Openquest 3 SRD Released for Free

 There is now a system reference document (SRD) available for Openquest 3rd edition. The SRD is free to download from this link, and will eventually be hosted as a HTML document on the d101 Games website here.

I haven't had time to write an in-depth review of Openquest 3rd edition, but the changes are substantive and wide-ranging from the first two editions, and overall they are positive cointributions to the system. Openquest's 3rd edition keeps its place as one of my two favourite implementations of the Basic Roleplaying system (BRP) alongside Mythras. 

Mythras appeals to the lover of crunch in me, but Openquest is an excellent, rules-light version of BRP that keeps many of the details that appeal to fans of BRP while simplifying and economising many of the rules that newcomers find fiddly. I think it's one of the best introductions to BRP that one can get. If you want a system that does not have levels, classes, or inflating HP, that makes combat feel deadly and exciting, and that sharply distinguishes between how different kinds of magic work, you might find the BRP family, and in particular Openquest, a product that appeals to you.

Along with the SRD, there is a free quickstart scenario and rulebook that contains most of the rules (it leaves out some of the magic systems available in the main rulebook).

Last Chance for the Openquest 3rd Edition Kickstarter

The Openquest 3rd Edition Kickstarter is in its last 40 hours. The PDF + POD coupon level is super cheap, at around 12.85 USD at current exchange rates. If you haven't tried Openquest before, I would suggest picking it up while you get the chance (I am not being paid or otherwise compensated for this post; I don't have an "affiliate link" or something to click on; I think I mainly bring grief rather than pleasure to the creator's life; I am doing this because I like the game and want to encourage others to discover it).

Openquest has always seemed to be criminally underrated and ignored as a game despite being one of the most mechanically straightforward versions of the Basic Roleplaying (BRP) system that runs Call of Cthulhu, Mythras, Runequest and other games. It's been around for over a decade now, and I'm really amazed more traditional players disgruntled with D&D & Pathfinder's moves towards superheroism haven't converged on Openquest. 

I think Openquest sits at a really sweet spot between the possibilities of "trad" and "OSR" styles of play, and I've used it for both successfully. Because of the variety of options for magic, it's considerably easier to "tune" it to run either high magic fantasy and low magic fantasy settings that diverge from D&D's baseline. The lack of exploding hit points means that even very weak enemies remain potential threats for much longer than in D&D. The focus on skills and the lack of classes means that a wider variety of character concepts are playable than in stock D&D. It's also humanocentric by default, which I tend to prefer in my fantasy games.

Anyhow, if you haven't previously checked out Openquest, I strongly recommend you do, and this Kickstarter is a good chance to do so very cheaply.

Science Fiction Skills for Openquest

Following up on these changes to Openquest's skill system, here's a list of possible skills that should be added to the skill list for science fiction games. Many of them are drawn from the Mythras science fiction skill list. I'm mainly interested in moderately-hard science fiction stuff, so there's no "Psionics" or the like. Obviously, I'd recommend removing Sorcery Casting as a skill in a sci-fi game.

New Skill Additions

Communications (INT x2)
Computers (INT + CON)
Explosives (DEX + INT)
Gunnery (DEX + INT)
Piloting (DEX + INT)
Scanning (INT x 2)
Science (INT x 2)
Social Engineering (CHA + INT)

Skills Changed for a Science Fiction Setting

Athletics
Driving
Engineering
Locale (Region)
Mechanisms

New Skill Descriptions

Communications covers using complex communications mechanisms like encrypted radio transmissions, tight-beam lasers or entangled photonic systems. Communications also covers encryption/decryption, using ECM / ECCM suites, and is the skill used for issuing orders to autonomous drones, vehicles, and robots.

Computers covers programming, hacking, data retrieval, and performing other tasks involve a computer's software systems. It's also used for setting up behaviour trees for autonomous systems (e.g. security systems, autonomous drones, etc.). Computers uses CON as one of its relevant stats because almost anything you'd want to do with it is an extended task requiring focus and concentration over long periods.

Explosives covers deploying, detonating, and defusing explosive devices. Rocket launchers and other guns that shoot explosive rounds are covered by Ranged Combat or Gunnery. Grenades, IEDs and demolition-charges are Explosives. The skill also covers analysing or identifying explosives and their aftermaths.

Gunnery covers using, reloading, and repairing weapons systems that don't use direct sights to aim, ranging from artillery to air-to-air missiles to ICBMs and installation-based rail guns. It is used by drones and other autonomous vehicles and robots to fire, and is used in most vehicular combat.

Piloting covers operating vehicles in three dimensions, whereas Driving covers vehicles that operate in two dimensions. Piloting is used for manoeuvring during vehicle combat, for astrogation and for space travel. Piloting is also used to remotely operate drones.

Scanning is the use and interpretation of complex scanning equipment whether these devices are hand-held or vehicle-mounted. Any device that returns results more complicated than a false-colour picture (e.g. thermal vision or low-light amplification) uses Scanning instead of Perception. Scanning is now also the skill used for surveying, replacing Engineering's role.

Science covers scientific knowledge, versus Lore which covers other kinds of knowledge (the humanities). Science uses specialities, so each 20% or fraction thereof in the skill grants another speciality.

