Rule Hub

Basic Starter Rules (from Lair of the Lamb)

Classes, leveling, Slightly more detailed rules

Classless Magic 

Studying Spells, Scribing Spells, and Spell Psychosis

Hexcrawling (incomplete)

More Loyalty and hireling rules

Subtypes of humans (largely derived from Arnold K)

Status Effects

The most important rule: clever ideas trump rules and rolls

Links for the Boswitch Bathhouse/DCO/barbarian campaign:

Barbarian PC character creation

On the culture of the Highlanders

Nearby cultures (surface dwellers)

Nearby cultures (under the crust)

General cultural similarities of the tribes

Available items for inventory amongst the tribes

Modest selection of Barbarian neolithic weapons

Language skill rules

Barbarian Home Depot

Before the PCs set out for their field trip, they will be allowed to stock up on any amount of the supplies listed below before they set out. Once they do set out, they will need to find more supplies and resources the traditional way.

Inventory: str+(bag you carry)

Refresher on weapons: 

• 1d6 damage 
• 1d8 if you two handed and str is 7+ 
• Two handed weapons take up 2 inventory slots
• Even if a weapon does not explicitly state a function in its description below, you can probably think of a unique use. For example while there are no inherent mechanics for crushing vs bleeding wounds, I am sure that the type of weapon you choose will make crippling or hemorrhaging easier. Modifying your weapons and options may also produce differences
• Hirelings taken from your tribe will have 14 inventory slots if given a backpack

Weapons:

• Stone spear: 25/35/40, versatile
• Stone dagger: better for tight spaces
• Boomerang: 40/55/65, returns if you miss, curved flightpath
• Sharp rock or sharp rock tied to a handle: as handaxe
• Bow and arrow: 150/210/240, two handed
• War club/root club, wooden or bone (mammoth): may be one or two handed depending on size
• Rock sling: 80/110/130, rocks are almost anywhere
• Spear sling: 50/70/80, damage as two handed
• Macuahuitl: two handed
• Dart blower w/ darts: 25/35/40, no damage: depends on poison
• Femur bone stabbers: easy to make, also can be used as stakes
• Remorhaz jawbone kukris: can also be used as flesh hooks
• Ivory harpoon: 30/40/50, barbed, can be tied to a rope
• Net: 5/-/10, can be used to catch things

Tools and Resources:

