Skull of God (eruption)

Half a day's travel in every direction from the skull, in sheltered valleys and on high plateaus, stand "the penitents" - closely spaced pillars of soft, dusty stone ranging from two to sixteen feet in height. People avoid them because of their vaguely humanoid shape (and because they make poor construction materials). Small birds, covered in like-colored dust for camouflage, nest among them. No other beasts dare approach.

Halfway up a plateau no one has ever climbed sits a monk, meditating, concerned that the tremors are imperceptibly escalating. The monk will relocate to a ridge only two hours hike from the skull for more direct observation.

The Monk: I had some initial ideas about who this monk should be, but after my talk last time of killing the sun and the moon, it's hard not to go with a monk (hah, that mouseover text) of the sun.

The Birds: I like these birds as the iridescent embers of a failed wish spell, ineffectively pursuing their task in perpetuity, but I also want them to be pieces of the "penitents'" souls so as to imply that a legendary Phoenix is a piece of the Skull's soul.

I'm of two minds about the terrain immediately around the skull. On the one hand, if it's flat and frozen, then the eruption could shatter it and make new hills and a lake where there were none before; on the other hand, having rivers and ridges already there would give the players some choice of where to weather the event. Plus ships would get stranded upriver, bridges would be knocked out downriver, and the river could run backwards for a ways. 

[The eruption is a great image, but it's more of an interruption than an adventure. Haven't worked out the larger scenario to drop it into yet.]


Eruption

The Skull of God

I'll return to dissecting BattleTech math soon, I promise.

A few years back, in our Pathfinder campaign, I added a gargantuan skull to our game world as a loose connective element between plot lines. (The next DM in rotation graciously agreed to place it in his city quest*.) Ideas have continued to accrete to it, taking up too much of my brain, and I need to exorcise them. Exorcism below the cut.

JUST IN TIME FOR VALENTINE'S DAY!
They're all pretty great, but I just cannot stop laughing at the mug.

Six Weeks of Events-

-if the players do nothing to change them. I kinda like the simple D&D seed better than the longer BattleTech ones.

Started with the event tables in the first edition Mercenary's Handbook and MechWarrior RPG. Not really satisfied with the results (my ultimate goal is to enable domain building in a randomly generated war front), but I think they're good enough to hang a short campaign off if I need to.

(Events below the cut.)

So You Want to Be King of Some God-Forsaken Space Rock (Bandit Kings part 4)

A simple kingdom generator that I'd like to eventually flesh out into generating full sci-fi and fantasy campaigns. Posting this draft version early because... well, I'd rather clean it up some (individual reroll buttons, formatting, grammar, better code, proper weight, proper attribution) first, but it's usable as-is. 

[Edit, Feb 14: you can now reroll sections without reloading the whole page. /Edit]

I fully expected Blogspot to make it extra rough to add javascript to a post, but kudos to them for keeping it surprisingly painless. (If your needs are simple, this guy makes it even easier - just put a list into his widget and it spits the code out!)

Random Kingdom below the cut.

Fire Temple

The primary DM in our 2014(?) Pathfinder campaign lifted a whole temple from, I think, one of the Zelda games. Parts of it translated more easily than others.

Nintendo DM: "This next room is packed with tall stacks of big clay pots."
The Party: "Do we detect magic, undead, etc inside the pots?"
Nintendo DM: "..."
Nintendo DM: "Don't you want to break one? It might have rubies!"
The Party: "We squeeze by one at a time, not touching the pots at all."
The Wizard: "Then once we're all through, I turn around and fireball the room to break as many pots as I can."
The Party: "SO MANY GHOSTS NOW why did you do that aglghghl"

Everything I can remember of the temple puzzles below the cut, plus spitballing variations.

Final Rat Quest

As the last GM in our Evil Rat cycle, I tried to tie as many plot lines together as possible. The best part was telling the players "Yeah? It gets worse" every time they recognized something and groaned.