Social Engineering allows a PC to engage in politics on a mass level. It deals with analysing and changing belief systems and ideologies through the use of propaganda and other means of mass communication. Influence covers changing an individual or small group's beliefs, Oratory covers a larger group, and Social Engineering works on the level of entire societies.

Changed Skill Descriptions

Athletics now also includes all zero-g / EVA manoeuvring in space.

Driving now explicitly covers all vehicles that operate in two dimensions, ranging from chariots to cars, trucks, and buses. Hovering vehicles with relatively fixed altitudes (skimmers, etc.) and humanoid robots are handled with Driving as well.

Engineering is now a speciality skill, and covers constructing or repairing any machine larger than a person, from groundcars and security systems to fusion plants and FTL drives. It also includes architectural analysis (Is the floor sloped? What's the gravity in this station? Are there secret doors here? etc.) and design. Surveying is now part of Scanning.

Locale (Region) has only a minor change, in that "region" should be interpreted broadly to include larger areas than a medieval person would mean by that term. A space explorer might have Locale (Mars) or in a game of sufficiently grand scale, Locale (Sol System).

Mechanisms now includes the ability to build, repair, and subvert electronic and electrical systems as well as mechanical ones.

Character Creation and Skills Extension in Openquest

I'm working on an extensive redo of Openquest based on the SRD / Developer's Kit. The final version will incorporate all of my house rules and preferences within the system. I'm going to present a few pieces of it in this post.

The first thing is a simple rationalisation of Openquest's skill selection system, which currently involves numerous sub-pools of points split across skill categories. Similarly to my Mythras Without Tears post, the alternative is to simply spend 250 points with one point = 1% of skill rating, with no more than 40 points allocated to a single skill. This is 25 more points than stock Openquest characters get, but the lack of sub-pools makes it simpler to distribute them. It also lets you spend an extra ten points per skill compared to stock Openquest.

The second thing is an expansion and revision of the skill list. I think there should be a few more social skills, and a few more skills covering outdoorsmanship. There are also a few skills that should be beefed up, clarified, or added to cover gaps. I'm also changing the base attributes of many skills.

Anything bolded on the list below is a new skill, anything italicised has changes in what it covers.

New Skill List

Athletics (DEX+CON)
Animal Handling (CHA+POW)
Close Combat (DEX+STR)
Craft (Job) (CON+INT)
Culture (Other) (INT)
Culture (Own) (INT+40)
Deception (DEX+INT)
Dodge (DEX+DEX)
Driving (DEX+INT)
Engineering (INT)
Healing (INT+POW)
Influence (CHA+CHA)
Insight (POW+POW)
Language (Other) (INT)
Language (Own) (INT+40)
Locale (Region) (INT)
Lore (Type) (INT)
Mechanisms (DEX+INT)
Might (SIZ+STR)
Natural Lore (INT+POW)
Oratory (CHA+POW)
Perception (INT+POW)
Performance (Type) (CHA)
Persistence (POW+POW)
Ranged Combat (DEX+INT)
Religion (Other) (INT)
Religion (Own) (INT+40)
Resilience (CON+SIZ)
Riding (DEX+POW)
Sailing (DEX+INT)
Sorcery Casting (INT)
Streetwise (CHA+POW)
Survival (CON+INT)
Track (INT+POW)
Trade (CHA+INT)
Unarmed Combat (DEX+STR)

On the new and changed skills:

Athletics now covers anything that is a sustained action - aerobic activity. Running, swimming, climbing, digging, marching, carrying heavy things, it covers anything where your progress is primarily dependent on your muscular endurance. Brute force now becomes the core of the Might skill. This is so you can have characters who are good runners, climbers, etc. but who aren't powerlifter types and vice versa.

Animal Handling is for dealing with animals, especially animals you don't ride, and is part of a larger break-up of Natural Lore, which in base Openquest is too broad a skill, and therefore almost always a must-have. It swaps in for Influence and Healing when you're doing those things to animals, and also is the skill that lets you train / tame animals.

Craft (Job) is probably the smallest change, simply making the varieties more apparent in the skill name (a constant source of confusion for new players in my experience). Its baseline uses CON as well as INT to represent patience and determination, which are more important to completing crafting tasks than a particularly deft hand or keen eye.

Culture (Other), Language (Other), Locale (Region), Lore (Type), and Religion (Other) all work using variations on the house rules I have for Mythras. So for every 20% rating (rounded up), you have in the skill, you get another speciality that your skill applies to.

Engineering, the skill Newt has threatened to remove from OQ at least once for lack of anyone taking it, gets a bit of a do-over in my version. Now, it applies to building or repairing any complex structure or device larger than a person (so fixing your wagon is Engineering). It also serves as the "dungeoneering" skill that lets you determine slopes and directions in enclosed spaces, provides an alternate way to detect secret doors and compartments (beyond Perception) and allows you to measure or estimate distances accurately. It also covers surveying the outdoors.

Influence now deals with social situations where the number of people involved is small enough you can have a conversation or discussion, with Oratory dealing with larger groups.

