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. 

Bad Idea Shitpost: D&D Pharmacology

All these bad idea shitposts will be meant to poke at the border between painful "realism" and practically usable rules and ideas that make the game more fun. Even if 99% will never ever practically work, I think it might be fun just to think about some of the ideas we can strip mine. Most characters are not assumed to have some kind of chronic disease, but drugs are not only used by people who are sick.

Today's topic is: pharmacology! Originally the idea was based around potions, but the principles here are a bit more expansive. I'll lay down some of the basic ideas I think can be interesting:

• Delivery methods
• Side effects/long term effects
• Dosing and alternative uses 
• Mechanism of Action
• Source: biochemical tools, alchemy, natural occurrence

Delivery methods feels like it can be fun, but I have no idea what it would look like exactly. You drink potions. BORING. Oral ingestion is (usually) a slower, long drawn release of drug effects that is affected by stomach acid and the liver it has to cross through. 

Snorting is a bit better, so is rubbing powder on mucus membranes. INJECTIONS are pretty cool. Your fighter popped a healing potion? Ok well mine just pinned himself with adrenaline and is getting ready to eat your fighter's face off. Into the veins and arteries is standard. Maybe a regenerative solution ingested will provide slow, stable healing over a few days while an injected solution will let you reattach limbs on the fly for less fluid. Roll for cancer though.

Brain and spine injections feel like they can go far. A lot of delivery methods are also related to where the destination needs to be. Potion of truesight delivered right into the eyeball? Or maybe give someone some MPTP, and watch them develop Parkinson's disease right before your very eyes.

Potential way to use this: 

Drinking a health potion should give you a long riding, general improvement to healing. For one week, you recover from lethal damage twice as fast and add +4 to con rolls. Maybe even throw in something like "add +2 (or roll 1d4) as a bonus every time you recover HP"

Intravenous Injection of half a health potion lets you recover 2d6 HP or bypass a con save/roll. Only doable once per day before you roll % for liver toxicity or cancer development (-1 max HP every month until death for simplicity). Severed body parts can be mostly reattached within 24 hours if held in place. 1 HP regen every round?

Site specific injection might be more useful through a narrative lense, existing as a tool that isn't necessarily bound by strict rules. It might also work better for something that is not a health potion. For example, you have a potion that boosts the abilities of wizards. Chug it in combat for a quick and dirty buff, sure. OR, you could lay the wizard down on an operating table and inject the potion directly into a brain ventricle or his lumbar spine. After a week or so, the wizard gains a more minor but permanent buff.

The main takeaway is that potions or exogenous compounds shouldn't only have one method of use; HOW PCs make us of these tools can have differing effects. And, if you wanted to make healing harder but didn't want to remove health potions entirely, make them more "challenging" to use.

And you don't absolutely need fancy modern syringes either. The first "syringe" was made using a quill and an animal's bladder (no promises about quality though; 1% chance of infection when you inject if you want to be cruel, or have it be on an X in 20 chance if you don't take 10 minutes to clean the syringe beforehand).

Side effects is just shorthand for tradeoffs. The real gameable principle is that anytime your PCs may wish to use drugs for their benefit, they will have to weigh the side effects. Nausea for 1d6 rounds, falling asleep, unstoppable bleeding, momentary amnesia, dyskinesia, trouble sleeping, tremors, need to eat more, need to drink more water, blood clotting, etc... Many of these side effects can easily be repurposed into things that affect the game: resting ability, dex rolls, no memory can be interesting RP, blood loss, risk of heart attack.

Another avenue to consider is long term side effects. This may be difficult to actually model. While I am sure you could generate a system where every [length of time] you need to make a con roll that gets progressively harder with the amount of drug used, it is hard to say if your campaigns ever last that long in in game time for your characters to feel their nuts shrinking from taking too much exogenous testosterone.

A digression: any character good with pharmacology for buffs and healing will also probably be quite good at killing and poisons.

All poisons are just drugs that are dosed to kill. I am sure you can figure out how rampant cell division and growth in a "health potion" might be used to kill someone. For that matter, you might also realize that a drug that provides growth might also be useful as a PED. (IRL, many tumors in men respond strongly to testosterone, due to its effects on growth; how much does your fighter want that +1 strength?).

A drug or plant that decreases water retention might not be all that useful if none of your PCs have a disease that requires a diuretic, but give enough of it to a scumbag enemy and they may just pee themselves into dehydration and death.

Or I guess you could just get the duke's daughter addicted to opiates or something to destabilize the war effort. Really, the sky's the limit here.

