Three Ways to Solve Resource Tracking

Resource management can be a real fucking drag.

I'm going to call out the biggest potential drags here:

Food
Light
Ammo

The trifecta of trackables. Mundane, cheap, and not that heavy. Often handwaved or forgotten.
Luckily they represent three different ways of handling resources in my game!

Prepper culture is essentially adventurers prepping for a dungeoncrawl that'll never come

But first!

Some game design theory around resource management.

Resource management has come up a fair amount lately in the OSR, which is of course what triggered this post.

DIY & Dragons has a two-parter on resource management -- Part 1 and Part 2

Followed up by Scones Alone in this post.

And followed up in turn by DIY & Dragons again in this post.

Read up if you haven't already, but I'll summarise where I'm coming from:

- I like the idea of tracking mundane resources.
- I want it to be easy.

So

There are two main ways a resource can be used up.
Drain or Use.

Drain is when they tick down over time. Usually these are the mundane things.
At the end of the day, mark off a ration. After an hour, light a new torch. Tick tick tick. They drain away.

Use is when you make the active decision to use them up. Throw oil bomb to set a thing on fire! Drink a potion to get a magic effect! Read a scroll to cast a spell! Throw torch in pit to see how deep it goes!

In essence, "This is constantly dwindled to prevent a bad thing" vs "You can choose to use this for a Cool Thing."

Resources that drain are the ones that are boring to track and easy to forget if they're left solely to the player to manage.
I've never seen a player complain that they've got to keep track of three different potions, but I had players forget to mark off rations and ammo and stuff all the time.

These Rations for RPG Races are great if you haven't seen them!

Food

Solution A: Give an active use.

The troubling fact about rations in my game is that they're cheap and trivially acquired for any party that's gone on at least one adventure. As long as you're not on a long long road trip through the uncharted wilderness (a situation that's literally never come up in my game in over half a decade), they're not an interesting resource drain.

So I flipped it from a drain to an actively used resource.

There are two main uses for rations in my game:
- Heal in a dungeon
- Heal fast overnight

My players think about food a lot, and track it individually. It's the primary healing mechanic so of course it's important!
This is even before the new cooking subsystem which has made at least one player start tracking Standard Rations in close detail.

In practice this means that rations are a dungeon crawl resource replenished between delves. Run out of rations mid-crawl and you run out of easy healing, spend rations on the surface to get back down there as soon as possible.

Food tracking: SOLVED!!

Light

Solution B: Procedural tracking.

Players gain no advantage from remembering to track light sources.
That's the simple fact. Even if they're not doing it maliciously, the only reason for a player to track light is out of a sense of fairness.
So as with anything that sucks for the player, it's up to the DM to make sure it's enforced!

Trouble is, tracking light is kind of boring overhead and takes up valuable mental load.

My solution, courtesy of a primordial version of Necropraxis' Hazard System, is to track light on the encounter roll.

Torches burn out after two Torch Burnout results.
Lanterns burn out after four Lantern Burnout results.

The main advantage of this, for me, is that it becomes part of the normal procedure of play. 

It's not extra mental overhead to track, it's part of primary dungeon timer mechanic - random encounters.
This also introduces a level of randomness to light sources which I think works. Torches don't all last exactly an hour, fire isn't quite so predictable.

Light tracking: SOLVED!!

Ammo

Solution C: Ignore it

"Hey what? I thought this was meant to be solutions!" I hear you say.
Ignoring it is a solution my friend. Tracking normal ammo is the worst.

It feels like it should be important, but in practice it's really not.
It feels like it should be interesting to run out of ammo, but in practice it's not either. You just stab instead, or get creative with random junk in your inventory.

My players simply don't make that many ranged attacks - they avoid combat if possible, shooting into melee has a high risk of hitting a friend, and most of them have firearms that take too long to reload mid-fight.
I even tracked ammo with a Usage Die for a few years and nobody ever got low enough on ammo for it to matter. C'est le jeu.

So - just ignore it. A few ranged attacks per session isn't enough to worry about really.
Having a quiver or ammo bag or whatever has an encumbrance penalty, so there's a small but notable downside to having a ranged weapon already. It's fine.

Ammo tracking: IGNORED!!

Solutions

So there you have it - three different ways to solve resource tracking.

A: Give it an active use.
Make it important enough to track actively, just like potions and spells and HP and all the rest.

B: Procedural tracking.

Track it through a game mechanic, ideally rolling it into some other procedural thing you already do.

C: Ignore it.
If there's never any real risk of it running out, just don't bother.

Ammo 2: Bonus Spitballing

In writing this I was wondering if there was a better solution to ammunition.

Ignoring it is a fine solution but inherently fairly unsatisfying when you could be the first person to come up with a Rad New OSR Mechanic.

So there are two other options if I want to stop ignoring ammo - give it an active use, or procedural tracking.

A: Active use would be the obvious one. Rather than spend an ammo to make a ranged attack, why not spend an ammo to give that ranged attack a boost?

