Six (Game System)

Premise

An entirely untested system. Can be used with Reconstructed Espionage Action or anything else.

A character can be represented by a lined sheet of paper, or a notecard. On the card you will write down the things you are carrying. One thing is one line.

You cannot carry more than six things. This is the primary mechanic of the game.

Rules

If you try to do a reasonable or easy task you will succeed. If you try to do a difficult task, or a reasonable task under stress, you must roll 1d6. On a 5 or 6, you succeed. If you can name a relevant thing that helps you, you also succeed. The GM and the other players can name things that would hurt you, which cancel out 1-to-1. If you encounter serious consequences, the GM may make you take on harmful things and/or lose helpful things.

If all your slots are filled with harmful things, you are dead or out of the game. It may be harder to let go of some things than others.

Sample Characters

Start by choosing a name and a class. This will determine your starting things. Each class also has a kind of thing they are good at acquiring from the environment. Here are a few sample classes.

Class - The Society Butcher

Fancy Dress. Silenced pistol. Command of six languages. Permission to enter elite circles. A hole where your heart should be.

You can pick up strings from NPCs you meet. A string is a thing that represents an obligation, and the strength of the obligation is determined by how long you spend interacting with the NPC.

If you spend five minutes talking to them, they will do a favour for you, or ignore an indiscretion. If you spend an hour talking to them, they will cover for you, or give you something to help you. If you spend a night with them, their heart will break for you.

Class - The Old Spenser

All-terrain smart camouflage suit. Night-vision goggles. Rifle. Close-quarters combat skills. A brutal wound, half-healed.

You can procure equipment from your environment. When you can name a gadget, tool, item, or small object that might reasonably exist in the scene, you find it.

Class -  The Pattern Analyst

Dull suit. Networked radio terminal. Encyclopaedic knowledge of most things. Air of standoffishness and undoubted expertise. A deathly fear of conflict.

Name three things in the scene and how they are connected. If the other players agree, they are connected in that way.

[To be continued?] 

Record of Fractal Conflict

Officially it is well known that the Great Pacific Republic is the dominant superpower of the first orientation. It claims the first orientation as its own, for it was the first of the empires to formalise the science of interface travel, and therefore received the honour of defining the origin of space and time. It was the first to convene the Interorientational Dialogue which established a fragile line of communication between the upper and lower powers, enabling for the first time a peace borne not of ignorance but of reasoned understanding. Naturally, it was also the first to violate that fragile but mutual peace, citing the need for security and vital resources for its citizens. The Dialogue still runs to this day, but all that is exchanged over the ansibles and conferences are threats and demands, warnings of imminent desecration, and the bureaucratic arrangements necessary for the repatriation of the dead. 

Officially, it is also well known that the Great Pacific Republic is also winning its war against his Revealed Excellency the Eiraene Emperor and the Empire which he commands. With the Taifang sundered by the Dysaecular Device (the sole product of the secret Esteeri Project Zeitenwende), it seems that once the Middernlands fall the Republic will become the dominant power in OQ, the first to unite all four sets of land and sky, joining eight realms under one roof. The roof, of course, being the roof of the Republican Chamber of State. Never mind that the Esteerenbild, which destroyed an entire orientation with a single gadget, is still alive and kicking. Never mind that the Republican Chamber has sat empty for the last ten years as war after war led to contiguous states of emergency, its rump parliament rubber-stamping a series of extraordinary decrees at the best of times and simply bypassed at worst. And never mind that the Republic is not even the only superpower in the first orientation.

You see, long before there were wars between orientations there were wars within orientations. In fact, there still are. The Great Pacific Republic of Eo was once matched with a rival Republic, the Seven-Starred Republic of the Folk of the Jien, whose sphere of influence rivaled the Pacific hegemony at every turn. The war was at first cold, then hot, then cold again, and by the time it came hot the third time around the Pacific Republic had begun using orientation traversal as a means to move troops without fear of detection or reprisal. The natural philosophers of the Jien had no means of traversing the fourth dimension, and found themselves at every turn hounded by the increasingly desperate cries of their people and their government for a wonder weapon; a miracle cure to end the war that was now turning decisively against them.

And then what happened?

They had no means of defeating the enemy. But they did have a way of remaking themselves. For the eminent philosophers of the Jien were well trained topologists and geometers of all kinds, including the foremost experts in functional topology in the entire OQ. And what is land, but realised geometry?

You don't mean...

Yes, to defend themselves against the Republic the Jien military developed the first fractal bomb. It was called an iterative regularisation device, a tool for enabling the distortion of local reality using the laws of mathematics. And they used it on themselves.