As it turns out, the most useful thing about pharmacology might not healing others or your PCs, but killing all of the PC's enemies.

PEDs and "steroid" type drugs may be interesting, but might only be worth thinking about if you can keep them short term. Combat drugs with downsides is easy. Long term use of steroids in a fighter looks like... I have no clue! Trenbolone is a very funny androgen; IRL it can be used to gain quite a lot of muscle while losing fat and being in ridiculously low body fat %. Apparently it also makes you ridiculously horny, paranoid, and a mess to be around. I feel like this can be used, but HOW?

Wizard nootropics is also an interesting topic; take this pill to ramp up your magic dice or spell slots, when you come down you have a risk of getting schizophrenia or spell psychosis.

An older idea I once had: Wizards learn too many spells and begin to slide into spell psychosis. Some of these wizards take a drug/herb/thing that prevents their spell psychosis. BUT, it also limits their ability to cast spells in general and comes with a number of basically int decreasing effects. If you can't really access a big part of your brain, you might get brain fog. Right before battle (or anything that involves a lot of spells), they wean themselves off the drug and hope that they're not so crazy by the end of all this that they fuck off and forget to take their meds.

I suppose you could create an entire pharmacology "class" or profession out of this. There is so much potential information in here that you could really go hard. Healer classes where you cast a handful of protection spells are boring. But a bootleg fantasy medic might be neat. If you have a gritty setting with low access to magic, someone who knows how to administer stem cell injections, dose drug effects, do basic surgeries, and make poisons becomes extremely valuable (and I think versatile).

But personally I think things like this should be accessible to all players. How it manifests needs some work.

A very important concept in pharmacology is Mechanism of Action (MoA). The precise mechanism of how a drug works can open up different ways for you to use them. 

A real life example: blood pressure medication. Some are ACE inhibitors, which prevent the creation of angiotensin, the molecule that signals for vasoconstriction. Sildenafil (viagra) inhibits PDE5 which increases cGMP, which promotes vasodilation. Nitroglycerin (a nitrate) also increases cGMP through a different mechanism. 

They both can have similar effects, but the exact symptoms and side effects can be different. Furthermore, they can compound on each other; if someone is having chest pain and high blood pressure during an EMT call, one of the treatment options is the patient's nitroglycerin. BUT, you ALWAYS have to ask if the patient has taken any sexual enhancement drugs, because the combination will vasodilate the patient too much and KILL THEM.

If you want to, you can also design fun drug combination effects. The main point of using MoA is that you may be able to create a "health potion" in at least a handful of different ways. 

Does the potion only accelerate natural healing and body functions? Effects: Cancer/"curse"/degenerative disease acceleration, rapid aging. 

Does the potion use stem cells to generate and populate the wound with new cells? Effects: developing cancer risk, may only work for some injuries and not others (for example, new neurons in the brain does not necessarily do anything without the same connections). Or maybe they do and you give your spellcaster a big fat brain, maybe you can use it to slowly regrow a limb!

Does the potion actually just encourage the release of body growth factors? Maybe you can use it as a "steroid" for your fighter.

Is the potion actually just a blended troll? Better be careful not to infect yourself with micro trolls.

Or maybe the potion is time fluid secreted by gigantic fate weaver spiders. Drink too much and you might accidentally reverse your memory and your body.

As you can see, MoA can integrate fantasy fairly well. These lines of thought can be really interesting for thinking about biomancy.

Drugs do not come from all the same places either. Some can be created in a lab with basic materials, others can be synthesized from plants, and others can be harvested from complex organisms. 

It is possible to integrate alchemical potions and drugs. You might fit it into a class or just have it as something PCs can do if they find an alchemist's notebook and get the right materials. But the more interesting option might be how you use gathering of biologically sourced compounds, specifically from monsters and other creatures.

The king has a quest for you: bring him the fresh penis bone of a Great Red Drake to be boiled into a fertility bone broth. As thanks, he will let you take some with you so that you too may enjoy a prodigious sexual enhancement stew, aphrodisiac, and fertility therapy.

There's room to fit in some pseudoscience/folk medicine/homeopathy stuff in here as well. What is dragon adrenochrome like? Maybe eating the heart of great beast actually does make you stronger. Or at least, it increases your charisma by 1, making you just a bit more "real" in the world.

Another example I need to get out of my head: there is a hormone known as HCG that is created by pregnant women involved in cell growth. This chemical has also been used in real life as an anabolic steroid adjunct. Here's the thing: before people learned how to harvest the hormone itself, the only way to really get HCG is in the urine of pregnant women.