So like:
Bow - Rapid Fire - Spend an ammo to roll damage twice and take the best.
Gun - Overcharge Round - Spend an ammo to deal exploding damage on evens.

But then this could be covered by magic ammo and trick arrows and such. Just give them the option to buy Overload Cartridges or Dum-Dum Arrows and they'll track them religiously.
Plus I already use Gambits for doing cool stuff with mundane attacks, making this concept unnecessary.

B: Procedural Tracking is the other side of the coin. Perhaps roll ammo depletion into the attack roll.

If rolling a 1 on an attack roll means you've run out of ammo, that works out to an average of 20 arrows per quiver which is bang on.

But then you run the risk of a real dumb situation where your first shot from a fresh quiver is also your last.

You could give each ranged weapon 3 Ammo Boxes and a Depletion Range, so a quiver of arrows checks off an Ammo Box on an attack roll of 1-3 and a bag of sling bullets only checks off an Ammo Box on a 1.

I'd definitely use this myself, only it doesn't solve the initial point that my players just don't make that many ranged attacks! 

Encumbrance

A final note on encumbrance - writing this post has made me realise just how important encumbrance is as a limitation for mundane items like these.

There's no real limit to how much food, light and ammo a party can carry in the overworld. Any party that can afford a cart, a barrel of iron rations, and a pile of torches can park up next to a dungeon entrance and be set for weeks of delving.

The only limit is how much you're going to take into the dungeon with you. 

Are you going to be slow and prepared? Or are you going to travel fast and light? If you're wearing heavy armour are you willing to slow yourself further with bags of rations and jars of lamp oil?

Being slow means you face more encounter checks, so the feedback loop of resources-encumbrance-encounters is important if you want mundane resources to be an important choice.

Which is to say - if you handwave encumbrance and/or don't use random encounters there's no point tracking mundane resources. 

It seems obvious when I say it like that.

Apocalypse Dragon Ninhursag

players pls don't read


--

NINHURSAG

Its Rune is Earth.
Its Breath is Poison.
Its Aspects are of Size, Plants, Crystal and Magma.
Its Plan is to destroy Shub-Niggurath by destroying all cellular life.

To worship Ninhursag is to worship the Dragon of Earth, of Poison, and of Secrets.



The Cults of Ninhursag

The Verdigrised Drakencult worship Ninhursag Undivided.
The Gogamogic Drakencult worship the Aspect of Size.
The Tangled Drakencult worship the Aspect of Plants.
The Fracted Drakencult worship the Aspect of Crystal.
The Magman Drakencult worship the Aspect of Magma.



The Taboos of Ninhursag

Never allow a curse or disease to be removed from somebody.
Never destroy a plant or fungus unless it is a threat to you or your allies.
Only ever allow yourself to heal by natural means.
Never advance the cause of another Dragon.

The Observances of Ninhursag

+1	Catching or infecting someone with a disease
+1	Being poisoned, including by narcotic substances
+1	Hitting 0HP and surviving
+1	Uncovering a secret that could damage someone or their reputation if known
+1	Allowing someone to live who you have at your mercy
+1	Destroying something that lives but does not breathe
-1	Revealing a secret
-1	Allowing a living creature to be killed that is no threat to your or your allies
-1	Attacking a fellow minion of Ninhursag, or thwarting their plans
-2	Harming yourself or, through inaction, allowing yourself to come to harm