Insight is the skill for reading emotions, sussing out hidden motives and desires, determining if someone is lying, figuring out likes and dislikes of someone, seeing through disguises, and the like. You can also use it to investigate bureaucracies or hierarchies to find out who is responsible for what. You can also use it to oppose Influence or Oratory tests, representing seeing through the other person's motivations instead of just stubbornly resisting them with Persistence. This is another gap in the base version of Openquest.

Language (Other) requires one change from stock Openquest. In the original version, where there were multiple language skills, you became literate in a language when your skill rating exceeded 80%. One quirk of this system was that starting characters were never literate in more than one language. Obviously, that won't work in a system using specialities. Instead, I would recommend treating the written and spoken versions of a language as different specialities. I think this gets across the quirks of language acquisition in real life more accurately anyhow - one might read a language fluently but have only a rough idea of how to pronounce the words or carry on a conversation (the difference in being able to read Chinese characters versus being able to speak Mandarin or Cantonese is illustrative of this).

Locale (Region) covers your knowledge of places, including geography, landmarks, climate, foreign affairs, broad history, and important individuals. Lore (History) would get you a deep dive into say, the role of salt in the evolution of trade networks, Locale (Region) lets you know that the city you're outside of is a famous salt market, the name of the river it runs past, and who's in charge of that market and river. This is another gap that's sort-of capable of being filled using existing Lores, but not well and not easily.

Might covers sudden bursts of power, throwing things, and breaking stuff. Any task prioritising muscular power over endurance will probably fall under Might instead of Athletics.

Natural Lore is broken up with Track, Survival, and Animal Handling becoming separate skills. Natural Lore is an amazing skill in stock Openquest because it's got so many disparate uses. Now, it covers plant identification and herbalism; mineral identification and spotting avalanches, fault lines, quicksand, and other dangerous terrains; predicting the weather and navigating overland. I think it's still a bit of a grab bag and a very good skill, but less obviously a "must-have".

Oratory is another social skill, covering addressing large groups of individuals - basically, any group where it's too large for a conversation. Oratory also differs from Influence in that it can get individuals to act against their own instinct for self-preservation - people can get swept up in the "madness of crowds".

Performance (Type) is another minor change similar to Craft (Job). The original skill's wording makes it unclear if you become skilled in all arts or just one. This makes it clear that you learn one.

Streetwise almost goes through the reverse of what happened with breaking up Natural Lore. It still covers finding fences and other criminal contacts, but this is expanded to finding any sort of contact or service in cities, legitimate or not. It also becomes the urban equivalent of the Survival and Track skills, and it covers information gathering, gossiping and rumour-mongering to those ends.

Survival is the survival function of Natural Lore hived off into its own skill. It covers finding food, water, protection from the elements, and related tasks (e.g. identifying if water is safe to drink) while in the wilderness. Even on its own, it's a pretty great skill.

Track covers tracking and pursuing people based on physical traces, primarily in wilderness settings. It's another very useful subcomponent of Natural Lore that's broken off into its own skill.

On changes to the attributes used to calculate the base of skills:

I broke skills up into three groups for this purpose. There are three "cultural familiarity" skills that are INT +40 - average starting characters will have a base of about 53% in these skills before spending points. There are also a bunch of practical skills that are based off the sum of two attributes. Average starting characters will have baselines of between 21% and 23% in these skills. Most of the skills with specialities and a few other skills that I thought were similar enough to them start off with just INT (or, in a lone case off just CHA) as their basis, giving an average starting character a rating of about 13% before points are spent on improvements.

One of my main goals was to get rid of the STAT+10 skill baselines since I've always had trouble remembering which ones are STAT+10 and which are just STAT. Numerically, the option I've outlined will be almost identical to them for characters with average starting stats. Another important goal was to bring a couple of attributes that otherwise aren't represented in the skill system very well into it. CON, POW and SIZ in particular crop up more frequently - POW in nine skills (mostly representing perceptiveness, intuition, or personal presence), CON in four skills, and SIZ in two.

On potential expansions yet:

I'm debating expanding the skill list to a full 40 skills. The main candidates are to split navigation off as a separate skill from Natural Lore; to split stealth off as a separate skill from Deception; to create a separate acrobatics skill from Athletics covering balance, poise, tumbling and other aspects of trained kinesthetic skill and agility; and to create a skill specifically covering lies and social deception that's distinct from either Influence or Deception (which is more sleight of hand and larceny and the like). It's the last one I'm not decided on, and I'd be open to other suggestions.

A Proposal for Cover in Openquest

Cover in Openquest is your main defense against ranged attacks, since you can't dodge them (unless they're thrown weapons). I think with some judicious planning, you can load on enough cover modifiers to make it fairly hard to hit you most of the time (e.g. using a giant shield for a -50% penalty to attackers, combined with standing behind decent cover for another -50%, which will neutralise all but extremely skilled mundane attackers and the magically enhanced). NB: For anyone trying to find the shield cover rules in OQ2, they're not a table and they're not where the text says to find the table, they're on pg. 60 under "Defensive Reactions" subheading "Parries".

Where things start to break down a bit is that many of the ranged attack spells don't have attack rolls. This is the case for several spells where you do get a chance to dodge them, implying to me at least that there is some sort of physical projectile sent on a specific trajectory (several of the spell descriptions also confirm this). So if someone shoots a lightning bolt at you, standing behind a castle wall is useless, because they don't have an attack roll to be penalised.

