This was inspired by some recent readings and thought it would be fun to try out. More Basic D&D fun!
Ghoul, Demonic (Ghūl) Armor Class: 4 Hit Dice (HD): 5d8+7 (29hp) No. of Attacks: 2 claw, 1 bite, + Paralysis and Ghoul Fever Damage: 1d4, 1d4, 1d6 Special Attacks & Defenses: Ghoul fever, paralysis (2d6 turns), shapeshift, undead Move: 90’ (30’) No. Appearing: 1d2 (1d3) Save As: Fighter 5 Morale: 10 Treasure Type: B, C
The demonic ghoul also called a ghūl or ghūla, is a much more dangerous version of the ghoul and ghast. This creature appears to be more monstrous than the common ghoul, though there still plenty of similarities to attest to their relationship. Demonic ghouls are believed to be corpses with a demonic spirit inhabiting their body. Similar in a way to vampires.
The demonic ghoul has the hindquarters of a donkey, sans tail, and sometimes the horns of a goat. They have the same ability to paralyze others, including elves, and are given away by their stench.
Where ghouls and ghasts feed on corpses, the demonic ghoul is not above providing their own corpses by hunting and killing humanoids. They are also known to eat living children.
The demonic ghoul can also shapeshift into hyenas and can assume the form of the last person they devoured.
The female demonic ghoul, the ghūla, can also pass as a living human woman. It is said they will lure prey back to her lair to seduce and then feed on them. Children born to these women are still-born but will grow up to become ghouls on their own.
Demonic Ghouls are undead and turn as Mummies. Ghoul Fever is a disease caused by the bite of demonic ghouls. The victim must make a save vs. Poison or become infected. One full day after this failed save the victim loosed 1d3 Constitution and 1d3 Dexterity points. At this point, they must make two consecutive saves vs. Death to survive. A fail on one save adds one more day to the disease and another loss of points. Two fails results in death.
A humanoid who dies of ghoul fever rises as a ghoul at the next midnight. A humanoid who becomes a ghoul in this way retains none of the abilities it possessed in life. It is not under the control of any other ghouls, but it hungers for the flesh of the living and behaves like a normal ghoul in all respects. A humanoid of 4 Hit Dice or more rises as a ghast.
Ghoul fever is also present in 10% of all ghouls and 25% of all ghasts.
You will never, ever see a "Women in Refrigerators" situation in one of my games. No woman will ever be killed to forward a male character's arc. Never.
You will never, ever see rape as a means of helping to build up a character as via a Rape-and-Revenge arc. As in when you take a character down to their lowest levels so they can be built back up into something more powerful. I guess the trope could be called the "I Spit on Your Grave" trope.
"But", you may ask "what if the story calls for it?"
Sorry, but no. Time to write a new fucking story then.
"But aren't you giving 'special treatment' to a certain group?"
No. And also fuck you, go write your own fucking games and don't buy mine if that is what you think.
Day 14: Are Your Game Mechanics and Characters Intersectional?
My mechanics are math which is about as non-intersectional as you can be. Math is math.
Again, not to sounds like a broken record, I go back to my key philosophic design foundation; Is it fun? Everything else flows from that.
Now to be fair. I DID write The Witch: Aiséiligh Tradition AS I thought a radical feminist witch group would look like in a D&D/Fantasy world.
Here I did play with concepts of power and gender as they related to the archetype of the witch. I based it on the "Reclaiming Tradition" in modern Wicca who have decided that they need to reclaim the name "witch" and make it their own positive label.
The Aiséiligh are in a very real sense my Social Justice Witch class. Lawful, Good, and sick your patriarchal shit.
I am of an age where I don't get a lot of time for my games, so I like to run them when I can. Since my regular group consists of my family there is not a lot of interest in me streaming the game.
Plus streaming games have a certain flow to them that my home games do not. Plus there is a ton of inside humor. What's the point in streaming content that really only the people at the table will get.
I have not against streaming games and think they are kind of cool really. The ones I have watched have been a lot of fun. But you likely will not see me doing it anytime soon.
Would I play in one that someone else was running? Yeah, I might do that.
Gavin Norman of Necrotic Gnome has been producing some great products for Old School gaming with his own unique style for years. His B/X Essentials is one of my favorite products.
Well now he is producing an updated version and it looks fantastic!
A faithful reproduction of the B/X-era rules in a digest-sized boxed set or "Rules Cyclopedia" style book. I am pleased the what I have been calling "Black Box Basic" for years is now coming in an actual black box!
Really there is so much awesome about this and I will spend some time next week talking about it.
