZR because I couldn't quite get one finished. Eventually I created Tower Trouble, a one page tower crawl (which will probably be included with GOZR RISING). But doing a full scenario for this game proved quite impossible for me to do. Why?

I think it's because this game is a toolkit. It is meant to inspire you to just play. You should roll on tables (or pick) to generate settings, NPCs, and situations. The material is meant for use and re-use both within the game itself and in other games you play.

Pre-written adventures are more like snapshots of a moment. A different vibe.

For GOZR RISING, I do want to include some adventures. But I'm not sure what form they will take. Honestly, I don't know if the default format of these pages is best suited to the task. An adventure will be looked at mostly by the GM, not by the players. But I designed the game book to be looked at by everyone. Therefore I think I might take a different approach for adventures and - GASP! - write them. With fonts and words and stuff.

But if I do that, I won't include them in the actual GOSR RISING book. They'll be in a separate book. Which, I think, is kind of a cool idea. You'll get the new GOZR book with all its color and art and handwritten craziness with new monsters, gadgets, and so on. And you'll get a nifty companion book with some slightly more traditionally-presented adventures.

As I type this, I'm reminded of Mörk Borg. That book is also heavily visual in its presentation. Indeed, when I started working on GOZR in early 2020, I got my copy of Mörk Borg at about the same time and was inspired by it. But the sample adventure for that game was in fact presented more traditionally and is even printed on different paper than the rest of the book (fancy!). I don't know if it is the case, but I suspect they might have done this for the same reason I outline above. It just makes more sense.

Still, similar to Tower Trouble, I might include a few one page "dungeons" in the main book. Just some locations to pepper into your games. The adventure book will be slightly more fleshed-out, perhaps.

We'll see.

The Paint Job

No, this post is not about painting or art. It's about old school gaming, house rules, and hacks. It's a bit meandering. Apologies.

I've been thinking about the many, many ways I've hacked B/X to make it play closer to my ideal way. This is no more evident than in all the different posts I've made about fixing the broken Thief class.

I've been working on various ways to alter the standard rules for my upcoming Doomslakers B/X project. I have wrestled with lots of ideas and found them all too fiddly, too trivial, or just too much.

Lately I've hit upon an idea that seems promising, though. It's a simple one, nothing rocket-science about it.

Instead of hacking the rules, maybe I'll just present my "meta rules" as an option, then keep the rest of the content more-or-less defaulting to the standard rules. For my own games, I use the meta rules, But you don't have to.

Most obvious example is luck. I always include some kind of luck mechanic in my games because I feel like without some degree of direct player-facing mechanic other than mechanics tied explicitly to character action, players often feel frustrated by game play. I know I do, and this is why I include such mechanics.

But luck doesn't modify existing rules, it just goes on top of them like a nice paint job.

What other kinds of rules could function in this way?

Well, Death or Debasement is definitely going to be part of the project. This comes from GOZR. It basically says when your PC dies, you get to decide if they are actually dead or not. I mean, why not? It's your character, after all.

Choosing Debasement means your PC is miraculously alive, has 1 hit point, and will be down for 1d6 rounds (probably out of the fight). Alternatively, perhaps they need to pass a Death save to recover and act.

Choosing Death means they are dead and you get some minor perk for your next PC, such as a bonus to an ability score or something.

Meaningful choices. More interesting that flat out death at zero hp.

EDIT: Choosing Debasement also means you randomly roll (or maybe choose) one permanent effect, such as losing some HP, dropping in an ability score, or something more in-world, such as losing a hand or whatever. Surviving death isn't free.

Another meta rule concept isn't so much a meta rule as a setting rule. Not unlike the old AD&D 2e "kits", the setting itself will modify character classes and PCs with choices the player can make, such as rolling on random character traits tables.

Here's where the Thief gets a lot of love, too. Because in Yria, the world of Doomslakers and Black Pudding, all Thieves are trained by a guild and there are five guilds, one for each city. And each guild's training impacts a Thief's skills and abilities in specific ways. The player who chooses Darkmirth as their guild (and perhaps home city) will be much better at stealth while the Thief of Kanebok may be more acrobatic and better at stunts. For example.

The net result of all this is that to play games set in Yria or to just mine Yria for ideas and adventures you don't have to adopt any of the meta rules if you don't wanna. It's fine. My feelings will be hurt but that's ok.

I'll ramble more later.