My proposal is simply that in these situations, cover penalties to attackers' rolls should become bonuses to defenders' dodge rolls. This isn't spelled out in the rules anywhere I could find, but I think it makes sense, and is mechanically simple to resolve. It does mean that huge shields automatically provide a 50% bonus to dodge against spells of this sort, but I'm fine with this, since it makes combat-focused characters (who are more likely to be carrying a shield) more resilient against sorcerers and priests.

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.

Everything You Always Wanted to Know About Blackwater But Were Afraid to Ask

Here's the concise summary of everything your average adventurer needs to know about the Kingdom of Blackwater in 723AS:

They use a silver standard for coinage. Their main exports of interest to anyone else are cattle, horses, linen, dragonbone, magical toxic waste, ancient relics, gold, and murder hobos. You mainly want to steal the gold, relics, dragonbone and magical toxic waste. They speak Wyvish, as do the hippies (Upper Wyvs), weirdos (Lower Wyvs), conans (Ulthendish) and the folks in the factory city to the east (Marlechers) but they all sound silly when they do. Their government has nobles and stuff, but mainly exists to extract taxes. There`s two kings, one`s a lich, and they hate one another and are gearing up for a big war. They have good scientists, wizards and engineers, but they all leave to go get rich elsewhere, unless they`re evil and want the magical toxic waste for themselves. Everything's poor as hell and most people look like refugees from some Byzantine province (Armenia or Pontus or Trebizond). Summers are cool and dry, as are winters. Blackwater used to be run by the hippies and weirdos hundreds of years ago, until they summoned too many demons or something and went back to their island to be crazy by themselves.

The Treetombs Region and Map

This'll be the starting region for the campaign, near the town of Treetombs at the edge of the Deadwood Basin in the kingdom of Blackwater.

Alderspring (Pop. 1,250)
Points of Interest: Blood Keep (castle), Deepwater (village), Rightblood Ranch (ranch), Scrubthorn (village), the Sunstone (lighthouse)

Alderspring is cattle country. The sacred bulls slaughtered in temples across the Wolf Sea are calved in the great herds of red and silver-coated cattle in the uplands. Fuligin-robed Deadwalkers of the Dismal Land, wolf-robed Krovi tribunes and the sorcerer-overseers of the Low Wyvs can all be found lodged in Deepwater, despite direct orders from the New King forbidding Baron Alderspring to do commerce with them. The baron sells the cattle for cash in hand, and uses the money to pay mercenaries to keep the New King's men out of his business. He sells sacred cattle on the sly to the Old King to placate his undead warriors, though it's an open secret and only a matter of time before he's caught. He is plagued by cattle-rustlers and an unusually large number of wolves, both of which he blames on the baroness of Redcrossing. Rumours abound that the Low Wyvs are building a gate in the hills to directly transport the bulls home without the need of ships, though where they would get a sufficiently large supply of human bone to do so is anyone's guess.

The Cinder
Points of Interest: Baroness Redcrossing's Schola (shrine), the Boiling Sands (lair), the Bone Gate (landmark), the Cinder (Crater), the Corundrum Gate (landmark), the Hecatomb (lair), the Onyx Gate (landmark), the Reclusium of Arvil (tower), the Tomb of Justin IV (shrine/graveyard), the Weeping Tree Labyrinth (dungeon)

The site of the Catastrophe, where the Old King's attempt to attain divinity as an immortal lich released the Grey Death across what was once "Greenwood Basin". The air is pungent with befouled geomancy. Somewhere in the stone flats lays the circle of thirteen petrified sorcerers standing around the great crater. The Cinder has great nodes of the precious black serpentine created during the Catastrophe, and sorcerers are constantly hiring foolish adventurers to recover even a mere handful for use in their experiments. The Grey Death has mostly dissipated, but a few smoldering cracks still release gusts of it now and then. A few necromancers and witches linger in the area personally, as do various beasts twisted by the Grey Death into vicious monsters.

Deadwood Basin
Points of Interest: the Bastion of the Keen Ones (tower), the Burning Place (graveyard),  the Lair of Many-Headed Hythax (lair), the Mother's Tear (shrine), Hammerdell Keep (ruin), Lonely Keep (ruin), Oakbend (ruin), the Sleeping Hill (dungeon), Splitstone (ruin), the Trembling Ground (lair), Woodweir (ruin), the Wyvish Locus (landmark)

Deadwood Basin was once the country's breadbasket, densely populated with small villages and keeps. Since the Grey Death came nearly a century ago, the region has been unpopulated and almost nothing will grow there. The area is spotted with ruins from prior epochs - geomantic locuses from the Wyvish Synod, ruined keeps from the Weaver Kings, and buried remnants of the Dragontime. A few tribes of Bonewarped have come down off of Dead Dragon Mountain over the years, and survive by unknown means amongst the ruins. The Old King's hordes are mostly deployed holding ruins across Deadwood, though why he is focused on this instead of reconquering his kingdom is unclear to the living.