Set Up: giant, oompa-loomp-like rabbits stole a magic water gem from an army of fish people and a magic air gem from somebody else, and have used these gems to secretly fly their 400-ft stone tower into foreign lands. They're enchanting the wellwater in towns near Rosebush to turn the townsfolk into giant vegetables for their larder. Nobody on the ground knows what's going on. The fish people have sent scouts to recover the water gem, but they don't know what's going on either, and mistake one group of furry mammal-people for the other.

Villages are empty, which makes a red herring of the psi-rat from last quest, while the weird unknown monsters and magically giant vegetables suggest treachery from Nim. I had stuff ready for anywhere the players could choose to go, progressing from garbled rumors to physical evidence to direct encounters.

How It Played: the PCs' political rival took off for the monastery the psion was in, so the PCs teleported there ahead of him. Which is fine, I expected that. Then one of the players began talking with the NPCs there as though he had existing backstory with them--he was improvising, but since I didn't know how much was improv and how much was pre-established, I was off-balance. Something I need to get better at.

This being our last quest with these characters and campaign area, I probably should've asked up front if anybody had loose ends they wanted to tie up. Nicodemus, for instance, was arranging with the monks to have his rival assassinated.

I don't think the players felt lost like they did in my city quest, but it's hard to tell. They leaned pretty heavily on Survival (tracking) rolls and I'm not sure if they considered any other way forward.

The 'boss fight' was good and bad. Bad, in that I again underestimated the PCs capabilities; it was trivially easy to stealth around picking the mob of rabbits off one by one, which means the rabbits never summoned the psychedelic dragons which would've been the real boss fight. Good, in that other members of the party were also bypassing the boss fight with fast talk and sabotage.

I knew the quest would most likely end with the PCs sabotaging the tower--they stranded it in the Elemental Plane of Air, and it can't do planar hops on its own--which I ran by the seat of my pants and it played fine. It very much felt seat-of-the-pants to me, though, and I wish I'd worked the mechanisms out more firmly ahead of time.

Rat Quest #4: Psionic Magnet

This was essentially a test of whether we'd ambush a potential threat before trying to parley with it. Short, just two sessions, run by Osbald (the hairless fighter)'s player.


The Prelude

It's about a month after our last quest, and for the last few weeks, Ratfolk have been vanishing from Rosebush and the surrounding villages. Ch'Dar (dragoon raider) and Barnabosa (my sorcerer) discover this on their own, Nichodemus (wizardly patriarch) is recruited by Rosebush's baffled sheriff, and the three of us eventually rope in Skrac (the plague alchemist). All four PCs resist an unidentified psionic effect during the night.

We figure out that nobody in Rosebush knows anything, except (if I recall correctly) one NPC saw one of the missing rats sleepwalking the night they disappeared. I think Nichodemus scries the surrounding villages to see which ones are empty; from that survey, we decide the disappearances are moving in a generally northern direction, but we don't detect an epicenter or (again, if I remember correctly) a particular path.

The only way forward is to wait for a sleepwalker and follow them. Which we do. Casting "Read Mind" yields only white noise and a slow mantra; spoken questions get simple, flavorful-but-unhelpful answers. I may have spent longer trying to wring useful info out of this guy than the rest of the party cared for.

Not sure how I feel about the prelude.

The DM warned us it would be a short/simple quest, so I shouldn't be disappointed that there was only one path leading to the main encounter, or that there was so little to be achieved on that path; I guess it just feels like we spent too much time spinning our wheels. Probably doesn't help that the PCs spent much of the first session operating separately.


The Encounter

The sleepwalker's path leads to a bonfire surrounded by a few score ratfolk, most of them on the cusp of adventuring age. Our party watches stealthily, invisible or flying as our individual talents permit, from beyond the reach of the firelight, as the much older sleepwalker has a joyful reunion with a young child near the edge of the camp.