Those bloody idiots. 

Idiots, yes, and many more things besides. Nowadays the entire sphere of the Jien, from their home plains to every satellite statelet they convinced to join their coalition, is about the size of four football fields joined together. Its border is now a perfect square, every point of land rearranged into a fractal which grows ever more dense as you approach the centre. When the Emergency Command heard what the Jien had done, they laughed and said the war would be over in three months. By the time I was sent to the front we'd just passed through the second ring of regularisation.

How long had the war been going on by then? 

Some fourteen years. Now it's coming on thirty.

How can it take so long to wipe out a few football fields?

If you start walking into the Jien empire now, you will find your subjective sense of space shrinking. Somehow, as you approach the centre each step puts you in a larger rather than a smaller space than before. Most of it is just void---empty land, filling in the points between the original geometry---but the overall effect is that the entire surface area of the Jien empire is still there, just folded in on itself. This was the genius of the geometers, you see. For they designed the fractal in such a way that the defenders, who were deeper in than us, would always have more land, more ground to work with, more angles of attack. Despite encircling them on all sides we were in fact always hemmed in, with our backs against the wall, made to look slow and sluggish. I was at the front for five more years. Every day the sky seemed emptier as we pushed deeper in. Eventually I realised that there was simply not enough sky left for the iterative mapping to work with, and all that was left was a deep atomic blue. Still, by the end of the five years we reached the outskirts of the Jien river valley itself. Their capital was within reach.

What did you find there?

Patience, student. For months by that point we had grown worried. Intercepts from the capital had become increasingly garbled, prisoners of war spoke of absent leadership and unclear directives. By the time we saw the walls and our aerial scouts saw how the insides seemed to widen as they flew in, it was already too late. They'd seen us coming, and detonated another fractal bomb inside the capital.

That... can't be good.

It isn't. One fractal bomb is nasty stuff, but the infinity is still fairly regular. A fractal inside a fractal... we shelled the capital, or what was left of it, for weeks, months, a year. Our scouts saw no difference. Time, too, slows when you are in the zone of contraction. Then we saw what was coming out. Half-soldiers, distorted tanks, gunships flying backwards and dilated in time, firing antimunitions that rose out of the ground with our soldiers still stuck on them. It was a fresh layer of hell.

So the war was never won.

No. It took us years more to evacuate all of our troops and every non-distorted civilian we could carry. There was no Jien government any more, no more war to speak of. There were only humans, who wanted to live, and the monsters inside the capital. The Republican Chamber declared victory, and now we just deposit endless shells into the territory from outside. Bigger bombs too, when we can find one. Eventually the plan is to get some Esteeri diplomats on side and arrange for a team to deliver a Dysaecular Device into the centre of the double-fractal.

Does that work? Will any of this work?

I don't know. I hope I never have to find out.

Setting: Reconstructed Espionage Action

Introduction 

The suspended tram jerks and shudders as you pass through another junction, centrally-controlled switches clicking in a choreographed handover. All around you the small steel box continues its steady climb, thin steel walls lined with reassuring mahogany handrails and windows framed in neutral cream. If you look closely you can just about see where the driver used to sit, near the front of the car, but now a small emergency stop switch is all that remains of the control panel. In place of a human operator a small telecomputer unit clicks and whirrs, streams of control signals flickering on its dot-matrix display. A small tab under the display accepts tickets and a seriously red bakelite phone allows you to call in case of a sudden emergency.

All around you the passengers are carrying out their expected roles in a morning commute. Someone is reading the newspaper. Someone is drinking coffee. On the velvet cushioned-bench besides you someone is using a pocket cassette player. They are playing the song Whirling-In-Rags, 12 PM. You can hear it leaking out of the terrible headphones. Outside the window you see an interface airship (too vortex is too unstable for jet engines) readying to shift, part of the ever-growing interfaced war effort against his Revealed Excellency, the Eiraene Emperor. The vocator on the radio says that their backwards thaumaturgies will soon be ground to dust, just as they did to the scholars in the hidden isles. Any day now.

The next time the switch handover happens you will be almost three minutes away from the Legislative District. When you feel the bump you allow your hand to fall open slightly. Their hand brushes against yours, as if by accident. Out of the corner of the eye you catch a pair of nervous eyes, a yellow beret, a light green jacket. Then the handover is complete. You don't talk during the last three minutes of the journey, even when they bump into you on the way out.