God's Eye (Pop. 1,000)
Points of Interest: Gib Hill (village), God's Eye Observatory (shrine), Marro's Grave (village), Tenbarrows (village)

The God's Eye Observatory will soon be the newest temple to the Divine Architect. Most of the villages and farms have sprung up in the past ten years from the construction, and the priests have purified the soil to the best of their abilities. The merchants in Treetombs have expressed an interest in the priests repeating the process in the barrens surrounding Treetombs, but the priests have refused to do so until they finish their temple. Controversially, the temple was built using black serpentine blocks for its foundation, making it a powerful geomantic node, but one that could easily become tainted without careful maintenance. The New King is a patron of the cult of the Divine Architect, and the new bishop has had to divert workers from finishing the temple to throwing up palisades and fortifications in case the Old King turns his attention from Deadwood Basin back to the coastal settlements.

Old Kingshall (Pop. 500)
Points of Interest: Beggar's Hill (village), Cattle Market (city ruin), the Eternal Keep (lair), the Fleeing Village (ruin), the Garden of Statues (lair), the Grain Market (city ruin), the Grey Palace (dungeon), Fatcoin Alley (city ruin) Kingshall College (city ruin), King's Lake (lake), the Late Seer's Village (ruin), Lord's Lane (city ruin), the Lost Man's Square (city ruin), the Man-Eater's Rest (lair), Old Markill (ruin), One-Girl Village (ruin), the Poor Quarter (city ruin), the Praying Village (ruin), the Sleepless Tree (lair), Smiths' Lane (city ruin), Stove's Waystation (village), the Tablet of the Grey Death (landmark), the Tomb of Theophora II (graveyard), the Vile Guard (tower), the Wailing Village (ruin), the Watchful Mother (shrine)

Once the capital of the kingdom of Blackwater, Kingshall is now a collection of petrified ruins haunted by the livind dead. The Old King attempted to ascend to lichdom a century ago, but the ritual went awry and released a magical force known as the "Grey Death" which spread across much of Deadwood Basin. It petrified thousands, killed thousands more, and created a vast wave of refugees whose settlement still determines the population distribution of Blackwater. Lingering traces of it in the earth have prevented the resettlement of Deadwood Basin. The Old King was thought dead, killed in the ritual, and a nephew ascended to the throne to rebuild Blackwater.

Two years ago, black-cloaked envoys went out across Deadwood Basin, announcing that the Old King's ritual had succeeded, and that he intended to return to his throne in Kingshall. His armies of wights and skeletons have mostly spent their time occupying the ruins across Deadwood Basin, and the nobility is split over whether to back him or the descendant of his nephew (now known as the "New King"). The coastal communities have yet to bear the brunt of his armies yet, but most expect it's only a matter of time.

Redcrossing (Pop. 2,000)
Points of Interest: Crowshine (lighthouse), Dunhill (village), Drybridge Keep (castle), Lair of the Lying Wolf (lair), Northcut (village), Redcrossing Ranch (ranch), Southcut (village)

Redcrossing mainly survives off selling produce and sheep to Treetombs. Drybridge Keep was built before the Catastrophe, but the barony is the result of a landgrab by the baroness' ancestors in the chaos immediately afterwards. The baroness of Redcrossing is a powerful sorceress of the Red and Bone Learning who keeps a schola with a handful of apprentices out closer to the Cinder. She pays handsomely for samples of black serpentine. Baron Alderspring blames her for the wolves that plague his herds, though no one knows what her motive might be. Redcrossing is the home base for the High Bailiff of the Stone Coast and his officials and mercenaries, and has become a strategically important site almost accidentally after the Old King declared his intentions. Redcrossing is nominally loyal to the New King due to the official presence, but sympathies amongst the peasantry are strongly in favour of the Old King.

Sharpwater (Pop. 3,000)
Points of Interest: Alderson's Ranch (ranch), Blade Valley (village), Burnt Barrows (ruin), David's Grave (village), Grass Hill (village), Kingshead (village), Pinebridge (village), Poplar Hill (village), Riverwatch (castle), Saltcliff (village), Storm's Sigh (shrine), West Reach (village), Whitebend (village), Wyvman's Rest (landmark)

Sharpwater is the most important barony in the area, both economically and militarily, but it hasn't yet declared for either king. Baron Sharpwater and the merchants of the port of Saltcliff were important local patrons of the God's Eye. He wouldn't want to see the temple razed, but his family was much more prominent in the days of the Old King, and the lich's envoys have promised him a return to greatness if he bends the knee. Popular sympathy is firmly with the New King, and he risks a revolt if he backs the wrong side. Sharpwater is home to the most prominent local shrine to the Unknowable Sea, and has two good ports, making it an important shortcut for merchants trying to avoid tolls on the Great Road and captains who want to avoid trouble at sea. The merchants of Saltcliff are the main rivals of the cartel that runs Treetombs, and they are always looking for ways to further impoverish the town.