We determine that the most magical person is near the fire, flanked by two guards similar skill to ourselves. Nichodemus, pretending to be a sleepwalker himself, approaches the sleepwalker and his kid to question them about this camp and the person running it. I forget how we start talking to the Psion--maybe Nichodemus casts dispell on the sleepwalker and his kid, persuading them to leave. I think the Psion interrupts here telepathically, to ask why we're bothering his people, at which point Barnabosa flies into the middle of camp to speak with him directly, and the other PCs join. (Nichodemus' player tries to inject tension back in by traveling spectacularly--but needlessly--in the form of a whirlwind.)

Turns out the Psion is subconsciously overpowering these people's individual wills, but doesn't know it. He thought they all just really liked the idea of following him into the wilderness to found a new civilization. Him and Nichodemus take turns expositing about how Psions like him were used long ago in the wars between Rosebush and Nimh, and how Rosebush hunted them to extinction. This Psion was apparently in the bunch of refugees we rescued last quest, and whatever suppressant Nimh had been using on him took a while to wear off.

Psion: "I hear the 'good' king was killed. Where do you stand on that?"
Barnabosa wordlessly points to the crown on his head, a prize from said king's corpse.

I don't know if the other players keep forgetting that Barnabosa wears the dead king's crown, or if they only pretend to forget; if the latter, then good on them. It's a fun moment to have every few sessions.

Psion: "Part of me wants to go back to Nimh and make them pay for what they did. But I know that would be wrong."
Skrac: "How were you planning to do it? I was going to use a plague."
Barnabosa: "Here's my card; call on us anytime."

I think the DM forgot our party is mostly chaotic or evil. Nichodemus, who I think is neither, suggested that instead of razing Nimh, the Psion go to a monastery in the northern mountains to learn to control his power.

This encounter was pretty fun. Clear dilemma in needing to approach the Psion, but not knowing what will be interpreted as an attack; and when we did get talking to NPCs, getting their cooperation wasn't--at least at first--straightforward.

Third Rat Quest: 'Friendly' Trials in Nimh

TL;DR? Don't procrastinate on evacuations, and make sure to charm the budding villains before they turn on you. Also, as DM, there will come a time when you fail to anticipate the consequences of an NPC's actions.

This quest was DM'd by the guy who plays Teddy and Ch'Dar (and who DM'd the Xanadu quests). He started with an interesting setup: after we killed Nimh's evil king and the key necromancers supporting him, de facto control of that city apparently fell to a coalition of wealthy merchants, one of whom formed a "Commission for the Establishment of Peaceful Relations with Rosebush." That Commission invited a delegation from Rosebush to receive a goodwill gift at a festival in Nimh. News from Nimh is scant (the road from Rosebush to Nimh is neither quick nor safe), so we can't really trust that this invitation is on the up-and-up.

[Now that the jump-breaks work again...]

Second Rat Quest: Mickey Rat's Magical Kingdom

TL;DR? We go to Disney Land, and decide killing Micky Mouse and The Beast is too much trouble. Edit: Or maybe our memories were edited. /Edit

We began in media res with each character having separately pursued petty villains into situations resembling logic puzzles. This was DM'd by Skrac's (the plague alchemist's) player, the same guy who gave us riddles last time.

• Ch'Dar the Dragoon (replacement for Teddy the Bard) was dancing at a village festival when something happened with his pack being stolen and a damsel was calling for help. He ended up trapped in a cell with a cylinder bubbling with amnesiac gas (which made him forget everything whenever he got too close), a candle, an amnesiac damsel, and a straw bed. 
• Osbald the Hairless Fighter had to fill the missing number in the series 16, 06, 68, 88, __, 98. I forget why. He might've been in a crypt with a lock.
• Barnabosa (my sorceror) had his sword stolen, and tracked the thief to a stretch of river with three towns. I could ask the river god a number of yes/no questions to determine which town the thief was in, but one of my NPC companions had comically wasted the questions until I had only one left. 
• Nichodemus, Wizardly Patriarch of the ratfolk, was petitioned by some lesser magic using rat for help in stopping an evil summoning. The summoning requires 5 rows of 4 posts, the evil summoner is creating the posts at a predictable rate, and the ritual can only be sabotaged as the final post is created.

Solutions (and rest of the quest) below the cut.

