Kor, the Ograkshasa Monk

What does rebellion look like when dad is an ogre mage and mom is a rakshasa?

In Kor’s case, rebellion looks like obtaining magic that makes you look mostly human and studying to be a monk in a monastery run by the Dragon Emperor. Of course, many of Kor’s forms don’t look a lot like styles practiced by Imperial monks. There are limits to how straight you can be when the Black Dragon is an old family friend.

Yeah, Jonathan says this is the most-me character ever.

I used the beastblooded modifiers and the bestial fury ability from Book of Ages (page 77). When Kor (it’s kinda Rak backwards, natch) goes beasty-fury, the spell making him look human drops temporarily and you get a glimpse of the tigrish-ogre beneath. I didn’t realize I could have sung “ograkshasa ograkshasa ogra ogra ograksasa” until now.

I’m using the past tense because we were right there, deep in the Stone Thief (thanks in large part to the activities of Kor’s older sister Kyla), when Paul Hughes gifted me with the certificate that crafted Kor at HeroForge. I decided to keep Kor’s hands facing human-style, instead of trying to show him full-beast. And then my wonderful talented friend Brittany Broyles (@blondeofmystery) painted Kor. Now we know how to make sure campaigns don’t get played again: make a HeroForge mini of your character.

Still, hope remains. If not back inside the Stone Thief, some other game. Maybe I’ll get really old school and blow a character created for one campaign into another version of the Dragon Empire, like a leaf in the wind. A leaf with fangs!

(a much better photo from Brittany, with the other two minis she painted for me accompanying Kor)

The Wave & Wave

Yeah, it’s two great books with almost the same title.

The Wave: In Pursuit of the Rogues, Freaks, and Giants of the Ocean, by Susan Casey, is from the genre that mixes compelling science with the author’s personal experiences. The science concerns the physics of giant waves and interviews with the people who study them, along with an investigation of previous understandings of giant waves, and how we are still underestimating the frequency and effect of rogue waves of 80’ or more. The science chapters are fascinating.

The personal-experience chapters eventually focus on time spent with champion surfer, inventor, and adventurer Laird Hamilton. The adventures on the waves are the closest I’ve come to reading a true-life Doc Savage story. If Hamilton isn’t bigger than life, we’re given an excellent picture of just how big life can be. For a more detailed review, this one is good.

Wave, by Sonali Deraniyagala, has an entirely different purpose and emotional register. It's not how big life can be, it's how big a disaster can be and how that hits one person. The cover design matches the book’s impact.

The first chapters are a mind-wrenching account of being caught in the 2004 tsunami in Indonesia. It’s unlike anything else I’ve read. The rest of the book follows a tortured path through survivor’s guilt and the mechanisms of a return to life. The copy I read didn't have a subtitle, but now it's subtitled "A Memoir of Life after the Tsunami."

I found myself reading a number of disaster stories during the pandemic. A disaster this huge, that hit a world away from almost everyone I know, is one of those things I try to remember as part of maintaining perspective. I associated Wave with another book I loved, Annie Dillard's For the Time Being. Dillard's book I can reread, Deraniyagala's, probably not.

Photo Wrapping!

This Christmas I came up with a method of wrapping presents that made me happy. It couldn't possibly be something entirely new, but I've never seen anyone do it. I don't feel like searching the internet for the people who did it first; I'm just gonna write it up!

I was wrapping a final round of presents and I didn't have enough paper or labels. I realized I had a color printer. And lots of great photos of the people we were giving gifts to. So all I had to do was print pictures of a gift's recipient on several sheets of 8.5" by 11" paper, fold and tape the sheets together to cover the key portions of the present, ensure that the face got central position on the packaging, and voila: no need for a label! For extra effect, use pictures the gift's recipient has never seen.

Depending on the size of the gift, you may have to use other bits of contact paper to hide portions of the gift. I feel like this style of 'wrapping' is more about providing the moment of opening-discovery, not trying to wrap the present tightly as if it was being probed by a 7 year-old.

