Shapeshifting Mystics in the Dawnlands

So there are shape-changing cults in the Dawnlands, and I model them using Mysticism from Mythras. They're most commonly found amongst the plains nomads - the Jarushim and Kadiz - where they are cross-clan associations of hunters and herders. Eagle, bear and coyote are the most common male shapechanging lodges, and crane, snow leopard and deer being the most common women's lodges.

Here's the talent list for the Coyote Runners, one of the more common male shapechanging lodges:

Augment (Athletics)
Augment (Endurance)
Augment (Survival)
Augment (Track)
Enhance Healing Rate
Enhance Movement Rate
Formidable Natural Weapons
Shapeshift (Coyote)

So this necessitated creating a Shapeshift trait. I'm using some of the information drawn from the shapeshifting spirits in the Animism chapter of Mythras (pg. 152).

In the Dawnlands, the mystic must be wearing a cloak made from the skin, feathers, fur, scales, etc. of whatever the creature they want to shapeshift into is, and they must hunt the creature and make the cloak themselves. They also can learn a "Beastform" combat style (common to all forms) that gives proficiency with Unarmed and Natural Weapons, and comes with Unarmed Prowess as a combat trait.

Shapeshifting is associated with a specific animal form - it's always Shapeshift (Coyote) or Shapeshift (Bear), etc., allowing access only to that animal form, rather than shapeshifting into any animal whatsoever. The mystic gains the average physical characteristics, armour points, hit points, creature abilities, and locomotion types of the animal when they shapechange, but keeps their own skills.

Unlike other traits, Shapeshift has variable intensity (similar to augmentations), costing 1 Magic Point per point of intensity. The mystic must maintain the trait with a minimum intensity equal to the intensity of a shapeshifting spirit able to transform them into that animal, as per page 152.

e.g. Transforming into a giant lizard requires a minimum intensity of 2, since a giant lizard is SIZ 19, and one requires an intensity 2 shapeshifting to transform into creatures between SIZ 13 and 21.

However, each level of intensity beyond the minimum required that the shapeshifting mystic invokes allows them to increase the SIZ of the animal form by 3. The mystic's new form gains the benefits (increase hit points, damage modifer, etc.) of the increased SIZ.

e.g. If our lizard-transforming mystic were to maintain their shapeshift trait at intensity 4, the extra two levels of intensity could be spent to increase the SIZ of the giant lizard to 25 (3 per additional level of intensity beyond the minimum).

Wounds and fatigue are carried over between forms.

Shapeshifting's meant to be a capstone ability for mystics who are progressing through one of these totemic cults, so I'm pretty good with it being a strong trait.

The Big Dawnlands Reference Documents

I'm sure after a decade of me talking about the Dawnlands in bits and pieces, people are eager to actually get a true overview of the setting. As part of my new Dawnlands campaign, I wrote up a 25-page reference document for my players. I also wrote this 8-page campaign pitch for my new PCs which specifically focuses on one sept of the Kadiz.

The idea wasn't that they would read the either document in full in one sitting, but rather that they could refer to them as needed, and dip into them to gin up ideas for their characters.  It also helped my organize my thoughts and present a "conceptually dense" version of the setting that was laid out as something other than a series of vignettes, disorganised reflections, and occasional partial introductions.

I cranked these out in about four days of writing after my workday, so it's not my finest and most evocative work (rereading them, I notice the usual mishmash of sub-typos present in that sort of work), but I hope people find it interesting.

Learning New Combat Style Traits

More Mythras-posting is coming as I refresh my memory of the rules and prep for the upcoming Dawnlands campaign. This time around, I was reflecting on this post I made at the end of January talking about combat style traits.

I think its reasoning is still solid, but now that I'm looking at teaching three new players the Mythras system, I want something a bit simpler. I want to pace the accumulation of exceptional situations to the players' growing familiarity with the system. I also want them to be able to look rules up in the book independently of me, which should reduce the amount of time I spend explaining, rationalising, and recording house rules, and empower them to answer rules questions themselves.

Therefore, I think the easiest rules change that resolves my frustrations with the limited number of combat style traits without loading on complexity for the PCs is to allow them to spend Experience Rolls to add new traits onto their existing styles. I'm going to set the cost to acquire a new combat style trait as Five (5) Experience Rolls.

This makes acquiring a new combat style trait as difficult and time-consuming as learning a new spell or talent in the advanced magical traditions, which I think is about right. It should also keep the number of combat style traits people acquire more limited than the other obvious option, which would be for them to cost 2 Experience Rolls (the same as opening a new Professional Skill or learning a Folk Magic spell).

So, to summarise:

New Trait for Existing Combat Style = 5 Experience Rolls

Mounted Combat Damage in Mythras

"A mounted warrior may, when charging with a braced weapon, substitute his own Damage Modifier for that of his mount." (Page 104 of Mythras)

Superficially, this seems to say that you can use your own Damage Modifier instead of your mount's when you charge while mounted. I think this is confusingly worded, but actually means you can substitute your mount's Damage Modifier for your own. Even if it's not what this passage means, it is what should be the rule.

My reasoning:

The average human has a Damage Modifier of +0 and when charging, this goes up to +1d2.

The average horse has a Damage Modifier of +1d12, and this goes up to +(1d8+1d6) when charging.

These are not aberrations in the rules, but rather almost all mounts are stronger than their possible riders, and because of the doubled bonus to Damage Modifier increases that quadrupeds receive when charging, they will almost always have a higher Damage Modifier than their riders.

The mounted warrior normally makes the attack when the combined unit charges, not the mount.

I can see no situation in which someone charging would want to substitute their Damage Modifier for their mount's, and for the situation to even make sense, the mount itself would have to be making the attack on the charge, which is a nonstandard situation itself.

Therefore, it seems sensible to assume that the preposition "for" is being used in a slightly odd way here, and what the rule is asserting is that a rider can use their mount's Damage Modifier when they charge (which makes charges that hit super powerful).

As a further piece of evidence, I ran a one-shot for Lawrence Whitaker once, and someone got charged by a mounted foe, and we used the interpretation of the rule that I'm elaborating here at that time without complaint.

I'm doing a big review of Mythras combat in preparation for a Dawnlands campaign I'm starting up with my D&D 3.5 crew come mid-May. I'm spreading the good word, getting some experienced roleplayers but newcomers to Mythras to try it out and see how they like it compared to D&D 3.5.

This line struck me because I thought I knew Mythras combat reasonably well, and yet suddenly I thought that I had misunderstood a situation that I've adjudicated many times. I'm posting this at least partly so that no one else undergoes the confusion I did.

(Also, happy Easter)

Overland Travel in Mythras

So I've been running overland travel in Mythras since back when it was still Mongoose Runequest II. I used to use a convoluted hexcrawling system that I ran off a cheat sheet I put together, but these days I've come around to running most overland travel in Mythras as pointcrawls.

In the Dawnlands, I use a songline system for pointcrawling, partially to show some love for the much-neglected Sing skill, but the system I'm going to lay out here is probably more useful to people using generic settings without songlines. The system I'm outlining is really a variation on the system for extended tasks laid out in this (free to download) expansion of the Mythras task rules, which I think is good enough that if there's ever a second edition of Mythras should become part of the core rules.

Basically, I think you should set up Mythras overland travel as an extended task where each extended task covers travelling from landmark to landmark. One PC should be appointed the expedition leader who makes the rolls (which are team rolls, effectively), but other PCs should be able to assist the expedition leader using teamwork to augment their skill rolls (Conveniently, I wrote some teamwork rules for Mythras a while ago).

The base difficulty of the rolls should be based on how easy to traverse and straightforward the path is. A road leading from one landmark to another should set base difficulty of easy while navigating trackless wastes from the peak of one massive sand dune to the peak of another sounds like herculean difficulty.

I also think that the extended task system for overland travel works best with a slight variation. Instead or rolling the same skill four times and determining the outcome based on that, breaking it up into four different skill rolls will make other PCs feel like they are meaningfully contributing, and encourage them to mix-up who is the expedition leader from time to time, instead of always relying on the one guy with Navigate 90% to lead them everywhere.

