One Page Role-playing Games

My friends and I like to come up with crazy game ideas all the time. Once in a great while, I'll throw down the gauntlet and challenge people to actually write a goddamn game. Not like, a seven hundred page monstrosity, just a wee little one-page or 24-hour game design. It doesn't have to be great, it doesn't have to be perfect, it just has to be a role-playing game, and you have to finish it. 

So now I'm issuing the challenge to the rest of you: write a role-playing game in less than a thousand words and put it up on your blog. The Rules are only this: It has to be less than 1000 words, it has to have a mechanic I've never seen before (or a kick-ass variation of a mechanic I have seen before), and you have to send me a link, either in the comments here or to my e-mail at friggert@hotmail.com or to my twitter at @warpgames. Go create!  

Wee Little People 

A Role-playing Game in One Page

The Point: You and your friends play the tiny people that live inside your house. Your characters are roughly mouse-sized and must overcome many challenges to simply survive. Also, you must never reveal the existence of your people to the humans, as they will kill you or eat you or something. Humans are terrible.

Tell a Story: One of the players is the Storyteller. He or she describes the situation in which your Wee Little People find themselves. The rest of you play Wee Little People and try to do stuff while the Big People in the house are clumsy and oblivious. Doing Stuff can include collecting food, thiefing things, fighting with the cat, disposing of garbage discretely, pilfering Tim’s weed stash, moving dice to where they will be most likely to be underfoot, building shelters under cupboards, finding water, defending your home against cockroach attacks, invading mouse holes for their supplies… You’ve got options. Alternatively, you could try and tell an epic tale of adventure on a tiny scale. But you already know how to do those.

Character Creation: Choose a thing you are good at, a thing you are bad at, a skill you have learned, and an item you possess. None of these may be the same thing (for instance, you cannot be good at climbing and have that also listed as your skill). When you attempt an action that relates to the thing you’re good at, get a +1 bonus to the roll. When you attempt a thing that relates to the thing you’re bad at, take a -1 from the roll. When you attempt to do a thing that relates to your skill, once per session you can succeed on the roll automatically. When you attempt a thing that relates to the item you possess, you ignore any penalties on that roll unless that penalty comes from the attempt relating to a thing you are bad at.

Rolling Dice: Whenever someone attempts something and the outcome is in doubt, roll a six-sided die. If you roll five or higher (counting all bonuses and penalties), you succeed. If the result is four or less, you fail.

Failing is Bad: Whenever you fail at a thing, mark it off on your character sheet. You are only allowed to fail at something six times over the course of a single session. If you fail more often than that, Bad Things Happen. The Bad Thing is decided by the player to your left, and you are out of the game until the next session.

This is Your House: Wee Little People is set in whatever place you happen to be. The setting is whatever is already around you. If you’re in your living room, for instance, that might include your couch, coffee table, TV stand, bookshelf, and the half-eaten pizza in the box on the floor. The antagonists are you. The Wee Little People cannot make their existence known to you, so whatever it is they’re going about doing, they have to try and sneak around you and your friends to do it. When Jim gets up to grab a soda, the kitchen is no longer a safe place. Scatter!

  

Discovery: If Bad Stuff happens to all of you, you’re discovered. If you are discovered, it can be safely assumed that you and your friends have cashed in on the existence of the Wee Little People and have left them to be tortured by scientists forever. You sick fucks. Or, you could spend the rest of the evening arguing about what you and your group would ACTUALLY do if you found leprechauns in your underwear drawer. Up to you, really.

Why You Can't Rest in Undermountain

One of the things that Ian and I kept coming back to when we were discussing a return to Undermountain for 4th Edition was that you can’t rest whenever the fuck you want in a dungeon like this. There are entirely too many things that would like to eat you, and part of the Undermountain experience is learning to deal with some resource management. You bust a daily in your first encounter, there’s no getting that back for a good long while. If you’re out of Healing Surges and you don’t have anything that heals without using them, you’re in a pretty rough position. Being able to sit down for four to eight hours every once in a while is a luxury, and it’s one you can’t have when running around this dungeon.

Think of Undermountain like a city; it’s a city in which every single one of the citizens would be more than happy to spill your entrails on the ground and bathe in them. Every place in the dungeon gets used, and gets used fairly regularly. The only places that people might visit less often are places that are completely barricaded, places that are only accessible through secret doors, or places that are so incredibly dangerous to get to that no one ever bothers. Those places are, to be honest, pretty few and far between.