You only dare look at your hand when you sit down at your bare, single-bulb apartment. As promised, its a vocator tape, the two metal studs indicating that it fits a Series V or later model. The label is left blank, but you pull out a trolley from behind your single bed. On it sits a Rosencrantz-V Vocator-Telecomputer Multiplex, a miracle of engineering---only the height of your hip. A woodgrain control panel with inset plastic keyboard connects an LCD screen, a voicebox, a studio microphone, and a small printer for printout and fax connections. Underneath it all sits a semi-transparent steel-framed glass case where the symbolic operator units and memory racks can be dimly apprehended, tinted a faint gunmetal grey by dust and poor lighting. It takes a few seconds to boot up after you insert the tape.

PACIFIC COORDINATION SIMULATION SERIES VII

1. Global Policy Convergence Under External Drive [Battery A-D]

2. Interface Cohesion (Phase Transition) Initiative [Battery E-G]

3. Political Counterinsurgency and Outlier Detection via Population-scale Statistics

4. [MORE]

... 

Merely possessing this tape would get you sent to the Giftschrank for advanced questioning, or worse. But the data is invaluable for understanding the plans of the Directorate for the next five years, so you sit down and start reading.

What is this?

This is an aesthetic outline for a setting more than anything else, continuing the ideas which started here. It contains elements of Disco Elysium, the computers of the 50s or 60s, Washington DC, WWII Germany, the aesthetic of Metal Gear, the writings of Vaclav Havel, and Critical Mass by Philip Ball. All of this is then blended with quasi-historical fantasy and some level of background magic radiation.

In essence it is simple. There is a world not unlike ours, with nations and factories and war and machines that compute via logical operations. In that world there is a shadowed state, which operates an order with scrabbling viciousness and totalising ambition. You are a tiny figment of animal imagination trying to survive within that order. And, as you pray and fight and hope and love, background forces stir that put the cold and dominated reality you see all around you into question. There is a Gare Polyphonique, and we're tuned into it, until the end of time when all mysteries are revealed. This world does not have a name yet: let us call it OQ, Orbis Quartus.

The Interface

The world of OQ is similar to ours, except that it has an element known as an interface. An interface is something like a direction on a compass, or the hour reported by a clock. It is an objective measure of some form of distance, just as we have measures in space and time. In spatial terms it is a fourth axis after X, Y, and Z.

Thus, to report your position in the world of OQ requires four coordinates: latitude, longitude, date, and interface orientation. To change interface is effectively to move between different possible worlds that coexist at that moment in space and time. OQ is therefore many overlapping planets at once, all of which lay claim to different versions of the same volume in space. 

The original way to travel between interfaces used natural portals: great storms in the sea, caves that cultists thought led into the underworld. They were treated as manifestations of the divine, or a sign from higher powers. Over time the mechanics of interface manipulation became formalised. Portals and interface vortices could be discovered, dispelled, and at last erected, and pocket-watches were created to measure your orientation. It was discovered that four great civilisations had arisen in OQ contemporaneously, each laying claim to the central landmass known (variously) as the Middern Eiraene Markgrund, the Fundament, the Oecumene, and the Taifang. 

Shortly afterwards, these civilisations went to war. 

The Present 

Now there is a tenuous peace between the two higher interfaced civilisation, the Great Pacific Republic (where you live, an industrial empire with votes but no democracy and subjects but no citizens) and the Esteerenbild (not much different, think the Moralintern but they actually managed to establish their ideal Innocent world on the backs of ancient powers). Both wage proxy wars in the lower civilisations for influence and resources, bringing airships and telecomputers to bear against fireballs and bespoke spirit-binding rituals. The Taifang has been splintered by weapons they cannot even understand and rendered a blasted heap, and the Middernlands are headed that way. The dirty secret is that it is very hard to establish a planet-spanning empire unless you have another planet's worth of resources to burn: it just so happens that in this case "you" do.

The players are likely to be discontents in the Pacific Fundament, rebels of various stripes, infiltrators from the "lower" interfaced planes. I intend the setting to provide plenty of ammunition for campaigns of all sorts, even classic dungeon crawling or hexcrawling types. I hope this seems interesting. 

Wandering in the Astral Plane

The astral plane really should not be just a void-world where ghosts or spirits live. It is, after all, the realm of pure idea and imagination, where concepts live. In honour of this, I devised a series of linked tables that allow you to project yourself into the astral plane. By rolling on the linked tables you will experience fantastic delusions/visions/glimpses of the impossible until your thoughts eject you. Suitable for vaguely Delta-greenish/modern OSRish/gonzo GLOGish/urban fantasyish settings. If I ever get the energy, I want to expand this to a full hexflower thing where you can move from hex to hex by thinking different thoughts/feeling different emotions. Merry glogmas!

