Red Sky Longwinter Skeleton (Patreon)

What's been happening? Well ... a lot of time went to making sure Witchburner and What Ho, Frog Demons! were published (and they were, and you can share links to them on DriveThru or, for the pumpkin-hued edition, on itch.io).

—That's Tumbo, the Twisted Druid. The full image was cropped in What Ho!, you get to see it in its full glory.

Longwinter

After our last poll, I also started writing, editing and arranging Longwinter, which I've affectionately named the Third, because it is the third time I've returned to that setting and because it is the fourth thing I write on the stratometaship ... oh, wait. No, that doesn't work. Sigh. Anyhow, Longwinter (First Quarter) will be the next update, going live in about 10 days. I estimate the whole sandbox will take a maximum of four updates (and for those of you who've been with me long enough and are now laughing, I hear your laughter).

Here is the current draft of the Longwinter intro:

Longwinter is a time-limited point-crawl sandbox adventure for a role-playing game. It is an escape room—the heroes are thrown in and they have to figure out how to escape (or beat the overpowered final boss) before they are trapped forever in the cold sleep of Winterwhite.

The adventure is strictly divided into two parts: Stories and Stones, which are open to all players (unless they are playing ignorant outlanders), and Blood and Bones, which includes the mechanics, which are strictly Referee facing.

So you can see what I'm getting up to. Two .pdfs -  a complete one, just for the Referee, and one without the sandbox back-end, open to players and referees alike. I listened when you said how much you liked reading my worlds and wanted to share them with your players. Now you'll be able to.

Red Sky

I've also run a couple of playtests of Red Sky Dead City in the last couple of weeks, and figured out how to add a few things to make the tomb-raiding missions run better:

• Quest givers and set items, to make it easier to run one-shot raids into the dead city.
• Events of the week, to quickly set the mood of what is happening in the occupied city the night of the session.
• An updated caravan/group sheet for the players. UVG compatible.
• An expanded AC/HD-to-full-stats table (like the one from Witchburner).
• A clear per-hour time-tracker for the Referee.
• An overloaded encounter table that splits day and night encounters (making the night far scarier). These last three work a bit like a two-bit DM screen and should be compatible with UVG as well.
• Possibly: a dungeon schematic legend, to make the diagrams easier to read.

Along with new quarters of the dead city, these should be ready in about 4 weeks. Yes, November might be the first month with two stratometaship updates. Not yet exactly sure how I'll handle the tiers. Patreon has offered some changes that should make it easier to create a separate tier where you are charged once, and you get all the content.

SkeletonWTF

While working on Longwinter, playtesting Red Sky, and editing Witchburner, I realized that I needed to update Skeleton (the never-complete ruleset I use) as I write, so that I can track all the abilities, effects, characters, powers, and spells in a single place. I'll be releasing this one to patrons for free once it looks a bit better.

At the moment it's about 12,500 words, but half of that is useless. What I'm going for is a loose ruleset that slots into your favorite rpg system and uses natural language instead of mechanics.

Urk. Natural language? It means spells look like this: 

Prestidigitation - Apprentice - you create, move, lift, color, clean, dirty, chill, warm, or flavor small objects. The automated feather duster in a cartoon? The rabbit in the hat? This is it. All changes and creation revert when the spell ends.
Level 1: It lasts about an hour.
Level 2: It lasts about a week.
Level 3: It lasts about a month.

Thornstone Obelisk - Petromancy - a stone-speaker awakens a calciferous living-stone thorn growth out of the ground with the motion of petric animalcules.
Level 1: Stone about a metre high grows from the ground in about an hour. Concentration.
Level 2: It grows in a few minutes.
Level 3: It grows in seconds.

And the rules are written like this: 

Blood for the Magic God: Spell Price
Magic is a rupture in reality, imposing otherworldy wrongness on the mundane world. This means that spells hurt to cast and heroes have to pay the spell price in points—hit points, stats, whatever. The total price they pay to cast their spell is their spell cost times the spell level.
A wizard casting a 3rd level spell pays 3 points, but a fighter pays 9 points to cast the same spell.

Spells are Inventory Too
Write down each spell you can cast in your inventory. It reduces how much you can carry. Maybe it’s the creepy skulls and the newt juice.
Spell books are valuable and cool because they mean you can carry a bunch of spells in a single inventory slot.

So, I'm writing content rather than definitions. Perhaps someone who likes writing defined rules will tackle them, but I will try to stick to normal words. So how you translate "short range" or "nearby" or "a few minutes" or "distant" or "several months" into your precise system is up to you.

This might be a terrible idea, but it's my terrible idea ... so ... uhm ... I'm sticking to it.

Stratometaship of Discord

The WTF discord is also live - if you have a quick question, want to chat about something I've written, or just shoot the rpg breeze, it's a good place to join. Sometimes I post upcoming playtests there. https://discord.gg/7SWcMb

And Finally

Thank you again for your support. It means a lot. And because it means so much, I am going to torture you with more verbiage at the end of this already very, very long post! A bit of fiction from Longwinter. 

“Seven years ago the long winter began.”

The pen nib paused.

Grease-creased fingers reached up to stroke the writer’s beard.

The pen tapped lightly at the edge of the ancient table. The thick plastic tabletop was carved in a riot of flowers and animals by a skilled craftsman many years ago. It had been lovingly maintained until recently.

Tired breath steamed. A sigh.

The pen returned to the yellowed paper covered in reams of faded lavender accounts.

“On the king’s door the new baron stood and proclaimed the dawn of an era of prosperity. Proudly he brandished the Khan’s deed of rights. We all cheered. We were now sole masters of the silver of Rudvik.”

“As we cheered silver chips glinted in the autumn air, sparkling like precious gems, like noon-day stars. Snowflakes come flickering off Mother Mountain in the chill breeze of Northwind.”

“We did not care. We were rich. We had fine furs. We had peace with the Centaur Khan.”

--/--

A good day of all saints to everybody, may the ghosts of your ancestors be kind.

-Luka