Cascade

 

Cascade, +1 Sword: Each consecutive hit after the first deals +1 additional damage. Any missed attack deals 1 point of damage to the user. 1/day, the user may speak to the sword's devil spirit as if by the Commune spell (1 question, 20% chance it is a lie).

Stormdriver Thornheart, one of the greatest of the old dwarf forgers, was challenged by a powerful and mysterious hero to make a weapon that could contain his dark soul's fury. He then heaped sacks of gold upon the table and added "If it is within your skill to do so." Thornheart, being a proud artisan, immediately agreed. When the forging was finished and the dweomers sealed, the dark stranger marveled at the blade's beauty. "And now" said the dark hero, "let us see if it can contain the fury of my soul." The dwarf's final payment was the full length of Cascade in his heart. The sword drank, the eyes of the pommel glowed, the enchantment was complete.

Sand in the Bone: Marks and Risk

In this post, I talked about weapons and weapon damage for Sand in the Bone. I said PCs would have "Mastery" they can spend on weapons. I've thought a little more about this and realized that I already have a thing called "Marks" which can easily cover weapon skills. So I'm folding the idea of mastery into Marks.

Characters begin with some number of Marks. A Mark is really just any special feature the Player wants to highlight about the character. Since this game doesn't have any traditional attributes, such as strength or intelligence, Marks allow you to customize however you like. So Mark could be a special skill, a relationship, a magical power, or even some kind of curse or negative trait.

Now, I do not want to go the positive vs. negative balance sheet route. In G.U.R.P.S., for example, you can gain points to buy skills and advantages by taking disadvantages. Need another 5 points? Give yourself a paralyzing fear of snakes. And so forth. This is a fine mechanic and I don't ever mean to give that game shit for what it does. It's solid. But I don't want that here.

So my idea is that there is a mix of creative and random elements to chargen. The random means you might get a negative Mark, such as a curse. That way we don't have to fuck around with making PCs that have intense coulrophobia in order to allow for extra perks. I want to be a better gymnast, so I'm making my dude a galaphobe!

Which leads to another concept I'm definitely working into the game: risk. Choices matter. So during chargen, Players have a baseline method for making a character and they can stick to the baseline and come up with something awesome. Or they can choose to take risks in the hopes of getting better results. This will manifest as multiple chargen tables you can choose to roll on. While there may be one basic table to roll on (A), you choose to roll on alternate table B or C, each of which have more potent results but also more drawbacks.

I want to carry that concept through the entire game. For example, the use of Sand, which I talk about here, is inherently risky. And not just in the random dice rolling way, but in the sense that you are making choices that increase or decrease risk.

ASIDE: I had flirted with the idea that you could play this game absolutely middle of the road. Making almost zero dice rolls, you could sort of coast through conflicts. But the tradeoff would be that you could never have amazing success or make incredible discoveries. You'd be living a boring life for a great adventurer. So I'm not sure if I want to include that or not.

Striding Warrior

This is art for my upcoming RPG, Sand in the Bone (formerly called Dead Wizards*).

I decided to lean pretty hard into the "sand" part of "sand and sorcery" on this project. I even re-tooled the setting map to eliminate some non-sandy environments as I found them to be utterly superfluous to the tone. I have this habit when I do setting maps to try to include all kinds of environments... like people will be disappointed if they can't do snowy north adventures in my sand and sorcery game.

This RPG will have an original system. It is not specifically OSR. It is not based on D&D. It also includes elements more akin to my old game The Pool. Specifically there is a risk element with a meta-game mechanic. And yet it is still a traditional RPG in the sense that there is a Judge and Players and they are separated at the table by a barb-wire wall of doom. I kid.

Sometime in the near future I will ask bribe my Monday Doomslakers friends to play this thing.

*If I can get some momentum on this I might do a supplement for the game using the Dead Wizards title. Hey... I can dream, can't I? Don't crush my dreams.

Sand and Something

I haven't been drawing much lately. Part of the reason is just lack of time and inspiration. Another part is that I've completed all of my outstanding paying gigs (exception for one or two I need to do). Another reason is that I'm more in a noodling phase than a doodling phase. I'm thinkin'. It's scary.

Mostly I'm thinking about Dead Wizards. I can't predict what I'll actually do this year but I truly hope that this game will see publication in 2020. I've definitely never been closer to settling on the core mechanics, theme, and all that important jazz than I am right now. This game has been through many changes over the past couple of years and none of the iterations have felt as right as this one.

So one big open question about this project is the title. I've been using Dead Wizards as the working title for a few years. And while I like that name quite a bit, it's abbreviation is DW... same as Dungeon World. And like it or not that bugs the shit out of me. I know it's a minor thing, but it's enough to put me off.

So the title I'm leaning into right now is Sand in the Bone.