A: How do you enter the astral plane? <depending on plot circumstance, or roll 1d5>

1. A lucid dream where you decided to peel away the surface of the dreamworld. <goto B1>

2. Meditation for thirty-two consecutive hours, according to the instructions specified by the recovered Tokai Botourouden (Tale of the Eastern Sea Dream-lantern). <goto B2>

3. You were on stage, and fell sideways. <goto B3>

4. [someone] cracked open your skull and [something] your brain [...] <goto B4>

5. Experimental program to determine the origin or prospects of consciousness through the use of EEGs, copious psychedelics, and transcranial magnetic stimulation. <goto B1>

B1: What do you see? <1d6, goto C>

1. A riot of sound, emotion, and colour. Howling red blushes and acrid blue silences, tinged with yellow fear.

2. A slow procession of ancient embarrassments, stirred up by an irritated superego.

3. The deep marsh of comforting primordial darkness that all sleep tends towards, arrested only by the day.

4. A replay of your life, flowing through the stream of a river. By moving your hand against or along the flow you can speed up or slow down the images. The air is lit by a beautiful golden sunset.

5. Yourself magnified a thousand times, talking, chattering, laughing, loveable, hateful. To go deeper you have to step around/through/into/beyond yourself.

6. Them. Why did it have to be them, waiting here in the dark? Oh god, you have so much to tell them. But would they understand? Can they ever forgive you?

B2: What do you see? <1d6>

1. Your house, but the colours have run cold and the time is fixed at midnight.

2. Your family, standing solemn and still, the jokes have fallen from their eyes.

3. Your Family, generations on generations, a great teeming mass of historic humanity reconstituted as astral shells. You can ask them many questions. Whether they remember the answers, and whether you can understand what they say, is another matter entirely.

4. A great stone amphitheatre, filled with meditating monks. You see a host of different colours on robes, banners with foreign scripts, and the standard of the Isshin-muten (One heart without sky) school whose practices you pilfered.

5. A massive theoretical construction they would have once called Oriental, impossible layers of towers on towers and seas of tiled roofs, gates ever growing and folding into themselves.

6. A beach. Each grain of sand is a letter or a character. The waves push the sand into new sentences and paragraphs, each lasting for a mere instant before being destroyed as the wave retreats.

B3: What do you see? <d6, goto C>

1. A massive industrial elevator, grinding and whirring as it cycles through backstage moments from across time and place. Macbeth, Agamemnon, Journey to the West…

2. A circle of people, clothed in skins and holding spears. You have been summoned as part of the enacting of a Hero’s Journey, a spectre of the future to perform for the past. A crackling fire sends soot into well-exercised lungs. Your body feels… younger.

3. Gold upon gold and ultraviolet upon ultraviolet. Barely human spectres–translated to umber-grey digital ghosts by your primitive visual cortex–review your performance in the simulation of your universe. Why has this agent simulacra temporarily unbound itself from the constructed quasi-Euclidean world-manifold?

4. Back on stage. The show goes on. The show is of your life. Offstage is just another stage. 

5. Three aged witches. Something tells you that they are the three witches. Three as old as story. Three as old as time. They smile with gaping maws for mouths.

6. A great stone amphitheatre, filled with everyone from your life, even those you have not met yet. They are clapping and cheering, celebrating you, all of you, all of the tiny disappointments that you suffered, all of the titanic blows you survived. 

B4: What do you see? <d6, goto C>

1. A circle of cackling magicians, wearing vestments and robes from another time and place. “This one will do,” says one, before another aims a spell from behind at his caged heart.

2. Still, gigantic, ponderous, glorious statues. Statues of the gods, past and present. Perhaps they are not statues—they cannot be, they are too terrifying and awesome. But they are not moving, not for you.

3. Three aged witches. Something tells you that they are the three witches. Three as old as story. Three as old as time. They smile with gaping maws for mouths.

4. An operating theatre. Surgeons with complex masks and devices for eyes, manipulating mechanical stingers that pierce and probe. Beeps and whirs, snaps and cuts, you are on the bench and unable to move until your thoughts untangle themselves.

5. A great library with caged shelves hanging from more caged shelves, forming chains of knowledge that stretch from a cold blue heaven into a burning red hell. Walkways connect them, and spirits scurry between the books. A set of hieroglyphs burn before your mind, giving you coordinates and commands. You find that you can choose to ignore them.

