The Dripping Tap

  Running my dungeon23 project using ERRANT continues to be a smash hit! The roster of PCs so far: Carné Halfling Deviant | Proficiencies Anatomy + Stealth pronouns Yes/Chef Carmen from The Bear, ready to cook monsters and chain smoke Bog the Toad  Frog-folk Violent Topsis Jellyfish-folk Zealot of a Sea God As to the custom nature of the Zealot, we came to an agreement that her Blessings were a) she can take half the damage of an nearby attack and b) a pool of 2D6 Healing Dice. They leaves visible scars since she's literally a jellyfish! Humphrey 6'3' Humpty-Dumpty Egg-folk Violent Died at the beginning of a session from an Escape the Dungeon roll, and I took pity on the player allowing him to continue as a shell-less egg, basically becoming an ooze New goal: either become basically a gelatinous cube, or get baked into something Filroy the Bold Gnome Occult | Snake-Oil Salesman The snake oil is piss. Getting jug of genuine wolf piss instantly created character and professio...

Errant includes an XP-for-Gold mechanic, but inverts it. Rather than gaining 1 XP per Coin, you instead gain XP after you've a) taken it home and b) have "wasted" it. Spending the gold in randomized sums on the likes of pretentious eatery, erecting statues in your name or declaring your piety (things those in the real world who hit a kind of lottery would do), that's how you get XP from your gold. The game names this mechanic Conspicuous Consumption . This is a real world economic term coined by Thorstein Veblen to describe buyers flexing their economic power through the consumption of goods, i.e. buying expensive things not for the product itself, but also the social power or class mobility that flexing your wealth provides.  So your Errants and hirelings return from the dungeon hall, but XP comes from superfluous research, vain pursuits, hobbies and interests that don't equate to 1:1 game benefits. Buying properties to turn into rentals and extracting wealth...

 My recent blogosphere obsession has been reading the backlogs of setting-specific classes for Vain the Sword: 2nd Edition and GLoG, OSR games with a wealth of options that exist largely on blogs like Whose Measure God Could Not Take. I was drawn in first by the blog The Nothic's Eye, with a series of articles on a Mesopotamian-esque setting called Qal Ashen . In a world cursed with "too much life" - manifesting in divine abominations and mutations - the only city left is the City of The Dead. I was super draw in by these articles, and loved the curated, setting-specific classes even as I didn't know how they worked. Down the rabbit hole I went, until I found and read  Vain the Sword second edition. I highly encourage checking this out for yourself, it's a wonderful read. When I got home from work a few days ago I sat  and read it front to cover, just enamored with its flavor, attitude and vibe. So...having glutted myself on GLoG classes and GLoG hacks, here'...

This post is part Dungeon23 update, part play-report for the first (albeit brief) test-runs of said mega-dungeon project.  The month of August was the time for a sewer level! Dungeon23 as a yearlong project has seen lots of internal changes, at least in my experience. I've changed notebooks, changed design philosophy, and I think the dungeon itself has undergone as many conceptual changes in my mind as it has just sheer progress. Does everyone constantly tinker with how they operate and do things? Or are there some out there who've been plugging away in their Hobonichi Planners all year? None can say, but I'm quite curious. I brainstormed all the cool stuff I'd want to stick in a sewer, divided them into four sections, and devoted a full two-page spread to each of the four corners/sections of the level. Then I scanned them and stitched them together in Photoshop. Despite missing some crosshatching here and there (because of the folds of the notebook) I was very happy wi...