How do we use this information? I'm not sure encouraging PCs to drink pregnant monster piss for stat bonuses is something you would necessarily want in your game, and harvesting the trophoblast cells around the early embryo has some "off putting" implications. But the actual implementation of these things, if you wanted to use them, doesn't seem too hard.

One last one, I promise. If you like putting a dash of sci fi into your setting, you may enjoy investigating beyond traditional ideas of drugs. 

The most notorious of the up and coming potentials is gene therapy. Specifically, gene therapy using viral vectors to deliver the cargo into the cells you attempt to treat. Current methods of injection make delivery one of the core limitations. If you wanted to target the brain, there is really no other option than to directly inject into a ventricle, the spinal cord, or directly into brain matter.

But for D&D we do not need to be held back by such things. That thing about injecting a wizard for a permanent buff? Gene therapy. Your family curse? Gene "therapy". Elixir of youth? Gene therapy.  

Beyond the merely biological you can get some neat ideas out of concept of "integrated biology": a rampant DNA code that tries to mimic whatever it eats, or maybe whatever it touches. Liches that control all their bodily functions, and use this to slowly turn themselves into things that are unrecognizable from their humanity.

The "dude" virus: A man feels feverish one day, goes about his business, collapses over, and dies. Over the next day or so his body breaks down into viral sludge and attempts to infect as many people as possible. The infected are slowly turned into clones of the first man who died, perhaps with memories limited to the day of infection. After maybe a week of assimilation the infected dies and sludgifies again. 

After a few cycles, you get mutations in the viral strains. The "dude" changes a bit over time. Or, you have someone who acts as a carrier. Either as a "dude" who never reaches the sludge phase, or as a normal person who turns everyone else into "dudes" upon contact.

Some of these viruses are designed to be "cre dependent", which basically means that they have specific effects when a particular compound is ingested and then "activates" the programmed gene sequence. Practically speaking this just adds trigger conditions. 

None of these ideas actually need to integrate any of the concepts I mentioned. It's entirely possible to have each thing as a standalone phenomena in your setting and having it completely untouched by these shitpost frameworks; the hope is that by introducing some of these framework concepts, it might help to jog a different perspective for creative juices.

Bad Idea Shitpost: Ranged Autism

Currently this game does not have prevailing rules for ranged weapons. Somewhat because no one ever actually has used one yet. No one in Lair of the Lamb actually used the sling or the bow, and the fighter in Tomb of the Serpent Kings hasn't used his bow either.

Combination of resource management (no one wants to use their ammo if they don't have to) and what I would like to imagine is clever gameplay; no one is really getting themselves into a combat situation in the first place.

However, the time will come when someone actually tries to kill something else from far away. Either the players or, much more likely, me.

This is all largely inspired by Delta's 2011 post on D&D archery and probability curves and also by my instinctive drive for "realistic" emulation of certain mechanics. The post gives a rather nice table of a computer calculated probability to hit a target based on a certain range. When plotted, the graph looks something like this:  

Nice. Notably, the decrease in accuracy is rather sudden from 200-400 feet than begins to taper out, taking longer and longer distances to become less accurate.

If I limit the amount of data that is used for a graph, I can also get some basic exponential equations for extrapolating further distances.

Somewhat useful. Despite the awful compression of these images, the basic trend lines can still be seen. (This particular screenshot is actually from when I was using polynomial equations, but a parabola doesn't make any sense) Equations are thus:

y=174e^{-.00357x}

y=165e^{-.00347x}

More or less the same result at a significant distance, a bit less accurate once you get closer. Both of these equations merely say that at a range of 1000 feet the computer calculated probability to hit is basically 5%. How sweet, roll those crits baby!

So how to we use this? This is where autistic emulation collides with practical goals. Is it fun to create a plethora of rules for how range and modifiers is supposed to be calculated? Not really. They can be hard to remember. This doesn't even factor in things such as skill of the archer, enemy AC, attack stats, environment, etc... 

Which is why I am not going to give a shit about those. Attack and defense rolls are already intuitive, there is no need to mess around with those. So long as range is (more or less) the only major factor when using ranged weapons 95% of the time, even a relatively autistic method should be fine. 

Of course, the assumption is also that when important, you will add or subtract modifiers. e.g. blinded, hard to see shit, hurricane winds, shooting into a crowd. But it may just be easier in those cases to just chuck in a basic -2 or -4 or just tell your PCs that it's not worth even attempting the roll in these occasions. These are rather situational; range is important enough that I felt the need to figure this out.