6. A digital nullscape, matrices of gridlines arcing between voids. At first, it appears to be merely rows and rows of nothing. Patterns slowly emerge from the shadows, ICE and AI constructs weaving between each other, interfacing with each other, devouring each other, spilling gigabytes of data into dust.

C: Even this is merely a shadow of the real astral plane. Which verb do you choose? <d8>

1. THINK <goto D1>

2. HATE <goto D2>

3. LOVE <goto D3>

4. REMEMBER <goto B2>

5. FORGET <goto B1>

6. PERFORM <goto B3>

7. MANIFEST <goto B4>

8. EXIT <goto E>

D1: What does it mean to think? <d4>

1. To grasp the iron laws of reality, and through them attain ultimate power. <goto F1>

2. To peel back the deceptions and falsehoods that drive our days, and beyond them attain truth. <goto F2>

3. To weave a deception about yourself, and in turn flee from that which you already know. <goto B1>

4. To think is to carry out the operations which form the computational unraveling of the universe. To think is to be. <goto G>

D2: What does it mean to love? <d4>

1. To deny yourself in abnegation, and escape yourself through a more gracious other. <goto B1>

2. To maintain yourself in the face of an uncaring universe. <goto F1>

3. To attain true appreciation of the oneness of things, and dissolve the artificial boundaries that divide us. <goto F2>

4. To exist and to care, which we do by existing. To love is to be. <goto G>

D3: What does it mean to hate? <d4>

1. Death. Destruction. Hurt them. They hurt you. Make them pay. <4d6 psychic damage, goto E>

2. Kill. Kill them. Kill someone. Kill them all. <3d6 psychic damage, goto E>

3. Why? Why did it have to be me? What was wrong with me, that you chose to do this to me? How could you? Why could you? Where are you? <2d6 psychic damage, goto E>

4. It is not me. It is not clean. It is not safe. It is not, it cannot. <1d6 psychic damage, goto E>

E: How do you exit the astral plane? <d6, end>

1. A fading, a dimming into a realer, more disappointing blackness.

2. An unravelling, the end of sense into nonsense into senselessness into a way a round a long the riverrun past eve and adams…

3. Floating. The infinite worlds become infinitely small beneath you. They recede into a unity, a unity that splits apart again into division, into reality.

4. Sinking. Fact, feeling, and idea swallow you. They demand more of you, until there is nothing to be done except to become real again.

5. Like a film reel or a comic book, time itself segments and accelerates towards the end of the story.

6. A train bursts onto the screen/dream/reality/self, and everything is shocked into order again. You wake up as if no time has passed.

F1: What is the nature of power? <1d6, goto E>

1. KINGSHIP. Rule them, command them, burn them, break them. <+1 CHA>

2. FORTITUDE. The totality of the self must become sealed against the totality of the other, this is true safety. <+1 CON>

3. OVERTHROW. Overcome all opposition, and thy will shall be law. <+1 STR>

4. FLOW. To be in the moment, to move with the moment, to supersede the moment. <+1 DEX>

5. KNOWLEDGE. To know is to control. Once you can understand something, you can have power over it and make it your own. <+1 INT>

6. FORESIGHT. True strength comes from knowing what battles to fight in the first place. <+1 WIS>

F2: What is the nature of truth? <1d6, goto E>

1. NOTHINGNESS. There is no root-substance, everything is relational and therefore hollow. There is no base matter. <Gain spell: DISINTEGRATE>

2. BEAUTY. The trueness of a thing is simply its aesthetic power. Falsehood is ugliness, and plain appearances mere nonexistence. <Gain spell: GREATER ILLUSION>

3. LIFE. That which is true is that which grows and changes over time. <Gain spell: RESURRECTION>

4. COMPLEXITY. There are layers upon layers, details upon details. There is always a caveat, another fractal reality beneath the current one. <Gain spell: POLYMORPH>

5. SIMPLICITY. Entia non sunt multiplicanda praeter necessitatem. <Gain spell: GREATER DISPELL MAGIC>

6. SYMMETRY. What is true in one place and time is true forever. <Gain spell: TRUE TELEPORT>

G: How is existence maintained? <goto E>

1. SUFFERING. Life is a mere contiguous sequence of senseless indignities. Shit happens and then you die. <Gain health>

2. HOMEOSTASIS. A delicate shell of extreme complexity and ever-shifting order, balanced on the cliff’s edge above senseless chaos. <Gain experience>

3. LOVE. You are loved, and that is enough. <Gain a wish>

 

Giving classes more gameplay, not less (Mechanics)

It is a common piece of advice that classes should not be able to skip gameplay, or otherwise reduce the time players spend interacting with parts of the world that the class is connected to. For example, a ranger should not have the ability to fast forward through overland travel, since presumably players choose to play rangers because overland travel is a core part of their ideal gameplay or narrative experience. 

