Rune Magic

Rune magic is kind of my baby. I hope you like it.

Schedule!
PART THE FIRST - Making Runes
PART THE SECOND - Rune Mechanics
PART THE THIRD - Rune Dungeon

Some initial points:
- It's powerful and flexible. If they're clever and into it you might have given them an extra levelsworth of power.
- This is all player skill not character skill, and generally an extra thing any class can use.
- Expect your PCs to start tattooing runes on their foreheads and tongues and carving stuff into armour and thinking up all sorts of badass abuses and exploits like guns and ironman suits.
- Be prepared to make up rulings and mechanics on the fly.
- Don't give them all of this all at once because they'll get overwhelmed. Hell, you might be overwhelmed too after seeing all this. By my genius.
-I introduced it via a dungeon as a kind of tutorial. Half the fun is seeing them try to work out how runes work, which runes mean what, and how to exploit them for fun and profit.




Now, basic rune crafting.
There are two types of rune, which I call Master and Minor.
Combine a Master Rune and one or more Minor Runes to create a Glyph.

Minor runes define the element being cast.
Master runes define how it's cast.

 So this is a Make Light glyph:

And this is a Beam Heat glyph:

So that's your basic two-symbol glyph. Orientation doesn't matter so long as they're connected by a line.

Before I go into the next bit, I tend to think of the elements as either Materials and Effects. 

Materials are anything that's affected by gravity. 
So Earth would be a material and Heat would be an effect.
This is important because a Beam Earth glyph will shoot out a ball of soil, while a Beam Heat glyph will create a sustained beam of heat for as long as you power the rune.

 These are the five Master Runes.

• Make creates a fist sized ball a handspan in front of the glyph.
• Take draws stuff into it, but releases it all at once when you break concentration.
• Beam shoots a beam of Effect or a high speed blob of Material.
• Repel throws material away from the glyph or pushes effects out in a cone shape.
• Change transforms the surface that the rune is drawn on into a material, or applies the effect to it.

And these are the five Minor runes.

• Light is bright like a light bulb.
• Heat is warm but quickly heats up like a stove top.
• Mass is for crazy physics effects and has been used to create zones of heaviness and beams of force and stuff like that.
• Cold starts off chilly but quickly cools like a freezer.
• Earth is regular soil.

"Dude you got me all worked up and I find out you've only got like 25 possible rune combinations of limited utility? Shit sucks."
Woah woah chill out imaginary uncouth man because there's more.


Advanced Rune Crafting  (ARC102)

In this unit you will learn how to:

• Use rune magic to impress the ladies.
• Compare and contrast Kennard F Wombus' Lesser Rune Theory and the Integrated United Theorum of Universal Lesser Special Runativity using exactly one introduction, one conclusion, and three body paragraphs.
• Tell the difference between a rune and a potato.
• Shoot laser beams out of your face.

So the other thing you can do is combine the minor runes to make different elements.
This is done with a triangle shape, but there's a major distinction, as shown below.

In the second example, drawing a master rune and two minor runes in a triangle shape simply casts them both at once. This means you get the benefits of two runes while you're only powering one which is good for saving energy or whatever.
Essentially Heat and Light are both cast separately into the same place, the result being a ball of light and warmth.

But if you add an extra line between the runes like in the third example, they combine to make something different. In this case Heat and Light combine to create a ball of Fire floating in front of the glyph.

You only ever have one Master rune, trying to cast a rune with two Master runes means it just doesn't work.


Rune combos follow in a visually pleasing format.
Also a word of warning some of them don't reeeaaally make sense, but in the real world you can combine two volatile deadly chemicals and get table salt so whatever.
And they're intentionally fucky so that they make you groove in your DM shoes. 
What the fuck happens if they draw a Take Water rune on the seabed? 
How does a Size Beam work? 
Is it really a good idea to tattoo Make Water in your mouth for desert journeys?




You decide!

Cold combos!

Earth combos!

Mass combos!

Heat combos!

Light combos!

