Types of Terrain on Hex Maps

Someone on the OSR Discord server asked me to write this up in a blog post, so I thought I would talk a little bit about terrain for hex maps.

When I am creating hex maps for overland travel, I typically use 6-8 types of terrain so that I can assign them to a randomizer and have the PCs roll whenever I'm not sure what a given terrain type will be if I don't already know. The eight main types of terrain I use are:

1) Blight 
2) Desert
3) Forest
4) Hills
5) Mountains
6) Plains
7) Water
8) Wetland

I sort the terrain into three categories based on ease of traversing it:

Easy: Blight, Desert, Plains, Water (with watercraft)
Difficult: Forest, Hills, Wetland
Impassable: Mountains, Water (without watercraft)

Easy terrain allows PCs to move through it at their normal movement (10km per 4 hrs of travel per the Procedure for Exploring the Wilderness Redux). While following a path in easy terrain, you cannot get lost.

Difficult terrain has PCs move through at 1/2 the normal rate (two travel actions must be taken to cross it). Paths across difficult terrain double your movement: It costs one travel action to move across the hex).

Impassable terrain cannot be traversed unless the PCs find a path across it, and they can only traverse it in the direction the path does. Paths across water can represent significant shallows or fords or small island chains close enough to swim from island to island.

Within these terrain types, I aim for a certain level of variation based on what makes sense for a given area. In a setting based on Scandinavia (all the rage right now), a desert will be an alvar pavement, a forest will be mostly coniferous, and wetlands will be bogs. In a setting based on Nigeria, wetlands will be flood forests, a forest will be an acacia / peacock flower / long grass mosaic, and hills will be a classic West African highland rise. I don't bother to mechanise this fine a set of details.

I find this tends to incentivise looking for paths, especially when PCs want to cross formidable natural barriers like mountains or lakes.

Placing Locations in Hexes

Here's a simple and fast system for placing locations of interest in a single hex on a grid. I am assuming a four hour watch as the basic unit of travel movement. Hexes can be divided into six equilateral triangles, for anyone who didn't know that.

1) Number the six triangles of the hex in clockwise order starting from the top

2) Roll a d6 and a d4

3) The d6 determines which sub-triangle of the hex the location is in. The d4 determines how many hours of travel into that triangle the location is (4 is the centre).

Variant: You could use d4-1 if you prefer fewer things in the centre and more things by the edge.

That's it, that's the whole system. I find it very fast in practice, and you can use a simple notation in your key to track this that looks like:

AA:17 Haunted Castle (1:3) 

where "AA:17" is the hex coordinates and "1:3" is sub-triangle and hours of travel in.

When the PCs search a hex randomly, they either pick one of the six sub-triangles, or the referee can roll a d6 for which sub-triangle they search if they have no preference. I make each search take a single watch.

The speed really helps here with populating a lot of content into hexes.

Into the Depths: Errata Already

Beloch of Papers and Pencils (one of the original playtesters) very kindly walked me through a number of ambiguous wordings and suggested some minor rules changes for Into the Depths. I'm grateful for his keen eye, and have incorporated most of them in. As a result, eight days after my first major update to the rule system in two years, here is the new version of Into the Depths incorporating Beloch's suggestions and a few minor changes I decided on after hitting publish last time.

Most of the changes are very minor. You'll notice slightly clearer wording in the grappling section, the sections where carrying capacity is explained (backpacks now let you carry 8 + / - Armour Mod. items, with special Frame Packs adding +3 to that capacity), auction catalogues let you assess the value of things slightly more easily, and some minor formatting, punctuation and phrasing changes in a few tables and other sections. I also removed a rules loophole Beloch spotted, where you could spend a day creating a new spell and suddenly gain half a level repeatedly. That's been changed so that creating spells no longer qualifies, only creating magical artifacts does.

If you're not sure what version of Into the Depths you have, I've been date-coding them for a while, so this update is 20180509, versus the version without errata, which is 20180501.

