Autopsy Report: Looking back at my first GLoG hack

Back when I initially started this blog I was working on a GLoG hack for the table I played with at the time. It is somewhat finished, but barely playtested and the few people that did play it seemed to hate it. 

Moreover, this is from before I realised you don't actually need rules for everything, so despite aiming for 'elegant design' it is a rather convoluted mess of rules I thought I'd need because they were so prevalent in other systems, rules I wanted to add because I thought they were missing from 5e and a bunch of systems and mechanics stolen from other blogs merely because they looked interesting.

For these reasons, I don't like looking back at it, it makes me cringe. However, every once in a while when I need an example of something I like, I find myself returning to stuff I wrote for this game and finding that the thing I remembered liking still holds up decently well. So I figured I'd do myself a favour and try to extract everything I like about it, so I won't have to dig through that mess in the future anymore. 

For those who know Dutch and want to read along, you can find the game document here (be warned though that it is really bad).

Good stuff:

The World

The world is you typical 'battleground for Chaos and Order' thingy, but with a twist. Rather than Chaos and Order being euphemisms for Evil and Good I based them on my understanding of the works of Deleuze. Chaos is difference, a lack of stability or repititon, a deafening cacophony of constant change. Order is repetition, the lack of any change or difference, a blinding sameness of everything. 

This means Chaos is both the nastiness of disease and sudden death as well as the pleasantry of spontaneity and unexpected reunions, while Order is both the horridness of mindless servitude and eternal boredom as well as the comfort of predictable harvests and regular meals. 

The world building exercise I gave myself was to try to use these two principles, of order and chaos, to explain everything in this world. Which brings me to

Alignment

Because this world is a battleground between order and chaos, I figured everything in the world (not just creatures) should have an alignment. There is chaotic earth which attempts to defy gravity (mountains but also floating islands), neutral water which moves but does so in a predictable pattern (rain seasons) and orderly wind which doesn't move at all (think wind still areas such as Cape the Good Hope).

In a moment of clarity I was smart enough to not make alignment into yet another system for the players to deal with (which I intially intended) and just kept is more as something for me to keep in mind when considering the world and the values of NPCs.

I did really tried to make alignment matter, by making yet two more things depend on order and chaos:

Miracles vs Magic

Miracles come from the Gods, all very Orderly beings. In fact, every God is an order, i.e. something which repeats. Mortals can try to invoke a God to perform a miracle by gaining their favour. Miracles all make the world more like the God is they invoke. 

Magic is injecting chaos into the world by manifesting an exception. All these exceptions are captured in dreams, after which they are powered by chaos and thrown into the world. Because of this, magic is volatile and dangerous. 

I honestly think that any world that has both magic and gods should do one of two things: Either magic and gods have nothing to do with each other and clerics are just religious wizards, or they should operate in completely different ways and miracles should be in no way similar to magic. Any setting in which divine magic is just like regular magic except you get it from the gods is kinda lame in my opinion. 

In this setting Gods hate magic, as they hate all chaotic things, so if you recently did a magic you probably shouldn't try to invoke a god. Speaking of Gods.

Gods

I freaking love weird fantasy religions. When I was still working on this setting I made an entire post about it. And I especially like weird gods.

For this game I made four major dieties and I think I did a pretty decent job at making them both weird and consistent:

There is a Fungal God of health, and through association also of life and death, community, and timeliness.

• To gain their favour you have to let carcasses rot in their temples, burn medicinal herbs, help the poor, or work as a day labourer during the harvest season. 
• Their favour allows you to invoke them to perform miracles. The Rot God can help you heal wounds, rot organic material, anticipate danger and share suffering. 
• They hate undead (for not knowing when to die), the diseased (for not being healthy), traitors (for going against the community) and grave robbers (for disturbing the dead). 
• If the Rot God hates you and you invoke them they will curse you with disease, make strangers unwilling to help you or make it so your wounds won't heal. 

A Lunar Goddes of tides, menstruation, of secrecy (during new moon) and honesty (during full moon), and moderation. 

• They like it when you sacrifice silver disks, menstrual blood and white animals, when you keep a secret.
• They can calm water, make things release what they are holding, force secrecy onto someone or force them to be honest. 
• They hate people who kill wolves (their original disciples), those who overfish (for knowing no moderation), those who make promises with the intention of breaking them and lycanthropes. 
• If they hate you they can slowely turn you into a crustation, plague you with bad weather or make it so that strangers never believe what you say. 