Expert Rune Crafting

One last thing!
You always have a single master rune, but you can add as many minor runes as you like!

etc etc etc

They've got to have the master rune in the middle of a geometric shape, but other than that go for your life.
Remember that your players have to actually physically draw the glyph!

Because they're big, you can have multiple combinations of elements depending on where you place the in-between sticks.
So say you want to make an explosion, but you're in space! Do explosions happen in space where there's no air? You don't know for sure, but you do know this is Frank's favourite topic of conversation and he brings it up whenever he's drunk.
Your eye is drawn to the half-empty bottle of beer next his hand. It's his sixth, and he got here late.
Frank's eyes are greedily lighting up, preparing his amateur physicist notes in his head.

You better do something.
You better 
RUNE UP.

You quickly draw a glyph, taking care not to combine Mass and Cold because it might make the explosion less rad. You PUNCH THE RUNES.

An explosion explodes the thing you're pointing at! Straight balla!

The DM makes boomy whooshy noises and makes explodey motions with his hands! 

Fuck yea the day, and Frank's suspension of disbelief, is saved!

Awesome work! Just don't mention the ending of BSG because he'll be off all night.

Alright! That's all for rune crafting folks.
See you next time as I tell you how they actually work mechanically!
OooOOOooOOOoooOOOOO

Part 2

Easy Familiars That Are Actually Good

So familiars.
Hard to make them good without doing retarded downsides and making them a gorramn liability.

•  A magic user can get a familiar for free if they want.
• You can make it run around and stuff and I guess it can tell you things that it sees. 
• It can hold an extra spell for you and cast it like normal.
• It can't die but you can interrupt its spell casting. 
• When you die, it erupts as a Summon spell with HD equal to your level.

 

bamf

Last night one of my players died.
Her cute chicken who only ever used its held spell to cast Unseen Servant so it could pretend to fly around erupted into a 3 HD lightning demon which proceeded to drag one of the other party members back into hell.

Of course it could potentially go well and the surviving players would have a new pet demon for a while, but honestly this is LotFP so it's going to go amusingly bad nine times out of ten.

Also don't tell your players the downside at first. Just let the wizards think they get a free spell slot and be done with it until they find out the reality is far worse.

An Interesting Conundrum

So I accidentally gave my players at-will breath weapons.
Oops.

I'll cover the rune system I made in some later post, but suffice to say that anybody can draw and activate these runes, but you get AC and move speed penalties while they're active.

In this case my players created what they termed a "super laser rune" which shoots out a deadly fan of fire and lightning.
Upon seeing its success in wiping out a wave of ghouls in the countryside, the fighter immediately carved the rune onto his breastplate.

I treated it as a breath weapon when he first used it, 2d6 damage and save vs. breath for half.
But now I'm in a tricky position where every single person in the party can draw and use this thing within a couple of rounds, making a mockery of a lot of fights.

And the worst part is that it's working entirely as intended.

How powerful is too powerful for my guys? Should I feel bad that they can barbeque a room full of mooks with their chest lasers? What about when they work out how to create a laser gun?

But really I'm not too worried. I'm stoked that they're really interested in exploiting a system I designed to be heavily exploitable, and a 2d6 breath weapon isn't particularly game breaking.

The fact that there's already a built in AC penalty thing gives an intrinsic penalty to their use, and I'm happy with that.

The impact on the world will be very interesting to see. It's a low magic setting and of course the populace is terrified of magic, but runes bring magic to the common man.
If they keep using runes in plain sight like they've been doing, the secret will be out. My low magic setting will start to transition to a high magic setting, and the impact of that could be great fun in a first-empire-to-get-gunpowder kind of way. Especially now that they've got them carved onto breastplates and stuff for anyone to see.

They've unleashed a lot of apocalypses in their time, but a technological revolution? This could get good!

So I Ran Death Love Doom

So I ran Death Love Doom.

