The Robgoblin
Wednesday 9 October 2024
Return of the Hit Dice
Tuesday 1 October 2024
The King is....Not Dead? Still?
Thursday 26 September 2024
Robgoblin Reviews - Mycelia
The Kickstarter Fairies have been kind this month. Off the back of Kavango the other week, the latest arrival at the Goblinhole is Mycelia, the self-described Strategic Mushroom Game from Split Stone Games. We got the Deluxe edition, because we're suckers for upgraded stuff, and it's nice to support independent artists and designers.
In technically unrelated news, the Common Descent podcast has also just begun a three-part series on the palaeontology and evolution of fungi. What can I say, goblins like mushrooms. Even if they are freaky and weird.
Anyway, the Goblinette (Goblette?) and I have only played through once, but here's some initial impressions.
First off the bat, the name has caused some confusion. Evidently, a large publisher created a game with the same name at virtually the same time. This is the moody, earthy independent game, not the light and whimsical family game. Apparently a good game, just not the one I'm talking about. Anyway.
This one hits you with the earthiness as soon as you open... well, the box it shipped in. Because the outer box itself is dark green. It really suits the theme of the game, and stands out pretty well on our game shelves alongside generally lighter boxes. The box is sleeved, as boxes apparently are these days. Don't entirely get the desire, but then I'm a function-over-form guy a lot of the time. I guess it keeps stuff together and makes it look a bit tidier on a shelf.
Inside the box, the components are nice and tactile. Painted wooden game components are always nice, the card is a good thickness, and the double-thickness card player boards with cutouts for cards and conmponents are an excellent touch. The artwork is excellent, all produced by the game designer - apparently a person of many talents, as they've also handmade the premium all-wooden 'Opulent Edition' of the game, which I'm sure those with deeper pockets than me are enjoying.
The triangular game board tiles tesselate very nicely, and make sense with the game mechanics, but do suffer from the minor problem that triangles are really difficult to shuffle. Squares or hexagons wouldn't work as well mechanically, though, and you only really have to shuffle them once, so that's fine overall.
Gameplay seems intimidating at first, but is actually pretty simple. The core gameplay loop is to grow a mycelial network and fruit mushrooms. Or in gamist terms, get resource cubes onto the game board, then spend those resources to play cards. At the end of the game, each mushroom card played scores points.
Each turn, a player gets to take two actions, which must generally be different
- Draw a new tile to expand the player board
- Move their mother mushroom (player piece) to contest control of the board
- Play spores (resource cubes) onto the board, one cube per tile, from a player's piece or
- Spend spores from the board to play a card and place a mushroom piece onto the board
- Draw a new card to their hand
- Decay (expend) a card to gain a bonus, sacrificing a mushroom piece from the board to do so.
Saturday 21 September 2024
How to Cause Wounds and Mutilate Corpses
Hit Points
When a character takes damage to their Hit Points, this always reflects some actual, though trifling, wound which saps the character's fortitude. It will be seen from the increasing numbers of Hit Points as characters gain levels that they are increasingly unconcerned by such trifles. Nonetheless, each blow landed offers an opportunity for acid, poison or the like to take effect.
When a player character is reduced to 0 Hit Points, they are not yet dead - though at this point every blow becomes potentially mortal, as discussed below. If using Critical Hits - however you choose to define them - these may have bypass Hit Points entirely and have a chance of directly inflicting a mortal wound. This offers the opportunity for a deadlier, more exciting game.
Monsters and non-player characters will generally die (or at least be out of the game) at 0 Hit Points. The Referee may choose to allow dragons, important non-player characters, and the likes to roll for injuries.
Injuries
When a character reaches 0 HP, roll on the Injury Table with a penalty equal to the damage in excess of that required to reduce them to 0 HP. Some results on the table do not automatically result in the character being removed from combat - especially if their foe has marked them for death. In this case, each subsequent hit requires another roll on the Injury Table, with a penalty equal to the full amount of damage received. It will be obvious that surviving a blow once at 0 HP is unlikely - though possible, if the character has luck.
Injury Table (Roll 2d6)
1 or Less: Grisly Death. Body so spectacularly destroyed that only a resurrection or wish spell can bring it back to life
2: Instant Death: Decapitated, or similarly grievous wound. No hope of survival.