The Boons of Ninhursag

2	Favour of Ninhursag -  Power any glyph containing the Earth rune with a single action
3	Eyes of Ninhursag -  at will hear strength and direction of beating hearts within 50', even through stone - if in field of view, see whole circulatory system and dark patches where disease lies in their body
4	Scales of Ninhursag -  +1 AC and +2 to saves, improve overnight heal rate by one step (Vagrant -> Comfortable -> Splendid -> Splendid+)
5	Heart of Ninhursag -  Choose the Aspect of Ninhursag you will worship; gain an ability based on that Aspect: Undivided - convert poison entering your body into any other type Size - increase size and power of muscles at will (+4 strength mod, rip tight clothing, grow a foot or so) Plants - exude soporific pollen at will (-2 to hit for those nearby, +1 Pain Poison if breathed for 10 minutes, you are immune) Crystal - encase self in crystal coccoon at will, you are immobile and take only 1 damage from non-smashy weapons, coccoon shatters if you take more than 5 points of damage in one blow. If smashed you are stunned until you pass a Save vs Stun to recover Magma - grow incredibly hot at will, glow orange, deal 1d6 fire damage to anyone touching your bare skin, take half damage from heat
6	Devotion of Ninhursag -  You gain influence over the effect of any glyph containing the Earth rune, allowing you to bend its power to your intent and control its manifestation. New effects must be at least somewhat plausible.
7	Breath of Ninhursag -  gain 30' breath weapon 1/day according to Aspect which deals your current HP as damage (Save vs Blast for half); Undivided - chlorine gas, blinds and chokes all affected until they pass a Save vs Stun (separate for each effect) Size - shrinks everything in radius to half its size for 10 minutes. Plants - Everything in AoE difficult terrain and everyone within entangled by grasping coat of vines until they can slice them off or Wrestle out of them Crystal - Jagged shards of crystal coat the area, creating difficult terrain and dealing 1d6 damage to anyone stepping or falling on it without suitable protection Magma - ball of magma rolls along at 20' per round, breaks into a 10' burning puddle of magma when it hits someone or an object. 1d6 damage/round to anyone standing in it. Rolls to hit vs unarmoured AC against things that could dodge out of the way.
8	Claws of Ninhursag -  Unleash the latent power of Ninhursag 1/day for 10 minutes, taking on shades of the Aspect chosen and granting you a 1d6 unarmed attack with an additional ability; Undivided - Extending claws grants immunity to poison and allows you to tear up rock and earth easily, throwing boulders for 1d6 damage or throwing up a cloud of choking dust that obscures normal vision Size - Extending claws makes you grow twice as big! Shreds anything you're wearing, double damage. Plants - Extending claws grants you 1d6 natural regeneration per round up to half max hp Crystal - Extending claws covers you in shimmering crystal and grants your claws brutally sharp crystal edges, 1d10 unarmed damage and you count as having a Shield which can be broken as normal (shattering your crystal shell) Magma - Extend claws and become immune to heat. Anyone dealing 4 or more points of damage to you in one hit causes magma to pour out of the wound and pool at your feet, anyone standing in it takes 1d6 damage per round.
9	Wings of Ninhursag -  grow dragon wings! Take on a bunch of cosmetic attributes based on your chosen Aspect. Fly at your normal movement speed and glide at double.
10	Apotheosis Protocol -  with a week of preparation, permanently transform into an Elemental Dragon of Aspect, control it until the end of the session at which point lose individuality but protect fellow drakencultists OR for Undivided worshippers become immune to all poisons and diseases and at will (or on death) explode into a cloud of chlorine gas of incredible toxicity
11	Apotheosis Acceleration - With a day of preparation, Apotheosise.
12	Apotheosis Ultimate - At will, Apotheosise as an action

The Elemental Dragons of Ninhursag

Base stats:

HD10 AC14 ML12
- Vision: No eyes, but have always-on Eyes of Ninhursag - see circulatory systems in line of sight and detect heartbeats within 50'

- Breath: HP as damage, Save vs Blast for half. Recharge on 5-6. - Claws: 1d10/1d10, pin to the ground or bat away to send enemy flying. - Bite: 3d10, pick up and swing around wildly on hit - Wrestle to escape - Tail: 1d10 sweep, those hit are sent flying back. Save vs Blast to avoid. - Death Throes: Triggered when the Dragon is destroyed.

Size:

Huge dragon carved of stone, spits enormous rocks, practically invulnerable
+ AC20 + Fucking enormous - three storeys tall + Bite picks up anyone within a 20' diameter (so like, anyone close to anyone else). Keeps you inside its cage of a mouth while smashing its head around. + Breath weapon is huge boulder that bounces and rolls like a cannonball + Death Throes: Collapses into rocks that collapse down into earth.

Anyone within 20' must Save vs Blast or take 2d20 damage from fallen chunks of dragon. Dust swirls up from the bursting rocks, sending up a great obscuring plume of dust and grit 50' wide

Plants:
Rocks and greenery swirling in vague dragon shape, regenerates, poisonous fumes
+ Regenerates 1d10 HP/round + Exudes soporific pollen in 30' radius - gain 1 Pain Poison every round you're in the cloud + Breath weapon is a tearing roil of vines and thorns and greenery + Death Throes: Soporific pollen cloud bursts out in a great 50' diameter cloud. Anyone inside must Save vs Stun or fall asleep. Plus take 1 Pain Poison per round breathed.

Crystal:

Crystal dragon growing around rocky core, real spiky, any spikes that break off become sharp minions whether it's hit or it just scrapes them off
+ Each hit by it or against it creates a swarm of crystal minions equal to damage. Pool into swarms of 10. + Breath a blast of piercing crystal shards. Getting hit grows heavy crystal on you and through you - +1 encumbrance tier per hit + Death Throes: Cracks and shatters into 2d10 swarms of 10 crystal minions that take immediate revenge

Magma:

Red-veined rock, a moving volcano, leaves devastation in its wake, sets forests alight and spits lava
+ Those in melee range catch alight at the start of their turn as if hit by an oil bomb. + Trails magma and fire dealing 1d10 to all who cross its trail. Constantly moving to spread more magma.

+ Breath a stream of magma that leaves 30' magma patch. Magma magma magma all day long. + Death Throes: Collapses into a pool of magma 50' diameter, frying everything nearby for 1d10 damage per round

Design Notes:

As with all the Apocalypse Dragons, Ninhursag is a synthesis of three things - the trad D&D chromatic dragon, one of the five Runes, and one of some shithead's Tiamat cults.