My basic solution was to define a bunch of parameters that stack -2 modifiers on the attack roll. So parameters of 100/200/300 feet would imply 100-200 as -2 and 200-400 as -4. By the time you reach 600 feet, you will have like 8 or 9 different -2 parameters. 

Theoretically you can extrapolate this out to like -20 or some shit using the equations but I would emphasize that these calculations should only ever be used in niche situations (trying to noscope the dragon 1000 feet away).

Practically, I think only labeling the first two or so parameters is usually good enough. For a longbow, anything between 0-150 feet of distance has no negative modifier at all. There are very few dungeon rooms where 150 feet of distance is even possible (let along with light). Full thing: 150/210/240/270/300/360/450/ 540/700

The original post goes into the theoretical probabilities as a pairing of a 12th level fighter from AD&D and a target of AC 10. While you could try to pair the probabilities around these expectations to change the range parameters, I think it's close enough to not give a shit.

You could also crunch the parameters into groups of -4 instead. The original post uses a -5 and -10 parameter. But for my game in which ranged combat is not exactly a likely expectation, highly staggered parameters I think are ok.

Or, just use what you already have. Unless you're super into wargaming and certain mechanics these rules don't even have to exist. Just use a flat range or the standard ideas of your preferred system. Elegant minimalism to facilitate the parts of the game you want to emphasize should always trump autistic equations.

For my game, this only practically affects snipers. Everything needs to be closer, and things become more dangerous. I like that. But if you want the opposite result then you can flip this on its head. After all, even though having light "should" make you more likely to be seen in the dark, the theme of the Mythical Underworld has led me to use an encounter system that punishes being in darkness. Light, in a game that is focused on dungeon crawling, should not be punished in this game.

The main point is; think about the themes of your game first before you implement any rule.

Also, if you do end up with parameters, it should be fairly easy to use them for different types of weapons. I plan to just shift the range curve down until I think I'm satisfied. Realistic? Maybe not, but it should work!

KILL

KILL KILL KILL KILL KILL KILL HERE ARE SOME UNGA BUNGA WEAPONS

Stone spear, axe, mallets, knives: classic neolithic stone weapons/tools. All are one handed except for the spear. Some people think the sword is the archetypal weapon of mankind, but the spear is a certified hut classic. 

Bow and arrow: Also pretty classic, definitely possible for the tribes to have even made their own versions of longbows (fit to be used by insanely strong hunters). I'm not even gonna put an actual image here, you can figure out what this would look like.

War clubs: Maori clubs also exist but they kind of just look like paddles. The first image is an example of a native american war club. The second shows two other types of war clubs, fijian. The third is a root club, which is sick as fuck. Historically, these tended to be one handed weapons, but I won't cry and shit myself if the PCs used two handed war clubs.

Spear slings: Hilarious chad weapon. Crazy thing: world record throw for one of things is over 848 feet. Would that be accurate? Probably not, but I like the idea of a war painted barbarian taking aim at some milklander archer and nailing a spear arrow through their stupid little head. 

Obsidian based weapons: macuahuitl are great. I'd probably let someone count it as a two handed weapon. King of like a weird greatsword. Obsidian knives and cutting edges are very nice. Obsidian is rather fragile so carved swords were never used, but obsidian knives are usable. 

Bone stabbers: Human (or maybe non human) femur bones sharpened into stabbers. Unbelievably cool. Almost anything made of bone could also have hypothetically been made from the bones of longstriders (supposed giant-kin) during the Revanwall super genocides.

100% fantasy world shit: Jawbone kukris are mentioned, even though they don't actually exist. I don't care though. Gigantic predatory jawbones could easily be turned into axe heads or war picks.

Carved giant bones can probably be used as big ass war clubs or spikes. There's definitely something to be done with mammoth tusks, and the fangs of giant beasts and spiders are probably usable as the killing bits of weapons.

There are definitely weapons to be made from monster materials. But the point is that, in general, spears and clubs are some of the easier things to make using the methods of the tribes. In order for a sword to be useful it will probably have to be made from metal. You definitely can also say you took metal weapons from a lowlander, but most tribesmen would not consider metal weapons particularly superior.

In the Veins, most weapons made by cultures down there use bone and stone exclusively (wood doesn't grow very well). It may also be possible for PCs to have traded/obtained a sword or certain type of weapon from the caves. Examples include mantis-shrimp swords and scissorfish knives. 

All said, a well made spear or war club will not fail you.