• Stone mallet
• hammering things
• 1 slot
• Stone axe 
• chopping and carving
• 1 slot
• Chisel 
• useful with a mallet for carving
• 1 slot
• Flint rock
• neolithic striker
• 1 slot
• Leather backpack/sacks
• backpack +7
• sacks +4
• no slots
• Rope/twine/string
• 30 feet of rope = 1 slot
• "infinite" ball of twine/string = 1 slot
• Attachable bone hook
• can be used with poles, rope, and for any number of applications
• no slots
• Poles 
• of the 10 foot variety and more
• 1 slot
• Torches
• 2 torches = 1 slot
• Waterskins 
• can carry three "drinks"/doses
• 1 slot
• Grease/lard/oil
• Fermented or normal milk/Cheese or butter
• Rations
• 1 ration = 1 day of eating = 1 slot
• Mostly dry aged meats
• Blankets/furs/basic animal skins
• 1 good blanket/skin = 1 slot
• Absorbent rags
• 1 slot
• If wrapped around a stick and hung above boiling water, can be used to collect distilled drinking water
• Bag of smoothed/jagged rocks 
• pebble sized, time consuming to make but can function similar to ball bearings or caltrops
• 1 slot 
• Bag of spiders
• 1 slot
• Cave/ritual paint
• 1 slot for a handheld jar
• Wooden or bone stakes
• 3 stakes = 1 slot
• Pipes
• 1 slot
• Clay pots
• Containers and mixing materials
• slot depends on size
• 6 inch diameter = 1 slot
• 1 foot diameter = 3 slots
• 2 foot diameter = 7 slots
• can also be used to contain other slot filling items but cannot be carried in backpack this way; only in carts/vehicles
• Boat
• canoes
• small rowboats: 5 people each
• smaller sized longship: 20-30 people
• Goats
• fermented goat milk (alcohol), normal milk
• pure souls for sacrifice
• Pine resin/sap
• Great for sticking things together, or fire starting material
• 1 slot for a bundle
• Black smoke leaves
• When burned produces a thick black smoke that results in partial blindness up to 5 feet away and complete blindness any farther
• 1 slot of leaves can fill a 30x30 room for 10 minutes
• Woodland ghillie suit
• Blending in forested environments
• 2 slots in a bag
• Basic animal pheromone glands, dung, or blood
• Giant or normal sized feathers
• Commonly found giant feathers go up to 10 feet in length
• Shedded exo-plates of a Remorhaz
• Not mirrors, but highly reflective and durable. Interlocking plates provide temperature insulation
• 1 slot for a 1 foot x 1 foot plate, but they come in many sizes
• Therapeutic Compounds:
• 1 slot = 1 bag. For non animal compounds, 3 doses are in each bag. 1 dose for normal effect, 3 doses for extreme effect.
• Mother's Milk: Found in the bulbs of the flowers brought up by the lowlanders. Induces an extraordinary dreamlike bliss that pulls the smoker into a sleep just precipitating the border of death. Can be diluted in the caverns of the mountain to produce Mother's Kiss, a liquor that sends the mind into the Waking Dream.
• Opium. Painkiller, causes extremely deep sleep for 1~6 hours.
• Higher doses slow down the nervous system. Con save to not stop breathing.
• In diluted liquor form, your mind enters psychotropia for 1~6 hours while you are still awake. Actions and sights may layer over each other. Also acts as an alcohol.
• Fever Fire: The berries of a nearly translucent plant that can only grow up in the glaciers, where the cold carves flesh like a knife. For a few minutes, the body seizes and burns. Frostbite and rot can be driven back, but it leaves the eater shaken and exhausted. 
• Drives the body into a powerful fever. Can save you against frostbite and jump starts the immune system. Con save at the end against exhaustion. 2~12 minutes.
• Higher doses overheat the body and over-activate the immune system. Con save against brain damage and con save against cytokine storming.
• Shaman Barb: A thorny vine bush found across the Broken Coast. Pricking the skin with Barb calms the nerves and tends to improve amiability. High doses paralyze the body and have been seen to drive some into madness, particularly shamans and their kin.
• Not a combat drug; would probably reduce initiative and combat rolls. Kind of acts like pot; can be used to reduce stress and improve morale, and is enjoyed during negotiations. 1~6 hours.
• Higher doses can act as a neurotoxin. Con save against full body paralysis. At ridiculous doses, wis/cha save against schizophrenia. If predisposed, schizophrenia is possible at high dose levels and offers no save at ridiculous doses.
• Salja: Made from the grounded hairy roots of tundra grass the grow near the Cloud Maker. The paste is grey and bitter. But, for a few minutes after eating, other things become addictive. The taste of other foods is easiest, then base sensations, and even behaviors.
• If unwilling, make a wis/cha save against developing addictions. High doses have basically no effect, but chronic and coordinated doses can strengthen the addiction.
• Tongue-Globber Toad in a Bag: Those who lick the toad will experience frightful swelling and great bouts of energy and strength. Unfortunately, they will also be rendered dumb and become completely unintelligible as their tongue swells up in the mouth.
• Your body swells with extra blood and your sympathetic nervous system roars into motion. Your tongue swells up, and so does your brain. +4 to physical rolls, -4 to mental rolls. You become incredibly drawn to bright colors and amphibians. 30 min~1 hour.
• Higher doses can be dangerous. Con save against hematoma. Con save against heart attack. Con save against shock. 
• Blood Belly Viper in a Bag: A single bite is all it takes. The fangs are small and the teeth barely nick the skin, but it is enough. You will notice after a day or two; the wound does not heal. The blood trickles slowly over the days, then over weeks. Only the strongest survive the harrowing month, and are left crawling with skin tight hands at the maw of Mother Mountain.
• Long lasting anticoagulant. Con save against effects. Wounds will not heal normally and blood will not stop flowing out. Your blood smells noxiously and obscenely sweet to everything within a mile. Lasts 1 month.
• Higher doses will probably cause necrosis and breakdown of organs.

These are the poisons accessible to the Highlands which are setting specific, but are not necessarily the most obvious to use in general. If you are curious and think about other potential poisons to use (either to be fed to someone or covered on your blade), I'm sure you could come up with something.

Classless Magic

I removed all the "casting classes" from my game. Wizards, clerics, sorcerers, and warlocks do not exist in the class format; instead, I wanted to make their traits universally accessible.

I like the idea of anyone being able to pick up a spellbook and, with time, learning a spell. Wizardry is learning and casting spells; entrapping/scribing/negotiating a spirit into your brain to cast a spell. It's something anyone can learn. "Wizards" are magical junkies that do it all the time.