So Ninhursag is a mix of:
- The poisonous Green chromatic dragon

- The Earth rune and its related rune-combo Aspects

- The secretive knowledge-gathering Jade Fang of Tiamat

All fairly disparate elements, so I feel like together they form a pretty interesting and non-trad melange.
At the time I made this (and this is still broadly true) the only Dragons the players knew about were this big green boi and the black Gravity Dragon Ereshkigal, so there's also an element of making them two rival and contradictory worldviews. Ninhursag is about keeping things alive, Ereshkigal is about letting things die.

So, design notes on the different bits.


Observances and Taboos.

Ninhursag's cultists are intended to be based on spreading disease and keeping living things alive.
After all, if everyone's dead a disease won't spread.
This is also why, for instance, you get a bonus for killing non-living things. Automatons tend to be disease resistant. Even the undead, which you'd expect to be vectors of disease, can't catch a cold themselves.
When Ninhursag unleashes the final ur-poison that will wipe out all cellular life, it wants there to be as many vectors as possible to infect Shub-Niggurath.

There's also a little bit of secret-finding and secret-keeping to encourage some of the sneakier Jade Fang stuff. A little insidious bit of extra spice.



Boons

Dragon boons follow the same format from dragon to dragon. They're always real good.

Bond 2 is when you the Favour, the ability to fast-cast any glyph containing the associated Rune. In this case, the Earth rune.

Bond 3 is the Eyes. Since Ninhursag is all about life, you can detect heartbeats and see circulatory systems (and disease) in field of vision. Real good unless you're fighting zombies or golems or whatever, but that's why you have to kill them.

Bond 4 is the Scales. All dragons give a +1 to AC and +2 to Saves, but Ninhursag also improves overnight healing rates. You're not allowed to heal magically during the day, but as a counterbalance you do heal more quickly with rest.

Bond 5 is the Heart and where things get interesting - your choice of Aspect here is your choice forever and grants you an always-on or at-will passive ability. So far we've only had one PC reach the Heart and they went for Size, which is fitting for POWERLAD the Muscle Wizard superhero.

Bond 6 is the Devotion which upgrades your rune abilities again. Essentially this means players tell me what happens when they activate rune magic, rather than me telling them.
It's potent and near game-breaking, but it's the apocalypse so they need all the help they can get really!

Bond 7 is the when you get the Breath and shit gets real. Dragon breath! A big ticket item! And different kickers depending on Aspect too.
One of the real cool self-limiting things for dragon breath in old school D&D is that it deals the dragon's current HP as damage, so it's the same here. As you level up in your class you do more damage with your breath weapon. Mechanically elegant!
We have a Goblin player with a whole gaggle of Goblin minions, each of whom he (until recently) had managed to set up worshipping a different Dragon each. That way he'd get access to all the cool powers without paying the exp penalty for Dragon Bond! Clever...
Unfortunately since his Goblins only have 1d6 HP, they can only do a few points of damage with their breath weapon. And also they die(d) really easily.

Bond 8 is the Claws. Another Aspect-based power. Unsheathe your Claws 1/day to get an unarmed attack and some monstrous Aspect-related extra ability. This is the combat monster perk where you turn into a humanoid dragon and wreck shit.
You can dual wield both claws, naturally. Remember in my game dual wielding means you roll twice for damage and take the best, and deal double damage if you roll doubles. A d6 unarmed strike is pretty beast!

Bond 9 is the Wings and they are the same mechanically for everyone because you can fucking fly baby!
At-will flight is weird because it's one of those things you think will break the game, but it really doesn't. Overland encounters are way different because you can just fly over them, but normal dungeons aren't changed so much.

Bond 10 is the final ability - Apotheosis. The capstone ability that essentially means you sacrifice your character forever in order to control an overpowered Elemental Dragon for a session.
What a choice!

The Elemental Dragons are player-scale, by which I mean they're the size of a truck and thus the sort of dragon that players might actually be able to fight against and the sort of dragon that will be effective against player-scale threats.
This as opposed to the Apocalypse Dragons which are the size of mountains and will just destroy you and shrug off any wound your measly sword can inflict.
Elemental Dragons are huge compared to a man, but still small enough to have an HP pool.

Anyway, sacrifice your character in order to do something crazy awesome. Since it takes at least 10 sessions to get to Bond 10 (you can test Bond once per week max), at my weekly game you've gone at least a couple of months with your character before you can blow their Draconic Apotheosis.
That's a lot of work to get to this point, which means sacrificing your character is meaningful.
It should be a hard choice, but then you do get to be a 10HD insanely powerful dragon which should be a hell of a good time.

Unless you're an Undivided worshipper of course, in which case you get ultimate immunities to poison and disease - you'll be guaranteed to survive Ninhursag's world-ending plagues at the very least.
You should probably Apotheosise as soon as you get a chance if you're an Undivided cultist, it's a permanent perk.
Plus if you die you'll take every motherfucker in the room down with you. Let's hope your friends are also Undivided so they can turn that deadly poison into a nap...