In particular, when no better ideas suggest themselves, I would recommend Navigate, Bureaucracy, Endurance, and Survival. Streetwise, Track, Seamanship, Boating, Ride, Stealth, or others might be appropriate as well depending on circumstances. Basically, think of the four biggest obstacles to overcome, find the appropriate skill for dealing with those obstacles, and make those the skills that are checked. The good thing about doing this is that whenever the PCs fail a roll, you'll know exactly what obstacle is slowing their progress down, instead of having to make stuff up off the cuff. Are they failing their Bureaucracy checks? Clearly, their camp is disorganised, and packing things away, getting everyone ready to go, making sure all the chores have been done properly, etc. takes forever.

The final result of the test tells you the pace of travel - 150% means you travel 150% your normal speed (The base for travel per page 69 of Mythras is 3 km/h for a normal marching pace or 5 km/h while riding horses). 25% means it takes you four times as long to get there. Survival rules in case you run out of food or encounter bad weather are on page 82.

I roll for random encounters on each leg (landmark to landmark) of the journey using an encounter grid, and I use my reaction roll system for weather for each leg as well (weather effects are on pg. 85 of Mythras). If these are too D&D-esque for you, in the past I have used a die drop map and you might prefer something like that to determine random encounters and terrain the PCs see around them.

I haven't playtested this system yet, but it's cobbled together out of bits that I have playtested previously, and I'm curious to see it at work in the Dawnlands campaign I hope to run later this year. If you give it a try before then, let me know how it goes for you.

Combat Style Traits in Mythras

If it's never come up, I'm not a huge fan of the default combat style traits in Mythras, since the effect of most of them is to make you ignore a cap on your combat style in some situation. e.g. When you're riding a horse in combat, your Ride skill "caps" (determines the maximum percentile value of) your combat style - unless you have Mounted Combat, in which case you get to use your full combat style.

Rules-as-written, a combat style trait only grants one benefit, and you can only have one trait per combat style, but this seems to be something honoured in its breach in fan-made material (Shout out to the Notes on Pavis guy for running a great blog). My assumption is that this represents running up against the limits of how this works in actual play, since it's something I've run into as well.

To recap the situation with combat styles in Mythras: The average Mythras character has 1 or 2 combat styles to start, and perhaps learns 3-4 total over the course of a long career. These combat styles form the primary skills characters use in combat for both attack and defense, and thus are a priority for most characters to boost. Those 1-2 additional combat styles will primarily be driven by either the traits of a new combat style, or the need to shift the weapons they use (or some combination of these two).

With the typical split between combat and non-combat characters in the parties I've seen (about half of all characters being combat-focused, meaning they get two styles), assume a starting party has about 1.5 combat styles per party member, except these aren't unique styles - most characters have a single cultural style common to all of members of that culture, and most Mythras parties are from a common cultural background. So only the 0.5 extra combat styles per PC are actually unusual or unique ones. In a party of four characters of shared background, that means you'll have one common style, and two unusual ones, each accessed by only a single PC.

How many combat styles there are in a particular setting varies widely, but typically you have between 3-6 per culture, depending a lot on military specialisations available within that culture. Most Mythras settings only use a small subset of the giant list of weapons included in the Mythras corebook - between 6-10 is typical, with 3-4 weapons per combat style, and in practice, you see a lot of repetition of the best weapons in different styles (Hello shortspear my old friend).

What this means in practice is that a lot of the odder combat style traits tend not to appear - they're either not attached to the main 3-6 options available, or they're just not present among the 3 different combat styles in a 4-person party (if you run with six PCs, you'll end up with 4 different combat styles on average). Also, some of the traits are far better than others because the combat situations they apply to are far more common, and these traits tend to be the most common, repeating across combat styles.

One of the outcomes of all of this is that combat style traits are not actually a very good method to ensure PC combat styles aren't capped. I'd rather just not have the caps in the first place, since they tend to take exciting action combats where the PCs are doing things like chasing people around on horses or climbing the rigging of a ship or storming a castle's walls and turn them into frustrating whiff-fests. Realism be damned, this is a game where you can play a cat-man wizard, and that cat-man wizard should be able to stab a guy while swinging from the rafters.

In place of the current combat style traits then, I propose that caps should be abolished in most cases, and combat style traits should not be the mechanism by which they are nullified. Instead, combat traits should focus on empowering characters with options or intensifying their combat advantages.

Here are some proposed new combat style traits. Each one has several abilities it grants to someone trained in a combat style, and most a couple of regular combat style traits cobbled together.

Berserker
Allows the use of the Flurry special effect so long as the character is wielding two weapons and the extra attack uses the second weapon.
If a character's damage modifier is two steps higher than an opponent's, their weapon size is considered one step larger for the purposes of bypassing parries.
Any psychological resistance rolls by an opponent are one step harder.

Duelist
May use Evade to dodge attacks in melee combat without going prone.
Allows use of the Flurry special effect so long as all extra attacks are made with a single weapon.
Can use the Change Range action to automatically withdraw from combat without a roll.

Lancer
Making a mounted charge with this style does not incur the one-step penalty to hit.
A character may spend action points to defend against attacks targeting their mount.
A character's damage modifier counts as one step higher for the purposes of calculating knockback.

Line Infantry
If three or more characters with this trait are in close order with one another, then:
Any enemy who engages them has their action points reduced by one.
They automatically get the benefits of using the Brace action against Knockback, Leap Attacks and Bash attacks.
Each character can ward an additional location using a shield or secondary weapon.

Marksman
A character may make ranged attacks while running (but not sprinting).
When using a ranged weapon, the hit location of a successful attack may be shifted to an adjacent location.
If three characters with the Marksman trait attack a single target or group of targets in close order, the targets are automatically Pinned Down (per the special effect).

Mounted Archer
A character may make ranged attacks while their mount is running (but not galloping).
When using a ranged weapon, the hit location of a successful attack may be shifted to an adjacent location.
A character can evade attacks without going prone while mounted, using their Ride skill in place of Evade.

Self-Defense
Can use the Change Range action to automatically withdraw from combat without a roll.
A character increase the size of your weapon by one step while parrying so long as they don't attack that round.
Outmaneuver rolls are one step easier.

Stalker
Can use the Kill Silently special effect.
When using a ranged weapon, the hit location of a successful attack may be shifted to an adjacent location.
Opponent's rolls to outmaneuver an attacker using a combat style with Stalker are one step harder.

Wrestler
Can use Grip as a defensive special effect
Opponent's rolls to evade, break free of, or resist immobilisation in a grapple are one step harder.
Unarmed blocks and parries count as "medium" sized.

Because the average character has only 1-2 combat styles, adding a couple of extra conditions or abilities onto each combat style trait doesn't increase the complexity very much for any given player. Monsters and most opponents don't even have combat style traits, so while the occasional custom-built major villain will have a touch more complexity due to this, most opponents won't be any harder to run for the referee.

You can make combat style traits that require 3 or more characters to get their full benefits available as cultural styles, so that most of the party will end up with them.

If you don't want to get rid of caps, then I would suggest at the very least combining a no-cap combat style trait with at least one other combat style trait that does something interesting.

I haven't play-tested these yet, but I'm hoping to later this year when I start up a Dawnlands campaign.

Songlines in the Dawnlands

I've written about songlines before, back when I was using Openquest to run the Dawnlands, but as I convert it over to Mythras, it's time for new rules.

A brief recap of songlines for those new to the Dawnlands:

Outside of the cities of Durona and Kaddish, there are no maps of the Dawnlands, and even in the cities, most maps are cadastral surveys used to sort out parcels of land rather than tools of navigation. While people are loosely familiar with the concept of maps, the low levels of literacy in the hinterlands would make them near useless anyhow.

Instead, people use songlines to get around. These are songs that encode the necessary directions for someone to get from one place mentioned in the song to another place mentioned in the song by decoding the rhythm, tempo, mode, scansion and actual semantic content of the lyrics.

Most songlines are vast historical epics tracing the journeys of heroes and peoples across the Dawnlands, criss-crossing and entangling one another to create both a tight mesh of navigational information as well as a comprehensive history. Songlines do not necessarily trace the shortest distance between two points it may connect, and part of the expertise and lore of using them well is to understand when and how to switch from one songline to another to cut a journey short. The elders of a clan typically serve as a storehouse of knowledge about the songlines, and clans trade unfamiliar or new songlines with one another as prized goods.

What this means is that there are two skills in Mythras that allow one to find one's way from place to place. The first is the Sing skill, and the second is the Navigate skill. Navigate covers overland travel off the songlines (which for the purposes of the skill's description on pg. 48 of Mythras are "unusual journeys" "in completely unfamiliar territory"). It works exactly as described in the Mythras corebook, and is mainly used by people who learn it as a professional skill through their careers.