Happy May Day: New Into the Depths

It's May Day today, and in the spirit of the day, here's a brand new expanded version of Into the Depths for free! (Link is to a downloadable pdf on Google Drive) (2018-05-11 edit: I've now changed the link to the newest version incorporating errata)

Into the Depths is my "core" ruleset for playing old school fantasy adventure games, as conveyed in four densely written pages. I've been running and playing in games using it for a little over two years now, and this is the first major revision since 2016, with the revisions based on my experiences playtesting it over that period.

Into the Depths might be the game for you if you're looking for a low magic rules-set that mechanically encourages dynamic fights and chases and that has a stellar gear list that serves in place of a power or magic system in most instances.

New material includes:
More gear options
More secret fighting techniques to learn
A magic system
An updated levelling rubric
The ability to be bad at things
Rule sections rewritten for clarity and ease of use
Numerous tweaks to the mathematical structures

One last change is that I'm opening up the copyleft on it further. Previous versions of Into the Depths were available under a noncommercial Creative Commons license. This newest revision is now available for commercial use (with attribution) for anyone who would like to publish and sell works using it as the ruleset.

Into the Depths: The Long-Awaited Magic Rules

I'm writing up some magic rules for Into the Depths finally. I'm drawing on a bunch of ideas that Beloch of Papers and Pencils (Magic Words), and Courtney Campbell of Hack & Slash and Benjamin Baugh (Spell power as trappings) have each developed, but using variations on those ideas within as simple a system as possible.

Here's the draft text of the Into the Depths magic rules. The list of magic words itself is forthcoming, I'm still deciding how fine a grain I want on the terms, and what selection will be most evocative and useful for referees and players thinking of coming up with their own.

Magic

1) Initiation: To cast spells a PC must be inducted into a mystery cult. A PC can only be a member of one mystery cult at a time but can abandon their old tradition and join a new one by undergoing a new induction. Levels don’t carry over from one cult to another. A PC learns two magic words (referee's choice) when they join a mystery cult.

2) Knowledge: PCs can know a number of magic words equal to their character’s level (not level of initiation). They can know a number of magic spells equal to their character’s level.

3) Creation: All spells are combinations of words. PCs can use as many words in a spell as they have levels of initiation into their mystery cult. Words cannot be used twice in the same spell. It takes one day of work to create a new spell, or to replace one a PC already knows with a new one.

4) Learning: PCs learn new words by finding them on adventures or experimenting on their own time. If a word is found on an adventure, only one PC can learn it. If a PC develops a magic word, they can teach it to others for whatever price they want.

5) Casting: You can cast as many spells per day as you have types of trappings at hand. If you get more types of trappings over the course of a day, the number of spells you can cast increases. Lose some, and it decreases (losing uncast spell slots first). Rare trappings may grant more slots than usual.

6) Effects: Negotiate with referee during spell creation. A typical spell targets one thing within 30m and either causes 1 instantaneous change or has effects that last 1 hr.

Magic Trappings

This is a selection of possible trappings, not an exhaustive list. Each type of trapping grants one additional spell per day.

Assistant / Apprentice	Must also be initiated into same mystery cult. Can be another PC. Must spend an action helping cast.
Bric-a-Brac	An accumulation of wizardly garbage: Stuffed alligators, jars of spider legs, etc.
Drugs / Mana	One-use, usable only once per day. Save or hallucinate. Small item.
Familiar	Counts as henchman who is of no combat value and full of sass. Unbuyable, must be recruited.
Grimoire	A magical book full of cryptic suggestions, bizarre claims, and unsettling illustrations. Cost based on title.
Idol	The creepier the better. Not normally portable.
Locus / Sanctum	A sanctified and prepared location that focuses mystical energy. Not portable.
Obsession	Unbuyable. Spell gained through obsession can only be cast to effect object of obsession.
Panoply / Regalia	Priestly or wizardly robes, hat, etc. Cannot be worn with armour.
Sacrifice	One-use, usable only once per day. Sacrifice a sentient being’s life. Usually unbuyable.
Staff / Athame	Counts as two-handed weapon (staff) or small weapon (athame). Must be in hand when casting.
Talisman	A cauldron, mirror, amulet, etc. that serves as a focus. Must be used to cast the spell.

