Echoes from outer voids

H P Lovecraft would have been 135 years old today -- though, let's be honest, that's just an excuse to do something with the pun* on Dragon Warriors, celebrating only its 40th anniversary. (Incidentally, this is an abbreviated version of a post that appeared on my Jewelspider Patreon page; go there for more lively awfulness.)

Dagon Warriors uses a variant of the Dragon Warriors rules for Prohibition-era adventures. Characters are categorized into types depending on how they deal with adversaries. These are not descriptive of the character’s role in the game; a character could be a private eye, a cop, a war veteran, a gangster, a librarian, a scientist, a reporter, a sculptor, or whatever they like – and still be of any type.

• The Boxer (corresponds to DW Knight) fights scientifically.
• The Brawler (like the DW Barbarian) flings themselves into the fray with fists and feet.
• The Psionic (DW Mystic) has recourse to paranormal abilities.
• The Scout (DW Assassin) relies on stealth and observation.

The world of the Cthulhu Mythos is science fiction, not fantasy – at least, it is in this version. So there is no sorcery, even though the powers of the mind might sometimes seem uncanny. MAGICAL ATTACK and MAGICAL DEFENCE are renamed PSYCHIC ATTACK and PSYCHIC DEFENCE in these rules. We also recommend capping character progression at 10th rank to prevent the game turning into HPL-meets-the-MCU.

Boxers get the following special skills:

• Disarm (applies to any weapon, not just swords)
• Two-handed fighting (fists, improvised weapons or handguns)
• Marksman (equivalent to Master Bowman in DW)
• Quick Draw
• Haymaker (equivalent to DW Swordmaster but applies to a punch)

Brawlers get the special skill See Red (equivalent to DW Bloodrage)

Psionic powers (equivalent to Mystic spells) are:

Level One

• Invigorate
• Suspended Animation

Level Two

• Darksight
• Might
• Pursuit

Level Three

• Allseeing Eye
• Mind Cloak
• Nourish
• Telekinesis

Level Four

• Clairvoyance
• Hidden Target
• Telepathy

Level Five

• Force Field
• Truthsense

Level Six

• Purification
• Survival

Psionics also get the abilities of Premonition, ESP and Awakening (corresponding to DW Adepthood).

Scouts do not have the alchemical or special combat abilities (throwing spikes, shock attack, etc) of a DW Assassin. Their special skills are limited to:

• Stealth
• Inner Sense
• Meditation techniques up to Void Trance (8th rank)
• Climbing
• Disguise
• Pilfer
• Picklock
• Track
• Memorize

Firearms

Player-characters do not wear armour. We have to be prescriptive about that otherwise you will end up with players like the guy in our Wild West campaign who insisted on tooling around town in a Conquistador breastplate. They may cite the gunfighter James Miller, but – no. Just no.

You could wear a bullet-proof vest. It’s encumbering (reduce ATTACK by 2 and STEALTH by 5) and when hit you first roll to see if the bullet struck the torso (indicated by 4-6 on d6) and if it does the AF is 8. The vest won’t stop you getting hurt – you’ll still take damage, and you’ll feel like you’ve been kicked by a Pierson's Puppeteer, but if the shooter didn’t make their armour bypass roll then you won’t be killed.

Revolver (d10+1, 5 points)

• Range (S/M/L): 20m/50m/75m
• Fires every round for six shots. Takes 6 rounds to reload completely.

Rifle (d12, 9 points)

• Range: 50m/100m/200m
• Bolt-action: requires 1 CR to load a single round or 5 CRs to reload a full magazine (5 rounds).

Firearms jam on an ATTACK roll of 20, requiring 1-3 rounds to fix.

Creatures

Some examples of Mythos creatures are given below. It’s not anticipated that player-characters will go toe-to-tentacle with such beings, however. If they did, their adventuring careers would not be long. Adversaries will usually be cultists (deluded humans who imagine their prayers are noticed by powerful otherworldly entities) and servants who have been forced or hypnotized into doing the bidding of an alien creature – as in the scenario "Abnormal Growth" which accompanies these rules in the original Patreon post, and the title of this post gives a hint as to what that scenario is about.

* The suggestion was originally John Hagan's, it just took me nearly a decade to get around to it.

