Wednesday 28 November 2018

Random Quest/Life Goal Leveling System


You start at level 0, with 1 random “life goal”, once you achieve that life goal you hit level 1.

Level 1: Now you receive a new random life goal plus a random complication for that life goal.Once you get that done you hit level 2.
Level 2: Now you receive 2 x random life goals.
Level 3: 2 x life goals, 1 x life goal complication
Level 4: 2 x life goals, 2 x life goal complications
Level 5: 3 x life goal, 2 x life goal complications
Level 6: 3 x life goals, 3 x life goal complications.

Etc.

Castle World 4 by ChrisCold: https://www.deviantart.com/chriscold/art/Castleworld-4-652693979


Some rules/ideas:
  • Helping some one else with their life goal removes one complication from your own life goals.
  • If a party member wants to take some one else’s life goal when it is randomly generated, they can if the party member it was generated for agrees. That party member just needs to clear their other life goals first.


Some plans:

Some notes on the tables:
  • Having class specific life goal advancement may be cool, but these are meant to be broad and probably lean towards a ne’er’do’well PC.
  • I attempted at making these broad while still having some guidance/structure to them. I would encourage different interpretations of the results of both tables.  

 D100 Random Life Goals:

  1. Stop someone near death from dying.
  2. Provide someone important with shelter.
  3. Guide someone important through a dangerous area.
  4. Receive a benediction or sacrament from a religious organisation.
  5. Cease the expansion of the forces of chaos or disrupt the control of the forces of order.
  6. Fully explore or recover something of value from somewhere dark or deep.
  7. Consult a venerable wise one for guidance.  
  8. Bring light to a place that was once in total darkness.
  9. Create a concoction of a healing or calming nature.   
  10. Explore the inner depths of your own psyche.  
  11. Secure a sample of a particularly exotic or magical creature.
  12. Make yourself be forgotten about by a group or someone important.
  13. Commune with the dead.  
  14. Gain ownership of a magical garment or armour.
  15. Acquire a servant or slave from the spirit realm.  
  16. Gain ownership of an at least semi magical charm or piece of jewellery.  
  17. Acquire a shipment of Dust.
  18. Be taught a new fighting style.
  19. Conduct an impressively profitable business deal.
  20. Acquire a beast used for transportation.  
  21. Complete a ritual or test conducted by a religious organisation.
  22. Train an animal.
  23. Drink from a magic pool.
  24. Deploy strategically a dangerous slime or jelly.
  25. Harvest or acquire a crop of magical herbs.
  26. Close or travel through a magical portal.
  27. Construct a disguise and fool an important person or group with it.
  28. Learn a new language.
  29. Lose a limb and have it replaced.
  30. Hold a public feast or festival.
  31. Securely bank next level x 1000 coins.
  32. Steal something valuable from an important person or group.
  33. Acquire a new piece of valuable jewelry (Worth next level x 1000 coins).
  34. Learn an esoteric secret from a venerable occultist.
  35. Acquire a treasure of learning from a library or similar structure.
  36. Defeat a demon within your  own mind or of your own making.  
  37. Complete a sacrificial ritual to sate some hungry deity.
  38. Have internal workings thoroughly examined by an appropriate  professional.
  39. Acquire a custom made set of armour.
  40. Have copy of yourself created.
  41. Have a major surgery conducted on self (most likely for augmentation)
  42. Receive a major blessing from a religious organisation.
  43. Retrieve something valuable from the sewers, or from deeper beneath the streets.
  44. Sign a life changing contract.
  45. Collect an overdue debt.
  46. Take a blood oath or an oath of similar consequence.
  47. Have a bounty placed on your head or claim a bounty on someone else.
  48. Employ a powerful retinue charged with protecting your life.
  49. Destroy all evidence of something horrible or horrific (possibly that you did).
  50. Drive apart two important  groups or individuals who used to be inseparable.
  51. Create an impressive public spectacle.
  52. Acquire a pack of powerful beasts.
  53. Discover a site of ancient power and conduct a ritual there.
  54. Mutate yourself or an important individual or group.
  55. Consult with a powerful shaman and become immersed within one of their rituals.
  56. Fully explore or retrieve something of value from a garden of delights.
  57. Cause reconciliation between two important individuals or groups.
  58. Cause a riot or a similar large public unrest.
  59. Advise a powerful individual or group on an important plan and see that plan through to fruition.
  60. Acquire a powerful monster or mutant for your own personal deployment.
  61. Deploy an elemental or similar being to strategic effect.
  62. Fully explore or find something of value in a ruin or similar structure.
  63. Cause a noticeable and publicly alarming fire or explosion.
  64. Repurpose what was once an abandoned, lost, disused or corrupted location
  65. Fully explore or find something of particular value in a place foul and filled with refuse and waste.
  66. Acquire a mechanical or otherwise non organic form of transportation.
  67. Follow a map to find something of particular value.
  68. Fulfill a prophecy, personal or public.
  69. Negotiate or otherwise broker an important deal between two individuals or groups.
  70. Somehow be granted a glimpse into the future.
  71. Slay or capture a particularly dangerous monster.
  72. Fully explore, get to the top of, or recover something of value from a tower.
  73. Establish a secure base of operations that you are the rightful owner of.
  74. Discover and document a previously unknown or not well understood creature or being.
  75. Grow something to a size much larger than is normal.
  76. Blow half your next level x 1000 coins on carousing.
  77. Have an outfit or uniform custom made for yourself.
  78. Pick a lock to gain access to a particularly valuable, dangerous or secure location
  79. Be captured or imprisoned and then escape.
  80. Have your next level amount of weeks rest and relaxation  in a location of absolute luxury and abundance.
  81. Recover and claim a treasure from beneath the ground.
  82. Gain access to a vault or site of mass storage and acquire something valuable from there.
  83. Fully explore a place forgotten or abandoned beneath the ground, or reclaim something of value from there.
  84. Either forge a relationship with, or deploy to achieve a particular goal, insects.
  85. Gain a sample or shipment of a valuable, if not magical, ore or crystal.
  86. Discover a secret long forgotten by history.
  87. Acquire an item that can cast magic spells.
  88. Discover an  entry, portal or gate to the lower depths.
  89. Explore to the bottom of a cave, hole or pit.
  90. Find something valuable that has been lost by an important person or group.
  91. Poison an  important individual or group.
  92. Have a custom weapon made for you.
  93. Successfully curse an individual of importance.
  94. Steal a relic, or a similarly important item of worship.
  95. Disrupt, destroy or otherwise disturb an important religious ritual.
  96. Assassinate an important individual.
  97. Disease an important individual or group.
  98. Fully explore or recover a treasure from a tomb, crypt or mausoleum.
  99. Survive or be cured of a life threatening disease.
  100. Have one of your bones be broken