And then, from the experience rules, because someone will ask if I don't mention it:

"3) PCs can be inducted into a mystery cult or magical tradition. This takes 3 months of training under a master, 10,000 SP, and completion of an initiatory task to be determined by your master. Gaining more levels of initiation requires a PC to complete more tasks and pay an additional 10,000 SP and spend three months training each time.

4) It takes one month and 2,000 SP to develop a new magic word of the PC’s choice, if a PC is capable of casting spells."

The Pack of Lies: Backstory as Equipment and Resource

I've been thinking a fair bit about backstories lately because I just started playing a D&D 3.5 campaign on a bimonthly basis with a group composed of two published authors (one is me), the former editor of a literary magazine, a librarian, and a video game writer, all people who as you might imagine have strong connections to literature. The game is strongly focused on narrative development, driven by proactive character decision making, and is in a way the best possible version of what something like AD&D 2nd edition and the whole "silver age" of RPGs aspired for.

We had a couple of months of prep between when we first sat down as a group to discuss potentially playing a campaign together and when we held our first session (a few weeks ago). Part of the prep included a questionnaire about our characters for us to fill out, and I basically ended up writing 5400 words of backstory for my character. I became the very "12-page backstory" guy that I've mocked in the past. While the referee of this campaign encouraged that and loved the backstory, as a referee I find the prospect of close reading, annotating and then summarising sixty-odd pages of half-complete amateur narrative dreadful.

In Necrocarcerus, PCs begin without backstories or histories, and they get them by finding and consuming "nepenthe", a distillate produced from brain juice that contains their memories from when they were alive. You can, of course, drink someone else's nepenthe and get their memories and thus their "backstory". On a related note, "experience points" from slaying monsters were also obtained by drinking their brain juice, which was essentially an undistilled version of the same fluid. I did this because Necrocarcerus is partially a parody of the tropes of Dungeons and Dragons, and I wanted to riff off the joke that PCs are often "murderhobos" lacking a backstory situating them in the world.

When we encounter "backstory" in narratives, it is almost always in the form of a narration delivered by a character during the actual story. It's backstory because it's a supplement to the narrative that precedes it and clarifies it, but the events of it are already completed. Authors have all sorts of clever tricks for introducing this material - characters in ancient epics brag about their past deeds as a prelude to boasting about their future accomplishments, while intellectuals in experimental novels cite one another's fake books, and detectives in noir novels muse about their past cases. In fact, the most derided way of presenting this material is probably the form most backstories actually take - supplementary, secondary documents that don't take into account the main narrative they're meant to be supplements for.

So getting away from that, I'm interested in a backstory system for use in my games that does a couple of things. I want backstories that are presented diegetically in the game, that are optional but that do reward players who come up with them, and that have different levels of player agency involved in generating them.

In Into the Depths, almost everything one can do is represented by a piece of gear, so here's some gear that ties into generating backstories.

Diary / Journal - Once per expedition you go on with a journal, you can choose to be Good At something. You must tell everyone an anecdote from your journal about why you're Good At this thing. This lasts for the rest of the expedition. If you lose your diary, leave it behind in town while you go on an expedition, etc. then an embarrassing anecdote gets out as someone takes the opportunity to peek inside. You lose your Good At and gain a permanent Bad At. If you make up the embarrassing anecdote, you get to pick the Bad At, if the referee has to, they get to pick what you're Bad At.

