Pillaging 2016 GLOG

My ttrpg self was born in 5th edition. After my first two steps I noticed that this house was wrong. I tried redecorating, changing lore and adventures to better fit my tastes, but quickly I started remodeling it entrely, changing rules and adding procedures without having any real experience yet with running ttrpgs, let alone designing them. And it remained wrong, its wrongness, I believed, lied in its very foundations. Fuck it, I'll just make something from scratch. And so I binged rules summaries on youtube, as I tinkered away at the monstrosity I planned to play in, until I finally stumbled onto my first real home in ttrpg: the Goblin Laws of Gaming. 

I am not sure what made me feel so at home in the GLOG.

Growing up with a hoarder, our house was always a bloated mess, at the time I was (and currently still am) definitely a mess, and the original GLOG, which I love, is also very messy.

My favourite philosophers are the French and German weirdo's whose writings are inaccessible and complex, needlessly so, according to many of their critics. For someone who hardly had a single campaign under their belt and no experience with the OSR playstyle, the GLOG was equally esoteric to me. 

Regardless, I am a critical bitch and have since looked around at other OSR adjacent systems and playstyles, but GLOG, like herpes, isn't something you ever get rid of once you catch it. Its influence still oozes out of my work. It is time to stop running away and face the GLOG head on, make a pilgrimage to its source and then pillage it for all its worth, once and for all. 

The plan

Step 1: Comb through the files of the 2016 GLOG (i.e. anything on the goblinpunch blog from 2016 that pops up when you search for GLOG). The cut off point might be arbitrary, but aren't all?

So that would be:

• GLOG version -1.0
• Goblin Guts version -1.0
• The GLOG Wizards version 1
• The GLOG Character Generation version 0
• The GLOG Alchemy + Oozes
• The GLOG Diseases version 0
  

Step 2: As I am raiding the place, I'll only pay attention to the valuable stuff, i.e. what I like or would like to adapt in a way that better suits me. No need to waste time on things I am leaving behind anyway, I am not trying to prove a point, or write a review. 

Step 3: Try to work a bit more schematic than just listing the stuff I like from the various documents. The things I want to steal broadly follow under one of three categories:

• Common ground: Principles and ideas that I find myself agreeing with. This is more meta and less actual game content. 
• Inspiring: Stuff I want to adapt to my games rather than steal outright due to differences in style, setting or preferences.
  
• Selection of Spoils: The best stuff that I will happily steal wholesale. 

Common ground

The fundamental principle that I find myself agreeing with the most is also what I think is crucial to GLOG as a whole. Moreso than the magic system and the four template classes it is known for, it is this bit of text in the original GLOG version -1 rules:

"[Abilities] are designed to be active (as opposed to passive), and each template will hopefully yield an ability that a player would be excited to gain access to. And most importantly, they are
designed to be incomparable. No +1 bonuses to other parts of the character sheet.

Abilities should give you a new ability, not just improve an existing one. Things like trapmaking
and clairvoyance cannot be compared, because each is preferable in a certain situation (unlike +1
Attack and +2 Attack)."

The myriad variations on spells, classes and (delta) templates I have seen all embrace this. They are stuff meant to make you excited and focus on incomparability over boring bonuses and improvements. This is also leads the one negative thing I will say in this pillage pilgrimage (the critical bitch in me just wouldn't stay quiet):

I don't think this version of GLOG does a very good job at this when it comes to abilities you get through leveling. The reason I feel justified in saying this is that this promise got me super excited, but then when I went through the Goblin Guts classes I noticed what I believe to be a lot of bonusses to stats, quite a few improvements on existing abilities, and many passive and reactive abilities (i.e. choose if you want to do X when Y happens to you). The brain I've made for myself isn't very compatible with that level of fiddly-ness, so it isn't what I had hoped to find, which is very much a me problem.

The other design principles throughout all documents are in spirit very enticing to me as well. I love stuff to be relatively low power, accessible to newcomers, simplified/consolidated to speed things up, and fast rather than comprehensive. Throughout it all there is a level of tongue in cheek that I also really appreciate. The way in which it takes what it presents seriously, but presents wonderfully silly things reminds me somewhat of Pratchett in all the best ways. 

There is also just a surprising amount of legwork. Surprising because I originally only looked at the initial rules overview and the wizards addition which felt a bit sparse in places. But when you add the tables from the character creation document, the 100 potions and the diseases you start to get a lot of very useful free stuff out of just GLOG branded posts in just 2016 and I really appreciate that. 