D100 Complications for Life Goals:

  1. Give everything of yourself.
  2. Ensure nothing or noone is injured.
  3. Receive nothing in return.
  4. Help everyone encountered.  
  5. Do it  more than once.  
  6. Lead to the pleasure of many.
  7. Achieve it mostly in a non physical manner.  
  8. Conduct yourself in a perfect and flawless manner.
  9. Stop everything else of importance.
  10. Mediate intently.  
  11. Convince someone else to do it for you.
  12. Create an appropriate fake or copy of the goal .
  13. Impress others to follow you.  
  14. Conduct yourself in utter secrecy.
  15. Cause a person or place to become haunted.  
  16. Please a deity.  
  17. Be completely reckless.
  18. Be affected by weird weather.
  19. Travel to several locations.
  20. Upset an important individual or group.  
  21. Not let anyone know what you are doing.
  22. Make part of yourself smaller.
  23. Risk disease or sickness.
  24. Be dangerously honest.
  25. Not use any magic.
  26. Create something new, novel and fresh.
  27. Revive something thought dead.
  28. Help something grow.
  29. Protect something delicate.
  30. Fix something broken.
  31. Make a profit.
  32. Have your deeds recorded.
  33. Mostly use your mind rather than muscle.
  34. Test a theory or hypothesis.
  35. Acquire a treasure or two.
  36. Spill some blood or break some bones.
  37. Interact with something incredibly old.
  38. See the internal organs or working of someone or something.
  39. Reverse the normal order of things.
  40. Start something that had been stopped.
  41. Settle a grudge or vendetta.
  42. Repurpose something used for something else.
  43. Have your actions judged.
  44. Break more than one rule.
  45. Flood something.
  46. Clean a foul or corrupted person or place.
  47. Risk enslavement, imprisonment or addiction.
  48. Ensure work is undone over time.
  49. Not break a set of very strict rules.
  50. Have a corrupting influence on a person or group.
  51. Traverse somewhere wild.
  52. Remove an infestation.
  53. Act wild and savage.
  54. Consume dangerously or something dangerous.
  55. Employ the services of animals.
  56. Remain calm and peaceful.
  57. Be a perfect pacifist.
  58. Cause constant conflict
  59. Ensure the same act can’t be repeated by anyone else.
  60. Never be the same again.
  61. Cause something to burn or set fire.
  62. Experience an extreme temperature or otherwise dangerous atmosphere.
  63. Cause something to break or fall apart.
  64. Bring ruin and woe.
  65. Bring something to the brink of explosion.
  66. Overcomplicate something to the extreme.
  67. Attract the attention of outsiders.
  68. Not stop moving.
  69. Make an important prediction that comes true.
  70. Unintentionally involve bystanders in your schemes.
  71. Somehow make yourself or a part of yourself bigger.
  72. Terrify something or someone.
  73. Interact with something gigantic.
  74. Use specialised tools.
  75. Interact with monsters.
  76. Become intoxicated.
  77. Seduce or be seduced.
  78. Free something or something.
  79. Create dangerous cracks in something big.
  80. Causes tensions between important people or groups.
  81. Go beneath the earth.
  82. Travel into the air.
  83. Deploy a decoy, or conduct a similar type of trick.  
  84. Show impressive durability or rigidity.
  85. Plant something that will grow.
  86. Do something completely outside of your normal skill set.
  87. Be incredibly greedy.
  88. Become more knowledgeable about history.
  89. Interact with time.
  90. Fill a gap, hole or missing piece.
  91. Cause or inflict pain.
  92. Make someone hate you.
  93. Suffer greatly.
  94. Desecrate something holy.
  95. Act ritualistically.
  96. Steal something.
  97. Get back something you lost or was taken from you.
  98. Kill someone or something.
  99. Transgress.
  100. Be a paragon of something.