S'mores - When you camp with a fire and someone has s'mores in their gear, each PC who wishes may tell one anecdote about their character's life prior to play, and in exchange, they become Good At one thing related to the anecdote. Anecdotes need not be true. This effect lasts until they use the Good At once, at which time it fades. One can only receive a benefit from one s'mores at a time.

Self-Published Memoir - Cost to have it printed is calculated based on its actual title, which must include at least one colon and two adjectives. Carrying a copy of your self-published memoir allows you reroll a save whenever you can relate an anecdote about your past that explains your resilience. "Inspiring" anecdotes grant an additional +1 on the reroll.

Lucky Charm - You can only have one lucky charm active at a time. You must explain why it is lucky for your character. It grants a +1 to one kind of roll (same scope as Good Ats). If you ever lose it, you have -1 to that kind of roll until you recover or replace it.

Into the Depths: Your Feedback

So I'm soliciting your feedback, internet community, on Into the Depths (link is to pdf download). For those just tuning in, Into the Depths is a classless, attributeless retroclone that I wrote at the end of 2016 that incorporates most of my favourite houserules from years in OSR games. It should be compatible with almost any d20-lite ruleset (Swords and Wizardry, Microlite20, etc.). I spent 2017 playtesting it, and I have some ideas for new material for an upcoming revision, but I thought I'd ask you, the wider old-school D&D community, to take a look at it and collect your feedback.

I'm particularly interested in any parts you think need clarification, expansion, or simplification in the rules as written.

Here's a link to some of the changes I'm planning to make based on my own playtest of it. I'm also planning to condense the experience milestones into a smaller list, add some overland travel rules, and a magic system of some sort. This will eventually become the core system of Necrocarcerus if I ever publish that setting, and it's creative commons so you can use or adapt it for your own ends as well.

Into the Depths: Knowledge as Gear

In Feuerberg, I got rid of knowledge skills and added books to the gear list instead. If you carried a book (one of six to nine gear slots you might have), you could read it as you went and ask questions about the topic, and there was a chance (usually on a 4+ or 5+ 6) that it would answer the question. If you wanted to play a smart character who knew a lot of stuff it was easy enough - just carry a lot of books around with you. In theory it took a turn of reading to answer any question, though I was sometimes a bit flexible about this.

I liked this system a lot because it turned knowledge into a scarce commodity by tying it into two of the existing subsystems that govern scarcity (the marketplace of gear, and encumbrance). It also allowed encouraged PCs to plan ahead about what topics they thought might be relevant, while giving them flexibility about what they could know, instead of investing a ton of skill points or training into knowledges that might not turn out to be useful. I think most of its faults in practice (which were few) were the result of me not being consistent or investing enough time in producing possible book suggestions on my end.

One of the meta-game structures of Into the Depths is that instead of a ton of powers from magic, or your species and class, or some other intrinsic aspect of you, most of your "powers" are either obtained or enhanced by gear. The idea is that you explore a dungeon or wilderness area using your gear until you reach a set of obstacles that you can't overcome with your current gear, then go back to your home base, change out your gear load, rest up, and go on with the expedition until you hit another set of obstacles you needed new gear for, etc. I tried in Feuerberg, not always successfully, to often have treasure apparent but requiring special gear to extract. e.g. a fossil embedded in a boulder that would be extremely valuable but requiring you to bring along special tools to cut it out without damaging it.

Books as gear are meant to play into this cycle. You encounter some incomprehensible gibberish in a long dead language no one speaks - get a book on the subject and decipher it. You want to know what kinds of monsters are roaming around (i.e. are on the wandering monster tables)? Get a book on the subject and read it. You want to build a fortress? Better read a book or two on architecture.

To enhance this in future games of Into the Depths, there are three changes I'd make to the initial idea. The first is to simply add more books covering doing more stuff. Cracking codes, deciphering languages, explaining how to build complex mechanical devices like traps or certain machines, etc. This is in addition to books that just straight up answer questions on archaeology or geology or whatever.