3: Mortal Wound. Disemboweled, stabbed through the heart, etc. Dead in 2d6 rounds. Save vs. Death or unconscious until death.
4: Slow Death. Internal bleeding, punctured lung, or other similar. Dead in 2d6 turns. Save vs. Death or unconscious until death.
5: Lose a limb: Roll to determine limb affected. If head rolled and no helmet worn, treat as Instant Death. If body rolled and no armour worn, treat as Mortal Wound, otherwise dead in 3d6 turns from blood loss. Takes 3d6 weeks to recover from wounds. Save vs. Death or unconscious until death.6: Paralysed: Devastating blow damages your spinal cord. Roll to determine loss of muscle and sensory function. 1-3: legs; 4-5, waist down; 6, whole body. Save vs. Death or unconscious for 3d6 turns.
7: Broken bone: Roll to determine location. 3d4 weeks to heal. Save vs. Death or unconscious for 3d6 rounds. If head is struck, no helm is worn, and save is failed, unconscious in coma until healed.
8: Knocked Out: Unconscious for 2d6 rounds and helmet destroyed. If not wearing a helmet, treat as Broken bone: head.
9: Stunned: Cannot take actions for 1d4 rounds and helmet destroyed. If not wearing a helmet, knocked out for 2d6 rounds instead.
10: Flesh Wound: Ouch. This one hurt. Cannot take actions for 1 round. If not wearing armour, cannot take actions for 1d4 rounds.
11: No Effect: You got off lightly this time.
12 or more: Adrenaline Surge: You gain 1d4 hit points per hit die. At the end of combat, you lose these hit points, and suffer a -1 penalty to all rolls. This penalty increased by a further -1 for each round of combat in which you act, and reduces by 1 for each turn you completely rest.
Hit Location (d6): 1, left arm; 2, right arm; 3, left leg; 4, right leg; 5, torso; 6, head.
Clearly, wearing a helm is a good idea. Why wouldn't you? That's a matter for when I talk about armour. But in short, can't see well, can't hear well, look like you're after a fight. Not getting hit is even better, which is why Shields Shall Be Splintered.
Other Death and Dismemberment tables are available. I like the 2d6 ones; this one owes a lot to Robert Fisher, Trollsmyth, and Troll and Flame. But make your own to suit your preferred level of carnage. Or add modifiers to the roll: Constitution makes sense.
Players should track each wound received by their characters, along with the time taken for them to heal. While a character is wounded, the character's recovery of HP is reduced by 1 HP per night of rest per wound, to a minimum of zero. If a character has the misfortune to suffer multiple serious injuries, the recovery times are not cumulative: wounds will recover in parallel.
I've intentionally not listed ways of treating wounds. An imaginative party can find ways to do it; the Referee should adjudicate them reasonably and fairly.
Recovery
HP is recovered at a rate of 1 HP per night of sleep, generally comprising six to eight hours in one or two stretches, possibly with a period of keeping watch. In a normal low-level party of four fools with swords adventurers, eight hours will allow one person to keep watch while the other three sleep.
If you are able to get a good night's rest - undisturbed, well-fed, warm, and in a proper bed - this increases by 1 HP per night. This will usually require that you spend the night in someone's home, an inn, or something of that nature, though a sufficiently wealthy party may be able to achieve this in the wilderness. Any requirement to keep watch or subsist on iron rations rules out a good night's rest. Note that in the common room of an inn, undisturbed sleep cannot be guaranteed!
If you receive attentive care, this increases by a further 1 HP/night. A nurse can only care for one injured person at a time, and is unable to rest while they do so. In extremis, one party member might nurse another, at the expense of their own rest and recuperation, though normally it will be necessary to seek aid elsewhere. This allows for recovery of a maximum of 3 HP/night. At the Referee's discretion, higher rates of recovery might be possible with the attention of a skilled physician, though this should come with a significant cost to the character's purse and at some risk to their health.
Those who are quick with numbers will note that if a character has somehow accumulated 3 wounds and not died yet, they will likely incapable of recovering hit points at all until their wounds heal. This isn't a system suitable for a 'save the world before next Tuesday' campaign. Long gaps between adventures, or stables of characters, are going to be essential.
Magical Healing
Healing magics, however administered, knit wounds together quickly and crudely. They may be quite sufficient to mend minor cuts and scrapes, though the crudeness of magic for this purpose means that scarring is almost inevitable.