Bond 11 and Bond 12 speed up the Apotheosis.
Bond 10 takes a whole week which means you need a lot of planning ahead. It's unlikely you'll be able to do this in response to a threat unless it's got a long lead time. Since I've got a ticking clock of the Apocalypse bearing down on my game, a week is actually quite a big time penalty too.
Bond 11 only takes a day, so you're more responsive. That demon threatened you? Come back the next day as a motherfucking DRAGON and show him who's boss.
Bond 12 is at-will apotheosis which is definitely OP. If you're fighting your ultimate enemy and they knock you down to near-death and you wipe the blood off your lips with your sleeve and gloat about how "this isn't even my final form!" and transform into an Elemental Dragon and bite off their head with your mighty jaws as they cower... you have truly used this ability correctly. I really hope this happens.

A Note on Aspects

You'll notice that the Aspect powers are fitting for the element they relate to, but the Undivided bonus is a bit of a curveball. Combining Earth-Earth creates Rock in the rune system after all, not Poison.

I justify this because the Undivided option is about bringing you closer to the powers of the Dragon Itself, not just its rune combo.
Ninhursag has a trad Green Dragon's poison breath and theme, so you get poison-related abilities.
The Undivided options for Ninhursag involve the Poison mechanics a bunch. Like the Heart lets you convert deadly Trauma Poison into less deadly Pain Poison, so you just pass out for a while rather than dying.

The other abilities mostly just fit the spec. Size makes you bigger and stronger, Magma makes you hotter and heat-resistant, etc etc.

There's another wrinkle in that Aspects are a combo of two Runes, so every Dragon Aspect is shared with one other Dragon. Size is an Earth-Mass combo, for instance, so both the Earth and Mass Dragons will have an Aspect of Size available.
To make these shared Aspects unique, the element is sort of flavoured by the Apocalypse Dragon you're worshipping.
The Earth Dragon makes its Size cultists get bigger and more muscular, while the Mass Dragon gives its Size cultists non-euclidean space-distorting abilities - changing the Size of distances.

This applies to the Elemental Dragons too. The Earth-flavoured Size Dragon is a huge stony beast that breathes huge boulders and crushes all before it, the Mass-flavoured Size Dragon is a roiling mass of darkness and spacial distortions whose breath smears you across space-time.

Elemental Dragons

I went into Elemental Dragons a bit under Apotheosis above.
Elemental Dragons are player-scale threats, in that they're a size that players could potentially interact with in a meaningful sense - the equivalent of Adult Dragons.
Yea they'll kill you, but they'll have to roll for it.

Elemental Dragons are on my encounter tables. Usually they roll around with a retinue of Aspect-aligned drakencultists who try to control it. Nobody's fought one yet, although they did have a very scary run-in with a Crystal Elemental Dragon. That was a stealth mission.

All Elemental Dragons share the same base stats and attacks, modified based on Aspect.
So stat wise these things are beasts. Big HD, a ton of attacks, a breath weapon, the works.
If you're clever and lucky only some of you will die.
And if you get to control one of these bad boys with Apotheosis, welcome to God Mode. This is your session now baby. The spotlight is for you!

The one little potential weakness - like their Apocalypse Dragon sire these guys don't have eyes and have to rely on heartbeat vision. Fighting creatures without heartbeats means you have to guess where they are, but that's why you have your fellow drakencultists around to help!
It's also why killing non-living creatures is encouraged by Ninhursag, see?

Really the only big and interesting idea here is Death Throes.
I swear I got the idea of these from someone's blog or maybe someone in the OSR Discord, but I can't remember for the life of me. If you know, let me know so I can attribute properly!
Anyway, rather than Lair Actions or having triggered responses to attacks, killing an Elemental Dragon triggers its Death Throes - in general these will fuck up whoever and whatever killed it. Fun!

Individually:
Size is massive and tough and eats multiple people at a time. The big stompy one that goes around stepping on people and shooting boulders from its stony mouth. Bonus points if it breathes its boulder while people are in its mouth already. Combo!
Plants regenerates while slowing melee attackers and putting them to sleep. Real annoying to fight I imagine. You can't do shit because the pollen makes you dopey, and the few hits you get in before falling asleep are regenerated quickly. What a bastard.
Crystal creates sharp splintery minions wherever it goes. Hitting it knocks off sharp minions. Getting hit knocks off sharp minions. You want to run? Oh but its breath loads you up with encumbering crystal, preventing escape and probably spellcasting. The sharp minions do Choppy damage which means more damage to less armoured characters too. Good luck.
Magma trails magma, breathes magma, sets melee attackers on fire with magma, endless fucking magma. A living terrain hazard. Good luck with this fucker too, especially if you're wearing flammable clothes or carrying explosives.


----

More on the Apocalypse Dragons

Apocalypse Dragon Resources
Learn to Kneel
Ninhursag
Atrahasis
Ereshkigal
Shamash
Mardūk

Kneel Before the Apocalypse Dragons!

The Apocalypse Dragons!

Five are they.