The second change is to introduce expendability to books. I like the idea of a usage die but I think it'll be complicated to track, so I'm just going to have each book capable of answering 1d6 questions on a given topic before it's exhausted. Once it's gone, you have to buy a different book, even if you want more information on the same topic. This helps prevent PCs from sitting around asking infinite questions while they're on the expedition and have the book in their possession, as well as effectively dealing with the question of what they can do with the books during their downtime (they can exhaust all of the questions a given book can answer, which is what they were going to try to do anyhow). Rare books you get as treasure might allow for more questions.

The third change is to introduce differences in quality. This will take two forms. The first is whether the books allow you to a 5+ or a 4+ on a d6, with better books (more expensive or harder to find) allowing success on the lower rolls. The second is that basic books cover one topic, but better books can cover multiple topics. This means you can haul along more knowledge without more encumbrance.

Some book ideas (all work on a result of 5+ on 1d6):

Cryptography manual -  Decipher codes you encounter
Phrasebook - Speak a language you don't know
Grimtooth's Traps - Design and build an overly elaborate trap
Farmer's Almanac - Predict the next day's weather
Code of Law - Bullshit your way out of legal troubles
Bestiary - Fill in boxes on the wandering monster table ahead of time
Collector's Catalogue - Appraise the value of non-monetary treasures
Herbarium - Identify helpful and dangerous plants you encounter

Considerations from Playtesting Feuerberg

I've been running a Feuerberg game since this summer (June or July, I can't remember) using Into the Depths, basically playtesting pieces of it and generating material as I go. It's a fun campaign and the players are great. That's also why I haven't been posting a ton about it, since I don't want to "spoil" anything before my PCs get to it. Playtesting always makes such an important difference to a final product when done properly, and I love doing it for my own games and for others'.

What's been discovered after four months of play

Here are some insights I've had about the Feuerberg setting while playtesting it. None of this will affect my current campaign, it'll come into play with the next iteration.

One Mountain, Not Two

Feuerberg really needs to be compressed down into one mountain instead of two, though with a number of sub-peaks and ridges on that mountain. I originally split it up into two mountains (the titular Feuerberg and its smaller cousin Himmelberg) so as to space out the content and emphasise the feeling of wandering around a wilderness as they travelled the mountain, but I think this detracts from the megadungeon feel and makes it more of a constrained overland sandbox. A good megadungeon needs its spaces and subsections to relate and interact with one another. The two mountains break that up and create two separate zones without clear relations.

Here's a crude sketch of what I think the new, consolidated, Feuerberg will look like:

Definitely not giving up my day job to become an artist

More generally, I need to consolidate locations across the playspace. No need for two weird forests when one forest with the interesting elements of both would do. I'm still thinking through the details of how to do this, but one idea is to curve the mountain and its sub-peaks slightly so that it has one large valley in front of it that includes the areas PCs start in, and two smaller valleys behind it, each of which can have a distinct theme and feel.

Make Overland Travel Harder / Make Dungeon Travel More Attractive

Ultimately, I want PCs to go into the dungeon underneath Feuerberg and use it to move around as much as they clamber over the surface. But I've set it up so that it's relatively easy to traverse the mountains (except for the death zones near the top) with lots of interesting sites to visit there, whereas the dungeons underneath the mountain are relatively unexplored and unknown. There are multiple things that I need to do differently, but one is to make overland travel a smaller and more challenging part of the game, to encourage the PCs to use the dungeon to move around.

Part of the dynamic of play should involve the ability to see interesting locations aboveground, but to require at least some underground exploration to get to them. This means more sheer, difficult to climb cliffs with interesting things at the top of them. Currently, such barriers do exist at some points, but I mainly left them higher up the mountain so as to funnel PCs towards certain areas of interest in the end-game. These should be closer to the bottom.