It's still evocative and kind of metal, even though this setting isn't "metal", per se. It's definitely sword and sorcery and Sand in the Bone has a gritty feel that I like. Plus it gets some of the setting's feel right in the name, sand being a central theme to the game.

ASIDE

I had set myself some hard rules about naming this game. I said absolutely zero of any of this:

Noun & Noun
Word of the Thing
Black anything

Success!

A Reflection on Dead Wizards

EDIT: I changed the name from Dead Wizards to Sand in the Bone for various reasons. This post is talking about the same game.

What follows is a long-winded reflection on Dead Wizards* and where it is headed for the future.

This might be the first time I mention the game in the blog:

My good friend Cyd is running a Penny Hack for us on Mondays, which is probably wrapping up soon. At that point I will ask my cohorts to indulge me once again and dive into a campaign that is largely inspired by mixing up Tanith Lee, Robert E. Howard, Frank Frazetta, and Richard Corben. Some good ole S&S in a project I've been calling Dead Wizards (or Kanebok... not sure how it will appear yet). I ran this once before and it was nice but this is a totally revamped version. Trying some ideas. Breaking the old game down and working from its bones to make a new toy. If all goes well, this will be one of my 2017 publishing projects.

But that was 2017 and I know for a fact I ran a Dead Wizards playtest locally almost 4 years ago. Or something like that.

This all started when I looked at Swords & Wizardry White Box and fell in love with the simplicity of the single saving throw. Somehow that morphed into a desire to make a sword and sorcery RPG which somehow morphed into sand and sorcery.

Sand and Sorcery

(Which, BTW, might make a killer game title.)

I am not sure if this label has a distinct definition. If it does, I am unaware. But it is what I use to describe Dead Wizards. All I mean by it is that the genre is sword and sorcery and that the setting has

a desert sands flavor.

First, about sword and sorcery. To me, S&S is fantasy wherein magic is both uncommon (but not necessarily "rare") and dangerous. There are no high elf good witches here. The genre sometimes has a bleak view of humanity too. But all I'm really concerned about is that the magic is uncommon and the heroes are larger than life - but still all-too-human. If you are a person who turns into a cat, then  you are weird and dangerous to others, not special and magical.

The sand bit is a little harder to nail down. I am not interested in making fantasy Arabia, but I am interested in riffing on some of the fantasy Arabian tropes. I'm also borrowing heavily from various African cultures and even dipping a little bit into India and southeast Asia. But none of them are the model and this setting isn't a representation of any real world analog. It is fantasy, pure and simple, wherein the people are not white and the landscape is not European.

If that is confusing all I can say is I'm going to try really fucking hard to practice "show, don't tell" with the presentation of this game.

And on to that reflection stuff

So the game began its life as a S&W hack. I ran one or two sessions in that vein, which were fine. Then I broke away for a while to do Rabbits & Rangers and when I came back to it I tried to design an original system, but with lots of S&W bits. The system was kind of modeled on the old descending AC from D&D. You had three categories and for each you'd have a to-hit table. That playtest was short but went OK as well. I still wasn't feeling it, though. I ran a few sessions of it and then my mom got sick and I kind of fell away from running games for a bit.

The next stab I took at it was even more of a non-OSR system. This time no playtesting took place. And now I'm back at it with another redesign. This one feels more right than ever before. An important element fell into place recently where a piece of the setting kind of clicked with the system. Namely, sand.

Since sand is everywhere in the setting, I thought what a great way to express it - have a "sand" category on your character sheet. Sand is how much willpower you can exercise over the world in which you live. The powers-that-be express their will on the world, and sand is their blood. So characters can use sand to express narrative control in the game.

This takes me back, back in time to 2001 when I wrote The Pool. The same concept is at play here. There is a bit of a gamble to the use of sand and the payoff is narrative control. This idea is what I remember being the most powerful and prescient impression I got from The Forge. This simple notion that a player could do some of the work that a GM is normally doing. Of course that idea blew up after those days and now we have probably hundreds of games devoted passionately to narrative gaming. Back then, not so much.

To be clear, this is not a story game. It would be fine it if was, but it isn't. This is a traditional RPG in the sense that you have a GM and players and the GM is responsible for setting the stage, describing things, and adjudication. But, like The Pool, this game allows for some degree of narrative control to go to the players via the sand mechanic.

I'll speak more about sand later. I've yammered enough tonight.

*I decided it was preemptive to bold and italicize a game that doesn't yet exist. So until I actually have a manuscript, I won't bold and italicize Dead Wizards like I normally would. It doesn't matter, I know. Stop judging me. My blog, my rules.

More posts about this game over the last few years:

Playtest #3
A Bit of Dead Wizards
Drawing Gaj'Uth the Three Headed Elephant