Plot Blocks

This was written two years ago, and it wasn’t the thing I was hoping it would be.

So I wrote this. It’s what I was hoping it would be. Having read it over, it feels a lot like what skill challenges were really trying to be.

SIFT: A Free One-Page Role-Playing Game

So, I’ve been pounding my face against the keyboard for the last little bit trying to put together a role-playing game based on Avatar the Last Airbender. There’s a 4E hack for the series, but I don’t think that the D&D treatment really hits on what Avatar was about, so I’ve been trying to mash together a version that hails to some of the better narrative-centric role-playing games of the past little bit.

But, I’ve got writers block, mostly in the sense of “I don’t want to work on this project right now.” And partially because my work doesn’t exist until I show it to you.That’s part of why I started a blog in the first place, was to get writing for an audience instead of just putzing around on a project, not finishing it, and not caring because fuck it, no one was ever going to read it anyway.

So rather than languish in my feelings of “Writing conflict resolution chapters suuuuuuuuuuuuucks,” I decided to write a new game in the meantime. It’s just one of my little one-page role-playing games, and it’s here for your enjoyment. It’s a military-mystery game based on an alternate reality game.

The ARG itself was sort of poorly put together and didn’t make a ton of logical sense, but the people who were invested in it were invested to the hilt. I have some pretty hefty criticisms of it, and those criticisms were eventually responsible for my leaving the game, but this isn’t really the place to air those. In the role-playing game, a United States military operation has recruited civilian help to crack codes and gather intelligence on an important mission. This more-or-less mirrors the ARG (where the role the civilians played was much less clear). There is something crazy going on somewhere in the world, and it’s up to one agent, one strike team and a group of asshats from the internet to stop it.

If you’d like to take a look at the game, you can find it here.

If you’d like to take a look at the source material, you can find most of it here.

If you’d like to take a look at the source material for the source material, you can find it here.

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.

Undermountain Encounter 1

 
Two broad steps lead down into a widening room crowded with a forest of stone pillars. Archways can be seen in its northern, western, and southern walls. Something metallic glints on the floor, among the many stone pillars.

This is the first room of any note in the original Undermountain campaign. There is a single piece of gold lying on the floor, and a rat that scurries away to the north. That's not an encounter, ladies and gentlemen, that's barely worth note. So we're going to beef this up a little bit. I'm saying, corpse of a dude lying on the floor, and a Dire Rat, a couple of Giant Rats and a Rat Swarm are feasting down. There are skeletons, as well, picked clean by the rats already. They're not the get-up-and-stab-a-dude sort of skeletons, they're just some dead people.

 

Dire Rat (D)		Level 1 Brute
Medium natural beast		XP 100
Initiative +2        Senses Perception +5; low-light vision HP 38; Bloodied 19 AC 15; Fortitude 15; Reflex 13; Will 11 Immune filth fever Speed 6 , Climb 3
m Bite (standard; at-will)
+4 vs AC; 1d6 + 2 damage, and the target contracts filth fever
Alignment Unaligned		Languages —
Skills Stealth +7
Str 14 (+2)	Dex 15 (+2)		Wis 10 (+0)
Con 18 (+4)	Int 3 (–4)		Cha 6 (–2)

 

Giant Rat (G)		Level 1 Minion
Small natural beast		XP 25
Initiative +3        Senses Perception +5; low-light vision HP 1; a missed attack never damages a minion. AC 15; Fortitude 13; Reflex 15; Will 12 Speed 6 , Climb 3
m Bite (standard; at-will)
+6 vs AC; 3 damage
Alignment Unaligned		Languages —
Str 12 (+1)	Dex 17 (+3)		Wis 10 (+0)
Con 12 (+1)	Int 2 (–4)		Cha 6 (–2)

 

Rat Swarm (S)		Level 2 Skirmisher
Medium natural beast		XP 125
Initiative +6        Senses Perception +6; low-light vision Swarm Attack aura 1; the rat swarm makes a basic attack as a free action against each enemy that begins its turn in the aura. HP 36; Bloodied 18 AC 15; Fortitude 12; Reflex 14; Will 11 Resist half damage from melee and ranged attacks; Vulnerable 5 damage from close and area attacks Speed 4 , Climb 2
m Swarm of Teeth (standard; at-will)
+6 vs AC; 1d6 + 3 damage, and ongoing 3 damage (save ends)
Alignment Unaligned		Languages —
Str 12 (+2)	Dex 17 (+4)		Wis 10 (+1)
Con 12 (+2)	Int 2 (–3)		Cha 9 (+0)

 

Now, this encounter is a lot like this past Wednesday's D&DE: U encounter. There were some rats, and people killed them, and it was good. If you've got a well-balanced party, it isn't a terrifying encounter by any stretch of the imagination, but if your party lacks some form of close blast or burst attacks, the swarm gets very crazy. I took out a player, and another almost bit it. This encounter doesn't have a clay golem thingy making psychic attacks all over the damned place, but that's probably for the best. Being dazed while there's an aura attack running around is no fun at all.

I wish I had some way to rebuild the maps from the Undermountain Map pack here. I can't wait for that functionality on the Adventure Tools package. Instead, I was forced to use Campaign Cartographer 3, which is a lovely program in nearly every way, except that it's damned near impossible to figure out just by winging it. You'd think there would be an easier way to make a fucking map, guys...

In this encounter, the location of the pillars doesn't matter much to the rats. Set them up however you like.The rats aren't really going to use the pillars to their advantage, anyway. They're just going to attack the first thing that looks like something worth eating. Which of course means the creatures that are not covered in plate armor. They'll try and get at the squishy controllers and maybe the strikers first, but they'll change their targets as the marks start to fly.

The half-eaten guy has 10 gold pieces on him, some useless armor (it didn't do him much good, anyway…), a long-sword, and a torch. The skeletons each have three gold pieces on them, and there are four skeletons.