Halaster’s a dick. He’s like this retarded five year old with a +5 rocket launcher of doom and a crack habit. He built this dungeon as the ultimate expression of his douchebaggery, and he knows that people are going to come in and try and fuck with his shit. To do that, they’ll need resources, and they’ll need chances to rest up, heal, get their shit in a group, and come up with a plan for how they’re going to tackle the next ring of this circus of death. He isn’t going to make that easy. If you want to sleep in Undermountain, you’d best be prepared to work for it.
Barricading a room seems like it might be the best way to make that happen at first, until you remember how much noise that makes. Monsters like noise, it’s like a dinner-bell to them down here. I don’t have a Wandering Monster chart kicking around for Undermountain yet, but if your players want to barricade more than one door of the dungeon, I’d suggest you kick in one of those doors and make them fight some monsters. “Oy, right, yeah. Heard ya bangin’ about up here an’ thought, ‘Well them’ll make a nice bit o’ supper, ne?’”

So we have a few rooms kicking around that are inherently difficult to find and/or get into. Those rooms have one entry and exit point, and that entry point is easy to barricade and make relatively safe. There's some room for discussion in how many safe rooms there are. Personally, I think it should be every six to eight encounters. So you won't see me detail a Safe Room on this blog for at least three more encounters (probably closer to five). The nature of each of the safe rooms will be different, as well. Some of them won't allow you to sleep; you can meditate fine, if you're an Elf or a Warforged or whatever, but characters that require sleep will find the safe room entirely too uncomfortable for that. Other rooms will make it impossible to mediate, but sleeping creatures will do just fine (some sort of psychic interferance). Some will allow you to do both. Some will have to be barricaded, some will require a skill challenge or an encounter to get rid of the Things Here Before You, some will need to be made more comfortable, some will have tricky little bits that will fuck with your day, some will be completely harmless but have strange features that make you think something's up. It'll be fun coming up with them.

Also, getting BACK to a safe room should be a terrifying ordeal in it's own right. Comfortable rooms in Undermountain are a premium; monsters fucking LOVE comfortable rooms. When you come back to a Safe Room after a couple of encounters, expect it to have become the home of something Terrible and Weird that will need to be defeated before you can sleep away the last three encounters.

Undermountain Encounters 3, Nimraith’s Rest

In this alcove lies a human skeleton, huddled under a riven brass shield. It is clad in the crumbling remnants of leather armor. A metal, visored helm sits upright on the flagstone floor nearby.

Nimraith's rest is a pretty simple room. In it, there is one thing, a skeleton under a shield. At least, that's the original encounter as written. If you disturb the shield, you have to deal with a stirge, which is never pleasant because stirges were assholes. In 4^th Edition, they're pretty tame little guys. They don't have many hit points, their defenses are low, and a group of kick-ass adventurers taking down a single bug is a pretty stupid encounter.

So fuck the single bug, says I. The obvious answer is to make the stirges a swarm, with a couple of singular stirges kicking around for good measure. But the smallest stirge swarm is a level six monster, and I don't really want to dumb a six down to a one. Another option is a few pesky bugs working in conjunction. D&D Encounters' first skill challenge could end in a random combat with a few different things. One of those things was a trio of bugs; a stirge and two fire beetles. Fire beetles, for the record, are fucking terrifying. 3d6 damage over a blast 3 is insane at first level. With a critical hit, it could take fresh controllers into the negatives. Put two of those assholes in the same encounter, and you've got fricassee wizard.

Normally, when I'm looking at inventing an encounter, I don't take the XP reward system into account much. I know what seems like an easy, balanced or tough encounter to me, and if it turns out it's different from what I imagined it would be like, I change it around on the fly. Today, though, I'm going to break this down by experience point values, because it seems like fun.

I'm figuring on a single flame beetle, at 100xp. It gives out a big burst to begin with, and can be either a recurring threat (depending on how your recharge rolls go), or an easy target for your players. After that, we need a stirge to hearken back to the original encounter, so I'm thinking a single stirge at 100xp. After this, we can get a bit more creative with it. I love minions because they pose a viable threat without overpowering an encounter. So I invented stirgelings by setting their Secondary Role to "minion" in the Adventure Tools, changing the amount of damage it does to a static 3 with 3 ongoing. We're throwing three of these babies in there, for another 75xp. That leaves me with some 125xp to play around with. Just enough for a second-level monster!

Going along with our bug room theme and rocking the swarm idea, let's throw in a second-level centipede swarm. For parties that don't have a lot of blast or burst damage at their disposal, swarms prove a hell of a challenge. For more balanced parties, or parties that love them some mages, swarms are easy pickings, while the critters that hang out around the swarms are a bit harder to deal with.