In game terms, this means that the likes of cure light wounds are able to restore hit points. But they cannot cure Injuries received via rolling on the status table. A spell such as regenerate might do the trick, though at a cost - for serious wounds, healing magic is really quite inadequate to the task.
These spells will merely reattach flesh and bone in the position where they lie. In this case, scarring is inevitable, and worse deformations are possible if (for example) a broken bone is reset while the limb is contorted. The character may, at the referee's discretion, continue to suffer some of the detriments of their injury - for instance, a badly-set broken arm may still be unable to wield a weapon.
In this case, a true cure, if possible, will require the attention of a surgeon or physician with the skill to safely operate on the casualty. This is likely to involve inflicting fresh wounds on the character: breaking a badly-set bone, for example. And that, in turn, means more time out of action, waiting for the wound to heal, and potentially catching some nasty disease.
No, magic might be a useful way to stay alive long enough to reach proper medical care. But that's really all it is. Go visit your doctor, folks.
Sunday 15 September 2024
Gaming Round-Up #1
What's been happening in the Goblinverse since I last wrote. Or at least, wrote like I meant it.
New Acquisitions
- Mazaza Games's Kavango, of which more later.
- Ben Milton's The Waking of Willoughby Hall
- Blackwell Games's For Small Creatures Such As We, Delve, and Rise
- Lost Pages's Beyond the Pale.
- MacGuffin & Company's From Hell's Heart I Stab At Thee
- The Merry Mushmen's Nightmare over Ragged Hollow, Raiding the Obsidian Keep, and The Horrendous Hounds of Hendenburgh, as well as Knock! #2 and #3.
- Twelve Pins Press's The Witch Of The Westmoreland
- Yochai Gal's Cairn 2e Players Guide.
D&D 5th Edition
Old-School Essentials
Tabletop Scotland
Kavango
Thursday 22 August 2024
The Tunnels
Monday 8 July 2024
Move's off, we're staying here.
Substack is a silly place. Back to Blogger, thanks.
Hoping to get back to weekly posts soon. Probably be a monthly cycle, aiming to get at least one of each of the following a month:
- A review of some RPG-relevant media. Maybe a game. Maybe an adventure. Maybe a book or movie.
- A variant rule, or class, or something like that. Probably not playtested. I'm a goblin, not a designer.
- An adventure seed or location.
- An opinion. Internal logical consistency optional.
Saturday 15 June 2024
Monday 6 May 2024
The Wood is Growing - RPG Blog Carnival
The Wood has been growing
Suggested Monsters
- Wild wood-elves, of uncertain loyalty. Perhaps the druid-lich is, or was, one of them?
- Lesser druids, servants of the druid-lich, imbued with strange and dark magics.
- Dryads, unrelenting guardians of the forest.
- Treants, shepherds of the armies of awakened trees which march forth in conquest
- Carnivorous plants and entangling vines, ensnaring and trapping adventurers, funnelling them into the path of the forest's defenders.
- Giant spiders and giant ants, dwellers of the deep forest. And if the insects are this large, how large must their prey be? Or those who prey upon them?
- Strange fungi growing in reefs atop colossal fallen logs.
- Elementals (fire and water), great forces drawn upon by the druid-lich.
- Will-o-th'-wisps, drawing adventurers deeper into the Wood.
- A dragon, which believes all the gold in the Wood is its by right.
- The druid-lich themselves, imbued with immense power to command living things, to control the elements, and to shape themselves as they wish. Their soul is bound to the Wood; so long as even one stem survives, the druid-lich can be restored.
Wednesday 1 May 2024
Robgoblin Reviews - The Monster Overhaul
I was going to write something about how game designers need to go hiking. But, actually, it turns out that a lot have. Fifth Edition's ludicrous statement that an average person can walk 24 miles a day whilst carrying a 150-pound pack is, fortunately, an outlier.
Best of the bunch, IMO? Probably AD&D 1st Edition, at least of the D&D variants. If you're still running 5e, for some reason, the AD&D rules are easy to steal for a house rule.
So instead, here's a review of The Monster Overhaul by Skerples.
Bottom line up front? It's excellent, go buy it now.
