How I World Build: House Rules for Viestinta

So, once again: players respond to context. And some of the most important context is rules. After playing multiple systems for years I have a few ideas of my own as to how to run a game. So here's the stuff I'm porting into Realms of Peril and Hearts of Wulin.

Rules for Both

What Could Go Wrong?

Whenever a player has to roll he has to ask, out loud: "What could go wrong?" Whoever wants to answer does so.  The GM might grab from the ideas as he wishes.

I love this rule from Trophy. Once you get people really into it the table just erupts into silly banter and egging each other on to worse and worse ideas.

Devil’s Bargain

Whenever a player makes a roll, other players (the GM included) may pitch a bad thing that will happen, regardless of success or failure. If the rolling player accepts one of these deals his roll counts as skilled.

Part of the Realms of Peril's appeal is the skilled/unskilled system, which allows skills to have real weight. This keeps the table banter pointed and it keeps the idea of the players feeding into the game engine going, as opposed to finding out later whatever nasty things the GM may have had planned.

Flashbacks

If a player has the money for an item or could have conceivably made a plan off-screen, he may state his plan or purchase the equipment. If the plan is implausible to the GM or he  couldn't have gotten the item in question to where they are in the present the GM may veto.

I. HATE. Shopping. And logistics. In RPGs. It bores me to tears. Just start the adventure and if you need something just tell me you have it and get on with it!

New Races: The Drahskin and the Hserpa

For both games here are a series of talents/moves that the Drahskin and Hserpa characters can pick, in both games.Yes, some of the talents are stolen from the Realms of Peril races, which are otherwise not allowed. Some of these abilities show up very different mechanically in either of the games.

The Drahskin

Fire Breath: May breathe fire on a nearby foe (using Strength in Realms of Peril). The attack deals D12 damage in Realms of Peril, but confers the Winded condition.

Fearless: You are immune to supernatural fear.

Iron Gut: In Realms of Peril you are skilled when resisting poison and alcohol, in Hearts of Wulin you get a free reroll on resisting poison and alcohol.

Vengeance: When hurt while fighting you either deal +1 damage and +1 AR against the perpetrator (Realms of Peril). 

Whenever you lose a Duel against someone who is above your scale, you may become equal to them if you narrate a scene where you hurt those you respect and love in your Entanglements to get even (Hearts of Wulin).

Psych UP!!!!! If you spend a rest singing and reciting the chants of the drahskin everyone gets +1 HP to recovery rolls while resting and camp (Hearts of Wulin).

If you spend an appreciable amount of time singing and reciting the historic chants of the drahskin you use the Comfort and Support move, with a free reroll (Hearts of Wulin).

Greedy: You can smell gold and precious stones.

One Eye Open: You cannot be surprised because you're sleeping.

The Hserpa

Cold Features: You are always trained in deception checks (Realms of Peril). You get a free reroll when using Hearts and Minds if deception is involved (Hearts of Wulin).

Slippery Foe: You are trained in grappling and dagger attacks (Realms of Peril). Unless the situation obviously dictates otherwise you are +1 scale when using grappling and dagger styles.

Hypnotic Movement: You may make a roll to hypnotize all who can see and hear you while singing and dancing.

Parsel-Tongued: You understand all reptiles and can speak to them in their language.

Steel Trap: You cannot be mesmerized, hypnotized, or fooled by illusions.

For the Greater Good: You only need half the rations of a human.

Poison-Fanged: Your teeth now produce a venom that grants someone advantage/reroll on their next roll against the target. 

Realms of Peril 

You're Not Special

Everyone gets the same basic items: basic clothes, backpack, tinderbox, two days of rations, a blanket, two torches, and either a dagger or a staff.

I hate shopping. Here's your crap. You'll find better crap out in the world, I promise. Let's play!

HP as Resource

Spend 1 HP to increase your die result by one; pick up the die and change it to its new result. You may do this as many times as you desire. Yes, you can do this to get a nat 20.

There are very few things Dark Souls the RPG got right, but the one thing it stuck the best was expanding HP into a resource to control dice rolls. The dynamic is an inspired push and pull, where players have to figure out just how far they’re willing to go to get their victory. The issue is that the advancement system quickly neuters the genius, and temp Position is a bad idea, flat out.

Realms of Peril has a fantastic progression system, one which feeds a bit more control to the players as time goes on, alongside the best d20 resolution system I’ve run into. So when you take this system, which really emphasizes degrees of success and failure, and throw in being able to spend HP to affect rolls? You get something special.