This is a photo of the top of a present to my wife Lisa, two prints used on the top, taped together, featuring the moment we saw that the angel wing mural in northern Oahu had been rendered in the colors of the dress Lisa was wearing!

Honorable Combat in 13th Age

Here's part of the first draft of a section of the upcoming Icon Followers book that details a rules variant I've been using in my campaigns. It's an important part of a book of NPCs who tend to be associated with the same icons as the PCs. I'm curious to hear from people who try it.

HONORABLE COMBAT

13th Age combat mechanics handle deadly fights against monsters, but we’ve largely ignored a style of combat that could create a variety of interesting stories. What happens when a group of paladins devoted to the Great Gold Wyrm disagree with the player characters about who should take responsibility for a captured evil sorcerer who has information that the PCs need? What happens when a rival adventuring party claims first dibs on a soon-to-surface living dungeon full of phat loot, saying that they’re better prepared to deal with this particular dungeon, and that the PCs should hang around as backups? What happens when a circle of druids insists that the adventurers leave their section of the Blood Wood when it’s not at all in the PCs’ interests but also not a matter of life and death, especially given that the PCs know that these are the druids who will soon be defending the woods against monsters from the Iron Sea?

Instead of fights to the death, all the way down to 0 hit points, I’ve been playing this type of fight between semi-respectful enemies as fights to the fall, down to 33% of each combatant’s normal hit points.

You fall at one-third hp: When both sides have agreed to honorable combat, combatants drop out of the fight at 33% or less of their standard hp. They can heal themselves, and heal fallen allies (or even fallen enemies . . .) but they take no further action in the fight. Play them as crawling or limping to get out of the center of the battle, or lying still and applying pressure to their wounds. Anyone targeting them with further attacks has broken the rules of honorable combat, and forfeits.

Deaths still occur. Mighty blows—especially against determined resistance from rivals who are about to fall but don’t want to give in—can score crits and take out foes. But killing the enemy isn’t the point. You can hammer this home when rivals who have been knocked out of the fight use healing potions or healing magic to help restore fallen PCs.

Combat pacing: Use the escalation die as normal, but remember that fights generally start slightly favoring the PC’s enemies. There’s a risk of an early loss if things go very badly for the PCs, but if any of them can hang on, the escalation die can pip them ahead in the end.

Not good, still honorable: In my campaigns, I’ve used PCs’ icon relationships as a guide to when honorable combat might be possible despite what good-oriented characters might expect of their evil or ambiguous rivals. Negative icon relationships generate fights to the death. But positive and conflicted icon relationships with ambiguous and evil icons ca lead to honorable battles.

For an example from my campaign, a character who had a conflicted relationship with the Three—thanks to a huge favor he had once-upon-a-time done for the Black—accepted a proposal for honorable combat from a flight of black dragons attempting to recover three half-dragon/half-lizardfolk eggs that the PCs had salvaged from a destroyed village. The PCs were attempting to return them to their lizardfolk allies, the dragons thought they took precedence over lizardfolk. Without that icon relationship, and the history it represented, the dragons would surely have attempted an ambush and thievery. As it was, the dragons badly lost the fight to the fall, and afterwards agreed to provide overflight security for the lizardfolk until the younglings hatched and were old enough to decide for themselves if they wanted to come join the Black dragon. It ended up feeling like a fail forward for the NPC iconic followers of the Three, while feeling like a kick-ass win and a good-deal-in-the-circumstances for the PCs.

Here's the aftermath of the honorable battle with the dragons, with lizardfolk rooting for the PCs on the sidelines, skeletons summoned by the necromancer occupying the middle ground, and small upside-down black dragon where the PCs critted it to death despite the 33% guidelines..