Pathfinder Transcript: First Rat Quest

[One of the players in our group had been keeping brief transcripts of our sessions. He gave up on it partway into this quest so he could focus more on playing.]

This is the quest I described here, the first in our evil rat cycle.

I was wrong - the other players didn't change characters after this quest, they just made their existing character less evil. (This DM had asked us to make sure our characters weren't so evil or chaotic that he couldn't hook us into the quest by having us repay an important debt.)

• My sorcerer was lawful evil, and stayed so. 
• I think the hairless fighter is within one step of chaotic evil.
• The alchemist was going to be literal-plague-upon-the-land double evil, but he toned it down to regular evil.
• The bard might be chaotic neutral. Doesn't really matter, because he kept accidentally flirting with every single NPC he interacted with, so he decided to roll with it. He did end up changing characters.
• I don't remember the alignment of the samurai who joined us later; the player changed shifts at work and hasn't joined us again.

The DM pulled out some dungeon tileboards for the warehouse fight and followup explorations. It felt like we didn't need them, but I guess I'd have said the same about the prison fight if we'd had them for that too. They had an extra couple bits of greebly terrain (half flight of stairs, gazebo, and so on) that I don't normally think to add, which was nice.

Pathfinder: Evil Rat Cycle

I have a little more to say about Periphery manufacturing rates, but it's taking longer than I expected to sort out.

In the meantime, here's some notes prepared by the first GM in our next Pathfinder cycle. We started out as a party of evil rats in a new campaign region--I think everyone else has moved onto their second, less evil rat by now. I'm the only holdout.

Pathfinder: Everyone Wants the DM's Attention

In our last session, while neutralizing the guards in an underground prison, the party tripped a trap (magic vial around the captain's neck) which drowns the level in water. The sewer grate at one end of the level seals up in stone, and an arcane lock seals the trapdoor in the ceiling at the other end. None of us had dispel or knock, and our rogue didn't think he could pick magic locks.

We're Level 14 Ratfolk this time, & mostly evil

Things got pretty chaotic.

Customization: Veteran Techs & Repair Facilities

You can make a veteran technician (one capable of designing permanent changes to a 'Mech) as a PC, but where do you find them as NPCs? MW1e doesn't give even a 1/36 chance that a MechWarrior would be randomly assigned one, which suggests that a typical regiment would have one or two at most. That's rare enough to be the regiment's chief technician--or working at a repair facility behind the front lines, which may be where the regimental technical pool is headquartered anyway.

It's hard to say how many BattleMech repair facilities exist in 3025. I'd expect them (based on nothing more than my gut, mind you) to be more common than factories, so maybe one in three regimental HQ worlds has a repair site? That would make the factory:repair facility ratio about the same as the repair facility:regiment ratio.

Ray Lederer art from Chaos March, page 65

Skilled Technicians (part 2)

After doing a fair bit of math, it looks like the chances of a BattleTech character getting a regular technician instead of a green one basically amounts to rolling 2d6 against a Target Number (hereafter TN) equal to the pilot's base gunnery plus their base piloting. And MW1e technicians almost always work faster than technicians in later editions- an average "Green" technician uses only 70% of the time listed for a repair, and an average "Regular" technician needs only 30%.

You're never going to roll a veteran (MW1e skill level 6 or 7) technician.

For most skills in MW1e, each level of skill reduces the TN by one. But repair rolls work differently. Each kind of repair has a fixed TN (and requires a set amount of time), which you modify per the charts below.

Comparing how your Learn score modifies repair rolls with how Attributes usually modify skill rolls, the author seems to be using base target number of 6. (When MW2e converted the repair difficulty chart from TNs to TN modifiers, it also assumed a base TN of 6.)

Technicians need to buy two levels of skill to improve their TN by one, which I think is meant to balance their progression against MechWarriors, who need to buy levels for two skills (piloting and gunnery). (MW3e tackled that issue from a different direction, by fragmenting the MechWarrior MOS and Technician MOS into similar numbers of sub-skills.)