Mighty Deeds of Arms

I hate "I roll, do I hit?" I hate it very much. Awhile back I wrote a thoroughly middling piece on replacing the attack roll with skill rolls. I don't think I was wrong to suggest such a thing, but Realms of Peril provides a framework that, tweaked just a bit, I can use to achieve those results. Enter the Mighty Deeds of Arms move!

Whenever you attack a creature and the GM says you may not kill it, ask why. The GM must give his list of considerations. Name how you will address one of those considerations, and roll:

16-20: You cancel one of the considerations the GM had and deal your weapon damage.

11-15: You cancel one of the considerations of the GM.

10-: The creature gets a free hit in, with the GM auto-hitting you on an attack.

Yes, if you reduce the monster to 0 HP it just dies, but now it's a lot harder to just batter it to death, and if you're not careful you could get killed yourself, which is how it should be. Keep in mind that players can spend HP to change their natural roll, so this isn't as harsh as it looks.

Deadly Strikes 

This is the normal kill shot move. It's still plenty dangerous, requiring you care in setting it up, but once you're able to just line up kill shots, you should be good! Keep in mind that players can spend HP to change their natural roll, so this isn't as harsh as it looks.

Whenever you attack a creature and the GM says you may kill it, outright, roll:

16-20: It's dead, and you heal 1d4 HP!

11-15: It's dead! Congrats!

10-: You both roll for damage.

Hearts of Wulin 

Screw Bell Curves!

All moves use 1d12 instead not 2d6.

If there is one thing I dislike about all PBTA, it's the insistence on using 2d6. It's a personal taste thing, and I get there's gonna be somebody going "But the bell curve is important!" Yeah, for putting me to sleep. Let's actually get some risk in, shall we?

A Wellspring of Emotion

Whenever a player fails a roll he may reroll his d12, provided he allows the GM to use a soft move. He may do this as many times as he wishes, with the GM getting a soft move every time.

Let the emotion flow!

How I World-Build: Viestinta's Conceptualization

So I decided to write how I world-build, and began the last week with a short post on the planet that started it all, Heranyt. As I wrote, I realized that the full notebook of stuff I have on Heranyt... well... I don't have any of how I got there, not anymore. Heranyt appeared in a fever dream of gameplay ideas and philosophy and mythology and religion and, well.... I didn't really write any of it down. So this time I'm writing the process down and hopefully others will find it mildly entertaining, at the very least.

So here's the deal: Viestinta is meant to house two different games: Realms of Peril and Hearts of Wulin, which is Chinese melodrama. Sound totally contradictory? It didn't to me, so I figured I'd try and figure out why that idea was so compelling to me.

Realms of Peril is an OSR/PBTA merge that's meant to be an open table game. I've been slowly coming around to the concept, after multiple years of trying to run things with a larger than three player crowd... only to find that the campaigns just can't seem to hold together. Schedules get way too weird. In fact I find non-open table games to be so hard to run that I specifically designed Crescendo to be a resilient against schedules as humanly possible, but that's principally by having the group be incredibly small. If I want to play with a larger group, I'm SOL. Welp, as it turns out Realms of Peril has been tinkered with to get everything not open table to go away. It's got a really good basic resolution system, and you can get a character to the table within minutes.

Hearts of Wulin is a PBTA about wuxia fiction. It's meant to be have proud and restrained badass warriors trying to not get their hearts broken and failing. The game, like most storygames, is meant to be played out in shorter spurts, short enough to where people can safely commit for two to four sessions and then move on. A lot of PBTAs try to solve the logistical issues by making sure there's less logistics, just period. I like wuxia enough to get over my usual aversion to PBTA, and found that the game is actually very good and I can't wait to get it back to the table.

On the one hand you have a drop-in, drop-out game and a short wuxia story generator. That doesn't explain it at all, does it? 

Nope, I don't think so either.

So I decided to write down "the story" of the setting, the thing that I'll base everything else on. Maybe there's an answer beyond "I just think it's neat" somewhere in there.

I know I wanted to keep yuan-ti and dragonborn, so I renamed them to hserpa and drahskin.

The clannish drahskin and devious hserpa, after wiping out all other civilizations except for humans (which they enslaved), turned their millenia old magical and martial prowess on each other. Given their strengths it surprised no one that the war was rather even, although the collateral damage could be truly awful at times.