13th Age Monster Design Workshop at GenCon Online

 

art by Rich Longmore

It’s that time of year when we get together to design a 13^th Age monster!

Saturday, September 12, at 11 a.m. PT, 2:00 p.m ET, join 13^th Age writers Liz Argall, J-M DeFoggi, Wade Rockett, and me as we juggle your brainstorms to create a memorable 13^th Age monster.

Register now . . .  for How To Design a Monster in 13th Age. 

Previously in Our Workshop

The last time we ran the workshop in person, the crowd whooped through a giddy gauntlet of drinking puns towards the monster we ended up calling a booze ooze! The full write-up is slated to appear in the Dwarf King chapter of the Icon Followers book I’ve been working on. Here’s a piece of the text along with the lower-level version of the booze ooze wrecker. There’s also a spoiler version that's loaded with puns and a couple varieties of mooks.

Origin Stories

Ale flows freely in dwarven taverns, drinking holes, and residential areas!  Most of it flows where it should, down dwarven gullets or weaker non-dwarven throats. But accidents happen. Despite the dwarves’ absurd fondness for ale, a certain portion of the booze gets disposed of, sometimes precipitously. Bad barrels are fine for human drinkers, but dwarves have standards. If there’s something wrong with a cask, it’s going down whatever passes for a sewer.

Sometimes, what’s wrong is a side-effect of magic spells that shouldn’t have been fired off near the brewery. Other times no one knows what went wrong, underworld hazards, so much harder to cope with than the problems faced by the weakling human brewers on the surface.

So hi ho, oh no, to the underworld we go, where bits and batches of ale-that’s-off is disposed of sloppily and with no thought for what it’s been poured upon. Down grates and dwarven pour-holes and into pits where things live and drink. Things like oozes!

Affectionate Booze Ooze

It’s not fighting you. It’s celebrating.

Large 5^th level wrecker [ooze]

Initiative: +7

Double-fisted approval +10 vs. AC (2 attacks)—16 damage

Lurch’n’hug’em +10 vs. PD—40 damage, and target is stuck until the end of its next turn

Special targeting: To use this attack, the booze ooze must be able to move. Pick a random nearby enemy the booze ooze appears able to reach with a move. The booze ooze uses its move action to engage that target, then makes this attack.

Flows where it likes: The ooze is immune to opportunity attacks.

Ooze: The ooze is immune to effects. When an attack or other ability applies a condition to an ooze (dazed, hampered, weakened, ongoing damage, etc.), that condition doesn’t affect it.

Resist acid 16+, resist poison 16+: Acid or poison attacks that roll less than a natural 16 deal half damage to the booze ooze.

Whoozy: A non-ooze that starts its turn engaged with the affectionate booze ooze takes 5 ongoing poison damage.

AC   20

PD    19                 HP 120

MD  14

Spearpoint! A 13th Age mini-arc for deviant dwarves

These are the PCs of the new 13th Age mini-arc we started playing last week. 

While writing Icon Followers, I made up an organization ambiguously devoted to the Dwarf King called Spearpoint. As I wrote about azers, derro, and Gold King mutants who are part of a Suicide-Squad style group of potentially salvageable—and definitely DENIABLE—Dwarf King covert assets, I realized it could make a fun story for a group of player characters, not just NPCs. 

People were expecting me to start running a new game none of us had played before. But I liked it less the more I understood it, so instead I switched tracks and began Spearpoint as a not-forever 13th Age arc, starting at 3rd level. 

 From left to right, the PCs are . . . . 

    . . . Tuli, a lava dwarf chaos mage who is new to the Dwarf Kingdom. 

    . . . Thorinn (jokingly referred to as Thorinn Normalshield), a highly disturbed/disturbing derro madness savant ("I am not an occultist; I am the Madness Savant! The onllllly Madness Savant!") who wears the shield on his back because dwarves are supposed to carry shields, and more convincingly wields a huge axe. 