Some choice quotes from my players:

• "I'd like to buy 5 rumours please!"
• "Uh guys I think we found where the horse's head went."
• "Oh there's a picture of her? Ew gross."
• "Sure whatever I'll go in first fuck it."
• "Am I the only one who's going to stab this fucking baby!?!"
• "Oh great something's moving in there. I wonder what's wrong with its vagina this time."
• "Dude fuck you I've gone into all the rooms first it's your turn."
• "What the fuck man. Did you pay actual money for this? Who the fuck wrote this."
• "I told you we should have fucking left as soon as we saw that shit with the baby."
• "Don't you dare fucking touch that fucking necklace."

All in all, a good time!

I've always thought that James Raggi's "Way too fucking dark man your players will flip shit gonna slap an 18+ on here" stuff is way more playable and far less your-players-will-never-play-in-your-game-again than he gives himself credit for.

But then this one's a bit different.
I first read this on the train and was going "oh shit ok, turning my back to the window now".
To put this in context I once watched the naked-chicks-and-copious-blood first episode of Elfen Lied on a train and didn't bother.
It's chock full of Really Awful Stuff of the body horror variety, and I'd be doing it a disservice to summarise it all here.

But my guys pretty much won this shit.

They overheard thieves going over their plans to rob the Bloodworth Estate, tipped the bartender a bunch for rumours.
They twigged onto what was going on as soon as the chandelier girl did her spiel, and decided to be worried about the guy, his mistress, and the granny.
From then on, it was kill first, kill again endeavour.

Remember kids, run away from Granny when she's got a demon in her!

 As luck would have it though, the first "creature" they fought was the undead-miscarried-baby-dragging-its-mother-via-its-umbilical-cord.
It was a nice introduction to the rest of this place. They were suitably freaked out.
Plus they were really remarkably lucky. The room with the tongue and cock-grub should have gone so much worse, but they passed their paltry paralyze saves without a scratch.

Rooms were explored, players were creeped out further, peals of nervous laughter were laughed when they found a statue of McIver.

A couple of giant-bug-possessed people were quickly dispatched with only a "that was way too easy" to their names...

And then Grandma Penelope shuffled up the steps.
She'd had a lot of leadup in the form of snip-snipping sounds, occasional cackles, and heavy footsteps. And now she was here.
They freaked a little when I asked them to pick a number between 1 and 8 to be their "lucky" number where Granny got to make some Adjustments.
It's probably the first time I've heard someone say "7? 7 damage? Oh thank god".

But menacing as she was, though, it turns out that when people really want to use the Big Purple d30 Rule they really use the Big Purple d30 Rule.
Big Bad Granny Penny went down like a sack of shit in the face of four seperate d30 damage rolls.
Poor old granny.

So hostiles despatched and top floor reached, they decided to grab whatever loot they could find and get the hell out of dodge. Clever fellows that they are, my players even grabbed the box of ominous necklace rather than let it fall into the hands of any robbers who would come after.

And so that was that!

Of course, the best part about running a LotFP adventure is the long term impact on your campaign world and players.
Now they've got an evil, cursed, incredibly valuable necklace that actively wants to be found.

I also had the psychic body-controlling insect things go ghostly and disappear through the floorboards when their tortured hosts were killed.

Will they be back for those who foiled the amulet's plans? You bet!

Being a Player

Hot damn, I was able to actually play DnD for the first time in forever these last couple of weeks.
And it's really fucking different.

First off, since I'm usually the DM, I had insights into the whole dungeon mastering shebang that nobody else really had.
Second off, the DM I was playing under kept looking at me to make sure he was doing good.
Third off, my game is the only game he's played in so he came pre-indoctrinated into the OSR cult. Plus I gave him the LotFP referee book and thus am I able to play in the sort of game I like to run.The perfect ploy.

It's been a pretty great couple of weeks all round, compounded by the fact that I overheard one of my players selling some random guy on my game at a party.

But anyway, after months and years of holding all the cards, it's super weird to be a player. But also super fun!


A play by play -

First session I lose 3 characters in +James Raggi's Tower of the Stargazer, which I had purposefully avoided reading, before surviving and hightailing with much loot with a fourth. I died a lot because I know Raggi's stuff pretty well at this point and knew that Fun-With-An-Ominous-Capital-F would ensue if I messed with all of the things.