And then one day the khen-zai artifacts were discovered.

Deep beneath the earth both sides found great store houses of the ancient race: medicines, weapons, and other technologies that could have advanced their respective civilizations hundreds of years in a matter of hours. The Emperor of Fire and the Emperor of Scales met in secret to discuss what they had found. It wasn't a long conversation: they sealed their discoveries away again, and had those who found and those who sealed the discoveries killed. They then agreed to assign guards over these sites, with strict orders that all who were to be found on these "sacred lands" would be publicly executed in the cruelest ways imaginable. They figured that the upheaveal would destroy both their peoples utterly.

And then one day the khen-zai returned.

The fabled elder race, the ones who had become totally ethereal beings, returned with their puppet bodies, to reclaim what had been theirs. Their living chitinous warships pounded the planet with an orbital bombardment that the peoples of Viestinta will never forget, nevermind the planet itself. All the people who had died to protect the planet's way of life... all was in vain.

But then the unthinkable happened: the drahskin Amgala, hserpa An, and the human Gi broke into one of the vaults and, using Gi to pilot, flew a mech into the heart of the mothership, and killed every single of the weak-bodied khen-zai. They returned, triumphant heroes. The planet had triumphed.

Nope.

The khen-zai had actually captured Amgala, An, and Gi, and tested a new technology on them: menticide, the art of brainwashing. They forced the three to believe they had won and sent them back. The khen-zai, while they were originally annoyed that their engineered toys had survived in their absence, they were intrigued by humanity able to use their tech. They had run into it before with other humans, but figured it was a "local" genetic anomaly. They were wrong. So they decided to spare the planet, and see what would happen with this unexpected turn of events. They retired to the ethereal plane to enjoy their debauched cruelties, and waited. They were in no hurry.

The Emperors' long-standing deceptions were quickly discovered and punished. Humanity was freed from slavery, and a world-wide republic was formed, with the technology discovered in the vaults being used to build quickly. Those who were on board were benefited. Those who were not were ignored, ostracized, or killed if the first two methods didn't work out. 

Those who weren't in the sprouting cities languished in small shanty towns, holding onto a way of life that, with the constant allure of the cities calling the young away, became insular, toxic, and more than a bit racist. But they see the error of abandoning the old ways. Or at least they think they do. The worst thing is not death or discomfort, but losing the meaning that comes only with death and discomfort. We'll see how long that lasts.

So that's a good place to stop. There's a lot of this that jumps out at me, and why two games are contained within it. On the one hand you have the newly formed Parliament, with all the hope of the good and the apathy of the evil intermingling, and it being hard to tell the difference at times. A new era has dawned! It is up to those in power to make sure that new dawn is worthwhile. There's all the idealism, honor, folly, and passion of such an enterprise, contrasted against the bloody and benighted past that may not be so past, but an ignored present situation that may kill everyone. And, to me, that speaks Hearts of Wulin.

On the other hand all you have to do is learn about real-world cases of mothers in the Appalachian Mountains giving their children Mountain Dew (which dissolves their teeth) instead of water, because there is no infrastructure to produce clean water there, to see the downsides of such a venture. A good drive through Steubenville, OH, a decade or so ago, would have shown a place dying because it wasn't a part of the global initiative.  And in these places one must survive however one can, whatever that looks like. Even if that means breaking into tombs and stealing tech and robbing the globalists at every opportunity to live... all the while espousing values that are not practical to hold anymore, because the world no longer works according to blood and sweat, but rationalization and passion. This desperation screams out Realms of Peril to me.

So the setting, unlike Heranyt or Rakkaus, now serves two functions: playing an open table sword and sorcery game, with people dropping in and dropping out, and short but intense personal stories that may or may not involve excessive mounts of idealism and doomed romance. Those things don't seem so separate to me anymore. And in fact, at least for me, it may not work out any other way.

Viestinta is a world in the midst of bifurcation. On the one hand you have the prosperous elites who no longer really know they're elites, having to deal with the consequences of globalization and the deadening effect that has one one's soul. On the other you have those left behind, who are trying to scratch out a mean existence in a world that has forgotten them.. and the horrors that live so close to them. It is a world of rapidly growing magitech and skyscrapes with squalor not even one hundred miles away... all watched over by the curious and otherwise-bored khen-zai.

That's a chilling set up.

We'll start focusing on importing real world stuff next time.!