    . . . the world's only half-dwarf, Jak Manblood, determined to prove he's more dwarf than any of these dwarves that fit properly into their dwarven armor. 

    . . . and a truly disturbing "hopping monk," i.e., an undeadish former (?) follower of the Gold King named something like Djkuud, pronounced to sound something like the French j’accuse. 

The players agreed that they wanted to push the icons to fit this dwarf-centric story, and after some discussion, the Madness Savant, aka Jonathan Tweet, came back with this preliminary assessment of the icons for the campaign. It’s going to be fun, and it’s a great example of tweaking your lens when you want to focus on a very specific type of campaign.

Also, there are fourteen. 

    the King (compares with the Dwarf King): Rules "the Kingdom", a subterranean land vaster than the Dragon Empire; most of it is currently in enemy hands. 

    Lady Scratch (entirely herself): Mysterious enemy of the Kingdom. 

    the Silver Queen (the Elf Queen): Surface dwellers interact with the Silver Queen through the so-called "Elf Queen." 

    Prince of Shadows (same): Archenemy of the Kingdom, an interloper who has stolen the treasures that had been held safe for Ages, a worthy foe. 

    the Green (the Three): Wingless and tortured, the Green worms through the Underworld spreading monsters. 

    Grave Lord (Lich King): Vast underground chambers contain undead waiting for some future uprising. 

    the Sun Emperor (Dragon Emperor): Keeps surface dwellers from bothering the Kingdom 

    the Sun Mage (Archmage): A dwarf who serves the Sun Emperor instead of the King, it's fine. 

    the Imperial Priestess (Priestess): Humans eat this shit up, I'm telling you. 

    Orc Lord (same): He sends troops and monsters through the Kingdom, searching for a route to Axis; everyone figures the Silver Queen is manipulating him into it. 

    Crusader (same): Glad that the Sun Emperor has this guy so the King doesn't have to get in there. 

    Archmaster Slime (High Druid): A drow ally of the High Druid, leader of the "slime mongers" (subterranean-style druids). 

    Diabolist (same): You know, don't spread this around too much, but she has proven to be the sort of archvillain that you can work with. 

    Great Gold Wyrm (same): The Great Gold Wyrm is the most admirable creature ever constructed and brought to life by dwarven artificers.

Half-Right: a new social game

A few weeks ago, in the brave land of maskless tabletop gaming, Fire Opal ran an eight-person playtest of a fun new card game. Everyone playing was meeting between one and six people for the first time, so as we ate pre-game tacos in my game-garage, introductions sparked in various pieces of the table while esoteric conversations built in others. I noticed that one particular conversation wasn't making sense to anyone else. I can't remember whether the participants were surprised that they were being obscure, or not, but I know I suddenly had the idea for a game we could play as we ate. 

Half-Right: Each player tries to come up with a question that they think half the people in the room will know the answer to, while the other half will have no idea or get it wrong. 

Normally you're counting yourself as one of the people who knows the answer, certainly that's how the two successful halvings played out in our game. I suppose that if you were hardcore you might be able to come up with a question that you don't know the answer to but that you suspect that half the room will know! 

Yes, it works better with an even number of players. I guess with an odd number you score a small win if half-rounded-down players know the answer and a big win with half-rounded-up. Better suggestions?

As the number of players grows, I suspect that getting close to half is worth some glory. In some groups, I imagine it's possible that no one will succeed, meaning getting close will be doing well. Obviously the game changes drastically the more people understand each other. It's not simple.

Our first game of Half-Right featured two successful interpretations of the group, a few near-misses, and a couple hilarious whiffs which no one but the questioner knew the answer to.

Follow-up: Now that I've typed it up, I'm aware that others must have invented/played this game before. It feels like something that could have been part of my social inheritance, but wasn't. Let me know if you have played the game before or if you find peoples who did. 

Also let me know which name you prefer, Half-Right or Half of Us. I've gone back and forth.