It is, in short, everything you need from a monster book. And nothing you don't need. Sure, bits are weird - it's Skerples, after all - but even the weird bits are useful. All the classic monsters are present: goblins, liches, dragons, and the likes. Usually with a unique twist, because nobody needs to see the same old statblocks again.
While the book is systemless, it's adaptable to some types of systems better than others. Any of the monsters could be run straight out of the book, if using Basic or Advanced D&D as your rules. I assume the same is true for GLoG. Fifth Edition, you're going to have to work at it - or take Skerples's advice, and use your existing rulebooks for basic statistics but use abilities from The Monster Overhaul. That's probably fair, and it's good that - despite the obvious, and explicit, old-school leanings - the book makes at least a nod towards what it calls 'games with a higher power level'.
And the abilities are fun as well as being easy to run at the table. No need to wade through spell descriptions for liches or druids, they have unique abilities there on the page. A dragon which breathes swords at you? Yes please. A centaur that's half centipede, half man? No thank you, I'd like to sleep tonight... but the stats are there.
Don't think that the book is just lists of monsters, though. There are random tables aplenty, for all sorts of things. Appearance. Motivation. Unique special powers. What flavour the monster is. Yes, really. Some of them give you interesting powers if you eat them. Most of them just taste horrible and will make you explode - or wish you'd exploded.
Which is fair. I don't understand the fixation some people have for eating monsters.
And then there's the Oatmeal Raisin Cookie Golem. If you're eating that one, you're the monster.
Scattered throughout the book, at least one to a chapter, are generic locations: a Wizard's Tower, a Dragon's Lair, a Shipwreck. They're tropey. That's the point. When you draw up a map, and don't know what all the rooms are for? Go consult the models.
Even the indexing is excellent. There's the usual stuff: alphabetical, by HD, by typical dungeon level (or, in this case, by the type of room on that level). But there's also an 'Index of Monster Utility', for those times you need something to show up and tell the players to please stop eating Oatmeal Raisin Cookie Golems. And a surprisingly useful, and logical, Celestial Index of Benevolent Knowledge.
A few random highlights for me?
The Random Lifecycle Generator, for one. It's in the 'Strange Water' section, for weird sea creatures. But it works equally well for any other type of creature. Because why can't mature wizards have be sessile and reproduce by spore dispersal? What did you think those towers were for, astronomy?
Also, the Referee guidance. How to handle players receiving wishes (grant them, and embrace the chaos!). And how to handle evil in games. I will quote directly, because it's an important line:
You cannot mix the two options. Either Orcs are people, or they aren't.
Seriously, the book is almost worth it just for this section. Page 60, people, go read it.
And finally, because I can't gush about this for too long, the actual physical artifact. This is a fantastic book. It is well laid out. Everything comes readily to hand; where a creature's entry extends over two pages, those pages are facing pages. The tables are clear. Even the inside endpapers are put to work. It feels nice and hefty in my hands, suitable for use - in a pinch - to bludgeon one's foes.
Though that would get blood on it, which would be a shame.
There are a few typos, but nothing major (I can't even remember them at the moment), and certainly don't detract from the text.
I look forward to running a game again so I have an excuse to use some of these monsters. They deserve to make some unwitting PCs lives miserable.
Sunday 21 April 2024
The Four Dragons
Surely everyone has a take on dragons. Here's mine.
Dragons follow their own morality, perhaps not quite so alien as that of the creatures of the Void, but certainly not one that humans might understand. In dealing with dragons, it is perhaps best not to draw their attention. Does it especially matter to a rat whether it is in a laboratory, the hands of a sadistic torturer, or the home of a loving owner? Could it even tell? So it is, when treating with dragons. Even a dragon which appears to be helpful is likely to view you as a useful curiosity... for now.
There are four Great Dragons: the Red, Yellow, Black, and Green. None is associated with Good, or Evil, or Order, or Chaos, in a way that mortals might understand. Lesser dragons may display some combination of these characteristics, and are correspondingly weakened by the dilution of their ancestors' blood.
It is of course the Yellow Dragon that is most feared, though in truth all inspire dread. Some hold that the Black and the Red dragon are enemies, and that the Yellow and White are enemies. Others hold that there is a fifth Great Dragon, incorruptible and unchanging.
Statistics for these in your game system are left to your discretion.
Yellow Dragon
White Dragon
Red Dragon
Black Dragon
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