Make it Easier to Access the Most Interesting Locations

Feuerberg has a bunch of really interesting locations that I, as a world-builder, think are visually compelling and have set up as sub-zones with extensive exploration opportunities. I realise now tho', that I've stuck them somewhat out of the way. I was hoping to lure exploration towards them, giving PCs a reason to cross more of the overland wilderness, but I think it will actually work better to push at least a few of them closer to the PCs' home base. It'll clarify major entrances to the megadungeon and give clear options for progress.

To do this, as well as in light of the reduction to a single mountain, I'm going to move the location of the town of Hoch, which serves as the base town for the PCs, so that the PCs don't have to march across most of the map to reach the areas that I'm most interested in them exploring. I'm also going to match up a few initial quests to each of these sub-zones more clearly to provide reasons for PCs to go immediately towards them.

Other Changes

I think I'm going to tie some of the factions a little more cleanly into the history of Feuerberg, but I can't go into the details right now both because I'm still figuring it out, and because I don't want to spoil anything for my PCs. I think I'm also going to push some factions deeper into the dungeon, and pull some slightly more towards the surface or closer to the starting area so that the PCs can encounter them more easily. I'm sure as I playtest things further more improvements will be discovered.

Into the Depths Revisions After Playtesting

I haven't yet rewritten Into the Depths nor asked my dear pal Chris Huth to remake the one-page version, but I have been playtesting it a lot this year via my Feuerberg campaign. I've been collecting player feedback, and noting my own feelings about things, and here's what I'd change:

1) I'd increase saving throws to success on a 16+ instead of a 14+. This would make it harder to save, and make bonuses to your roll from gear and the like more important. It starts you off with a 25% chance of saving, instead of a 35% chance.

2) I'd pull the helping rules out into a separate section called "helping" since the "Turn your 1d6 roll into a 1d8 roll" rule seems to be the most commonly overlooked rule in the game, and its current placement under risky and dangerous actions make it appears like it only applies in those circumstances, as opposed to more generally..

3) Shift getting "Good Ats" to odd-numbered levels instead of even-numbered levels so that you get your bonuses spread more evenly across levels - improvements to your scores on even levels and Good Ats on odd ones. As it currently stands odd-numbered levels are comparatively dead, while all improvements happen on even levels.

4) I don't know that I'd use it in my online games where we tend to have more of a "pawn" style of play, but I'm strongly tempted to add a rule where when you camp, if you tell a unique story that relates to your character's backstory and describes them doing something interesting, you can become Good At that one thing for the rest of the adventure. Alternately, I might make this the effect of a boozy party item.

5) I should probably add some Bad At rules where you only roll a d4 instead of a d6, with each Bad At giving you another Good At.

Those are the main changes I've noticed and wanted to make, though if any readers out there have more, I'd be willing to take them under consideration.

Feuerberg: Base, Face, and Summit

The majority of the Feuerberg campaign takes place on, in and between, two mountains which are approximately the height of Mount Everest in our world. Altitude is therefore a recurrent concern. I want some simple rules to cover dealing with it that won't turn into a lot of minutiae.

The key information to know for these rules is that the campaign area is split into three altitude regions: the base of the two mountains, their faces, and their summits. And one can be either unacclimatised or acclimatised to each region.

The Base

The base is anything below about 4km in vertical height from sea level. That's the town of Hoch, the valley between the mountains, and about the first 2km onto either mountain (you start about 2km up already). All PCs begin acclimatised to this height, and do not lose their acclimatisation to it.

The Faces of the Mountains

The faces are the portions of either mountain between 4km and 8km vertical height from sea level. This is a true montane environment, and the altitude at which people begin to run the risk of fatal complications. All PCs begin unacclimatised to it.

While they are unacclimatised, they must make a saving throw at the end of each day that they have engaged in strenuous activity. Failure means they lose 1d4 HP and cannot regain hit points, as hypoxia and altitude sickness rip up their metabolism. Days spent resting do not require one to make a saving throw.