Skill Level	Target Number	Total Cost
1	7	free
2	6	10
3	5	30
4	4	60
5	3	110
6	2	190
7	1	310
8	0	470

MW1e gives each character type a free level (the first level) in their core skills, and attributes don't affect a skilled repair roll, so a technician character can be "Green" for free, or "Regular" for only 60 points. "Veteran" skill would require 190 points, just about the maximum a new character would squeeze in. In contrast, MechWarriors spend 35 points on attributes, plus another 40 for "Green" level skills; or another 90 to rate "Regular;" or another 170 to rate "Veteran."

Repair rolls accrue XP more slowly than combat does, however, so technicians advance more slowly during actual play. That may be one reason skilled technicians are less common than skilled MechWarriors.

Techs have shorter careers than MechWarriors, too--maybe ten years vs. twenty-five. A technician attached to a 'Mech unit encounters a wide variety of technology and swaps knowledge with colleagues from other backgrounds; at some point, this experience may become valuable enough for the technician to get lured away into the civilian sector. Workplace injury no doubt plays a role too--although MechWarriors and technicians both face radiation hazards, live ordinance, and the threat of being crushed by multi-ton objects, MechWarriors do so for only minutes at a time from behind a half-ton of armor and strapped into a harness and neckbrace; technicians do so for hours at a time with few of the same protections.


To Be Continued: repair yards, Solaris VII, and the march of technology

The Firefly/Dollhouse (Andromeda) Campaign

Firefly has a ton of obvious parallels to BattleTech. Change the crew from small-time smugglers and scavengers to small-time mercs and scavengers, and you've got a ready framework for a campaign.

Skilled Technicians & Mech Customization

tl;dr? almost half of all field technicians can make short-term modifications (but short-term only). Will talk about player characters, tech progression, repair facilities, Solaris VII, and redoing the skill chart in a following post.

In MW1e:

• A tech with skill 4+ can attempt a temporary repair with improvised parts by adding +3 to the repair difficulty (reroll each time the hit location takes damage). This can "involve grafting an arm or leg from a different 'Mech type onto the afflicted unit."
• A tech with skill 6+ can research 'Mech design. 

In BattleTechnology #4 (aka #202):

• Stuart Bell, the mercenary who created the CGR-SB Challenger by modifying a Charger to use a smaller engine, had a skill of 8 and stupendous amounts of documentation (and recommends at least a skill of 6 for anyone trying to follow his modifications).

How easy is it to find an NPC at these various levels of skill?

BattleTech AU: The Under Sphere

Some years ago I struck on a number of ways to procedurally generate alternate campaign settings from existing BattleTech material. My third and favorite is an underworld where people, 'Mechs, factories etc appear when they die or are destroyed in the Inner Sphere.

An obvious consequence is that characters or regiments who were killed off are still knocking about; or less obviously, in the case of conquerors and assassins, they quickly find themselves outmatched by vengeful victims and get killed again. So the ownership of planets tends to lag by a war or two, and many of the little alliances from the 2300s and 2400s would still be around.

It's my favorite because it lends itself to...

BattleTech AU: Inner Sphere Turned Upside Down

[Edit: found my proper notes on this. /Edit]

A few years ago I struck on a number of ways to procedurally generate an alternate universe from existing BattleTech material. The second, and probably most playable, method was to flip the Clan Invasion to the "south" of the Inner Sphere and also flip all the events and major personalities.

• If I remember the force listings from 20 Year Update rightly, an invasion from the "south" would have to plow through almost exactly the same number of 'Mech regiments as the "northern" invasion did.
• Kristen Marik's girlfriend, Kali Liao, crashes her aerospace fighter into the Ilkhan's flagship!
• Victor forbids Hohiro from dating Katherine!
• Takashi Kurita sends the Genyosha and Ryuken to help defend New Avalon! Then dies of shame!
• Yvonne betrothed to Ragnar Magnusson!
• Word of Focht splits from ComStar and flees into Lyran space!
• Kristen Marik becomes Khan of Clan Jade Falcon!
• Peter Steiner Davion dies, replaced by Draconis double! Lyrans and FRR invade!
• Thomas Marik's wife assassinated! FWL blames Draconis Combine, dissolves Concord of Kapteyn!
• Word of Focht seizes Terra! ComStar moves headquarters into Capellan rump state!
• Isis Marik taken bondsman!
• FRR forms "trinity alliance" with Oberon Confederation and Greater Valkyrate!
• ComStar Civil War erupts in Draconis Combine and Free Worlds League!
• FRR conquers Alshain district!
• The True Hanse Davion, aided by his Enthroned Double and many children, kicks off the Federated Commonwealth Jihad!