For tactics, I'm thinking the stirges are going to attack as soon as the party is visible to them. They're going to go for the weakest looking characters, even if they're marked; they aren't smart enough to realize they're in danger of the fighter's opportunity attacks, or that the Warden is going to push them away from their food. The fire beetle is going to step out from behind the shield and let go with its recharging blast attack, then hide behind the shield for the extra cover and take a total defense action until the blast recharges. The centipede swarm is going to come from the hall to the south, a good choke point, where it will try to draw their enemies so that they can make short work of them between their own aura attack and the fireballs behind them.

This isn't intelligence, mind, this is blind instinct. The bugs don't want to deal with a group of people, they want to deal with small chunks of a group of people so that they can eat.

The (F) can be a little tough to see over the skeleton and the shield, but that's where the Fire Beetle is. 

 

Stirge (S)		Level 1 Lurker
Small natural beast		XP 100
Initiative +7        Senses Perception +0; darkvision HP 22; Bloodied 11 AC 15; Fortitude 12; Reflex 13; Will 10 Speed 2 , Fly 6 (hover)
m Bite (standard; at-will)
+6 vs AC; 1d4 damage, and the target is grabbed (until escape) and takes ongoing 5 damage until it escapes. An attached stirge doesn't make attack rolls while grabbing a target and gains a +5 bonus to its AC and Reflex defenses
Alignment Unaligned		Languages —
Skills Stealth +8
Str 8 (–1)	Dex 16 (+3)		Wis 10 (+0)
Con 10 (+0)	Int 1 (–5)		Cha 4 (–3)
Monster found in Monster Manual and Compendium
© 2009 Wizards of the Coast LLC, a subsidiary of Hasbro, Inc. All rights reserved. This monster statistics block has been generated using the D&D Adventure Tools.

 

Stirgeling (L)		Level 1 Minion Lurker
Small natural beast		XP 25
Initiative +7        Senses Perception +0; darkvision HP 1; a missed attack never damages a minion. AC 15; Fortitude 12; Reflex 13; Will 10 Speed 2 , Fly 6 (hover)
m Bite (standard; at-will)
+6 vs AC; 3 damage, and the target is grabbed (until escape) and takes ongoing 3 damage until it escapes. An attached stirge doesn't make attack rolls while grabbing a target and gains a +5 bonus to its AC and Reflex defenses
Alignment Unaligned		Languages —
Skills Stealth +8
Str 8 (–1)	Dex 16 (+3)		Wis 10 (+0)
Con 10 (+0)	Int 1 (–5)		Cha 4 (–3)
This one's my own creation, based on the Stirge, above. © 2009 Wizards of the Coast LLC, a subsidiary of Hasbro, Inc. All rights reserved. This monster statistics block has been generated using the D&D Adventure Tools.

 

Fire Beetle (F)		Level 1 Brute
Small natural beast		XP 100
Initiative +1        Senses Perception +0 HP 32; Bloodied 16 AC 13; Fortitude 13; Reflex 12; Will 11 Resist 10 fire Speed 6
m Bite (standard; at-will)
+5 vs AC; 2d4 + 2 damage
C Fire Spray (standard; recharge 5 6) • Fire
Close blast 3; +4 vs Reflex; 3d6 fire damage
Alignment Unaligned		Languages —
Str 14 (+2)	Dex 12 (+1)		Wis 10 (+0)
Con 12 (+1)	Int 1 (–5)		Cha 8 (–1)
Monster found in Monster Manual and Compendium
© 2009 Wizards of the Coast LLC, a subsidiary of Hasbro, Inc. All rights reserved. This monster statistics block has been generated using the D&D Adventure Tools.

 

Centipede Swarm (C)		Level 2 Brute
Medium natural beast		XP 125
Initiative +4        Senses Perception +1; darkvision Swarm Attack aura 1; each enemy that starts its turn within the aura takes 3 damage plus 2 extra damage per centipede swarm adjacent to the enemy. HP 44; Bloodied 22 AC 14; Fortitude 14; Reflex 15; Will 10 Resist half damage from melee and ranged attacks; Vulnerable 10 against close and area attacks Speed 6 , Climb 6 (spider climb)
m Swarm of Mandibles (standard; at-will) • Poison
+4 vs AC; 1d6 damage, and ongoing 5 poison damage (save ends); a creature already taking ongoing poison damage is also weakened (save ends). The centipede swarm's attack deals 1 extra damage for each centipede swarm adjacent to it
Survival Instinct (immediate reaction, when hit by an area or close attack; at-will)
The centipede swarm shifts 3 squares.
Alignment Unaligned		Languages —
Skills Stealth +9
Str 9 (+0)	Dex 17 (+4)		Wis 10 (+1)
Con 14 (+3)	Int 1 (–4)		Cha 6 (–1)
Monster found in Monster Manual 2 and Compendium
© 2009 Wizards of the Coast LLC, a subsidiary of Hasbro, Inc. All rights reserved. This monster statistics block has been generated using the D&D Adventure Tools.