Deaths included:

• Trapped inside one of five magic mirrors, mimed bringing the mirror that previously made an evil mirror-clone come out of it and place it in front of my own, hoping to step out into the real world. Instead, cause infinite clones come out of infinite mirrors and shattered all of them... and myself.
• Licked salt from the magic circle which kept an insane wizard from escaping.
• Did all the steps to utilise a super space telescope and got beamed across space and eaten by the doopy dancing slime-natives of the planet I arrived on. I don't know what I was expecting to happen, but it wasn't this!

So anyway, kind of a character funnel in it's own way. I had a blast!
The guy who escaped with treasure was a throwaway halfling with middling stats known as Wuggles Bungo.

Next session it's just me and another guy who show up. We're in Generic Not Even Named Fantasy Medieval Township and so Wuggles Bungo, halfling party master, decides to spend the shit out of his loot and make a name for himself with his arms crossed in a douchey manner the entire time.
His motto: "The party don't start til I walk in"
Something I learnt - dicking around in town spending all your money and being a top bloke is actually a lot of fun. No longer will I be worried about people's enjoyment when my players are on one of their frequent shopping trips!

So shopping trip over, plate armour on and my two new intensely loyal men-at-arms in tow, we decide to look for some adventure! Conveniently placed guards tell us there's a place called Goblin Gully just across the way.

I've seen this one page dungeon before, but I don't let on due to my newly discovered drive to be a filthy metagamer.
Things I could remember included a tree with goblins in it, a bridge, a ceiling with a hole for goblins to chill in, and an evil slime in the depths.

Half the dungeon and several goblin corpses later I send my injured henchmen home with a hefty cash bonus since I am a good guy hobbit and I know a funeral isn't much of a party.
We cross a fairly rickety bridge, meet a goblin, and I bluff hard by saying I'm an albino goblin and a friend. We murder him. His friend calls out to him from above, we wave his arm out into his vision like Woody with Buzz's arm in Toy Story. I climb the rope, the goblin boss sees through my "amazing" disguise, and after running deeper into the dungeon we end up trapped in the lowest level of the dungeon ever-so-close to a giant slime.

"Shit, well, I've got ten days of rations, I'm sure our henchmen will be back to find us when we don't return in a few days."
"Why would they come back?"
"Uh we worked out some protocols with them in the bar before we left, this is Omega Protocol B5 - if we are missing come find us or we won't be able to pay your wages."
"... fine"

Credit where it really is due, newbie DM did a bang up job of letting us play as my henchmen in their thrilling rescue mission. They distracted the goblins, while our "real" characters used barely plausible thief kit instruments to knock the bar off the door and barge it down.
Of course, we broke the door off the hinges, leading to a dead sprint out of Goblin Gully with an enormous, potentially town-destroying slime on our tail.

All in all, it went pretty well!

Char Gen is Super Boring

Ramble time!
One Choice. That's all my players get at char gen.

Admittedly for most of them this is the first tabletop rpg they've ever played, so that's all they need.
But it's also all I'd want if I was rolling a new character.

Choices at character generation are really fucking boring in general, and completely overwhelming to the newcomer.
They've heard things about this game, filtered down through pop culture and geek references. You roll funny shaped dice! You pretend to be an elf! People wear funny hats when they play it! You play as a dungeon or possibly as a dragon!

Whatever the actual system is, they come to the session and their thought process goes something like "oh god look at all these people I hope they like me" and then probably "I sure hope I'm not bad at this game I don't want to screw up and have them laugh at me".
And then you give them a sheet covered in arcane symbols and notations and boxes and terminology and they go "oh shit this is really complicated I'm gonna fail".

This is where it splits.

You could just say "Look at these classes, pick one that sounds rad. Then I'll get you to roll some dice so we can write down some numbers on your sheet and we'll get going!"
And then if they ask "but how do I know what I can do?" you tell them "Pretty much anything you can do in real life!" and then you're off and running and the newbie is experiencing DnD and having fun and insulting the dice and all that jazz!