When PCs are following songlines, which count as the "normal" way to travel in the Dawnlands, they use Sing to find their way (Sing is a standard skill available to all characters).

To determine the length of a journey, either pick a number between 50 and 1000, or roll 1d1000. This is the percentage the navigator has to accumulate in an extended task roll using their Sing skill in order to successfully guide the party to where it wants to go.

Each day of travel, they roll their Sing skill. On a critical success they accumulate 50%, on a standard success 25%, on a failure 0%, and on a fumble, -25%. When they have accumulated a percentage roll equal to or higher than the roll of 1d1000, they have arrived at their destination. If for any reason they drop below 0 due to fumbles, they are lost. It's very hard to get lost while using songlines, but they also channel travellers along courses that may not be the most direct route, and other travellers, bandits, etc. are much more likely to be following songlines themselves rather than roaming around randomly.

PCs may aid one another or augment their Sing skills with relevant passions, skills, etc. If they can collect an especially useful or direct songline, they can shift the base difficulty of the Sing rolls down to Easy (rolling 1.5x their skill).

For every 100% accumulated, the PCs will come across a landmark or area of interest that serves to reorient them with a new verse (that is, verses typically cover 2-4 days worth of travel).

PCs can also use the rules for crafting equipment on pgs. 65-67 of the Mythras corebook for crafting songlines, using the Sing skill for task rolls. This requires them to have travelled the course involved, and can either involve merging together two or more songlines, or being part of a group where someone successfully uses the Navigate skill to find the way.

Literacy Specialties in Mythras

I want to apply the specialities concept to the Literacy skill in the Dawnlands (my Mythras iron-age central Asian-inflected setting), but without simply having it be a repeat of the specialities of the Language skill. A simple repeat of the same specialities would just turn Literacy into a skill tax imposed on PCs. I also think it's pretty boring.

I also think we need to avoid the obvious extension of it, which is to separate the ability to interpret and decipher writing in a particular form into speech. I initially made this error and had five different alphabets, syllabaries, abugidas and pictograms, which Literacy would let you turn into something you then needed a Language skill to make sense of. I think this would increase referee cognitive load in planning and preparation, without adding much to the game.

You, my well-educated audience, may have already encountered the idea of "literacies" in contemporary educational theory. This is often used in the context of explaining various digital media competencies, but I think elements of this can be projected backwards in time, and laterally, for our purpose, to make the Literacy skill interesting and fun. To tip my hand, I want to expand the Literacy to cover a variety of hermeneutic practices, of which reading plain text on a page is only one example. Literacy now becomes the skill of interpreting symbol sets other than speech. I do want to be careful not to step too far into the domains of other skills and replacing the need for Customs, Culture, Lore or Art, but I think there are a few pieces that could fall under Literacy or one of these skills that we ought to bring under the Literacy skill.

NB: Along with allowing you to decipher the types of texts below, I think that in many cases Literacy should also cover producing examples of them.

Here's a brief list of ideas of interpretive practices that might be important to someone in a fantastical pseudo-ancient or pseudo-medieval setting.

1) Reading out loud
2) Codes and ciphers
3) Dreams, omens, oracles
4) Technical, mathematical, and scientific jargon and diagrams
5) Financial and legal records and accounts
6) Reading silently
7) Magical writing (or this may be a subset of #4)
8) Maps & calendars

A brief justification for each of these as ideas:

Reading out loud and reading silently are separate developments historically, as weird as it may seem to a modern person trained in doing both from a relatively young age. It seems like in the Western world, reading silently emerges shortly after monasticism, as part of the contemplative practices of monks. Until that point, so far as we can tell, people mostly read things aloud, even when they were reading for themselves. Breaking them up as specialties is a minor but fun idea with the effect of estranging the setting in a subtle way for players.

Codes and ciphers represents the ability to encipher and decipher texts written in codes and ciphers. It's handy and it doesn't cleanly fall under any other skill unless you make up a Lore speciality covering it. If you have "thieves guilds" or the like, you might want to make up a separate speciality for their specific codes, but I think the narrower this speciality, the less useful it is.

Dreams, omens, and oracles are in the representations we have from the ancient world almost always vague, riddle-like things that require expert interpretation, and dramatically much can turn on the ambiguous possibilities of an oracle or omen. I think this should also cover things like astrological charts, hexagrams from the I Ching, and the markings on the intestines of sheep. I think this is, like literacy in codes and ciphers, rapidly becomes less important or useful the more narrow it is (i.e. just interpreting dreams or just interpreting sheep intestines or just looking at chickens pecking grain out of a grid).

If you've ever tried to read an old mathematical or technical manuscript, you probably understand why this is distinct from one's familiarity with the scientific concept under discussion, or one's ability to read the plain text of the manuscript. For that matter, if you've ever seen two people quibble over what a blueprint means, you've probably had the same experience. Diagrams can be surprisingly ambiguous, especially if it's stylised so that particular design choices are intended to cover specific information rather than serve as a picture. It's also less relevant in an ancient or medieval setting, but I think reading graphs probably falls at least partly under this speciality as well. Whether you want to make a "high-falutin' writin'" speciality that combines this with the no doubt extremely similar problems of interpreting magical writings is your preference. I would separate them into two specialities mainly as a matter of personal taste.

Financial records and accounts remain a specialised form of literacy with entire certified professions dedicated to them (accountants, stockbrokers, etc.). Understanding them is distinct from mathematical knowledge per se (which I think is properly one or more Lore specialities). Historically, this type of writing precedes the others - records of debts and receipts are the oldest writing we can find evidence of. Legal records and documents, which are often tax records of some sort historically, are similarly obtuse and impenetrable even if one has a rough and ready sense of what the actual law applying to a situation is. You may want to roll these under the Commerce and Bureaucracy skill, respectively. Mythras doesn't have a forgery skill, and allowing this as a speciality allows you to make a forger, which I think is something PCs want to do often enough that it's worth having a special skill covering.

Maps and calendars are really two different types of literacy in real life (interpreting abstract spatial representations and abstract temporal relations), and understanding them were specialised skills historically. Thucydides found calendars in contemporary Athens so confusing that he simply invented his own method of tracking time in his historical work. How to calculate the exact date of Easter is a perennial dispute amongst the Christian sects even now. I'm not sure either kind of literacy is quite useful enough to be worth a speciality on its own, but together they're fairly handy, especially since having them as a Literacy speciality should allow a PC to produce them.

NB: I considering reading maps quite different than the Navigation skill, since the later covers going to places, and maps do all sorts of things other than guide you somewhere (here's a neat one that's useless for navigation).

Some of these might reasonably be Lore specialities instead of Literacy specialities. But, I think one thing to bear in mind if one is using the specialities system is that getting more than 5 specialities in a particular skill is a challenge because of the difficulty of acquiring skill ratings above 100%. So loading some potential Lore capabilities onto Literacy means that characters don't have to sacrifice one of their Lore specialities to get ahold of them, and can instead raise their Literacy skill (which is often surprisingly low).

Other than the ones listed above, I'm open to suggestions for other Literacy specialities.

A Few Notes on Combat Styles in Mythras

Combat styles in the Mythras family are left with relatively undefined scopes in the rules as written. Individual referees are left to figure out how many combat styles their setting will have; how many (and which) weapons any given combat style encompasses; and which the special trait(s) each style will have. Having now designed about twenty different combat styles for several different settings with very different feels, I'd like to share some of my impressions.

As an initial qualification, I'd mention that Luther Arkwright, the one published science fiction setting, breaks from a bunch of what I'm saying below, though it arrives as a similar set of conclusions about how combat styles should work nonetheless. I'm also leaving aside "Monster Styles" since they can be created off the cuff without consequence.

The Observations

1) PCs will typically have between one and two combat styles right out the game, and the slow increase in skills in Mythras means that most will either stick with their original styles or pick up at most a third. I've never seen a PC with four or more combat styles, never even heard any one discuss the possibility as a realistic option for their character's development.

2) In my experience, the typical Mythras party has PCs all come from a shared cultural background, so you'll find that most of them share the same primary combat style. But, every other character in a typical party will have a career that allows them to access a second combat style (or in the case of Mythras Without Tears, will sacrifice a professional skill choice to gain access to a second combat style). Most of these PCs will want their second choice to be unique withing the party (unless one of the combat styles is particularly good). So when you're trying to judge how many combat styles you need for the party alone, use that as your baseline assumption.