I have seen what is very, very close to the final PDFs and they look fantastic.
I do want to talk about those covers.
Not sure if this will be the final cover, but it's awesome!
I mean look at that! A castle on the back of a giant turtle? I want to GO THERE NOW!
Kudos to Andrew Walter for these great covers that feel so 70s inspired. They look like the cover to a Yes or Uriah Heep album. That's an adventure right there.
Welcome back to Featured Artist! This time I have an artist who is making a name for himself doing custom characters sheets. That is not all he does, but these are so much fun I had to share.
Today is a big day in astrophysics. The first-ever image of a black hole has been released.
The black hole is 500 million trillion km away, or 500,000,000,000,000,000,000 km or 52,850,042 Light Years.
When that light left the black hole's event horizon the Earth looked like this:
Just some perspective, plus I love those maps.
Much like magic, black holes have "suffered" due to the expansion of science. What do I mean by that?
For much of the 20th Century, the black hole of science fiction was monstrous, mysterious, even evil thing. A star that ate everything that came to close including light and time. It's not hard to see why there were some sci-fi authors who categorized them as monsters.
In fact, this one is a monster. It is 40 billion km across and has a mass 6.5 billion times that of the Sun. For reference, the Earth has a diameter of 12,756 km and the Sun has a diameter of 1.392 million km. That dwarfs the Sun more than our sun dwarfs the Earth.
In fiction black holes lead to other universes, often evil ones. Or sending people to different parts of the universe in defiance of any laws of relativity. Indeed they were the ultimate "MacGuffin" to break all sorts of laws of reality.
BlackStar, as a game concept, really owes a lot to these older ideas of black holes in more than just name.
In truth, the ideas for BlackStar got their very first start for me in the 1979 Disney movie The Black Hole. I remember seeing this at the 67 Drive-In in my old home town. The movie is full of ideas that characterize what I want BlackStar to do and be even before I add the Lovecraftian bits. We have a crew exploring space. There is a psychic crew member. We have an evil mad scientist in his old castle spaceship surrounded by mindless servants and evil strongman; it's practically gothic horror. Even the tag line is horror, "A Journey That Begins Where Everything Ends".
Another black hole sci-fi/horror movie that was a big, if not one of the biggest, influence on BlackStar is 1997's Event Horizon.
In Event Horizon, we have a black hole, in this case, an artificially created one (like what we see in the Romulan Warbirds) that power the ship. The mystery, and horror, of the Event Horizon, is where was the ship the entire time it's been missing. We learn that the black hole has taken the crew into a hellscape not dissimilar to what we saw at the end of The Black Hole. Claire Weir's, Dr. Weir's (Sam Neill) dead wife, tells us "I have such wondrous things to show you" brings to mind Pinhead's "We have such sights to show you" from the Hellraiser movies. Indeed they can be assumed to be the same sights.
In both cases breaking the laws of physics, in both cases trying to move faster than light, opens you up to the consequences of breaking the Laws of Creation. The black hole becomes the proverbial gate to Hell. Abandon all Hope Ye Who Enter Here.
This is made even more explicit in the Doctor Who episodes "The Impossible Planet" and "The Satan Pit" from 2006. In this, the scientific portrayal of black holes is contrasted with the classic sci-fi portrayals. In Doctor Who black holes are a means of travel. Gallifrey and every TARDIS is powered by "The Eye of Harmony" a captured black hole created by the Timelord Stellar Engineer Omega. It has as much horror as the engine in a Tesla sedan. Neat yes, but not horrible.
The Satan Pit turns this on its head. Here the black hole "just eats" according to the Doctor. The black hole is The Pit, the jail that the devil can't escape from. It is the Christian Hell or the Abyss.
Consequently, the episodes have been compared to "Event Horizon" and "Alien" by critics.
So that leaves me at today. What can black holes do to inspire horror?
Much like "anti-matter" gave way to "dark matter" in the minds of the creatives, black holes have been largerly replaced by "Wormholes". But even a wormhole is still sci-fi shorthand for "short cuts in FTL travel". Sure they can be like "gates" but the fear is diluted.
I think where I am going to go with all of this is take a page from Event Horizon and make the drive of the new Mystic class ships be the problem. They were designed to move faster than light, the heralded Warp-13 drives, but the real purpose is to open rifts in space-time to allow these horrors to come through. Both sci-fi horrors and cosmic horrors.
Black Holes, like the God of the Gaps, has had its mystical notions removed for the more appropriate scientific ones. As someone that originally studied to be an astrophysicist, this is a great thing. But as someone who loves horror and sci-fi adventure, I feel like I have lost something.