Treetombs (Pop. 5,250)
Points of Interest: Blackstone (village), the Dragon's Stairs (landmark), Hulthar's Folly (ruin), the Oak Synod (graveyard), Treetombs (town)

Treetombs is still the economic hub of the region, despite its decline from the days before the Catastrophe, when it was a major city connecting Kingshall to its ports on the Stone Coast. The land surrounding the town is poisoned by the Grey Death, making farming difficult. Still, it survives partially due to its market charter, which negates the tolls and excises of anyone traveling to Treetombs along the Great Road. The town is run by a cartel of free merchants who unite only to crush opposition to their rule. They have bent the knee to the Old King, though he hasn't actually done more than send a small squadron of skeletal warriors into the hills around the town. Treetombs has small shrines to the Great Mother and Divine Architect, and most of the region's professionals and specialists call it home. It's also a popular place for exiles, bandits, mercenaries and ne'er-do-wells to lay low in, as the High Bailiff rarely comes to town. The town gets its name from the nearby (now petrified) Oak Synod, a graveyard from the days of the Wyvs, who entombed their magnates within the hollows of great oaks. The Old King's soldiers have recently begun cutting down the oaks to revive the bodies within, to great outcry from the residents of Treetombs.

The Wolf Sea Divine Cult Spell List

The list of spells available to each major cult in the Wolf Sea area. Each cult can teach members spells from the Common list, and then has six specialty spells + and an appropriate Otherworld Journey spell.

Full write-ups of the cults will follow at a later date.

Sorcery Spell Lists in the Wolf Sea

Here's a list of spells that the four sorcery schools in the Wolf Sea teach. The list of spells marked "Common" can be learnt by a wizard in any tradition. Barons of Hell are demons, Drowned Legions are masses of undead warriors and sailors who drowned, Undead Wyrms are self-explanatory, and Tulpa-Shoggoths are creatures made of protoplasmic dream-stuff.

You can also get a sense of the cosmology of the setting. Along with the living world, there's the Afterlife, Hell, and the Dreamworld. The Afterlife is where dead souls go, whether for good or ill. Hell is an alternate world, not where the wicked end up automatically, but rather an alien reality, and the Dreamworld is where the contents of dreams come from and go back to once the dream ends.

Battle Magic Spell Lists in the Wolf Sea

There are three battle magic skills in campaigns set in the Wolf Sea. Necromancy, taught by ancestor cults, psionics, taught by psionic dojos, and geomancy, taught by geomantic schools. You can learn all three, and they're widespread throughout the continent. Other battle magic spells exist, but as one-offs or specialties you have to search out and learn.

When you create a character, you pick one to start at POW x 3, and the other two start at POW. You can raise them by spending improvement points like any other skill.

Here's the spell list of battle magic spells (taken from Openquest 2):

Magic and Religion in the Wolf Sea

The small area of the hexcrawl continent I'm focused will be called "The Wolf Sea" just because it sounds kind of cool and so I don't have to keep on calling it "the western bay".

Anyhow, here's a map of how you learn magic in the Wolf Sea and surrounds. Blue squares are common institutions that teach battle magic. Red squares are schools of sorcery, orange squares are religions, and purple squares are shamanic groups. Each type of blue square has its own spell list of battle magic spells, while each religion and sorcery school does as well. Each shamanic school teaches you to manipulate certain kinds of spirits. All this stuff will get covered in the write-ups of each group.

The blue square are the starting positions for PCs on this diagram, unless you start as a priest or a sorcerer, in which case you start on an orange or red square as appropriate. The arrows indicate institutional access. So if you want to say, join the Sailors of the Dream Sea, you'd either better be an initiate of the Void Drowned or Unknowable Sea, or a member of a psionic dojo. The actual transitions can arise organically in game, they don't need specific rules covering them.

Here's a map that's somewhat messy, but covers the various churches operating in the Wolf Sea. It's colour-coded. Different bubbles of the same colour indicate independent church organisations.

Red - The Krovian Imperial Cult
Pink - The Idols of Hell
Orange - The Way of Peace
Yellow - The Divine Architect
Purple - The Ancient Dragons
Blue - The Unknowable Sea
Black - The Void Drowned
White - The Great Mother



From this you can see that the Void Drowned and the Idols of Hell are mostly marginal, except for that big city of devil-worshippers controlling the southern half of Wyvland. The Ancient Dragons are trucking along strong in the hinterlands, but are almost gone in the heavily settled areas except for a rump presence in the westernmost region of Blackwater, while the Unknowable Sea is fading in popularity except amongst port-towns. The Way of Peace is a missionary religion spreading itself over the sea, while the Divine Architect is mostly popular in the cities of Blackwater and Marlech. The Krovian Empire forbids all churches other than its own unified Imperial Cult and the cult of the Great Mother. The Great Mother is popular almost everywhere, but the church is fragmented.

Most of these religions will crop up elsewhere in the campaign setting, as will new ones, while a few will be specific to this area.

The Starting Map for Players

This'll be the starting map for the hexcrawl, more or less. I have a heavily marked up referee-only version with a lot more stuff on it (mostly dense networks of villages and castles too minor to note here, but also all the caves and dungeons). This area is about 1080km x 720km, covering an area about the size of Turkey, or about 20% larger than France, with four major polities and several minor ones at their periphery.

Also, Cole mentioned going down the language rabbit hole. Here's a diagram laying out the connections between languages. Purple language 1, as yet unnamed, is the dominant language in the area, but the Krovian Empire speaks blue language 5 (which will probably be named Krovian), and purple language 2's periphery is that dense forest in the north-east.