The bells, the bells!

Chime Born characters are those whose time of birth marks them out from others. In the north-western parts of the world of Legend (especially Ellesland, Chaubrette and Kurland) this is believed to confer special abilities. Roll 5d6 during character creation and consult the table:

Technically the character must have been born within the sound of church bells, not merely at those times of day, which implies they were born in or near a town, monastery or large village where the bells would be rung at regular times.

Given the rolls required, characters like this will obviously be very rare, but I agree with Damien Walter that the value of role-playing rulebooks is not only in deciding what happens in a specific game, but to tantalize with all the possibilities that might occur. Glimpses of other possibilities or future games; the hint of the bulk of the iceberg floating darkly below you. So there will be some folkloric touches like this that may never apply to your PCs personally, but will nonetheless colour how players see the world.

I originally considered the Chime Born feature for the Jewelspider RPG but it ended up on the cutting-room floor, at least as an overt game mechanic. It smacks too much of 18(00) strength in the old days of D&D -- a footling detail that isn't worth including if players are really just going to accept the vagaries of statistical chance. But I expect the Chime Born to get mentioned somewhere (perhaps in a scenario or in the magic section of the rulebook) even if they're not a PC option, and they could work very well in Dragon Warriors if not in the lower-fantasy version of Legend that is the setting of Jewelspider.

Lich Lord, Legend-style

Gamebook critic and writer Oliver Whawell writes to say, "I was the perfect age for Warlock of Firetop Mountain when it was released, and quickly became a fan of gamebooks. The Fighting Fantasy books developed alongside my reading age, but then they started to feel a bit immature - and along came Blood Sword: great writing and a challenging game, especially if you adhered to the rules.

"Inspired by the excellent work of Red Ruin Publishing (and a throwaway comment from Wayne Imlach) I wanted to see if Blood Sword and Dragon Warriors were compatible. It took a little while but I created a formula that would turn a warrior’s stats into a knight's, and an enchanter’s stats into a sorcerer's, and then applied this throughout. It worked for humanoid opponents remarkably well, so I just had to find modifications for animals, demons, and giants/dragons. I did cheat with a couple of extreme encounters in book 5; other than that the numbers don’t lie.”

The complete set of stat blocks that Oliver kindly provided for all five Blood Sword books is a bit much to reproduce in just one blog post here, so I'll release them in installments. To get started, though, Oliver also calculated the DW stats for The Keep of the Lich Lord, and you can download those here.

If you're a Fighting Fantasy fan, don't miss the latest issue of Casket of Fays, which is free on DriveThruRPG and has stats conversion from AFF, rules for Rhino-Folk (a critter from Out of the Pit, apparently), and the Volucreth as a Fighting Fantasy species, as well as Mercanian runesmiths and a complete town (I do love maps) in Outremer.

Fay day

A new issue of Casket of Fays is always cause for great gladness. Issue 9's highlights are too many to list but they include an interview with Lee Barklam of The Cobwebbed Forest. Lee is a man after my own heart, as this comment shows:

"Combat – and magic – is likely the last resort for embattled adventurers, and I place more emphasis on ensuring the lands in which the characters adventure feel genuinely strange, dangerous, and exciting."

That's exactly what I'm trying to do with the Jewelspider RPG, but Lee is way ahead of me with his homebrew rules. He also once played a sorcerer who didn't cast a single spell in the whole adventure, which is exactly as it should be.

The issue also contains new creatures, weapons, rules, a great piece on heraldry, an industrial-scale gibbet, a much-needed system for balanced character generation, and a Q&A with me that I'd entirely forgotten. (Luckily I still agree with myself on most points.)

Did I mention it's free? What are you waiting for?

As well as those in the Casket, there's another Fay celebrating today - the magician Fay Presto, whose birthday it is. I've only met her a couple of times; each time she was mingling with the guests at publishing parties and performing magic literally under our noses. Close-up magic like that I find much more impressive than the million-dollar illusions like making the Eiffel Tower disappear. (I even managed to make Salisbury Cathedral vanish myself once; big deal.) Her tricks are real wizardry and she's one of Britain's best-loved conjurers. So happy birthday, Fay.