3) Though they may not realise it at the start, most PCs will eventually want one of their two combat styles to have a fairly good ranged weapon (usually the short spear), at least one to let them use a shield, and at least one with the Mounted Combat trait (even if they don't need to invoke it all that often). The more they can layer these into a single style, the more desirable or necessary that style becomes.

NB: If you're a PC and you notice your enemies are using a combat style that has a trait other than Mounted Combat, try to get your enemies to jump onto their steeds (perhaps by fleeing on your own with them in hot pursuit) and then remind your referee about capping their combat styles with their Ride skill. You won't be popular, but you will be nigh-invulnerable to most stock enemies.

4) If there's a trait that rewards a bunch of PCs using the same combat style in tandem with one another (i.e. Shield Wall, or Formation Fighting) either everyone in the party will take it as their primary combat style or else it'll fail to reach the critical threshold of three PCs and be ignored / snubbed. If you're using careers, it's extremely unlikely that three PCs will get access to, and choose, the same secondary combat style through their careers, so you have to make it available at the Culture stage. In parties with multiple cultural backgrounds, don't expect people to take these combat styles.

5) The Mythras core has just under 60 weapons in it (counting shields), but most settings use a much smaller subset - I believe there's about 13 (counting shields) in Mythic Britain, and around 25 in Shores of Korantia's combat styles (with most of the variety in a small number styles that are less common). In the Dawnlands, I went for 12 - ten actual weapons, and two kinds of shields (I am considering adding another three of four, but haven't made up my mind).

A certain amount of doubling up on weapons between styles is good (since it allows a character not to have to carry a golf bag of swords), but you don't want too much overlap since that lowers people's willingness to take it as a second style without a further incentive. And that incentive might actually convince them to take the second style and ignore the first anyhow.

In practice, I find the ideal is about three weapons, especially if you're designing a lot of styles that count shields as one of those three. That lets PCs who take two combat styles use four offensive weapons, and at least one kind of shield, possibly two, without penalty. Three weapons also helps keep the style focused - with four weapons you tend to start asking yourself "What would the most common secondary sidearm for this person be?" a lot.

I also have a tendency to create a single combat style in a campaign that allows you to choose any two weapons you want. You gain in freedom of choice by losing that extra slot. This helps accommodate the folks who really, really, really want to wield a particular weapon that wouldn't otherwise be available.

6) There's a temptation that's indulged a lot to create near-identical combat styles differentiated by culture (usually with a slightly different sidearm or . Instead, I recommend picking the common types of soldier in your campaign setting, creating a combat style for each one, and then just reusing them across cultures to save time.

The Conclusions

Combat styles tend to work best when they have about three weapons per style. You should assume that at least every other character in a typical party is going to want a unique combat style. If you want a style that synergises when multiple characters have it, make it a cultural style rather than a specialty style you get access to through a career. Mounted Combat is an inobviously excellent and useful trait, so having it in a couple of styles is a good idea.

(Re)Introducing the Dawnlands

Over the nearly ten years (since 2008!) that I've been designing and running the Dawnlands, a lot has changed. I thought I'd take the opportunity to reintroduce the setting to new readers of my blog. It's shifted from a D&D 4e setting to an Openquest setting to one run by Mythras. And for folks who've been following it since the old RPGsite thread, a lot of names have changed, and many of the original D&Disms have been stripped out or altered significantly. Rather than make people dig through five year old blog posts, here's a brief introduction to where the Dawnlands is nowadays.

The Dawnlands is a psychedelic mythic fantasy setting built atop a layer of social realism and very loosely inspired by the historical khaganates of Western and Central Asia. Literary inspirations include Milorad Pavic's Dictionary of the Khazars; the Secret History of the Mongols; Constantine Porphyrogenitus' De Administrando Imperio; Chabon's Gentlemen of the Road; Calvino's Invisible Cities; Borges' short stories and many others. The archetypal Dawnlands story is something like getting cursed for bringing a crappy gift to your cousin's wedding, and having to go take magic mushrooms so your ancestors can guide you to the lost grave of a cannibal-wizard guarded by creatures made of his solidified spite so you can steal the crown he's buried with and bring it back as a better wedding gift to get uncursed.

The Dawnlands is an area about the size of Oregon (about 250,000 square kilometres) with six main cultural groups and two cities, with an overall population of about 2.5 million sentient beings.

The main species are:

Habiru - Canine-headed men broken up into racial groups based on what type of dog. The Kartakalli coming from the north are Habiru (with white-furred wolf heads), but a jackal-headed and a grey-furred wolf type are both indigenous to the Dawnlands. Originally, these were hobgoblins, orcs, and gnolls.

Humanity - There are three main racial groups, the Kads, the Qurun, and the Weykulni. Neighbouring groups present as visitors include the Salt Men, the Men of Rhuap, the Goguriz, and the Men of the Three Towns. In the original version of the Dawnlands, Kads were humans, the Qurun were elves, and the Weykulni were orcs.

Urum - Scaly-skinned humanoids with weird eyes about a metre and a half high. There are several subvarieties, with the most important being the Nethom, a distinct phenotype who rule the southern city-state of Durona. Most Urum live in Durona, in the Orthocracy of Kaddish, or amongst the Forest Dreamers. In the original Dawnlands, the Urum were halflings, goblins, kobolds and the like. Nethom were originally dwarves.

Voidmen - A refugee population from the southern Kingdom of Falling Stars that rules alongside the Nethom in Durona. Dark-skinned with eyes that appear to be empty fields dotted with stars. They live much longer than anyone else (centuries).

The main cultural groups are:

Duronans (pop. 500,000) - A rich society of highly stratified castes with Nethom and Voidmen at the top as zamindars and thakars, and a vast ryot and slave population underneath them. They are busy establishing colonies throughout the south-west Dawnlands, and trying to stave off a slave rebellion. They worship those of their ancestors who have attained divinity and live amongst the stars. Durona was originally called "Dwer Tor" in earlier materials.

Forest Dreamers (pop. 200,000) - A recently-formed theocratic confederation located in the great western rainforest known as the "Forest of Dreams". They worship the Hivehome, the great insect-spirits of the dream world. They are trying to drive out the Duronan slavers. They are split into tribal factions aligned with different temples of the same cult.

Kartakalli (pop. 50,000) - Monotheistic Habiru invaders from the north who worship the god of winter. They toppled the Kingdom of Weykuln and are picking over its bones. The cruelest and most fanatical members of a much more sophisticated society. In the original Dawnlands these guys didn't have a name, so I eventually got around to giving them one.

Orthocracy of Kaddish (pop. 1.2 million) - Once High Kaddish, the paramount state of the Dawnlands, the Orthocracy is now merely its largest mess. An incredible font of magic, technology, culture, but with no real government, it staggers from crisis to crisis somehow managing to survive. Even the vilest gods are acceptable to worship in lawless Kaddish. It possesses the unique magic of "soulforging", which allows it to create new species and transform existing ones.

The Plains Nomads (pop. 150,000) - The king-makers of the Dawnlands, who roam the highland plains of the Dawnlands. There are two main confederations or khanates, each of which despises the others. The Hill People are the descendants of a ruined civilisation known as the Cities of Night, conquered by High Kaddish. The Kadiz were once the ruling landowners of High Kaddish until they were driven out in a revolution. Both groups worship the Storm Bulls and the Wolves of the Earth, ancient gods of the plains.

The Weykulni (pop. 400,000) - Once a proud state controlling the northern mountain passes into the Dawnlands. Now, a series of squabbling nobles slowly being picked off by the Kartakalli as they dispute who should be king. Peasants are fleeing the valley-refuges and great castles of the Weykulni magnates as their armies march against one another. The priesthood of the God of Gates are being hunted down by Kartakalli assassins. Much like the Kartakalli, these folks originally didn't have names, but I was referring to them enough via circumlocutions that I eventually just gave them one.

More to come some other time.

Mythras Without Tears II

I've been fiddling and experimenting with the character generation system for Mythras since writing this post, and here's what I've decided to use for skills in Dawnlands games. To me, this combines the ideal amount of customisation with speed and ease. I'm also including some passion house rules that make them easier to calculate (and slightly lower on average) than the stock rules.

Starting PCs pick seven standard skills, seven professional skills, and one combat style. They can swap out one professional skill choice to get a second combat style choice. They get 350 points, and can spend up to 45 points on any skill, adding 1% per point spent. They also add +40% to their Native Tongue and Customs skills.