Characters who have acclimatised to the face stay acclimatised so long as they don't descend below the face. There are no negative consequences once one has acclimatised.

The Summits of the Mountains

The summit is anything above 8km in vertical height from sea level. Feuerberg gets close to 9km high, even with the top of it shorn away, and its summit area is about 3km in diameter. Himmelberg is about 8.5km high, with a much smaller summit of only 1km diameter. In real life, we call these places "death zones", and they lack enough oxygen to sustain human life for more than a few hours.

Regardless of how acclimatised or unacclimatised one is, one cannot digest food, can't sleep, and must make a saving throw every hour or lose 1d4 HP while in the death zone.

Unacclimatised characters on the summit must also make a separate saving throw every hour or begin dying when they're in the summit. It takes 1d6 turns to die, through a combination of hypoxia, cerebral edema, pulmonary edema, and cold.

Acclimatised characters don't have to make the saving throw to avoid dying. Character stay acclimatised to the summit only so long as they don't descend from the summit.

Acclimatising

So being unacclimatised is pretty bad. You probably want your PC to acclimatise to the altitude they're going to. Here are some methods for doing so.

1) Magic

Any spell that provides you with breathable air of some sort (e.g. a spell for travelling underwater or the void) will provide you with suitable air to count as acclimatised for as long as it lasts. Magic items that provide similar capabilities will also work, as do weird mutations and magical powers you get from mystery cults. If the magic lapses or the item ceases function, you count as unacclimatised and start suffering the consequences within 1 turn.

2) Camping and waiting

The most accessible method. You camp in a hex adjacent to the region you want to become acclimatised (i.e. on a base hex adjacent to the face to become acclimatised for the face, on a face hex adjacent to the summit for the summit, etc.). For the face, you camp for two weeks, for the summit, a month. At the end of that time, you roll a saving throw and if you succeed, you are now acclimatised until you next descend the mountain. You can repeat the period of waiting and camping as many times as one wants, in case not everyone passes the first time, but once acclimatised, you don't need to roll a saving throw again. You get random encounters while you camp, so you're going to either want a fortified camp or to find ways around having to do this.

3) Eating weird stuff

At the start of the Feuerberg campaign, you can't buy anything that will let you acclimatise more easily or rapidly. But, there are several options that you can go hunt down on the mountain itself to make acclimatisation either easier or faster. These are the ones that are openly known, though few have ever seen or used them.

Fresh Yeti Spleen - A yeti's spleen can be split between 1d4 people. It grants acclimatisation to the altitudes of the faces for 1d4 days for each person who eats it. The yeti strenuously object to this practice (-4 to positive reaction rolls), can smell spleen-eaters from far away, and do their best to make life difficult.

Blue Coca - A blue-green plant that grows wild in montane climates, where its fragrance is precious to minor air elementals, who drape themselves in smells the way mortals do clothes. A small amount is cultivated as a recreational drug by the Xarxeans, though they don't make it available to humans. Chewing quids regularly (for at least a week straight, 8 hours a day) before an expedition means it will only take a day to become acclimatised to the face, and three days for the summit. You can't heal naturally (only from medical care) while chewing blue coca.

Grey Mantaka - A psychedelic drug of unknown origin, though rumours claim a particular monolith high on Himmelberg oozes the stuff on nights of the new moon. Grey Mantaka acclimatises you to both the face and summit immediately upon taking it, for 1d6 days each. You must also make a saving throw or hallucinate wildly. This means you fail all saving throws to disbelieve illusions, suffer a -2 on attack rolls, and concentrating on anything for more than a minute or so requires a roll of 5+.

Other drugs and concoctions are rumoured to exist, but knowledge of their existence must be sought out in play.

Bonus Grubbing in Into the Depths

For new readers, Into the Depths is a one-page D&D-like inspired by Searchers of the Unknown that I wrote over Christmas break. It's compatible with most Swords and Wizardry material. You can download it for free here. I'm going to eventually write a magic supplement for it, but in the mean time I'm using Wonder and Wickedness as the spell system.