To summarise the spoils so far:

• Make abilities incomparible and active rather than bonusses and passives. 
• Have PCs be relatively low in power level compared to the fictional world.
• Simplify ruthlessly in ways which allow for accessibility and speed of play. 
• Introduce silly things but take them completely serious within the universe.
• Do the legwork to make it actually easy to run once that repository is in place.

Inspiring

The world of Centerra is wonderful. Everything is to a certain degree sentient, so you bargain with diseases, speak with metals (through magical means) and imprison spells. It is delightfully evocative and imediately fantastical. But I am not the biggest fan of concepts like 'ethereal planes' or even 'souls'. In modern times it often implies a Cartesian worldview that I find really stifeling (i.e. there is 'thinking stuff' and 'material stuff', and one is really just their thinking stuff with material stuff being an annoying necessity). Extending the privilage of being a 'thinking thing' to all entities is a novel way to deal with it, but I would like to try to do something non-Cartesian while ending up in a similarly fantastical place (if any of that makes sense). 

Having various ways to attack characters, other than just damage is great. Angels making you doubt yourself and stress leading to panic reactions has always appealed to me, but I've always found the systems for this really fiddly. I recently came across a sollution in the comment section of this blogpost though that nicely fits the consolidate principle: Have HP represent whatever it needs to in the fiction. How to make Doubt different from normal damage? Change what table you use once they get past/to 0 HP. Death and dismemberment for sure, but use a panic table when it is stress damage, various levels of new outlooks on life if you use doubt, versions of social disgrace if it is a knightly duel etc. (You can consilidate maximally I think if you do what Electric Bastionland does and have 1 roll dictate all of combat and death and dismemberment using something similar to its scar system but for anything below 0).

Advancement past level 4 is really cool, where abilities are either the result of surviving danger or going out to quest for them. As I tend to prefer levelless games I would probably want all progression to work this way from the get go. Either start with funnel peasants, notable survivors amongst them getting an ability, or start with a single ability and then go at it if you want more. 

A bunch of the Goblin Guts abilities are really good inspiration for this as well. Impress is a great example of something I would probably not have thought of as an ability, but seems relatively easy to dole out as a reward for impressing some important figure. In the same way Challenge, Redirect and Speak with pet are great as inspiration. 

I like a bunch of spells enough that I'll yoink! them later, but one idea that I find really inspiring is turning spells up to eleven. Knock unlatching armor and Feather applying to anything not just people are great examples of what I mean. I might even wanna take Knock further making it open anything that can be considered to have been closed (including mouths, pockets, etc.). If you get to use a spell only once a day, better make it count.

Selection of Spoils

• Using 'small enough to put inside your closed mouth' to determine if something is negligible.
• Hit Points as 'do not get Hit' points.
• Spells can be retrieved from wizard skulls
• Death Mask (spell): Peel the face of a corpse and wear it as a disguise.
• Raise Skin Kite (spell): Undead at your command. If you carve a face in it you can cast spells through it.
• Mirror Object (spell): Reach through a reflective surface to grab a reflection of an object and pull it into reality as long as it is within reach, not too heavy and not too big.
• Anchoring (potion): Drink to become basically an immovable rod.
• Duo-Dimension (potion): Become two dimensional.
• Fusion (potion): Combine with the next creature you touch.
• Speak with metal (potion): What it says on the tin. 
• Filth Feavor (disease): Stressful moments might have you soil yourself.
• Sleeping Sickness (disease): You keep needing more and more sleep to rest.
• Wandering Heart (disease): Your heart slowly moves out of your chest.
• Random Inducement (table): Why haven't I seen a table for 'why are you adventuring?' before. Maybe I did and I just forgot.
• Potion Miscibility (table): What happens when potions mix (potentially inside your body).

Doing a GLOG

I want to get the Star Prison megadungeon I made for dungeon23 table ready and I need a ruleset to run it. So why not make it a GLOG hack. How much this will still look like GLOG is going to be super debatable, given that I won't use the same resolution mechanic, combat mechanics, probably not even the same magic mechanics and probably won't use levels, so no template classes.

But it will be a dungeon crawler, I'll try to stick to many of the same design principles that the original GLOG lays out, and I'll probably inject it with a bunch of stuff lifted (directly) from the documents I pillaged for this post.