A Blood Goddes of punishement, war, learning, and retribution

• who likes folks confessing to mistakes, sacrifices of knowledge and your own blood, as well as folks who participate in public punishment.
• who can punish chaos, invigorate warriors, learn someone or something's history and compel creatures to right their wrongs. 
• who hates cowards (for fearing what is needed), war criminals (for directing war against the innocent), repeat offenders (for refusing to learn from their mistakes) and veteran killers (for those who spilled blood for just causes are under protection of the Blood Goddes). 
• who punishes by making you unable to defend yourself against attacks, making strangers hostile against you and causing amnesia.

and finally a Gate God of protection, hospitality, ownership and travel.

• They like it when you throw a good party, return possessions to their rightful owner, when you grant access to otherwise closed of places and sacrifices of shields and armour. 
• They can shield you from harm, block entreeways, create gates and make places hospitable. 
• They hate those who refuse shelter to the needy, thieves, those who deface doors, and greedy folks. 
• If they hate you they can make it so that armour and shields never protect you, strangers won't let you inside their homes and make all doors difficult to open. 

I remember it being a lot of fun to make these, and if this setting gets used for something else at some point I'd love to make a bunch more of smaller gods as well, with less powers and less restrictions.

GLoG Classes

As mentioned, this was meant to be a GLoG hack. I was immensly inspired by the delightful weirdness of Arnold Kemp's goblinpunch blog and especially how this was visible in the classes he made for GLoG. 

One thing I thought was a bit of a shame though, was that on the chassis of the wizard class you had a bunch of interesting and fun variations, while for other characters different classes where just that: different classes. 

With that in mind I tried to do two things: 

• Make my classes really weird, while remaining true to certain expectations people had of a class.
• Make chassis for each main class with a bunch of variations. 

I think these two worked surprisingly well together. By working with variations on core classes I could stay somewhat predictable, while the variations themselves could lean a bit more on the weird side of things. 

There are too many classes to list them all here (though if you are interested you can find them here instead), but these are some of my favourites:

• Track Taster Specialists: Specialists are basically rogues. The Track Taster leans into the wilderness variant of the specialist, so basically a ranger. It is basically just a joke from cartoons made into a class: Excentric tracker doesn't just look around but smells and even tastes the tracks as well. I leaned into this by allowing Track Tasters to unlock stuff they could learn about creatures whose tracks they had tasted. 
• Vanguard Grunt Fighter: In my mind a lot of fighter classes in tRPGs seem to glorify combat. I wanted to make a fighter class who had actual grunt experience, basically a fantasy trench soldier. Doing everything to survive was the theme, so they can play dead, use dirty tricks and start out with red berries to use as fake blood. 
• Big Rot Mystic: Clerics are dumb. They are a trope from stories that rely on monotheism (christianity) applied to faux polytheism in a way that doesn't make any sense. However, there is something of a historical correlate: Mystery Cults devote themselves to singular Gods despite being part of polytheistic society. If your part of a Mystery Cult you get access to more exlusive miracles from that God and you can slowely become more and more like them. The Big Rot Mystic gets Charm Person, Rot Wounds, Share Thougths and Fungal Thrall. Great stuff.
  
• Jester Bard: Jesters are fun. This one had the ability to make jokes and tricks auto-succeed as long as they suffered the same effects as their victims, which seems thematic on me and an easy way to balance things. I am still proud of that ability. 
• Knights: All of them honestly. The idea of pledging yourself entirely to an order made me want to go weird, a lot weirder than is usually the case. I have knights that don't sleep and are thus immume to all magic (also beneficial magic), knights that can't stop smiling and cause others to laugh along with them, knights that are in constant flux and who look different everytime you look at them and knights who are holding their last breath and are thus neither dead (and therefor unable to die) nor alive (and therefor unable to naturaly heal wounds). 

Honestly, even though I am not 100% sold on the execution of all of the classes I still like the idea for almost all of them, and they are what I would like to reuse for some other project the most of anything in this mess of a game. 

Stuff that might be good

GLoG Magic on Steroids

GLoG magic is fun. Magic Dice are tangible represenations of how much magic power you have left, the idea that bad rolls don't use up Magic Dice means that rolling low and rolling high is both good for different reasons and I love the mishap and doom systems on doubles and tripples. 