Starting PCs also pick three passions. The first passion has an initial rating of POWx5, the second has an initial rating of POWx4, and the third's initial rating is POWx3. Skill points may also be spent increasing passions as if they were skills. PCs may also swap out one professional skill choice for a fourth passion, which has an initial rating of POWx5.

Art, Culture, Craft, Languages, Literacy, Lore, and Musicianship each have a number of specialties. Customs is the equivalent of Culture for a character's home culture, and Native Tongue is the equivalent of Languages for a character's home culture, but Customs and Native Tongue are distinguished by not having specialties. A character with these skills has a number of specialties equal to 1/5th the skill. Characters test their specialties at full. Outside their specialties, any tests with the skill are at least one grade harder.

One side effect of these passion rules is that most spellcasters are going to start off a little obsessive. I consider this a feature, not a bug.

Mythras Without Tears

Creating characters in Mythras is reasonably complicated, especially since one must go through three separate steps to spend skill points, each of which has different restrictions. I won't be using the rules below rules for character generation for the pre-generated characters I'm putting together for the scenario I'll be running at LozCon, but I may use them for Runequest / Mythras character generation in the next campaign I run.

Instead of selecting a culture, career, and spending bonus points, you select seven standard skills, seven professional skills and up to two combat styles (not counting Unarmed). You must spend at least five skill points improving each of the fourteen to sixteen skills, and may spend up to 45 points improving them. This produces characters who are almost identical to regular Mythras characters but without all the substeps. Theoretically, characters could end up knowing two kinds of advanced magic (sorcery and theism, say, or even just two schools of sorcery), which I'm personally fine with. If you're not, simply impose a limit on how many kinds of magic a single person may know.

The restrictions of the substeps theoretically force you to spend points to ensure your character has a basic competency at things their culture values, but in practice, I don't think dumping five skill points into standard skills you've already got a basic ranking in accomplishes that. What it does do is force you waste about 20% or so of the points you got from your cultural background on skills you don't want more than a basic ranking in anyhow. At least by choosing the standard skills, you'll be able to make sure they're all ones that match your character concept.

Personally, I think I'd all up to +50 to be added, to encourage a slightly higher degree of specialisation, but keep the overall size of the pool (350 points) identical.

Some people no doubt find the culture and career process helpful for shaping their character concepts, and I recommend people who do so use the method in the rules as written, but I often find them at least as much a hindrance to realising a character concept as a help personally.

Language and Lore Skills House Rules for Mythras

I've played a lot of  Mythras and Runequest 6 over the years (and Mongoose Runequest 2 and Legend - it's all the same game under different labels, and I've been playing it off and on since 2010). In the current version of the rules, it's difficult for characters to either have a lot of lore skills or to know a lot of languages. It's even more difficult to play a character who both knows a lot of languages and has a lot of scholarly knowledge because of the way character creation works, where you end up having limited slots for professional skills.

As someone who likes to play scholars in settings with lots of languages, I wanted to make this a bit less demanding on the fairly limited pool of skill points starting characters have. So I use the following rules for each skill:

There's no longer separate Lore:Whatever or Language: Whatever skills, except for Native Tongue. Instead, there's just Lore, Native Tongue, and Language. Lore and Language are both professional skills, and swap in during character creation whenever the originals do. Characters pick a number of specialties equal to 1/20th of their skill rating in the relevant skill (round down). For Lore these are areas of study and knowledge, for Language they're languages you know (other than your native language, where in Mythras you receive an automatic 40% bonus to make its role as a skill-capping skill that sets a limit for other skills easier to bear). For the purposes of skill rolls and caps, you use the single rating of the skill whenever you're dealing with an area of specialty.

e.g You have a Lore of 60% so you choose three areas of specialty. For your badass Kadiz gnostic, these are Dreams, Geomancy and Spirits. Whenever you need to make a Lore role involving those subjects, or use your Lore skill as an augment, you base it off the 60%.

This means starting characters will typically have 0 to 3 specialties in each skill, depending on their level of specialisation. A character made using the stock rules could have a similar range, but would have to spend three times the skill points to get this level, and would probably have to choose either language or lore skills instead of being able to do both. The net effect of this will be to make multicultural parties easier, and to allow characters to be knowledgeable without sacrificing all of their skills points to be so.

On a related note, Mythras and Runequest 6 don't actually explain what to do when someone attempts to test a professional skill they lack (if it does do so, it's not mentioned in the index under the entry for "Professional Skills", and it's not in either the skills chapter or the character creation section. The training rules imply you can't test without having opened access the skill, since it costs 3 experience rolls to "get a basic grounding" which I interpret as being able to get access at the level of the sum of the two relevant stats (i.e. it costs 3 experience rolls to develop Literacy at Int x 2 if you don't start with it as a skill).

With that in mind, I tend to favour not allowing rolls relevant to professional skills a character lacks. Even if one did allow them at severe penalties (i.e. one adapted the rules in the Combat section for using weapons outside those allowed by the Combat Styles you're trained in so as to apply to other skills), since you're only using a low base to begin with, you're almost never going to succeed.

On a second related note, I've debated making a similar change as I did for Language and Lore for combat styles, but I think this is a more radical change and needs to be tested and played around with before I implement it, since access to combat styles is much more strictly controlled than access to lore and language skills (starting characters still typically start with 1-3 combat styles, as this system would also be likely to produce).

I'm going to be running the Dawnlands at LozCon this summer (April 12-April 14, 2017) and these will be the rules I'm using for it. I just generated eight pregen characters in a row for a one-shot scenario I'll be running, one that involves a multicultural party, so I think it'll be a good test.

Live Settings

I like to do a review and update of the various settings I'm running, planning, designing, etc. This is partially for my benefit, partially for the sake of those interested in them.

Fantasy:

Moragne (Mongoose Runequest 2)- Dead (since 2009!) and cannibalised for the Old Lands. I took a few of the story-ideas and setting elements from this, but left the Anglo-Norman trappings behind. I ran one single-shot adventure and one campaign in this, and felt I'd done the bulk of what I wanted. The was the final campaign of the group I ran this for (my old university group) and it disintegrated as we moved onto other phases of life (only one other guy and I still play RPGs).

Emern (Swords and Wizardry) - Dead since 2012, when I ran the last campaign in it. The group I ran this for has basically dispersed as well. There are elements of this that have made it into most other D&D campaigns I've run or planned since, but I don't think I'm coming back to it any time soon.

The Wolf Sea (Openquest)- Dead and cannibalised for the Old Lands. This was basically a map and some notes, so I mostly reused names and a few setting elements. The work I did on this was as much about learning how to use Hexographer to create child maps properly as anything else.

The Dawnlands (Openquest / Mythras) - Still alive, but I haven't run a campaign in it since 2013! I'm converting it over from Openquest to Mythras and revamping the setting extensively to remove some of the D&D 4th edition-isms from it and replace them with other weird fantasy and Central Asian elements. I'm working on turning this into a setting book, in fact, which is why a lot of what I'm writing for it isn't turning up on my blog right now. I think I'm going to aim to run another campaign towards the back half of 2017, when a rough draft of the new and revised material will require some playtesting.

Necrocarcerus (Swords and Wizardry / Into the Depths) - Still kicking. I was running a campaign of this as recently as the end of 2015 / start of 2016, and ran an adventure - Ribshack of the Demon Prince - in summer 2016 using Into the Odd. I took a break from running to free up the time slot to play in Courtney Campbell's Perdition game. In hindsight, what was slowing me down was writing a huge house-rules document that quickly spiraled out of control without adding a ton of fun to the game. I wrote Into the Depths as a chassis to run Necrocarcerus and the Old Lands, and killed the giant house-rules document. Over the holidays, I also read the Doomed City by the Strugatskys, which is surprisingly Necrocarceran, though I'd never heard of it prior to seeing it in the book store. Reading it got me a bit fired up to work on the setting again in a public-facing way. I'm going to go back to writing fun, fluffy content for it. Expect more Necrocarcerus content for the blog, but I don't think I'll start working on a book for it until 2018.