The natural answer to this is that classes should give their players more options to interact with the world, not less. In particular, we should give players options that are hard to come up with simply with ad-hoc creative thinking, or otherwise quick improvisation at the table. Not only are simple and predictable class abilities boring, they also lead to questions like "if the rogue can roll to sneak, does that mean nobody else can"? 

Here are some ideas for rich and option-expanding class abilities. Names in italic are references. I leave out the magical classes because of all the classes they are the most well-equipped with options already.

Meta note: I use dice-based checks to gate uses of abilities because they are a common gameplay "button" and offer a good dose of uncertainty (especially for the failure-gated abilities). Depending on the preferences your table you may want to skip the checks.

Martial Classes

Battle-cunning: When you succeed on a to-hit roll, you can always specify a body part to target. You can also target accessories or pieces of equipment like rings, sword hilts, or bowstrings for disarming or other manoeuvres. You can also choose to simply roll damage as usual, or forego damage to perform a specific trick or manoeuvre taught to you by a master.

Lightning Reflexes: When you roll to dodge or evade an attack or trap, you can specify what side of the attacker you end up on, or what part of the room you dodge to. If you are holding a weapon or a large item, you can always drop what you are holding to automatically succeed at an evasion roll.

Recoltes et semailes: When you fail on a to-hit roll, you can choose from the following options: If you push, you can still hit and deal the minimum damage for your weapon or attack, but the next attack against you by any opponent gains advantage. If you withdraw, you fall back out of range of the enemy's melee attacks (they will need to move to get to you), but are now prone (you'll need to use your movement to get up).

The Body Speaks: When you fail on a to-hit roll, you can use the chance to observe a weakness, current ailment, old wound, or past scar on an enemy as they strain to block or deflect your attack. If they are a notable foe, the GM will tell you what you see and a snippet of their history or lore. As an alternative, you can make a perception check. On a success, you can predict what they will do next turn in broad strokes (attack, flee, go for an item, shout a command).

Specialist Classes

Perspicacious Loris: When you succeed at a perception check in any inhabited area, you can see, as if it were playing out before your eyes, 1d4 ways in which the space could be used. One of them is accurate to the way it is currently used, if it is used at all. This can reveal traps if the traps require regular maintenance. The vision takes place over the course of a second and is reflexive. (Credit to @choiroffire and this post)

A Quiet Fellow: When you succeed at any check related to hiding, deception, or passing undetected, you will be informed of the explicit requirements for someone to discover your presence or uncover your deception by the GM. If you or anyone else does not break those requirements, you are considered undetected by default. If the situation changes significantly, the GM may alter the deal.

Liar's Friend: When you succeed at a check related to detecting magical or mundane deception, disguise, illusion, or charm, you can work backwards and discover what the deceiver or liar was trying cover up, or at least have a very good hunch.

Improvise! : When you are discovered in a deception or uncovered from hiding (or simply fail a check related to these activities), you can immediately improvise and describe how you use a learned ruse, trick, part of the environment, or piece of training to escape from the situation. Roll another check for persuasion, deception, stealth etc.: If you succeed you can extract yourself from the scene unscathed. However, if you fail this new check the consequences will be much worse (suspicious guards become hostile, angry customers become violent).

I met a traveller: You can determine upon hearing a rumour or a tall tale the sort of person who would spread it, its approximate provenance, and how likely it is to be embellished (but not how likely it is to be true).

Overland Classes

The Folkways: If you succeed at a check related to tracking or navigation in an outdoors or wilderness area, you can name something you want (a shortcut, food, water, shelter). The GM will offer you a deal for it: a shortcut can be dangerous, food can be off the beaten track, shelter can require 1d4+2 hours of work to set up. You can choose to take the deal or not.

Hwaer cwom symbla gesetu: When you encounter ruins, habitations, or other buildings in the wild, you can immediately tell how old they are, their approximate purpose, and how much force it would take to tear them down.

Reading the Leaves: When you come across a patch of disturbed wilderness and succeed at a perception check, you can sense what happened here in the last while (it can be the last few hours or the last few days depending on the weather). You can then ask questions of the GM: Did someone or some animal pass through? What kind? Was there a struggle? Were they wounded? Was magic involved?