Maybe Dark Matter and Dark Energy can be my new mysterious thing! In any case it needs to be frightening. They say "in space, no one can hear you scream", but I also want "in space, no one wants to hear you yawn".
And this song was on my mind while working on this post.
My design principles start with "Is it fun?" and end with "Is it fun to write?"
I mean sure there are some subversive messages explicitly about Colonialism (and in particular about the British Empire in India) in Ghosts of Albion. But the message is not one of action it is more directed to people who already understand what a bad thing it can be.
So yeah. I guess the scope of my writing is just not that large.
Bloat Games has been putting out some quality games for a little bit now and they are certainly the new "It" company in the Old-School scene right now. Their newest Kickstarter is now up, The Blackest of Deaths - A Dire Old School Fantasy RPG and I have been given access to the "Ashcan" copy of the rules. Let's have a look and see what this Kickstarter is all about!
The Rules
We are greeted on the very first page with a "Caution" and "YOUR CHARACTERS WILL DIE." I think that sets the tone for the game quite well. The aesthetic reminds me of Dungeon Crawl Classics mixed with HackMaster to be honest. Not my usual vibe, but I like what I am reading so far.
My favorite is the line "yes, this is the type of game your grandparent’s preachers warned them about in the 70s & 80s!" Ok then!
We start out with what are the two big "rules" of the game;
1. "Rulings vs Rules", there is no rule for everything in that can happen in the game. The GM is in charge and will make up what they need to make up to keep the game going.
2. The Core Mechanic. Roll a d20 and d6 at the same time. If the d6 comes up 1 you get a Hinderance. If it comes up as a 6 then you get a Benefit. 2, 3, 4, or 5 are ignored. There are also Advantage and Disadvantage rules.
The character Attributes are the same, but instead of a range of 3-18 you just have your pluses or minuses. Max is 3, the lowest is -2. You start with 10 hp +/- your Con score. The only way to get more is via magic! There is no leveling up! This is you.
To offset this all characters have some Luck points.
Armor and Dex scores don't add to "AC" but reduce damage given.
There are four races, elf, dwarf, goblin and human. Races can raise or lower your scores.
There are six classes, Assassin, Barbarian, Monster Slayer, Necromancer, Ranger, and Street Rat.
They work as you expect, each one with a specialized purpose. Monster Slayer has a unique talent for killing a particular monster you choose for example.
There are a limited number of spells (no levels) and most deal with combat.
Equipment and weapons finish off the Player's Section.
The GM's section is the other half of the book.
We go over the basic rules again and discuss some difficulty checks. This is where the game's "New School" roots show from under their "Old School" dye job! But in truth, it all works great.
There is a good sized monster section with the monsters in a very distilled format. Just the essentials.
All the favorites are here and it is easy to see why and how these monsters will mow through most characters.
There is also a good-sized section on treasure and magic items.
The game is fast to pick up and lethal. It is close to an OSR "Beer and Pretzel" game to be honest. Great for a single night or weekend or even as a side-quest with a "Magnificent Seven" style adventure.
As of this writing, the game is funded (in the first 2 hours!) and they are at the first stretch goal of 20 more monsters. There are plenty more where that came from too.
Really looking forward to seeing what this game does.
Day 9: How Do Your Games Distribute Power Among the Players?
Well, I would have to say I try to focus on mechanical balance as much as I can within the scope of the rules.
Some games, say for example many old-school games, balance is not really a consideration. But you also don't play those games for balance, you play them for the game-play-experience you get (not XP in this sense).
So I create witch classes that are, for the most part, pretty weak at love levels. This in on purpose since it fits in with the design constraints of the games I am working with. The payoff is once you get to higher levels you are pretty damn powerful. Like scary powerful really.
In other games, I also look a lot into the balance of the character types. For example in Ghosts of Albion Tamara and William, the "stars" of the show are also some of the weaker characters power wise. They are not the great powerful warrior Queen like Boadicea or the magic using vampire or the poet whose words can shape reality. This balanced with their ability to affect the plots and course of the game via their greater Drama points.
After that, it becomes the realm of the individual game masters to do their job.
At the top of my list, I will say is Jason Vey. We worked on Buffy together and a bunch of other projects.
We agree on all the "big stuff" and respect each other's backgrounds and areas of expertise. But we are also not afraid to go at it when defending something we both want.
A collaborator should bring out the best in you and you for them.
I also would not hesitate for a chance to work with Christopher Golden and Amber Benson again like we did on Ghosts of Albion.