I suppose you could roll a d6 to determine where the Clans attack from- North, South, East, West, Terra outward, all directions inward; but invading from the "south" is most similar to the canon Invasion, and probably has the funniest character inversions.

BattleTech AU: Compressed Century

Some years ago I struck on a number of ways to reuse BattleTech's existing material to generate alternate universes with a minimum of brain sweat. Here's the first one:

The Compressed Century

1960s: race to the moon.
1970s: race to the stars.
1984: Terra's governments collapse under the strain of supporting ~150 colonies. All Terran assets are withdrawn or abandoned.
1989-1990: Admiral McKenna consolidates power on Terra, then reconquers a swath of the colonies. He's eventually stopped by ex-Terran Militia who were abandoned in the 1984 withdrawal.
All years: the events described in a given book happen in the year it was published. The 'Mechs published in 1984 are available in 1984, the ones published in 1990 are available in 1990, and so on.

If you've looked into BattleTech for any length of time, you may, on occasion, have heard someone complain that certain aspects of its history are hard to swallow; the "Compressed Century" sidesteps all those issues, is extremely straightforward to implement, and (since you simply take things in the order they were published) completely negates any need to refer to Word of God.

random cargos

Back in February, someone asked what the rough cost per ton would be to ship bulk cargo in BattleTech, and requested suggestions for semi-interesting cargoes to inflict on player characters.

As a quick rule, DropShips and JumpShips (hereafter DS&JS) suggests that a commercial ship makes about 2d6x10% of its usual revenue per mission.

Based on the revenues-per-mission and the cargo capacities listed in FASA's TR:3057, shipping should cost about 105 to 111 C-Bills per ton of cargo. (The per-mission revenues look like they were taken from a chart in DS&JS, which has a more complex system, and I suspect uses a base cost of 100 per ton). That matches up well with MW1e's comments that transportation can cost from 500 C-Bills for a single person (which is about five tons worth of cargo - I wonder if that's where BattleSpace got the mass of steerage quarters?) up to "several thousand" C-Bills to ship a BattleMech. And of course, transport into a combat zone can cost up to 10x higher.

The price should be per jump, which means any DropShip which can find customers for 500 tons of cargo space can make enough to pay for passage on a jump collar.

Here's all the cargoes I came up with:

• a herd of cattle
• whatever Han Solo was hauling in Episode 7
• one deadly and unpredictable midget (the man loves fire)
• enormous hallucinogenic fungi
• industrial sand
• petroleum sludge
• soylent (capellan) green
• quadrotriticale and/or tribbles
• agrimechs or mining mechs
• aquaculture farms
• computer chips and/or fiberoptic components
• fiberoptic cable too large to have any known use
• a stack of enormous polished mirrors
• antique weaponry or wines (for Kurita space)
• copies of the most recent season of Solaris VII bouts
• high art filled with drug stashes
• drugs stashes filled with corporate espionage
• corporate espionage team with several ten-ton cargo containers they refuse to explain or open
• metal nets filled with mysteriously irradiated space debris
• a smaller dropship
• a thruster or engine part for a larger dropship
• precursor metals or components for weapon manufacture
• a rare isotope of water
• a library of Vogon poetry
• refugees
• spare filters for a water filtration plant
• medical and/or disaster relief supplies

The 1987 House Sourcebooks all have sections discussing what they trade with other states, and some of their corporate and planetary profiles mention imports and exports too.