Ninhursag, Clathrate Dragon. It is of Earth, of Poison, of Secrets.
Atrahasis, Deluvial Dragon. It is of Cold, of Ice, of Stasis.
Ereshkigal, Singularity Dragon. It is of Mass, of Gravity, of Despair.
Shamash, Bolide Dragon. It is of Heat, of Fire, of Rage.
Mardūk, Gamma Burst Dragon. It is of Light, of Electricity, of Power.

Each is the size of mountains.
Each has upon its eyeless face a Rune.
They have tried, in their own ways, to prevent the emergence of Shub-Niggurath.
Each attempt has caused an extinction event.
Each attempt has failed.

The Beast in the Core of the Earth is still here.

Why Worship Such Atrocities?

Why indeed? These Apocalypse Dragons care not for man. They care not for life itself. 

Their only goal, the only goal that matters, is to prevent Shub-Niggurath from cracking the world like an egg and spreading its star-seed to infest other planets.
Terrestrial life is nothing to them. Sacrificing the earth to save the universe is a akin to us sacrificing an ant to save a city.
They do not speak. They do not care. They live and think on timescales too vast for us to comprehend, and far too vast for them to comprehend the short non-events of human lives.

So why, then? Why worship them?

Dragon powers! 

Those who obey the whims of a Dragon gain access to potent abilities. 

Claws, breath, scales, wings, Rune control, a whole host of fantastical abilities.

And the price? Merely abide by the Observances that you must obey or avoid to gain favour, and avoid breaking Taboos.

Are these things the dragon actually wants from its followers? Or are they merely a shallow surface reading of the echoes of the thoughts of a creature far too powerful and ancient to comprehend, justified post-facto by desperate adherents clinging to a foolish hope that their Dragon will save them from the end of the world?

Either way, it seems to work.

How to Worship Such Atrocities.

These rules are basically cribbed and slightly adjusted from Perdition.
If you want a bunch of rad demon lords to worship instead of dragons, check it out!

In brief:
Your Bond to a dragon is a number between 1 and 12.
Each Bond level grants an ability, but applies a cumulative 5% penalty to earned exp.
New adherents start at Bond 2.
Maintaining your bond with a Dragon requires you to avoid breaking its Taboos.
Improving your bond with a Dragon requires you to abide by its Observances.

Initially bonding yourself to a Dragon is remarkably simple.
All you need to do is kneel before an Apocalypse Dragon, or be baptised with its Rune by someone who is already Bonded to the Dragon.
Strengthening your Bond is where it gets interesting.



Here's an example of the Taboos and Observances of one of the Dragons - Ninhursag.

Taboos must not be broken. Break a Taboo and you lose 1 Bond level.
So if you're at Bond 4 and break a taboo by letting someone cast Cure Disease on your friend, you drop down to Bond 3.

Observances are important for when you attempt to increase your Bond level with a Dragon.
You want to collect the positive modifiers while avoiding the negative modifiers.
Whenever you trigger an Observance, mark it.
You can attempt to improve your Bond level once per session.

Improving your Bond:
- Either kneel before your Dragon or listen to a sermon from a someone who has a higher Bond Level than you.
- Roll 2d6 and apply any modifiers from your Observances.
- If you roll over your current Bond Level, it increases by 1.
- Whether you succeed or fail your Observances reset, erase all marks.

Ninhursag's bond abilities

The abilities follow the track above for all Dragons, ie. you always get Eyes at Bond 3 and Wings at Bond 9. What the actual effects of those are differ by Dragon though.

The abilities remain unknown until someone unlocks them. I'll reveal the abilities in subsequent posts about the Dragons, but to illustrate, here's what my players have seen so far.
At the moment our current highest Bond character is POWERLAD.
He's at Bond 10 with Ninhursag so has unlocked the following abilities:

click to expand

You'll notice that at Bond 5 you have to choose one of the Dragon's Aspects.
These are based on Rune combinations. That's all over here if you're interested, but not directly relevant. All you need to know is that you can choose to worship the Dragon Undivided or one of its four derivative Aspects.

In this case, POWERLAD chose to worship the Aspect of Size, granting him a bunch of size-related abilities.
Coupled with his potent Muscle Wizard abilities, he's a real superhero!


It's possible to worship multiple dragons at once but it's hard to maintain since you've got to juggle a bunch of different and often mutually contradictory Taboos and Observances.
It's technically possible though!

Discussion

This is part worldbuilding, part faction play, part optional sub-quest, and part alternate leveling system.

Alternate Leveling

Characters in my campaign peak at the soft cap of Level 7.
Getting there is hard enough, the work of maybe a year of play, and after that exp requirements are so vast that they're practically unattainable.

This means alternate methods of gaining power and abilities are welcome. This is one result, a means of gaining cool new powers and abilities that isn't tied to class or level.

The players quickly grasped that optimal thing to do is to get to a high level then get into a dragon cult as a sort of prestige class thing. Hence why the Level 7 Muscle Wizard POWERLAD is the main Drakencultist in the group.
Since you're probably not going to level up anyway the exp penalty isn't such a big deal, and since you're not going to level up anyway you might as well go hard into Bonds!