 

The Great Bowl (Setting)

A setting post inspired by Sekiro, the Three Kingdoms, and Japanese and Chinese mythology.

Sit down, my son. You are now of age, and I must tell you what my mother told me, and her mother told her, and so on until the first days when we arrived in the great bowl. Your mother passed early defending our village, so it falls to me. I hope I will do her story justice, as she did for me so many times.

The world in which we live is the great bowl (太元). Our village elders believe it was an ancient lake created by the gods in their strife, which has dried up in the ages that have passed since the years of the wise emperors. In those days gods and men were not so different, and one could know the histories of things merely by asking the divinities within them. Now the gods are remote, and rule by onerous written laws and vast celestial courts. It is known that they define our fates by actuarial tables and arithmetic. It is hard to talk to them, and harder still to plead your case. The merciful listener goddess who keeps the west safe for the lotus-path followers has herself been placed under divine arrest. She cannot help us now.

So, what is in this great bowl? You have seen most of it. There are villages, built along the old Yi River (易江) which runs from west to east, starting above the rim of the bowl and running down into the cavernous courts of hell which pull the land into shadow around them. You would do well to stay away from those parts of the valley, for they are where the echoes come at night.

In this bowl the greatest monuments are four sacred cardinal temples (四象廟). They are larger than our houses and halls. They are larger than anything we could build today. The story goes that they were built by great emperor Shengzu of the Li dynasty (立聖祖), the last of the good and wise kings, who sought to leave the bowl and forge a great empire. He built them to honour the many gods and the cardinal divinities, and they in turn gave him four sacred treasures with which he killed his rivals and conquered the land. They are as follows, remember them well:

To the north, the Black Turtle-snake Xuanwu (玄武), who gave Shengzu his sword after Shengzu made the correct offerings. The pale snakeblade, it is said, grants the wielder invincibility in battle, but only while they are holding it.

To the east, the Azure dragon Qinglong (青龍), who gave Shengzu his crown after Shengzu presented a great speech. The dragon-blessed mianguan has sixteen braided cords made of dragon whispers and pearls from the sea-king's palace, and gives the bearer total knowledge of the past and future.

To the south, the Ruby phoenix Zhujue (朱雀), who wrote Shengzu's writ of kingship after Shengzu wooed them with song and archery. On the writ it is written that he who bears this scroll will claim all eight corners of the world under a single roof, and thereby make the whole realm his abode. For it is well known that beyond our bowl the realm is a square.

To the west, the White tiger Baihu (白虎), who never yielded to Shengzu's bribery, martial prowess, and flattering words. They say that the frustrated Shengzu used the pale snakeblade to slice off one of Baihu's marble paws, and crafted the first imperial seal out of it. This ancient wrong - and it is a wrong, even though Shengzu won the fight - is why the tigers in the west still hunt us.

The temples still stand today, protected by the divine laws and ancient rites, but they are old and out of repair. Perhaps in our time there will be a great storm, and then the final protections of Shengzu will fail and we too will die.

What did you say? Yes, we once were a mighty people, who ruled lands far beyond this tiny bowl. We had a great and mighty empire that united many tribes, and we marched across the desert to find rival empires which we engaged in trade and war. But our emperors were unwise and capricious, and in time they squandered the riches the generations past gave us. Our fertile fields they desecrated with war and famine, our great archives they desecrated with lies, our noble people they desecrated with rapacious taxes, and our great gods they desecrated with foul and unspeakable deeds. Till at last the heavens turned against us, and the last of the emperors was incinerated by lighting in a great storm, and the great lords arose in revolt. That was when we fled the royal city and returned to the bowl from whence we came. 

Alas... Yes, alas for fate, which brings time and decay. Still, my son, it is hard for a heart to escape the dictates of fate. And to speak the truth, I am sparing you many stories of the imperial days, and they are not glorious ones. Perhaps it was for the best that what was united by evil forces came to divide once more.

And for you? Well, if you wish to stay in the bowl, there is much for you to do. We hold back echoes and ghosts from the caverns of hell at night. By day we negotiate with the other villages for food and other necessities. Every now and then someone gets it in their head to become the next Shengzu, and we have to beat them back. Every year we must undertake a pilgrimage to all four of the cardinal temples, to complete annual rites and remember the past. But I sense that your heart lies beyond these walls.