The Old Lands (Into the Depths) - Living and currently under development. Basically a garbage-can setting in the good sense. Necrocarcerus is a high-concept setting in a lot of ways, and running an adventure that assumes you're dealing with a medieval village full of living people doesn't quite sit well within it. So I created the Old Lands to let me run modules, pre-written adventures, megadungeons, etc., and to recycle the best ideas from Moragne, Emern and the Wolf Sea into one setting. It's an early-modern setting with weird and dark fantasy elements. Expect to see it pop up from time to time, but probably as actual play reports. I'm hoping to start a campaign set in it sometime in February and run it for at least the first half of 2017 (hopefully longer).

Science Fiction:

The Tellian Sector (Stars Without Number) - My 40K / Stars Without Number mash-up is effectively dead. I haven't worked on it in years (though I still get a few hits a day of people looking it up). I worked on it originally because I really disliked the original Dark Heresy rules, and when I looked at 2nd edition, I liked them even less. I think I've also had my fill of fantasy translated to space settings, and want to run some (slightly) harder science fiction. If anyone wants to finish this, the only things it really needs to be a complete conversion are a weapon and gear write-up, and a consistent way of converting Spike Phases and their effects into Void Shields (plus, I guess, Space Marine rules if one must).

Unnamed Transhumanist Post-Apocalyptic Star Trek Thing (Openquest - River of Heaven? / Stars Without Number?) - I've been reading Alastair Reynolds' Revelation Space books, Peter Watts' Blindsight stuff, Transhumanity's Fate (the FATE conversion for Eclipse Phase), Feersum Endjinn and a bunch of other semi-hard transhuman sci-fi stuff of that ilk. I've been having an itch to run a science fiction game for some time that would focus on a small group of post-human post-scarcity explorers sent out to recover and enrich the beliefs and ideas of the devastated star systems around them. That sounds boring, but the idea would be to delve into ancient space hulks to recover encrypted data libraries with the cultural production of entire clusters, to encourage and assist the masses of crapsack worlds to overthrow their feudal masters by smuggling them cornucopia machines through cyberpunk hijinks, and beat back interstellar imperialism through cool space battles. I'm still thinking this one through, and it'll probably be 2018 before it's ready to go.

Openquest House Rule Retrospective

Back in early 2012, when I was gearing up for an Openquest campaign set in the Dawnlands, I came up with a bunch of house rules for Openquest. I thought it would be useful to go through them and pick which ones I wanted to keep. I thought I'd do a bit of retrospective on these, having playtested them and run a successful campaign using them.

My weapon and armour creation system for Openquest, with the rules for calculating ENC. In hindsight, I should use these to pregenerate a weapon and armour list rather than hoping to do it on the fly. It also needs something to determine when a weapon gets the flex, set or range qualities, and I need to rewrite the set weapon rules so they're more relevant and useful. This ruleset has a tendency to generate swords as dealing 1d6 damage, rather than the typical 1d8. Specifically, "longer than a metre" should become "longer than 60cm" (two feet, in moon units).

My teamwork rules. These work well. My experience was that the most confusing part was collaboration, where PCs are rolling different skills. The difficulty wasn't mechanical, it came from trying to explain how their alternate skill was relevant. There were just a number of times the PCs wanted to do it and couldn't figure out how to have it make sense in the world. I don't think this is a problem with the rules though, the PCs just needed to get into the right head-space.

My new major wound table worked well. I learnt that one piece of information I should keep at hand about PCs (along with their Evade, Persistence and Resilience scores) was their major wound threshold.

My overland travel tracker is straightforward, and was the beginning of the line of thought that brought me to my procedure for exploring the wilderness in Swords and Wizardry. It could probably use an update and freshening based on the intervening years of development. For people who don't want the complexity, it's a simple way to determine how far the PCs move in a day, and what they run into.

My mounted combat rules work well and don't really need to be changed. They're a straightforward improvement over the baseline Openquest rules (fewer numbers change, but more options open up). I hate the "Riding is your skill cap when riding" rule in Runequest, since it basically turns Riding into a skill tax.

The movement, called shot and "free hand" rules here all work well. I would keep them unchanged. I did allow characters with a free hand to initiate grapples using them, which occasionally gave things a MMA feel as characters would hack at one another with swords and then suddenly lock up into a grapple and resolve the fight through that.

Competence bands are basically just a procedure for doing what plenty of other referees in Basic Rolepaying games do anyhow. They work and are simple to use in play.

Abolishing attribute differences between species worked fine, though occasionally people wanted some slight distinction between their jackal-headed brutes and their elvish archers. I think what might work well here is to grant each species a single distinguishing trait that is not merely an attribute difference or percentile bonus to skills, but rather allows you to use one skill in a way no one else can - dogmen can bite with unarmed for extra damage, dwarves can use Perception to see when it's totally dark, etc.

Advanced plunder ratings didn't work well at all. The system was too complicated to easily parse, and involved making numerous decisions about what a create did or didn't have that merely added an extra layer of adjudication. The options for modifying this are either treasure generation tables with types, similar to old school D&D, or to simplify it drastically down to the two most important factors - what loot does the monster have, and how valuable is its body as loot? I should write something about this, but I now use a simpler system where every monster is ranked from A to F in terms of its loot, and then has either a + or - for how valuable its body (or body bits) are. +A would be a dragon or demigod, a creature that both has a horde, and is priceless when it's knackered, while a F- is a creature with nothing whose body is near-worthless. If you want to encode a bit more information in the notation, you can shift the + or - to either side based on whether the loot is in its lair (on the Left side for Lair) or on its person (the right side) as I did above.

Abolishing spell ranks didn't give me the results I wanted. I had a few PCs with high POWs who were able to pull off extremely high spell ranks very early in their careers, which made them disproportionately powerful in whatever campaign they appeared in. I think the correct solution for what I want is to expand the rules for divine magic (which I ported over from MRQ2 / RQ6) and use the tens digit of your relevant skill to determine the spell's magnitude. The 5 IP for new spells was good though, and I'd stick with it. It gave each PC a few signature spells they used over and over again, which also reduced the amount of player skill and attention required to manage spells, especially buffs.

Abolishing the common magic skill is the one that I still haven't made up my mind about. Some players really struggle with wrapping their heads around using other skills, and some love it. The rules themselves work fine, it's mainly an issue of playstyle. I think I'm going to keep on using this, but I expect it to play differently if I adopt the above-mentioned rule about spell ranks. So you'll use the tens-digit of whatever skill you use, instead of Battle Magic Casting. I also think I'm going to ask PCs to pick 1-3 skills off a small list that are the skills they use to cast magic ahead of time to help them get a clearer idea of how their own personal style of magic works. When I initially playtested these rules, I let PCs pick whatever skill they wanted in any given situation, but this meant a lot of people trying to use "abstract" skills like Perception and Influence and Language (Own) because they saw these as requiring the least amount of preparation and effort compared to Natural Lore or Craft. There was also the occasional attempt to piggyback battle magic spells on other spellcasting skills, like Sorcery or Religion (Own), though I discouraged this whenever it occurred. I think locking PCs down to a handful of prechosen skills will encourage them to more clearly conceive of how their character cast spells, which should avoid most of the problems. If that doesn't work, I'll probably just make Language (True Names) [a Language (Other) skill for everyone) the skill one rolls.

Anyhow, I plan to continue to experiment with new rules and variations, though it's been a bit since I've run an Openquest campaign.

The Dawnlands are Back / Dooms

I'm going to be converting the Dawnlands over to Runequest 6 from Openquest. My plan is to run a third complete (fourth total) campaign set in the Dawnlands sometime in the next year or so. I've been playing in Lawrence Whitaker's Mythic Britain campaign now for a little over a year and Legend / RQ6 has always been one of my favourite systems, with only the challenge of teaching it to new players holding me back from doing more with it. Here's a bit about cursing the people who killed you using the passion system from Runequest 6.

Dooms

Anyone with a passion rated higher than 100% may, upon dying, choose to utter a doom - a curse or prophecy on or about the subject of their passion. The doom must be made in the round the person expires, and must consist of a few short sentences, with a total length in words of 10% of the passion's rating (so a 100% passion allows 10 or fewer words). The character must be able to speak aloud.

Upon making the doom, the character checks against their passion. On a critical failure, the doom is realised only as a cruel joke of fate on the curse-giver. On a failure, the doom has no effect. On a success, the doom takes effect until the next dusk or dawn, whichever comes first. On a critical success, the doom becomes permanent until the character's body is buried or cremated with suitable ceremonial pomp to appease their spirit (requiring either Customs or Exhort), or a shrine, idol, totem or other marker is erected to honour them (such a marker must be Consecrated as per the spell by a priest of the same religion as the character). Dooms come into effect immediately.