Sub-Quest

It's kinda cool to have an optional extra thing you can be doing that doesn't disrupt the party's goals.
Sure, you might be incentivised by Taboos or Observances to do certain things or act in a certain way, but you're not trying to persuade your friends to come with you on some random sidequest that's got nothing to do with their actual goals.

It does make things interesting though.
There was a time when POWERLAD's player was frantically telling someone "don't come near me with that fucking healing!" so they didn't break their taboo against healing unnaturally. That was great.

Faction Play

Factions are a great way to drive player action, and since you've got to go back to the Dragon or one of its Drakencultists to level up your Bond it means you've got to deal with that faction a bunch.

If you piss off everyone in the cult, the only way you can strengthen your Bond is to fight or sneak your way to the Dragon itself. Dragon don't care about petty human squabbles.

Plus, since there are 5 different Aspects of each dragon that means there are going to be at least 5 sub-cults in each Drakencult, and that's ripe for faction play too!
We've just come off a month or so of gameplay involving internecine strife within Ninhursag's Drakencult, it went great. POWERLAD is a high priest now and everything.

Worldbuilding

Is there a better way to get my players in contact with the campaign lore around Apocalypse Dragons?
Dragon powers! Who could resist!
Now there's a fair amount of theorising around what the Dragons are, what they do, and how one might be exploited to juuuust about stop the end of the world without them kicking on to destroy the world in a whole other way.

Power Level

There's one more thing tied up in this - the power level of the abilities.

You might notice in that POWERLAD ability sheet thing further up the page that these abilities are actually real fucking strong. +4 Strength at will? Breath weapon deals your HP as damage?? Bond 10 lets you turn into an elemental dragon??? What the fuck?

This is a symptom of me letting go of that "low level play" dial as we get into the Apocalypse.

The world's totally fucked and there's a ton of stuff that's too big to be solved by stabbing it with sharp sticks, even dragon-powered sharp sticks. Might as well kick it into high gear!

Putting Your World to Death

I hope, for your sake, that your world has a good long life ahead of it.
But if you've suddenly found yourself dealing with imminent apocalypse, hopefully this will help you set up the fall.


A note for my players: Possible spoilers ahead. I don't think there's anything suuuper major in here that will ruin stuff, but read at your discretion.

The Impersonal Apocalypse

First things first - some context.

Mine is an impersonal apocalypse. Shub-Niggurath is a huge but non-sentient creature that is breaking out of the world. It will shatter the world like an egg. It doesn't think. It does not, and cannot, care about this.

Similar might be the sun going out, or a meteor coming to destroy the Earth or Cthulhu rising. Nobody caused this. It's nobody's fault. It just is. And now we've got to deal with it.

This as opposed to an apocalypse caused by something with an actual will and sentience, like Sauron or Thanos or a generic Ancient Evil That Has Awoken. There's always the slim possibility that you can reason with or trick such an entity. At the very least you can murder them or seal them away or whatever.

This doesn't change the following post all that much, but it's maybe useful for context? Anyway.

Faction Endgames

Your first task is to work out what your campaign's main factions are going to do now. How do the existing factions react? Are there any new factions brought forth by impending doom?

It's the end of the world. The world ending is bad for everyone. Who's trying to stop it and how are the planning to do it?

And most importantly - how do these plans oppose and clash against each other?

I've got three general spheres for how factions are reacting to the rise of Shub-Niggurath:
- Save humanity at all costs.

- Save the planet at all costs.
- Save the universe at all costs.

Examples:

The Apocalypse Dragons are here to save the universe. They live and act on timescales so vast that the spread of a planet-cancer across the universe over aeons is a real and present threat. They will destroy the world and all life on it if it stops Shub-Niggurath from spreading.

The Necromantic Duvan'Ku are here to save the planet. They're willing to sacrifice as much of humanity is necessary to ensure the planet's survival. After all, it's not like they'll kill off the trees. In a worst case scenario "living" as Undead even after everyone else is dead and gone.

The sin-eating Demons, perhaps counterintuitively, want to save humanity. They feed on sin, and if there are no sinners left then they'll starve. If they found a way to save humanity at the expense of the planet and the wider univere, they'd do it.


The key to all this is that every faction has good reasons for doing what they're doing. They're generally all doing what they think is right and for the greater good, but also with a level of self-interest that can clash against some factions and align them with others.
Their reasons and motivations might be different, and there's a lot of conflict depending on what time scale they're working on and what they personally value, but each faction thinks they're the good guys willing to do what it takes to save what's important to them.

There's an extra layer for my game because I've got players who've been in the same campaign world for literal years. These factions are known.
They've got all sorts of friends and enemies in the world. There are even recurring characters wandering around who some players recognise from previous adventures with previous characters. It's intense! The joys of a long-running game!
Now suddenly all the factions have shifted to their final endgames and it's really kicked the game into a higher gear. With that game history on their side, the players have enough of a grasp of the game world to really work out how they'll make an impact.

A Note on Agency in a Dying World

Players have a lot of agency in a world that's fairly fucked up.
I think it's because you can really see the cracks. Who do you help? Who do you oppose? Who do you exploit for personal gain?