Or you could say "Look at these classes, pick one that sounds rad. Then look at these races, pick one that sounds rad, but be careful because some classes are better on certain races. Then take these six numbers and put them in places that complement the kind of guy you want to play as. Then look at this feat list and pick one of fifty options. Then decide which of these skills you want to be good at, although you're already good at some of them because of those six numbers you assigned earlier so you might want to be good at those ones."
And then if they ask "but how do I know what I can do?" you give them yet another mouthful of terminology.
And they're really scared because look at all these numbers. And everyone knows that if something has lots of numbers you can be bad at it.

Plus if you spend a lot of time on the character sheet it makes it seem like the sheet itself is important. Which a fairly important distinction.
4e was pretty balls to run because people used their sheets for everything from skills to attack powers, and so if they were posed with a challenge they'd all look down at their sheets to see what the best way of overcoming the challenge with one of the numbers they had.
My current OSR mashup-thing game is really fun to run because the sheets are only really used to record the stuff they've picked up over time. If they're posed with a challenge they think about it and ask me for descriptions and stuff. This challenges my own improvising skills and creates situations and locations that I never anticipated. Then when they've decided on the plan of action, that's when the sheet comes into play.

And stats? Give me random stats over point buy any day. Point buy is only useful if you've got a balance fetish, and a balance fetish leads to a million rules, each more boring than the last.

Case in point - the spell Command.

Here's the LotFP version:

When a Cleric casts this spell, he may give the
subject a single word command, which it obeys
to the best of its ability. The single word must
make sense as a single command, such as
approach, drop, fall, flee, halt, surrender, sleep,
etc. Although a target could be instructed to die,
this will only make the target take on a coma
tose state for a single round. Note that the
caster must be able to speak the language of the
target. Any intended target who has more than
5 levels or hit dice or an Intelligence of over 12
is entitled to a saving throw. This spell is
ineffective against undead

Here's the Pathfinder version:

You give the subject a single command, which it obeys to the best of its ability at its earliest opportunity. You may select from the following options.

Approach: On its turn, the subject moves toward you as quickly and directly as possible for 1 round. The creature may do nothing but move during its turn, and it provokes attacks of opportunity for this movement as normal.

Drop: On its turn, the subject drops whatever it is holding. It can't pick up any dropped item until its next turn.

Fall: On its turn, the subject falls to the ground and remains prone for 1 round. It may act normally while prone but takes any appropriate penalties.

Flee: On its turn, the subject moves away from you as quickly as possible for 1 round. It may do nothing but move during its turn, and it provokes attacks of opportunity for this movement as normal.

Halt: The subject stands in place for 1 round. It may not take any actions but is not considered helpless.

If the subject can't carry out your command on its next turn, the spell automatically fails.

I love shit that can be exploited cleverly by a player, which is why I love the LotFP version of Command. One word, obeyed to the letter. But! It has to be a single word that encompasses the entirety of the player's intention so they can use some sweet sweet vocabulary skills to great effect.
By contrast, Pathfinder's version is the most fucking boring spell I've ever seen in my life. Pick one of five utterly boring balanced words of mild utility. Urgh.

But anyway I'm not sure where I was going with that one. Swinging back on topic, char gen choices are way boring. I'd prefer a character to be special based on what they've done and how they act in the game, not special because they took Two Handed Fighting over Improved Crotch Grab at level 3.

For myself, I don't even like having a proper character concept in mind when I'm making a character. Hell, nobody ever ends up sticking to their original concept anyway.


So if it's a game I've never tried before just roll me up some random stats, give me a different class to everybody else so as not to step on any toes, and we'll see what happens.

That'd be awesome.

Crits and Fumbles

This article is now old

I made new and better tables here - http://tenfootpolemic.blogspot.co.uk/2014/03/new-crit-and-fumble-tables.html



I love crits and fumbles. They're the bomb.
Swingy combat, massive potential for my DM plans to be screwed up, and all around good old fashioned gore.
Plus, crits and fumbles generate table stories like nothing else!
Trouble is, if I just make up additional effects myself I can't help but rule in their favour. I'm a huge softie. And if I introduce something like this, I want it to apply to the enemies too. It's only fair.