Clerics don't exist as a term. Religious "casting" is replaced with miracles; divine intervention. You want something from your god? Pray and sacrifice.

Those with high charisma manifest their destiny in the flesh; the powers they gain are an extension of themselves, as much as your own limbs and your brain. "Sorcerers" don't need magic die, they just get abilities. Those who believe themselves to be children of dragons grow scales and claws. A mighty and arrogant warlord will find his skin truly impervious to iron. It is belief, not objective history and reality, that shapes the body of a "sorcerer".

Warlocks are just a term; they make deals for power, no matter the kind. You can ask for spells, strength, money. Plenty of wizards are also probably warlocks.

Vessels act as conduits for spirits and other non fleshed beings of power; gods, demons, elementals, etc... Word Bearers speak with the Voice of the Authority. The thrall of Davok in my Lair of the Lamb run can ignite flammable material on touch (including their on flesh, which they can burn at -1HP per 10 minutes/dungeon turn).

More things exist; practically, the only "categories" of magic that matter are wizardry spells, miracles, and everything else. All of these can intersect and overlap. Any PC that wants to use "magic" can have a number of options; it offers an extremely high amount of variation and "customizability". 

For context I run my games using the GLOG ruleset, which includes the use of magic die. Like I mentioned in my post on spell psychosis; MD is mostly based on the number of spells you know. This is why any PC can learn wizardry independently from their templates or levels. A magic system with spells slots is less intuitively detached from class levels.

• 1 spell = +1 MD and int
• 3 spells = +2 MD and int
• 6 spells = +3 MD and int
• 10 spells = +4 MD and int

Basically every time you gain another MD and int, you will need to learn a larger number (+1 stacking) of spells to gain more MD. There is no upper limit on this besides going crazy from spell psychosis and getting murdered by a paladin.

I should also mention that all PCs can "smell" magic. The kind of magic can also be guessed at based on the type of smell. For example, a lightning trap smelled of strong ozone, while anything undead smells of sulfur (you are actually smelling the presence of the soul that was dragged up from hell into the corpse). A little something that I picked up from Matt Colville.

This functions as a way for PCs to detect the presence of relevant spells/enchantments and know if an item is magical. Gameplay shouldn't be hamstrung by lack of access to spells, and it gives another way for PCs to gain more information and be clever about their choices.

Bad Idea Shitpost: Psychosurgery

The idea of translating pharmacology and other medical tidbits into the game keeps gestating in my brain. Another idea that I am rather fond of is psychosurgery.

I had originally started thinking about this while learning about neuroanatomy and the strange types of behavioral symptoms you would get after lesions in the brain or "ectomy" type surgeries. A classic is cutting the corpus callosum that bridges the two halves of the brain, keeping them both functional but limiting their ability to communicate. To a degree, it seems like both halves of the brain retain the ability to think (independently?) but information from one half has a hard time communicating to the conscious mind (one half of your brain has information you as a whole are not aware of).

While I was thinking about barbarian tribes, I thought about a concept where tribe members, as a coming of age exercise, would take a razor sharp "knife blade" of obsidian and slowly hammer it into the skull of the tribe member, right down the middle of the head. The problem is that I was never sure what exactly that would translate to in terms of gameable stuff. Split brain? Disrupted pineal gland resulting in less sleep? Going with a more abstract theme of "gaining insight"? I think having the procedure making the person immune to "blinding" effects might be interesting. Can't see illusions, can't be affected by perception altering things, can't be mindwiped? Who knows, there were enough tribes anyways

That idea was also inspired by a story by one of my Adv. Neurobiology professors. One day a man walks into the emergency room, followed by his brother who is apologizing profusely. Nothing seems wrong; there are no obvious behavioral or psychological symptoms. The problem is that the man actually has a knife embedded in his head. Punctured the right side of his temple and the tip was sticking out the other side. He ended up being fine in the end.

Psychosurgery in this setting (Centerra based, using concepts like wizard vision and spells living in the brain), or any fantasy setting, could be quite interesting. Profane Ape did a post relating to how enchanters can change the mind. Very cool. But I also like the idea of kidnapping someone and fiddling with their brain to do some wicked CIA shit. That was originally the inspiration I used for an order of paladins known as the Black Hand.