It's April. And I have to admit I am kinda missing the A to Z challenge this year. Maybe I'll do it next year. But in any case, I was thinking of past challenges last week and the topics I have done and one topic just kept coming up nearly every time I did it.
Lilith.
The story of Lilith has always fascinated me. The character has always fascinated me.
I suppose then it is no surprise that she lies at the intersection of all my interests.
Also this weekend I finished a nice binge watch of Chilling Adventures of Sabrina, Part 2. Here the amazing Michelle Gomez plays Lilith the Mother of Demons and the First Witch.
Lilith Queen and Mother of all Lilim (demons) Hit Dice: 18d8 + 33 (114 hp) Armor Class: -3 [22] Attacks: 2 claws (1d4), 1 weapon (1d8) Saving Throw: 3 Special: +2 magic weapons to hit, magic resistance (65%), immune to fire, magical abilities, summon minions Move: 12/18 (flying) Alignment: Chaotic Evil* Challenge Level/XP: 20/3,400
Lilith appears an inhumanly comely woman standing 5’7” tall and weighing roughly 130 pounds. Her skin is cinnamon colored, and her hair is waist length and blood red. She has a pair of leathery black bat-like wings that she can hide or expose at will.
Lilith never openly attacks. She considers combat beneath Her and will not partake in it. Her arena is intrigue, guile, and deception. Why fight when a cup laced with poison or a dagger in the night is much quicker.
She can use ESP and cast fireball, hold person, charm person or charm monster, suggestion and teleport at will. Three times a day she can cast lightning bolt and wall of fire. She can see perfectly in darkness of any kind. Lilth can summon 1d4+4 lilitu with a 100% chance.
The First Witch
was the first witch and can cast any witch spell. She cast spells as a 20th level witch but does not have any occult powers other than her magical abilities listed above.
Lilith was the first human woman. She rebelled against the gods that created her and now controls armies of demons. The gods won't work against her or strike her down because she knows all their True Names.
Lilith has no true friends because most fear her. She is known to ally herself with the Goddess Ereshkigal since both have similar portfolios and areas of concern. Some even claim that Lilith spent some time as Ereshkigal's handmaiden. Others claim she served Astártē or Ishtar.
Appearance and Emissaries
Lilith always appears as a young very attractive woman. Most often with long flaming red hair. It is claimed her true form is that of an ancient hag with long, but sparse wild black hair, talons, fangs and the feet of a predatory bird. Either or neither could be her true form.
Naamah - Known as the Daughter of Lilith Naamah is either a demon, a human or something else. She is honored in her own right as either the Patroness of Whores or the Patroness of Those Who Hunt the Night (slayers of the undead). Her title as The Daughter of Lilith, as opposed to just a daughter of Lilith, is significant. She may be her first true daughter or she may be her first human daughter.
Abyzou - Another daughter of Lilith. She is a powerful Lilitu Demon. She takes pleasure in possessing others and destroying them from the inside out.
Nox - The Petty Goddess of the Dusk is also believed to be a daughter of Lilith. Possibly the offspring of Lilith and a Sun god.
Camazotz - a Son of Lilith and the bloodthirsty god of Vampires. Some claim that his father may have been Orcus.
*Lilith's alignment is listed as Chaotic Evil. The Chaos part should be obvious, she has rebelled against the entire universe. While many of her actions are evil, she still kills babies, she is also a lot more complicated than that. Lilith has a high personal morality. She honors and keeps her friends and associates. You can trust that she will always do what is best for herself, but she also cares for her own "children" so she will protect them.
Holy Texts
As witches, the worshippers of Lilith hold their own Books of Shadows as their holy texts, but a few are are considered to be helpful in understanding Lilith.
The Splendor - The foundation text on which many of the Gods of Light have based their own holy texts. The Splendor mentions Lilith as one of the first demons of darkness. For this reason, many religions will see Lilith as a threat to their religion.
The Enochian Tablets - More details on the life and rebirth of Lilith. Written in an ancient angelic script that is difficult for many sages to translate. Also discusses her relationship to the divine and the demonic. It also details the origins of Those Who Hunt the Night.
For the games I write I try to make things as flexible as I can within the guidelines of the rules so people can do anything they want.
I don't want to be the one to say "No. You can do that." I would rather write my material so I can say "Yes, you can do that, let's figure out how."
Want to play a Winter Witch that is just like Elsa? Yeah, you can do that. Want to play a White Witch, but make him psychic instead? Yeah, ok do that thing!
Whatever else beyond that is up to whoever is running the game.
At the same time, I try to market my games and books to appeal to all sorts of crowds.
Looking forward to seeing what everyone posts for this!