The DM grins widely.

So here's the deal.
Nat 1 or nat 20, you have to roll again to confirm.
Fighters get to add their level to the confirm roll because they're fighty. This means fighters never choke on their crit confirms and never double-fumble on their fumble rolls, which seems fine to me!

Confirm Fumble

1 : You really fucked up this time! Roll twice on Fumble table.

2 – 10: Roll on Fumble table.

11 – 19: Regular miss.

20: Recover! Reroll to hit.

Confirm Crit

On crit:

1 : Roll damage as normal – You choked!

2 – 10: Regular crit - Max weapon damage

11 – 19: Roll on Overcrit table

20: Roll twice on Overcrit table – MASSIVE DAMAGE!

Then if you lucked out (or fucked up) you get to roll d100 on the bigger tables!

D100 roll	Result	Effects
01 – 05	Glancing blow	Half weapon damage to target.
06 – 10	Weapon twists	Half weapon damage, but lose next action
11 – 15	Weapon(s) tangled	Self and opponent lose next action, 25% chance to drop weapons
16 - 20	Drop weapon	Weapon on ground, one round action to retrieve
21 – 25	Disarmed	As above, but not immediately retrievable
26 – 30	Fumble weapon	Lose next action as you recover
31 – 35	Hit wrong target	Hit another nearby (randomly determined)
36 – 40	Caught on gear	Sacrifice action to untangle – 1-3 on a d6 for success. Dex applies.
41 – 49	Hit yourself	Half damage to self.
50	Weapon breaks	Quarter damage to you and target, weapon broken.
51 – 55	Foot slips	Slip over, fall prone.
56 – 60	Bump ally	Both lose next action.
61 – 65	Bump enemy	As above, randomly determine
66 – 70	Full stumble	Fall against someone sending both sprawling, randomly determine
71 – 75	Off balance	Lose next action, +d4 to attacks against you next round
76 – 80	Hit yourself hard	Full damage to self.
81 – 85	Twist ankle	Lose next turn, limp for next 1d20 minutes
86 – 90	Throw weapon	Hits a random combatant. Full damage.
91 – 92	Hit yourself harder	Full damage to self, +d4 to attacks against you next round.
93 - 94	Weapon snaps	Half damage to self and enemy from shards/shock/etc
95	Weapon shatters	Full damage to self and enemy
96 – 97	Hit and stun ally	Full damage, ally loses next turn
98	Crit ally	Crit your closest friend
99	Overcrit yourself	Oops
100	Megafumble.	Roll twice on this table. Rolling this again stacks.

D100 Roll	Result	Effects
01 – 10	Huge Hit	Max damage, plus reroll damage and add to total.
11 – 20	Advantage	Max damage, +d4 to attack/damage on target next round
21 – 30	Powershot	Max damage, enemy prone and cannot act next round
31 – 40	Legshot	Max damage, random leg useless. Enemy crippled.
41 – 50	Armshot	Max damage, random arm useless. Stuff in hand dropped.
55 – 60	Gutshot	Max damage, enemy takes -2 to attack/damage until pass CON check
61 – 65	Blinding Blow	Max damage, enemy attacks at -d4 for d4 rounds.
66 – 70	Stunning Blow	Max damage, enemy cannot act for d4 rounds
71 – 75	Force Fumble	Max damage, enemy rolls on critical fumble table
76 – 80	Cleave	Max damage, make an attack against another target
81 – 85	Armour Buster	Max damage, enemy armour takes two Notches.
86 – 90	Devastator	Max damage, enemy stunned, prone, -2 to attack/damage, -2 AC.
91 – 93	C-c-c-combo!	As Huge Hit, plus keep rolling attacks against target until you miss.
94 – 97	Headshot	Double max damage, plus reroll damage and add to total
98 – 99	OHKO	Instant kill, no saves
100	Monster Crit	Roll twice on this table, rolling this result again stacks.

This was all made a long while ago and originally pertained to 4e so the results are a bit hokey now.

Between this and the Hack & Slash death crit table, I sure do see a lot of injuries!