However, from folks who played a lot more GLoG games than me I learned that doubles and tripples are rare. I wanted them not to be, so I made Magic Dice explode on a 6. This means there is always a chance of causing mishaps and even dooms (though only a 0.5% chance if you use a single die). 

I never playtested it, so I don't know if it is good, but I think it could be. Volatile magic is something I find very fun in theory, but if it actually is fun in practice is something I'd have to find out. 

Armour Pieces each having Drawbacks

I don't know if this would be fun to track or if I would even be able to keep track of it while also playing the game, but I had this idea that the major drawback for using armour shouldn't be weight (as armour isn't actually that heavy and the weight is well distributed) but the fact that it impairs you in some way. 

Helmets would impair vision and hearing, breastplates would be uncomfortable (making them unsuited for resting in them), gauntlets would make precise fingerwork more difficult and grieves would slow you down. 

This is me, unknowingly, getting into FKR territory and I think it could be a lot of fun (though the main drawback of breastplates should be that they are hella warm and grieves should mostly just be loud). However, as I don't know how it would be to track this stuff at the table (and if it would even come up during a game) all of this extra detail might just slow the game down without actually adding anything of value to the experience. 

Inventory Slots

I find my players don't use them and I personally haven't played in a game that uses them. They seem fun in theory, though they stretch the imagination a bit. 

The alternative (just do what makes sense) seems like it works just fine, except I find that in practice it never comes up and makes inventory unimportant for most of the game. That might be good, but I would like to give inventory slots a chance, as you can put so many interesting things in them. Characters get soaking wet? Put 'soak' in their inventory. Characters get fatigued? Put fatigue in their inventory. Characters get hurt? Put their wounds in their inventory. 

Especially the Mauseritter version, where all of this is tangible (something people like about GLoG Magic as well) and much more visible then if it is written on a piece of paper, seems like it could be a lot of fun. I'll have to try it out some time and see if it works for me or not. 

Diseases

Curses and poisons are fun. Diseases seem like they should be similar and therefor fun as well, but I find that I never know how to do them. Most of the time I forget they exist and when I do remember them I find I just don't really know enough about diseases to make a good assesment about whether or not my characters should potentially get one. 

Making them feel like actual diseases and not just debuffs like in most videogames, is especially hard. In this hack I have a system with incubation times, durations, symptoms and remedies. Which seems like it is way more book keeping than I am willing to do. 

The remedies are a lot of fun though and I tried to come up with alternative names for common diseases that I am quite proud of. For example: 'The Hot Shits' are cured by drinking salt water infused with goats hairs.

Part of me wants to find a way to make diseases work, but another part of me wonders if curses and poisons aren't enough by themselves. Maybe I'll get a chance to try them out some time and see if I like them or not. 

Group roles

On paper these are so good. Callers off load some of the spotlighting from the GM, mappers introduce a fun extra dimension to exploring, a quartermaster can keep track of communal supplies allowing for more cooperation, and a bookkeeper can keep track of funds as well as NPCs the players might have gameable relations with. 

The one time I tried to implement them it didn't work, but that entire table was quite disfunctional so there might be hope for group roles yet. I guess I'll just have to see how future groups respond to them and decide whether or not to keep trying them out based on that. 

Stress

The one in this game is horrid. However, I do think it could potentially be interesting to have something like this. Figuring out how PCs cope with stress, what they do if they freak out and how getting more and more stressed might affect them seems like it could be an interesting part of a game if done well. 

Maybe other than keeping track of stress and when PCs reach a breaking point is all that should be systematised though, leaving the rest to the players to decide based on their own comfort levels. 

Conclusion

I don't think I'll ever 'play' this game again. It stinks in many, many different ways I won't get into. However, I think that I there is quite a lot more good stuff in there than I remember (most of it undoubtedly stolen from better bloggers). 

Especially the 'might be good' section has a lot of things I am interested in trying out to see how they are doing. 

It looks like some of this might make it into a new project I am starting up, which is exciting. 

 

New FLoK post should be next. I overhauled character generation (and it looks promising) and I am working on writing GM and player advice (which is even harder than I thought it would be). 

Also, I haven't forgotten about Project Social. I'm just doing what I always do and get excited about new ideas before finishing old ones, which doesn't mean I don't want to finish the old ones. 

Arguably, this is me going back to an old project to finish it as this game is the precursor to Mankement and anything I end up doing with these ideas could arguably be thought of as a variation on that project.