The skeleton has some gear on him, but it's mostly useless. The shield is split in half (the word "Nimraith" written across it in Thorass). The leather armor is old and cracked and parts crumble into useless strips of leather when someone attempts to wear it. The rotting remains of a backpack are folded under the corpse containing a moldy mass of cloth scraps and a polished ivory tube worth 2sp. Inside the tube are two scraps of parchment. One is a partially completed map of Undermountain called Nimraith's Map, the other is a scroll with the Comrade's Succor ritual written on it (Dragon, 380), which is a godsend in a place like Undermountain. With it, a group can give up healing surges to give those surges to other players. And in a place as deadly as this, every one of those surges counts.

Undermountain Encounter 2, The Hall of Many Mirrors

The corridor ahead seems to reflect your lights back from many glimmering surfaces, on both walls. All is quiet. Something small is lying on the floor, part way down the corridor.

The thing on the floor is the burnt out stump of a torch. The only reason I can gather that anyone would put this into the room is to get players to wander in, hoping that the small thing is, in fact, a Hackmaster +11 that just happens to be lying on the floor. Today's players will see a fucking torch stump and wonder why whoever was using it didn't bring sun rods.

There are sixteen large, heavy oval glass mirrors in this corridor, eight on each wall. They all look basically the same, though a few are showing signs of wear from being in a dank dungeon for a very long time. Some have a faint aura of magic about them, old protection spells meant to keep the soggy atmosphere of the dungeon from damaging the silver mirror-backs.

Three of the mirrors hang in front of small storage caches. The contents of these caches changes with the seasons. Sometimes creatures leave a little something in one of them to save for later. Sometimes adventurers, believing their goods will be safe in such a cache, leave themselves something to help on the way out. Below, you'll find a chart. Roll to see what your players find in the caches.

Things You'll Find in Undermountain

01-07	A garlic-stuffed, deep-fried rat.	51-57	A jar of dead bees.
08-13	A gem worth 50gp	58-59	A suit of leather armor +1
14-20	A potion of Healing	60-69	Frighteningly well-drawn goblin pornography
21-25	2 leather-bound books. One level 1 ritual.	70-74	A potion of Cure Light Wounds
26-35	A +1 sling	75-83	A gnawed-on dragon-femur (40gp)
36-42	A pile of shiny rocks and a 10gp silver statue	84-88	AD&D Undermountain poster map.
43-45	Poorly drawn goblin pornography (1cp)	89-98	A religious amulet to a dead god
46-50	An amulet of defense +1	99-00	A +2 weapon of the player's choice

 

The westernmost mirror on the north wall is a Mirror of Opposition. In Second Edition, what this basically meant was "Steal your player's character and beat the snot out of her with it." The mirror creates a perfect likeness of the player's character with her stats, her abilities, her armor, her weapons. Then it tries to kill the original. This was terrifying mostly because a single player character was a lot more proficient at the killing of people than any monster in a dungeon. While that's still true in 4^th Edition (even more true, actually), the fact that stat blocks have changed so drastically over the past few editions, makes creating a duplicate of a player character difficult. Add the fact that Dungeon Masters have a hard enough time trying to remember everything in a stat block, let alone look it up in a character sheet that doesn't even belong to them, and you get a trickier situation.

Lucky for us, then, we have the Doppelganger. Now, so far Wizards hasn't really put out a lot of first-level dudes that don't suck. So I was forced to make a few. Below, you'll find stats for copies of each of the main character roles: there's a defender, a controller, a leader and a striker. When a player examines the Mirror of Opposition, a Doppelganger of the appropriate type will come out of the mirror and immediately attack him or her. Whenever another player character is within line-of-sight to the mirror, another creature steps out of the mirror and begins the next round with the initiative.

The mirror has 50 hit points (being a magical artifact, it's tougher than your normal mirror). If it is broken, the Doppelgangers are dazed (save ends) and take a -1 to rolls to hit and all of their defenses. Two more doppelgangers will appear the round after the mirror is broken, also dazed (save ends) but without the -1 to attacks and defenses.