Into the Depths uses a fairly simple skill system. Any time you try to do something with a risk of failure and a consequence for failing, you roll a d6 and try to get a result of 5 or higher. If someone helps you, you roll a d8. If you're "Good At" doing the thing in question, you add +2 to your roll. If a group is doing something that they all succeed or fail on together, then they nominate someone to roll on their behalf.

The "5 or higher" is basically a DC (a "difficulty class" from d20) and can be adjusted up or down as you desire. I mostly only adjust it up, while things that make the task easier add bonuses to the PCs' rolls, simply to keep it all as simple addition. Most equipment typically doesn't add bonuses, it either allows you to do things you couldn't otherwise or allows you to avoid having to make rolls by automatically allowing you to succeed (a few pieces allow you reroll a failed roll).

One of the things this system is intended to do is to give the PCs kind of a crappy initial chance to do anything (unless it's an area of core expertise) and so encourage them to grub around for bonuses to their rolls. Here are some of the ways that I let them do so, that you might want to try in turn.

+1 to rolls for:

Taking double the usual time to complete the task
Having a clue, secret, or other inobvious but relevant information
Someone else has done the hardest part of the task
Having a specialised piece of equipment (Specialised equipment should only apply to a small set of predefined situations)
Magical assistance, including blessings
Executing a plausible, well-described plan of action

+1 to the DC for:

Each person past the first two in a group where one person is rolling on behalf of the group
Rushing (1/2 normal time or less)
Crappy equipment
Plans relying on seriously flawed or incorrect assumptions
Magical interference
Difficult environmental conditions

These lists aren't meant to be exhaustive, they're just prompts to get referees and PCs alike thinking about how they can fiddle with the difficulty of any given challenge.

Into the Depths: Update

A new, updated version of Into the Depths.

I added a clarification of how you sneak, changed being good at something to giving you a +2 instead of just increasing your die type (so you can both apply it potentially to saving throws or attacks, as well as allowing you to stack it with someone helping you), changed how surprise works (each side now rolls to surprise the other), and I updated the wandering monster table slightly to match the current categories I use. I say I did this, but really I just came up with the rules and C Huth did all the hard work of laying them out.

Anyhow, enjoy.

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.

I Get By With a Little Help From My Friends

+C Huth of The Elder Skull blog and Pelgrane Press, as well as a friend in real life, has very kindly created a one-page version of Into the Depths for your enjoyment using his layout wizardry. I like it a lot. I've also edited the numbering issues on the original 3-page pdf version, if only to prove to myself that yes, I can count.

Next up, I'm going to work on two supplements, one for Necrocarcerus, and one for the Old Lands. The latter is basically my "I want to run a module" low-concept campaign setting. These will have the much-anticipated "mystery cults", more gear, languages, that sort of thing. I don't know when I'll get them done, but hopefully soon, I've got a lot of stuff scheduled for the new year to work on.

Merry Christmas

I decided that rather than struggle doing conversions of various retroclones / neoclones, I might as well just write another one (the first one was Microlite Iron Heartbreakers). Here it is: Into the Depths. It's free for download and you're welcome to modify it however you please.

It's a chassis that I'll be building off of and using for Necrocarcerus and other fantasy campaigns, loosely inspired by the size and rules minimalism of Searchers of the Unknown and Into the Odd, with bits and pieces of my favourite house rules in it, and based off my experience using various versions of Swords and Wizardry. It's meant to be easy to plug material from other games into - my become-a-wizard rules for it will be some mixture of Wonder and Wickedness with the spell research rules from Crimson Pandect. It's classless, with minimal stats to keep track of, and is almost entirely the player-facing elements of the rules. I stuck in an upgraded version of my leveling rubric for the Black Hack, since that seemed popular with folks.

Anyhow, merry Christmas and enjoy!