Maps of an Openquest Hexcrawl

I'm thinking my next campaign once Necrocarcerus finishes up will be to run an Openquest sandbox with a lot of hexcrawling. To that end, I've been preparing maps using Hexographer. The setting itself doesn't have a ton of detail. I'm holding off choosing names, feel, etc. for now until I have a numbered list of the various elements (languages, etc.) that I can flesh out. At last count there are 26 living languages, and somewhere around a hundred polities - almost as complex as Europe.

This is the continent it'll be taking place on. This map is using 30km / hex scale:

And this is the starting area, at 5km / hex scale. It's a "child map". This is the player-facing map (though they wouldn't start with it). I'll be filling in the referee-only material separately.

Labels will be forthcoming on both maps once I find a format I'm happy with. I've also got to populate the second map with GM-only locations, and then do some setting writing, both some large scale stuff and some detailed technical writing statting everything up.

Bonus maps!

I uploaded the continental map to Realtimeboard and did some doodling. Here's a sketch of the major polities and their areas of influence.

And this is a map marking out the linguistic boundaries of each region (the colours are meaningless, I just selected them for contrast and visibility):

Fast Crit Resolution in BRP

Calculating whether a particular roll is a critical success in Basic Roleplaying and its derivatives (Runequest, Openquest, etc.) is probably the most time consuming part of resolving a roll. Depending on the version, one needs to figure out what 10%, or sometimes 20%, of one's skill score is and then whether the roll comes under that number. While one can precalculate the number, the actual skill score frequently changes due to bonuses and penalties, which also change one's critical threshold.

I propose that adapting the method of resolving critical successes from the Harn system would allow one to resolve these rolls more rapidly. I'm surprised this hasn't become a core part of the BRP system's resolution. Harn's system is also percentile based, and you achieve critical successes 20% of the time, but the system can be easily adapted to the 10% threshold I prefer.

The rule:

If a roll succeeds, and the ones digit on the roll is a "5", the roll is a critical success.

This speeds things up by removing a process of calculation and replacing it with simple recognition. Choosing the "5" digit has the same effect as the already existing rounding rules for critical thresholds.

For a 20% critical success threshold, the two digits should be "5" and "0".

[Review] River of Heaven

The short version: Good system, badly edited, blah setting (mainly due to presentation). Mainly worth picking up if you're looking for the tools to run your own BRP or Openquest space setting.

River of Heaven is a frustrating book. The Basic Roleplaying lineage has a real shortage of solid science fiction implementations, especially if you're only counting ones in print or that aren't just Call of Cthulhu with spacesuit rules. So River of Heaven is really welcome for that reason. It uses the Openquest variant of BRP (one of my favourite versions of Basic Roleplaying), adapting a lot of the rules for firearms combat from the earlier Openquest setting-supplement The Company and adding spaceships / vehicles, bodily augmentation and a variety of biological types (genetically augmented humans, space-born humans, androids, etc.). Like all Openquest books, it's standalone, so you don't need a copy of the Openquest core rules to run River of Heaven games.

Though it has a particular setting associated with it (mostly detailed in the back of the book), you could easily adapt the system to your own science fiction campaign setting. In fact, my recommendation is to do so. If you wanted to pull out your old Mutant Chronicles books, this would be a good system to run games in that setting with.

The default setting is not terrible, but you get a lot of weirdly unplayable information about it, at the expense of interesting things to do. In general, the presentation veers towards physical details about the planets and stars, at the expense of the social geography, which is described only briefly for each one in longform text. I would rather know the capitals of the planet's polities than the metallicity of the star it orbits around, especially since the latter information is available on Wikipedia. The beginning of the major interstellar conflict that will eventually plunge humankind into a new dark age is briefly outlined in a planetary description that doesn't mark it out as particularly important or interesting (you will only realise it's the beginning of this conflict if you read two other parts of the book). This is not the only example of something being buried in a way that makes it hard to piece together.

The overall presentation of information leaves you grasping to pull it all together and make sense of the bigger picture or to get a clear idea of what your PCs could do that's particularly interesting.

The setting also has something that is purely a personal issue, and which may not bother you: A religion whose only religious doctrine appears to be "AI is bad" (the "Renouncers"). It's clearly a nod to Dune, one of the main influences on this game, along with Alastair Reynold's Revelation Space series. But it's a terrible science fictional trope, because it's unclear why anyone belongs to the religion. Why do they think AI is bad? Why are they a religion and not a political group? The Renouncers are set up to be major players in the setting, but we get only a few scraps of information. The cool alien villains that nearly wiped out humanity and that everyone is terrified by and the AI uplifters are also underdescribed, though at least one gets stats for two kinds of machine avatars.

The overall effect of the choices made about how to present this setting left me feeling unenthused about it. I don't think it's bad or stupid, it's just got an extremely weird focus about what information it wants to tell you about itself, and that focus doesn't sell it very well.