The concepts in the blogpost above use "gates", and are generally more abstract. These can probably be used as they are and imported as procedures, but the types of psychosurgery I want to try and implement  are as follows:

• reading "personality"
• toggling wizard vision
• entering psychotropia at will
• telepathy organs (other people with organs are "linked")
• implant/remove spells (basically just carving out that piece of brain or putting one in)
• reading a wizard's spells without killing them
• psychotropic ego retention
• telepathic inception (dive into the dreams of others you have a "link" with)
• reading memories (psychomotor memory and emotional memories easiest, descriptive/information based memories much harder)
• cure/implant phobia
• psychotropic memory retention
• selective memory triage
• telepathic syncope (you can instantly make unconscious anyone you have a link to)
• personality implantation
• cure/implant paranoia
• psychotropic lucidity
• telepathic psychotropic syncope (instantly send the linked into psychotropia)
• memory implantation
• cure/implant hallucinations
• telepathic blindspot (like a false hydra)

These were all made when I was doing my initial designs for the Black Hand. There was a lot of focus on gaining usable behavioral information, gangstalking paranoia, psychotropia, and telepathic links. You don't necessarily need to kill your enemies, you just need to kidnap, gaslight, brainwash, and fundamentally change who they are so that they end up serving your needs without them knowing you exist.

But outside a certain theme of procedures, there's a lot more you could do with this. Things that immediately come to my head are purely neurological phenomena: phantom limbs, personality disorders, implanting (or curing) certain mental illness, removing the ability to fear or recognize fear, remove the ability to feel pain, implanting amnesia, etc... There are probably things with more of a D&D twist to do but I cannot think of them right now; I find that writing about things I know more detail about tends to make them much more literal.

I did make a "magical" item which is actually just a syringe you poke into someone's skull to suck out some of their higher order souls, but besides that (and possibly the dEr0 conspiracy) most of what you could do with this idea feels "less magical". Which is fine. A lot of these procedures are simply impossible with surgery alone, but this is weird fantasy surgery. Honestly I like the idea of it much better when it's just some dude cutting apart your brain.

You could also prompt certain behaviors with triggers/implant strong behavioral circuits. Give someone a "high addiction risk" personality, link that reward pathway to a certain behavior and stimulus, and just wait. People will do insane things for addictions in real life. After speaking the trigger word, Cha save to resist the overpowering urge to slaughter your friends (if you fail you try to kill them and feel orgasmic while doing so). 

Combine some of these concepts with pharmacology and who have something interesting cooking. Maybe a class? or maybe just a large number of weird and hopefully gameable interactions.

It also occurs to me while writing this that you could also use this for NPCs or enemies. While it seems interesting on paper I'm unsure whether it would be fun or useful. Giving PCs the ability to brainwash and manipulate the NPCs in your worlds can be very fun for them, but doing so the other way around might not be particularly fun. Especially if they are unaware; I doubt you can do anything very complex like implanting "kill triggers" for the PCs. This will vary by group and play content but screwing over the PCs without them knowing using these ideas is probably a bad idea.

On the other idea, a paladin suddenly popping into existence near the PCs and talking to them like he has known them for years is pretty interesting. "Yeah, you guys seemed real suspicious for a while there but you've all been cleared. Have a nice day." Of all the ideas from above to use on the PCs, a "ghost in the campaign" is the most entertaining to me. But, like a false hydra type campaign, you could do something more elaborate if you have cooperative players. 

I think one thing that could possibly be fun is if the PCs refused to learn/listen to certain things because they knew that their memories could be read, or took obsessive steps to make sure none of them was alone/asleep to prevent procedures from taking place.

• The paladin following the PCs cannot easily enter a private area because he won't be blinded to people he has not specifically given the right procedure for
• To do procedures, the paladin needs to anesthetize and work on the "patient" for a lengthy amount of time
• Procedures can only be done once a month and need that time to heal. The might also leave scars/markings of performance

Those three conditions actually can give you a lot of leeway for how the PCs might handle something like this. Babbling to random strangers about watching out for a person they don't know how to describe, refusing to be alone or isolated, checking people's skulls to see if they have any markings of psychosurgery.

One last thing: Psychosurgery for non humans. I think it would be fun to be able to learn and carry over things from one organism to another with study time. Like how some birds (or people in this setting) can sense magnetic north. Or, giving your PCs proximity trackers in each others heads. Now when they split up, the will know exactly when the others die. 

What happens if you stuff a piece of dragon brain into someone's head? For the sake of this entire post, antibody mediated rejection does not exist. Or maybe it does, and learning how to overcome the major histocompatibility complex is a specialized form of wizardry or medical-fantastic technique.