Dooms make all skill rolls directly related to avoiding them one step harder, while all skill rolls directly related to bringing them to fruition are made one step easier. If the dooming character includes an end-condition to the curse, all skill rolls are either two steps harder or easier, as appropriate. Characters are not automatically aware of dooms.

e.g. Torun Half-Nose is stabbed to death by Hafek the Unwise. As he gargles out his last breath, he curses "My children will avenge me!", rolls his passion [Love (Children) 115%)] and gets a critical success. Torun's children will then find all skill rolls related to avenging their father to be one step easier, while Hafek finds any rolls to resist them will be one step harder.

e.g. Bjan the Wolf-Eater returns from campaigning to find a Kaddish warband (the Locusts) has destroyed his kraal, slain his family and friends, and plundered his village. He commits ritual suicide out of shame, cursing the destroyers of his line "Kaddish will bleed until the mountains are ground to dust" and rolls his Hate (Kaddish) 130% passion. Bjan critically fumbles, and so a Kaddish herbalist investigating the healing properties of a rare clay in the northern mountains suddenly finds it makes the perfect addition to bandages to encourage clotting (or at least her Lore roll to identify this property is two steps easier).

Some Extant Dooms in the Dawnlands

"The Kaddish will never know peace" - made by the (now) Lich-King of Dlak upon his death during the destruction of Dlak (Affects all rolls to directly drag the Orthocracy into a war, or to start a riot in Kaddish)

"I will be slain three times, and three times resurrected" - Tegon, the Maimed Lord, vampire near-god (Directly affects all rolls to ritually resurrect him or to prevent this from happening)

"My children will feast on the graves of the optimates" - Mainos, halfling Broken Chain martyr (Affects all rolls to prevent revolutionary sentiment from growing amongst the Dwer helots and slaves)

Second Dawnlands Campaign Finished

Finished the second Dawnlands campaign last night after nine (maybe ten, I lost track) sessions.

The set up: The PCs are Kadiz nomads, members of the Barreeve clan. Killer Rohan, a mercenary related to them, returns home for the winter assembly and kills one of the members of the rival clan while drunk (the dude hit Rohan's kid). The PCs are recruited by their clan to assemble the goods necessary to win the potlatch that will decide Rohan's fate.

What they did: They decided to slay the Killer of Wives and Children, an undead sorcerer who used to belong to their clan who killed a bunch of people 70 years ago before fleeing into the wastes. Along the way to finding him, they explored a ghost city inhabited by necromantic terrors and a friendly cyclops; interfered with an archaeological expedition looking for demons to dig up; slew a golden god-shard golem; got killed by the golem and then brought back to unlife by the cyclops; attempted to become kings of the ghost city; met a raiding party from the Orthocracy led by a guy with no face who rode horses made of shadow; met a cool gobliness tattoo artist one of the dead PCs married surreptitiously; had a wagon chase with some hobgoblins; picked up a cantakerous and slightly nutty priest of the God of Gates; hung around with some Dwer merchants and helped them against the guy with no face; met a cannibalistic ogre hermit whose dryad wife made him eat vegetables (because she was also a cannibal); slew the cannibalistic ogre hermit's former wife, a harpy with a leech head who shat blue flames, and her twisted spawn, including giant spiders with human hands growing out of their backs, a thing that's kind of like Jabba the Hutt except it sprayed poison gas, and a thing that was basically a starfish made of legs.

The conclusion: They got to the citadel of obsidian glass the Killer of Wives and Children had raised, got inside to meet him under the pretext of negotiations, and then one of the PCs thought negotiations had broken down and tried to trick the KoWaC into believing they had come to welcome him back to the clan. The KoWaC proceeded to make them his Nazgul, complete with flying black horses, summon his zombie legions to crawl into the belly of his Dracolich for easy transport, and fly with them back to the ghost city to summon the rest of his army before heading back to conquer the Barreeves, their rival clans, and anyone else nearby. About half the PCs were pro-Nazgul, and half were uncertain. The KoWaC summoned the ghosts and met up with the faceless Orthocrat's band, who the PCs had sent to this city several weeks beforehand thinking it was a good way to get rid of them. Finally, realising they weren't going to get a better chance, one of the PCs threw a javelin into the Killer of Wives and Children, and an epic battle ensued, with PC vs. PC combat, a dracolich tearing someone in half after biting their head off, the KoWaC doing the Vader death grip and a PC's magic shield repelling it, ghosts possessing zombies that the dracolich was shitting and puking out of itself all over the battlefield, somebody shooting a giant lightning bolt, and shadow horses tearing off people's shadows as they escaped their control. It ended with one of the PCs using magic berserker axes to behead the dracolich while the priest of the God of Gates castrated the KoWaC's decapitated body (to neutralise his sorcerous power). They released the ghosts from their imprisonment, waved goodbye to the Orthocrats who'd helped them out, and went home where they won the gift contest handily, released Rohan, and retired as mighty heroes of their clan.

Pretty good for nine or ten sessions.

Your Body is a Temple to the Black Vermin Gods Pt. 3

Part 1 is here.

Part 2 is here.

Putting Things Inside Yourself

Concoctions

Concoctions differ from mere potions in that they are intended to have a permanent effect by transforming the inner functions of the person. All concoctions are made using Lore (Alchemy), and require a Resilience test from the drinker. Critical failure on the Resilience roll leads to horrible, immediate death; failure results in 1d10 damage that cannot be stopped by magic; success results in no effect whatsoever; on a critical success the concoction works and the drinker experiences whatever effect it is intended to have.

The King of Poisons

An edible black sludge made from the mashed remains of a murder gnome that has eaten a snake that has eaten a rat that has eaten a spider that has eaten a scorpion that has eaten at least ten fire ants. The drinker becomes immune to all poisons, and is considered to have passed any test involving poison with a critical success. Their fingernails turn black. Most common in the Orthocracy and Dwer Tor.

Quicksilver of Longevity

A silvery fluid injected up the nose and into the brain. The recipient stops aging for twenty years and their nose drips silver mucus for the rest of their life. May be used multiple times, but only in sequence. Orthocrats are the most common users of this concoction.

Smoke of Changing Gender

The ground-up gonads of ten different sentient creatures of the desired sex mixed with jimson weed and other herbs and then smoked. The smoker changes sex permanently into the desired sex (usually accompanied by visions of a woman in white performing the changes). Using the magically-potent gonads of sorcerers allows the smoker to change genders with merely an ordinary success.

Coals of Clear Fate

Hot coals made from the sacred wood of the Dreaming Tree set aflame by lava. Must burn to ash while on the tongue, then the recipient must swallow the ash. Grants three visions of how the recipient could die, each one further along in life but more horrible. Recipient must choose one, and will die of it, but cannot be killed prior to that situation. The visions are often vague about some of the critical details. Often used by warriors of the Forest People.

Red Glass Powder

Made by pulverising the vitrified blood of Eternal Night. Must be inhaled. Inhaler gains +25% to all skill rolls at night-time. Pretenders to the Throne of Night must use this concoction publicly to prove their mettle.

Parasites & Symbionts

Purple Literacy Worm

Purple Literacy Worms enter the skull through the nose or ear, and sever the optic nerve before replacing it with themselves. The effect is to render their hosts literate in all languages, though the worm cannot supply meaning or break ciphers. The worm is affected by all conditions that affect the host's body, but must resist separately. The host may survive a poison that kills the worm, or the worm may be magically confused while the host resists. Two outcomes are most likely: The worm either starts eating through the material around it (the host's brain), causing a major wound and the loss of 1d6 INT, or the worm detachs from the back of the eye and the host is blinded until it reattaches. Persistence 25%, Resilience 25%

Whispering Liver

A blackish, intelligent, demonic fluke that replaces the liver of the host and renders them immune to the effects of alcohol or other poisons. Whispering livers talk to their hosts, though most of the advice they offer is bad. The give the host jaundice when they feel they are being ignored. Whispering livers are caught by drinking from unfiltered water and reproduce by provoking the host to vomit a wriggling mass of juveniles into the nearest water source.