Production-wise, the book is both very pretty, and very, very badly edited, though there is at least one incomprehensible design choice. It's printed in full colour bleed, and the colour choices are well-made to improve readability (black text on a grey background). D101 books are almost always badly edited, but this is the worst one yet. Text is repeated both in headers, and most obviously, in the double-listing of PDAs in the equipment section. Some sentences, luckily mostly descriptive text rather than rules, are simply gibberish that look like half-finished rewrites. Tables have inconsistent spacing from the text around them. And in the combat section, several rules are just wrong or missing - the rules for double-tapping refer to hit locations (a thing the Openquest variant of BRP does not have) and there is no actual rule for determining how many shots in a burst hit the target despite the text telling you to roll to determine this. As well, it has the usual Openquest ambiguity about whether characters can dodge ranged attacks, with the dodging rules saying "No" unless they're hand-thrown, while various other spot rules mention doing so.

The incomprehensible design choice is to have five different sidebars on five different pages of the equipment section contain various sections of rambling in-character essay about tea (with a "Cont on pg. XX" at the end of each one). It looks like it was filler for various pages that had large tables on them and that couldn't fit a second table, but I'd rather just have had blank space, or at least a listing for tea in the "Food and Accommodation" table.

Like I said, it's a frustrating book. I do think there's a solid core here, especially with regard to the system, though the lack of editing gets in the way of it at times. It's worth picking up if you're looking for a BRP science fiction game and are willing to basically tear the system out and use it as a toolkit to run your own space adventures.

[Review] Openquest 2

Disclosure: I am a fan of Openquest. I was one of the backers of the Indiegogo campaign for OQ2 (I am thanked by name on the general thanks page, along with other contributors to the campaign).

Openquest 2 contains zero fundamental changes to the mechanics of Openquest. Instead, it provides more spells, better explanations of gameplay and how to tweak it to suit your style, a brief realm system, some new skills, and colour pictures. Broadly speaking, a lot of the changes are incorporating material / inspired by other systems, including other versions of BRP (Basic Roleplaying, the percentile system that powers Runequest, Stormbringer, Call of Cthulhu and other systems). Sometimes this is good, sometimes it seems extraneous.

The two new skills are Wealth and Relationship (X). Both at optional, so you don't have to use them if you don't want to.

The Relationship skill is basically a passion-system like other BRPs have, and is something I really dislike outside of its use in Clockwork and Chivalry, since it rarely does anything directly in any of these games (typically, such skills add their tens digit as a percentile bonus to another skill). At least in C&C it represents one's ideological commitment to some position in the Civil War and comes up whenever you try to proselytise for your side or resist proselytisation by another side. I'm very leery of skills - and older versions of BRP are notorious for this kind of skill - where having them doesn't allow one to do anything different, it simply gives one a bonus to some other skill roll, or allows one to make a second kind of skill roll under certain conditions one otherwise couldn't. The Relationship skill here collects a bunch of fuzzy benefits together under four headings (Allies, Dependents, Enemies and Organisations) with different benefits in each case. If you wanted to create something like the D&D 3.5 Rangers' specialty enemy ability, this would allow you to do it. One of the things I like about Openquest is that it tends to give you clear expectations - whether in the form of concretely defined actions one can take, or in the Big Bonus rule - and I find that the relationship skill doesn't really do that.

Wealth is the typical BRP skill for people who don't want to track individual coins or assets. I go back and forth on this skill, since it mainly exists in games to represent credit but does a bad job representing how credit works or how it motivates people to act. This isn't OQ2's problem tho', it's really a problem with Call of Cthulhu / the BRP gold book, which use this skill. Personally, I think I would stick with the individual asset approach, at least at lower levels of play. This skill has all sorts of sublevels and requires you to determine where specific pieces of gear fall (tho' it provides a chart with some guidelines) so you know what kind of stuff you actually have to roll for or not.

The spells are strong, and good additions to the system. Openquest is now in competition with Runequest 6 for the best battle magic system in a BRP-type game.They're mostly fixed-magnitude, and appear inspired by various low level spells from D&D (this is good), though there are some progressive ones that upgrade. There are a few "extra action" type spells, which I am mixed about. Multimissile was already in the game, but new ones have been added, and I worry that this will create an action / magic point economy at the higher levels of power and transform high level combat into managing it. Still, overall, the additions to the spell lists (not just battle magic, but divine and sorcery as well) are welcome.

The Realm management system is mostly about quest generation, as it should be, and includes notes on using the quests for the various power levels PCs will be at. Like most stock OQ work, it's pretty sparse. I may expand on it and the attached mass combat system sometime in the upcoming year.

The game in general includes a lot more advice on how to play it, which is good for me, as I use Openquest to introduce people to BRP-type systems. I would feel more comfortable handing OQ2 to a new referee than OQ1, now that I have the option to choose between them. The examples are more fleshed out, different campaign power levels are discussed, and there's some discussion of modifying the base assumptions (i.e. different types of magic available and how) to help you create a particular feel.

So, I like Openquest: It remains one of my preferred systems for fantasy roleplaying games, and I will continue to use it for such in future. Openquest 2 is more an extension and continuation of that source text that a radical revision of it (the two are fully compatible, which is nice as I already own three well-loved copies of Openquest 1). I would recommend picking Openquest 2 up for all the same reasons I recommend picking up Openquest 1. I don't know that it's dire and urgent that you switch over if you're happy with Openquest 1 already, but if you like it and want more spells and options, it's worth checking out.

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.