Thursday 8 November 2018

Vultureman Class (The God Faced Lands)

I'm working on a project with Christopher Mennell: The God Faced Lands.  It has a sort of fantasy mad max in space vibe going on. Warbands of mongrel aliens stampeding about on bizarre and mutated mounts, fighting their way across a plain of skin ripped straight from the face of god. 

Here's an overview of the setting from Chris himself: 

"The Dumontiluvian War rages across the vast, pockmarked skinlands of the God Faced valley of He-who-Hungers, with the roving hordes battling to drive their enemies into the massive, screaming gorge whose walls rise up and crest into a fang-rimmed chasm known as the End of the World.".

I've been working away at a bunch of different crazy classes that Chris has come up with. Each comes with a table of possible warband names and a set of mind, body and soul mutations. Here's the Vultureman. The art is by Guillaume Jentey.

Guillaume Jentey.

From the recordings of Mindsage Chemen’ell: Clearly at some time the hawkbeasts were free roaming. The gangly vulturemen, In all their skeksi-like glory, have imprisoned them, quite possibly in heavy and burdensome shackles making flight difficult but possible, but hardly graceful. And the vulturemen could fly themselves, but they are lazy and hate to use their wings.”

Cruel iron beak and talons, both are often rusted and red stained. Rotted pale skin, jowley, hanging and loose. Flesh marbled with blue veins, visible through molting black feathers. Nigh useless haggard wings terminate in gnarled fists. Eyes of loathing scowl out with disgust at the universe, crowning a hobbled and gangly form.

d12 Clan Names:

  1. The Saturnian Wing.
  2. Crypt Buzzards.
  3. The Cracked Talon.
  4. Hade’s Feathers.
  5. Hackled Claw Brood.
  6. The Lord’s Murder.
  7. The Titan Flock.
  8. Fleet Odium.
  9. The Cthonic Volt.
  10. Foul Orcus Committee.
  11. The Feast of Kettle Maws.
  12. Bearers of The Great Wake.

Mind Mutation, d6
Body Mutation, d6
Soul Mutation, d6
  1. Other beings with wings are an offensive most vile, must remove all pairs they see.
  2. All wings must be under their suzerainship, bound and controlled by them alone.
  3. Must pilgrimage to the highest place in the land, that shall be their home.
  4. The largest carcass must be found, to hold the feast of all feasts. Then there will be peace.
  5. Constantly cackling hysterically. Vile, cruel laughter that intensifies when blood is drawn.  
  6. Must teach all other beings to fly, against their will. Often by throwing them over sheer cliffs.
  1. Staglike horns erupt like rude bone lightning from the base of the beak. Protrudes menacingly and  used for gouging.
  2. Two ever bickering and beak snapping at one other heads.
  3. Scaled and bereft of feathers, taking on the visage of a winged reptile.
  4. Hyper coloured and psychedelic plumage. Swirling, sicking and too bright.  
  5. d6 small black birds perch and nest along the shoulder flesh, a symbiotic relationship. They spy and send messages in exchange for protection
  6. Ancient and dead, half skeletal. The consumption of too many carcasses has extended the lives of these vulturemen beyond death.  
  1. Green, irradiated globe eyes. Refuse to acknowledge the sentience of all beings without this trait. The Green Orb is their holy icon.  
  2. Ever smoking braziers of charred flesh. A cloud of black smoke cloaks and follows them.
  3. A caged pet demon is their godlet, it always gets the choicest carcass cuts. It grows in size and anger.
  4. Their holy work is the creation of an enormous bone effigy. It is dragged everywhere with the clan and ever growing.
  5. Weep and wail in memory of the dead grove: A mythic mound of rotting flesh surrounded by the neverending perches of dead branches.  
  6. Never speak, only caw and shriek. A sash of dark green is tied about all of them. The air shimmers red above and behind them.

Class Details:
Iron talon (d8 when mounted, d6 x 2 on foot) and iron beak (d6), +1 To Hit every 2nd level, Gangly form and distracting feathers (AC 13), d6 HP per level.
Vulturemen can, begrudgingly, fly short distances by testing CON at Disadvantage. Add level to CON when testing for flight.
Level 2: Spending an hour feasting on the corpse of beings recently slain grants a bonus of 1 to all rolls for the next day.
Level 4: Wing feathers calcify and harden, now glinting and metallic. Gains a d6 bonus to AC and loses half that amount of DEX.
Level 6:Half level times a day can spend a round glowering with menace at a target. Test CHA, if successful target is cursed for d6 hours (rolls everything with Disadvantage).