A sandbox game needs roguish, pragmatic, self-motivated characters to work properly. There's a lot of stuff for characters get roguish and pragmatic about when everything's falling apart.

And when every faction is doing bad things for the right reasons, it gives a lot of solid reasons for players to support, oppose or unite various forces. It's pretty cool!

Apocalypse Timeline

This is your second task.
Decide how long the world has to live. For me, I gave them just over a year.
Shub-Niggurath began rising in November last year, it's going to crack the planet in December this game-year.

Now it's time for the fun part - make a calendar of what each faction is doing each month!
You'll be updating this timeline as and when players mess with the course of events.

Since we're past this point in the timeline now, I suppose I can show you at least this much.

Players may not want to expand

The idea with this is to make sure you know what the big movers and shakers are doing, especially in the case of players just jumping up and heading off somewhere new. Gives you something to work around!
It also means that when players do something of real significance, you can work out how they rebounds and impacts different forces in the world.
My intention is to release each of the things by the end of the month, but I'm a little loosey-goosey on the exact timings. Preferably the players are on the surface to witness such things when they happen so I miiight nudge the dates along a little bit to make it a bit more cinematic.

Deep Carbon Observatory has a similar sort of long-range timeline thing that happens if PCs never influence events, so this is definitely in that vein.


I really wanted to use apocalyptic events from Revelation to get that good fucked up apocalypse feel. Evangelion influence again, probably.
Seven Trumpets, Seven Vials, all that good stuff. Combine with all the other various swirling ideas and themes, shake, and strain over ice.
So far it's all lined up weirdly nicely. When the First Trumpet was due to sound I looked around to see what could have kicked that off, and conveniently one of the players had managed to set the table for me!
They gave the alchemist who wanted to create a Shub-Niggurath-destroying omnipoison a sample of extremely powerful demon spider poison. The alchemist tried it out, it went wrong, and now there's no grass and cancerous tentacles and a third of all flora has withered and died. How prohetic!

I don't care I loooooove big fuckoff indestructible natural disaster dragons

End Times Encounters

The third task is adjusting your encounter tables for this new reality.

I've got some tips and gimmicks for encounter tables here.

One thing I'd say - don't weight the results via multiple dice in the apocalypse. 

I've moved all my end times encounter tables from 2d6 to a straight 1d12 so all results are equally common.

Having a weighted 2d6 is for conservative simulation of a fairly dependable ordered world. Common local encounters go in the middle numbers, doom-wizards and elemental dragons go on the rare numbers. Having a straight 1d12 roll means you see the doom-wizard as often as you see anything else, which works for the chaotic terror of the apocalypse!

Read the post if you're not sure what I mean I guess.

The other thing I've done with a number of Lair results is to put them in conflict with "Roll Again", so there's going to be much more naturally occurring conflict in the overworld. It's the apocalypse, everyone's fighting everyone else, dark times for all really!

Seeing two sides in battle is perfect for a Lair result. The encounter is close and the players can easily engage if they want, but they can also go the other way and avoid the situation.

Information and Agency

Players need information to make informed choices.
Making informed choices is Agency.

I've been honest with players about when the world is set to end, ie. December 1601.

I figure we've all played enough games where the apocalypse is juuuuuuuuust about to happen, but you've got plenty of time to run around doing some final side quests before actually triggering the final mission.
(Looking at you, Mass Effect)

By giving a set end date I'm saying that I'm legit about letting the world die. GOOD LUCK!

There's already a sense that they're going to have to be reeaally careful about using time-advancing mechanics like Carousing or Spell Research. I'd previously made those things take a while simply so that the game timeline advanced sorta kinda at a pace with real time. 

Suddenly downtime is recontextualised from a straight money sink to a real risk/reward mechanic.

Do we risk spending a week or so partying to level up? What if something terrible happens in the mean time?

I've been stocking up the Rumours table with more news than before. I've de-emphasised hints at nearby dungeons. The players know which dungeons are important now. Instead the rumours tend to be about wider events in the world, and hints at the sort of threats that are becoming more prevalent in the overworld.
Rumours about what's happening on the front lines against the Dead, updates on the movements of Battlefortress Fate, etc etc.
Gameplay is necessarily moving up to a grander scale, so the rumours reflect that. Nobody cares so much about Granny Questgiver's lost cat when there are literal angels falling from the sky.

Be liberal with the information you give out. Nobody's cagey in the end of days! Everyone anyone meets is going to have some story about something major happening somewhere, so let it happen!

In Closing

The end of the world is an exciting time. Embrace it!

I like to think my game has always had high stakes, but that's often been in the context of character life and limb. Suddenly world-saving stakes have shifted my game to another gear!

No matter what the outcome, I imagine the aftermath of the apocalypse is going to gear-shift my game again.

Hexcrawling and rebuilding a shattered world? Space voyagers flying off on shattered fragment of Earth? Time-fucking attempts to rewind and rewrite history?

I'm excited! And if your world is ending, you should be too!