Horror Ants

Horror Ants come from the dream world. Once in the Dawnlands, they attempt to build portals to allow more Horror Ants in. Horror Ants' bite requires a Persistence test to resist. Otherwise, the victim is charmed to want to help the ants, who take up residence in their throat and create a certain amount of droning and vocal fry whenever the host speaks. The ants can be killed by eating noxious peppers, drinking poisons, electrical shocks, or by spells specifically targeting them. Disobeying the ants requires a Persistence test: failure causes the victim to collapse and begin screaming as they are filled with terrifying hallucinations. Horror ants are a common vermin in the dream world and tend to slip through portals to it left open too long.

Foot Rats

A soulforged rat species found in the Orthocracy, mated pairs of Foot Rats gnaw off the feet of hosts while they sleep, injecting a soporific anesthetic to complete this task unnoticed and dealing 1d8 damage in the process. They then graft themselves onto the stumps. Foot Rats double the speed a host can walk at, but they are fidgety, and if the host goes more than an hour or so without walking anywhere (for example, if they are trying to sit by a camp fire or read a book), the rats will take it upon themselves to start moving around. The rats sleep for four to six hours at a time, as they please.

Your Body is a Temple to the Black Vermin Gods Pt. 2

Part 1 is here.

More ways to alter your body:

Cutting Pieces Of Yourself Off

Amputation

Amputated limbs may be turned into familiars by the person they were once part of. All that is required is either the Pet spell (from RQ6) or the Call Spirit spell (from OQ). For the duration of the spell, the limb will be animated and may be commanded to perform any task the caster requires. The body part will continue to decay, but so long as it remains intact, it may reanimated repeatedly.

Amputated hands and feet are also preferred containers for charms, magic point stores, etc. and may be turned into such using the normal rules for their creation.

Blinding

Ritual removal of the eyes can grant Witchsight / Second Sight as per the appropriate spell (depending on whether one is using RQ6 Folk Magic or OQ Battle Magic). The ritual requires the surgeon to have the appropriate spell and achieve a critical success on a Healing test. The ritual can be performed on someone whose eyes have already been removed - it is the elaborate pattern of scars and modifications that carry the spell.

Members of the thaumaturge caste in Dwer Tor often ritually blind themselves as part of an ascetic withdrawal from the concerns of the polis. This is most commonly done late in life, as a form of retirement. Murder gnomes in the Orthocracy usually blind one family member to help them find souls to consume.

Castration

Ritual removal of the testes will transform them into Magic Point Stores (as per the spell) capable of holding a number of Magic Points equal to 1/3rd of the donor's POW at the time of removal. The donor's POW score is not affected. The ovaries can be used in the same way, but the greater danger and difficulty of extracting them makes this less common. The ritual requires the surgeon to test both Sorcery and Healing successfully, and one of the two tests must be a critical success.

Removal of the testes is a reasonably common, though not ubiquitous, condition of admission to schools of sorcery in the Orthocracy of Kaddish. It is fairly uncommon for anyone else, though the Kadiz and Hill People do castrate some war captives as a form of non-magical ritual humiliation.

Circumcision

Priests who are circumcised may spend 8 hours meditating to regain a single spell they have cast, once per day. Circumcising someone is a Healing test and can be done by anyone.

Ritual circumcision is not practiced in the contemporary Dawnlands, but was extremely common among the priests of the Children of Night, who retain this power in undeath.

Grafts

Grafting is the process whereby a limb or organ from one being is attached or implanted magically on or into a second being. There are two main reasons to graft a body part onto someone: To recover from a Major Wound that damaged or removed a body party; or to replace a body part with one that grants powers or attribute increases.

If you are using the normal Openquest Battle Magic rules: A Heal spell at Magnitude 6 can be used to graft on a body part on. The body part being grafted on must replace a missing or damaged body part (it must have either taken a Major Wound or have been surgically removed).

Using my house rules (which include using RQ 6 Folk Magic): The grafter must know both the Heal Folk Magic spell and have the Healing skill. They must cast the Heal spell using the Healing skill and score a critical success on the Healing test to successfully graft the part on. The location must either have taken a major wound or the body part must have been surgically removed.

Surgical removal of limbs requires a Healing skill test. On a failure, the patient loses half their current HP (enough to cause a Major Wound). If they are not at full HP, this may kill them. On a successful test, they lose 1/4 (one quarter) of their current HP. Either way, the limb is removed.

Grafting body parts on has two effects. If the location was suffering a major wound, the character recovers from the Major Wound, replacing any lost attributes, skills, etc. once they have healed to full HP.

The second effect is that the person gains some feature of the new body part. Determine what the body part was and apply the following rules:

Limbs: Take 1/4 of the STR, DEX and SIZ scores of the recipient and the body part's donor and compare the their respective attributes. If 1/4 of any of the donor's score is higher than 1/4 of the recipient's respective score, then increase the appropriate attribute by the difference. If 1/4 of any the recipient's score is higher than 1/4 of the donor's  respective score, then decrease the appropriate attribute by the difference.

If the donor had a special touch-based power, or a claw attack, these may be gained by the recipient.

Organs: A character can modify any one attribute by grafting on an appropriate organ. 1/4 of the recipient's attribute is compared to 1/4 of the donor's respective attribute. If the recipient's attribute is higher, then reduce it by the difference between the two quartered scores. If it's lower, then increase it by the same amount. Only one attribute may be changed at a time by organ replacement.

If the creature had an organ associated with a special attack or power associated with a body part (e.g. a Medusa's gaze attack; a cockatrice's beak), then replacing the recipient's organ with the appropriate donor organ grants that power.

Grafts are a relatively common way of dealing with severed limbs. The Kaddish use organ grafting more than other cultures do.

Your Body is a Temple to the Black Vermin Gods Pt 1.

A couple of players in the Dawnlands game have remarked that there's a cyberpunk or transhumanist feel to it because of the relentless modification of the PCs' bodies. Two died and came back as undead last session, one with silver wiring for the nerves that were smashed in by a stone altar hurled by a golden golem, and the other with mercury blood that replaced the blood he'd lost when the altar shattered and lacerated him. I don't know why I like body modification as a theme in my rpgs (I have no piercings or tattoos in real life), but here are some of the kinds of modifications PCs can have:

Body Markings

There are four kinds of permanent marks on the body that can be made to have supernatural effects: Tattoos, Moko, Weals and Brands. PCs may pierce any body part they so please. This is a common way to hold charms and magic point stores, but is not itself magical.

General rules

All body markings require an artist with Craft (Skin Artist) to make a test. Receiving a body marking is a painful, often dangerous, process in the Dawnlands, and the recipient of one takes an amount of damage equal to the relevant factor when it is applied. The factor will be described in each entry. This damage cannot be blocked by armour or magic, and must be healed naturally. On a failed test, only the damage is inflicted, and no benefit is gained. This damage can cause major wounds. All body markings require the recipient to invest a number of improvement rolls equal to half the factor.

Tattoos (Factor: Spell Magnitude)

Spell tattoos may be used to hold folk / common / battle magic spells, with each tattoo of at least hand size holding one (and only one) spell. Spell tattoos may be of any magnitude. The artist creating the tattoo must know the spell at the correct magnitude. The spell counts as permanently active, and has the recipient as the target for any effect. If for some reason the spell effect would end due to a condition, it is suppressed so long as the condition holds then reactivates as soon as the condition is gone. Spell tattoos require the recipient to invest a number of Magic Points equal to the spell's magnitude which are not recovered unless the spell tattoo is removed.

Spell tattoos are common to all cultures in the Dawnlands. In Dwer Tor they are mainly used to control slaves and shunned by the upper classes.

Moko (Factor: Converted MP)

Moko are tattooed scars done by chiseling grooves into the skin and filling them with pigment. They convert maximum Magic Points into maximum Hit Points permanently at a ratio of 1 to 1. Any number of Magic Points may be converted, though a person with 0 MP still falls unconscious. The recipient does not automatically receive HP and must recover them by resting. 

Weykulni and Forest People are the most common users of moko, especially their warriors.

Weals (Factor: Converted HP)

Weals are bulging scars, often caused by the insertion of foreign material (including pigmented particulate) into open wounds. Weals convert maximum Hit Points into maximum Magic Points permanently at a ratio of 1 to 1, as the inverse of moko. A person may have a higher maximum Magic Point total than their POW using this method. 

The Kaddish use weals more than anyone else does.

Brands (Factor: Spirit Armour Points)

Brands here refer to scar designs caused by burning. Magical brands grant armour points in spirit combat (only). A person may have up to 6 points of armour against such attacks. Branding deals twice the normal damage receiving a body marking does.

Part 2 is here.