 

Doppelganger Mirror-fighter		Level 1 Soldier
Medium natural humanoid		XP 100
Initiative +2        Senses Perception +0 HP 33; Bloodied 16 AC 20; Fortitude 17; Reflex 10; Will 13 Speed 6
M Bastard Sword (standard; at-will) • Weapon
+8 vs AC; 1d10 + 3
Shapeshifter Feint (minor; at-will)
+4 vs Reflex; the doppelganger gains combat advantage against the target until the end of the doppelganger's next turn.
Change Shape (minor; at-will) • Polymorph
A doppelganger can alter it's physical form to take on the appearance of any Medium humanoid, including a unique individual.
C Doppelganger's Hate (standard; at-will) • Polymorph
Close burst 1; targets all enemies in burst. The targets are marked until the end of the doppelganger's next turn. If a marked creature makes an attack that does not include Doppelganger Mirror-fighter, as an immediate interrupt, the doppelganger may slide that creature one square.
Alignment Unaligned		Languages —
Str 16 (+3)	Dex 10 (+0)		Wis 10 (+0)
Con 10 (+0)	Int 10 (+0)		Cha 10 (+0)
Doppelganger Mirrormage		Level 1 Artillery
Medium natural humanoid		XP 100
Initiative –1        Senses Perception +3 HP 22; Bloodied 11 AC 13; Fortitude 11; Reflex 13; Will 14 Speed 6
m Mace (standard; at-will) • Weapon
+6 vs AC; 1d8 + -1 damage
r Dark Blast (standard; at-will) • Implement, Necrotic
Ranged 10; +7 vs Reflex; 1d10 + 3 necrotic damage, or 2d6 + 4 necrotic damage against a target at full normal hit points
C Cursebite (standard; encounter) • Implement, Necrotic
Close burst 20; targets cursed enemies; +4 vs Fortitude; 2d6 + 4 necrotic damage
Curse (standard; at-will)
The Claw doppelganger darkmage curses the nearest noncursed enemy. The curse lasts until the end of the encounter. Once per round when the darkmage hits a cursed enemy, it can deal that enemy 1d6 extra damage.
Darkmage Fanatic (when the claw doppelganger darkmage drops to 0 hit points)
The Claw doppelganger darkmage makes a basic attack
Change Shape (minor; at-will) • Polymorph
A doppelganger can alter its physical form to take on the appearance of any Medium humanoid, including a unique individual (see Monster Manual, page 280)
Alignment Evil		Languages Common, Elven, Goblin
Skills Arcana +7, Intimidate +8
Str 8 (–1)	Dex 8 (–1)		Wis 7 (–2)
Con 10 (+0)	Int 14 (+2)		Cha 16 (+3)
Equipment Mace, Rod Implement

 

Doppelganger Mirrorpriest		Level 1 Lurker
Medium natural humanoid		XP 100
Initiative +7        Senses Perception +0 HP 22; Bloodied 11 AC 15; Fortitude 13; Reflex 14; Will 13 Speed 6
M Mace (standard; at-will) • Weapon
+6 vs AC; 1d10 + 3 damage
C Fleshknit (standard; encounter) • Healing
Close burst 1; targets allies within burst; targets gain 1d6+5 hit points, plus an additional 1d4 if bloodied.
C Skinsculpt (standard; at-will)
Close burst 1; targets one ally in burst; target gains 1d6 hit points.
Alignment Unaligned		Languages —
Str 10 (+0)	Dex 16 (+3)		Wis 10 (+0)
Con 10 (+0)	Int 10 (+0)		Cha 10 (+0)

 

Doppelganger Mirror-rogue		Level 1 Skirmisher
Medium natural humanoid		XP 100
Initiative +4        Senses Perception +0 HP 28; Bloodied 14 AC 16; Fortitude 12; Reflex 13; Will 14 Speed 6
m Short Sword (standard; at-will) • Weapon
+6 vs AC; 1d6 + 3 damage
M Shapeshifter Feint (minor; at-will)
+4 vs Reflex; the doppelganger gains combat advantage against the target until the end of the doppelganger's next turn
Combat Advantage
The doppelganger sneak deals an extra 1d6 damage against any target it has combat advantage against.
Change Shape (minor; at-will) • Polymorph
A doppelganger can alter its physical form to take on the appearance of any Medium humanoid, including a unique individual .
Alignment Unaligned		Languages Common
Skills Bluff +9, Insight +7, Stealth +7
Str 10 (+0)	Dex 15 (+2)		Wis 11 (+0)
Con 12 (+1)	Int 9 (–1)		Cha 14 (+2)
Equipment Short sword
© 2009 Wizards of the Coast LLC, a subsidiary of Hasbro, Inc. All rights reserved. This monster statistics block has been generated using the D&D Adventure Tools.