The outside world is dangerous, my son. If you could find some vestige of the old blessings from the cardinal temples, perhaps you could leave. What is outside the bowl? To the west is a vast desert, beyond which they say strange and foreign peoples live. To the south is the ruins of our old capital, a vast and impenetrable maze of walls and gates. To the north a storm has raged for the last twenty years and more. And to the east after many miles of walking is the sea, where the mighty dragon they call the eastern sea-king sits.

It's best that you stay in the bowl. It is safer here. But if your heart is set, I have only one piece of advice for you: Forge your own path. Do not repeat the mistakes of the past.

The Herald of Woe (Enemy NPC)

They say that he rides in full black garb, even during the hazy midsummer months when the moon brings no coolness and the sun a baleful warmth. He is not armoured save his head, where he wears a dull grey helmet from some vanquished principality. He arrives always in public, during the day, when there are children playing in the town square and merchants hawking their wares in the market. None know where he retires once his work is done.

They say that his order is dead or dying, that no new initiate will replace him when he is gone, because his nation has been wiped from the earth and the adherents of his secret faith burned at the take. They say this and half-believe it, regardless of any evidence for or against these rumours, because they are terrified of him.

In the hidden isles they say that some mystics learned to commune with a nameless god. The domain of this god is most peculiar. The god does not rule over any element, or symbol, or land, or bequeath any form of magic. Instead, the domain of this god is the inner realm of a person's heart, their private moments, their whispered self-admonitions, the thoughts they think in the quiet hours of a very cold evening. The mystics called this god the Lord of Silence, and in communing with the Lord they learned to detect the innermost secrets of any whom they laid eyes on.

Wisely, these mystics kept to themselves, and mostly used their art to further their studies of the psyche. They did this in the hopes (some say) of ridding the world of shame and guilt, a noble goal indeed. Unfortunately, they came to admit a student to their ranks, who learned their arts and fled in the dead of night. The student, proud and cruel, used his skill to become a spymaster for a kingdom. Eventually he rose to absolute dominance within the kingdom, and became feared and loathed by the king and the nobles alike. Using his terrible knowledge he kept each angry party at bay, and spent their secrets to play them off against each other. His power was absolute... Till at last death, who accepts no gifts and fears no threats, came for him. 

But it was too late, death was too patient, the spymaster (whose name men swear never to speak) had already trained students of his own. These students learned lesser techniques, more crude approximations of the true mystic communion, but they were no less feared. They formed an inner cult to the Lord of Silence and kept a death-grip on power for four generations until the whole kingdom was annexed by the Empire in some war or another, and the flag suborned beneath the Cloth-and-standard Throne of His Revealed Excellency the Emperor at the Capitol Mount where He was borne. The cultists were scattered, the cult disbanded.

They say that he is one of the cultists, or someone who took on their mantle. He rides into town at midday and whispers secrets to men, secrets they would die rather than see revealed. No matter rich or poor, noble or citizen, each pays his dues to the herald of woe. Those who refuse to give in to blackmail are destroyed with a sentence, or a phrase, and often flee their homes never to be seen again. Sometimes he need not even say the phrase in public.

Some who hail from the isles themselves say that the Lord of Silence is not a figure of terror. They say that the Lord is a benevolent god, who sought to relieve the burden of torturous secrets and self-deceptions from those who had to live with them. How the Lord can then empower such agents of misery is unknown. Surely he would know the darkness of their innermost thoughts?

Then again, they say that after his death the king of that long-forgotten principality ordered the spymaster's head cut open to see what brain spawned such wickedness. They say that when he did so, he found his skull an empty shell.

Herald of Woe

2 HD, AC as leather, longsword (1d8)

After 1d4-1 rounds of observation he can whisper a secret to anyone in sight of him as an instantaneous action. Only they hear this secret. They must immediately make a morale save (or equivalent) or take 2d8 psychic damage. If he is allowed to speak in an uninterrupted manner for one round to a target, they must also make a morale save or enter a panicked fight-or-flight response. 

Depending on the number of secrets a person carries, he can keep doing this indefinitely. Those who are resistant to Fear take half damage and get advantage on such morale saves. The average person has 1d4-1 secrets. Add 1d4 per rank of nobility (knight, lord, duke, king...). For PCs, at character creation or when encountering the Herald each PC should roll 1d6 for any secrets they might have. If the Herald directs his attention at you, you take the damage, write down a secret, and give it to the GM. Secrets obtained in play or during adventures add to this total, rather than taking up an existing secret's place.

On death, drops a wooden idol. Attuning with the idol over a week allows a trained cleric or magic user to commune with the Lord of Silence. The Lord, of course, will not offer any response, but perhaps if he is made aware of how his gift has been misused something of this terror will end.