Ancestral Knowledge

So, like I said in the last post, I've been reading, and loving, Outcast Silver Raiders. One of the choices it makes that I'm enjoying is presenting the players with no racial (ancestry, species) options up front—everybody's a human by default. The game gives the GM a bunch of the trad demihuman options in the back of the book…but then actively discourages them from actually using those options. An all-human party makes a lot of sense for the Mythic North setting in particular (weird, grimdark 13th-century Scotland, more or less), but it also helps punch up any fantasy setting by making whatever non-humans the players encounter truly unusual and strange.

Besides, the menagerie of D&D demihumans, those intended for players and those intended as NPC foes alike, just isn’t very interesting. I'm not going to belabor this point too much (other and wiser folks have written at great length about it before), but they’re almost all just crude racialized exaggerations of real groups of people.

Most “monstrous” demihumans represent the Western archetype of the “savage.” They're primitive people hanging around on marginal land (swamps, jungles, mountains, caves, deserts) basically just waiting to be colonized or slaughtered. They might do a little raiding, a human sacrifice or two, or some quasi-cannibalism to remind us that they're evil (in case we don't have an alignment system to assure us that they're Evil), but mostly they're passive objects of imperial violence. They've often been given recognizable trappings of indigenous American cultures, or at least stereotypes thereof—feathers, tomahawks, blow guns, spear throwers, and so forth. Goblins, kobolds, and lizardmen fit into this category, among others. It's super racist!

Other monstrous demihumans, rather than being uncivilized savages, represent the anti-civilization of The Horde, threatening to turn the world upside-down and displace the point-of-view culture from its “rightful” place on top. Orcs, hogoblins, and their ilk get a bunch of cultural markers that suggest nomadic steppe people, particularly the Mongols (the centaurs of the Warcraft franchise are an especially ugly, heavy-handed example of this).

Several categories of “civilized” humanoids are just real human beings dressed up in fantasy trappings. Halflings and gnomes are basically “what if little people were magic?” (with an extra coat of racist paint on the halflings in WoTC's “they're also Romani” characterization). Dwarves are a bit of the same, although at least they have solid roots in folklore…although of course in contemporary fantasy fiction, their culture tends go heavy on a lazy mashup of Scottish and Jewish stereotypes.

In all these cases, one of the major problems is that there's little or no attempt to imagine demihumans as anything other than simplistic analogues for real groups of people. There tend to be few, if any, internal distinctions within the racial categories. Each group gets one pantheon, one language, maybe two cultures if they're lucky. (Sometimes, what should be a distinct culture gets spun off as an entirely different species.) Maybe a few different tribes, all of which behave more or less identically to each other. Some of the latter-day D&D ancestries have had sense enough to step away from “These guys are Mongols” or “These guys are Aztecs” analogies, but they still paint with a too-broad brush. Dragonborn? They're just some dudes, but with scales. Tabaxi? Well, they're naturally curious, of course. Meow.

* * *

Okay, but what about the two most popular non-human 5E species? Elves and tieflings have been conspicuously absent from my diatribe. And why? Because they're actually pretty interesting, they're probably popular in part because they're interesting, and they show two good ways forward for character ancestry.

Elves have the important distinction of being older, wiser, haughtier, and generally better than humans. At least elves think so, and that makes them novel. Most D&D demihumans exist, both in the game and outside of it, for humans to dump on (and by extension for people in dominant real-world groups to dump on minorities). They're barbarians, savages, animals, misshapen creatures. Elves, on the other hand, look down on humans. Elves are smarter, more beautiful, better at magic. More cultured. More civilized. You can kind of map an envious awe of an older “race” by some young upstarts only recently emerged from barbarism onto, say, the 19th-/20th-century German (and Western European, more broadly) obsession with Greece and Rome, but it just doesn't work that neatly. Elves aren't Greeks or Romans. They're more complicated.

Much more complicated, in fact! They get real internal cultural differences. They get multiple languages. They get varied religious practices. It tends to be a bit thin, still, and it's mostly derived from Tolkien (so no need to give TSR or WotC any credit), but a few different elven nations and some kind of conflict among them is a lot better than halflings or orcs get. Elves are also distinct, surprisingly, for having real physiological differences from humans that actually matter in the game, like resting via trance rather than sleeping. They could certainly be weirder—if we stuck closer to their folkloric roots, they'd be stealing babies and drinking blood—but they're at least a little bit alien.

Tieflings represent the opposite end of the spectrum: not alien and strange like the elves of folklore, not merely foreign like the myriad demihumans who ought to just be replaced by distinct human cultures, but uncanny. Almost normal, almost like “us,” but off somehow. Tainted. Marked. Problematically literal infernal ancestry aside, tieflings are a richer and truer analogy for being a despised minority than the essentially antisemitic dwarven trope of “They’re hardworking and smart and by golly, they just love gold” or anything like it could ever be. To their neighbors, they almost seem like normal people, but something in their deep ancestry is different, wrong, corrupt. They can't be trusted. They're probably up to no good. And there are signs. Blood will out. (Aasimar, on the other hand, aren’t the least bit interesting, because they don't represent anything authentic or recognizable; nobody in real life ever believed that some particular racial other in their society was actually inherently better than them, and descended from angels no less.)

Reinventing the Magical Polyhedral Wheel

"Cosmic Tree (Pochote)" by Jesús Lozano Paredes

The image is basically unrelated to the post; I just saw it at LACMA this weekend and thought it (and everything else there by Jesús Lozano Paredes, and in fact the whole exhibition We Live in Painting) was awesome. Seeing a bunch of cool art while traveling the past two weekends has been one of several factors that's got me thinking about fantasy instead of my usual dogged focus on science fiction (poring over my new copy of Outcast Silver Raiders has been another; more on that below and in posts to come).

* * *

Spring, as I believe Tennyson said, is when a youngish man's fancy turns to magic systems. They're never quite right! And as life returns to the world and hope returns to our hearts etc. etc. we think: I can reinvent this wheel. I can imagine something greater. Unpredictable and dangerous yet elegant and simple, and also redolent of mystery and darkness. Easy.

I've been reading Outcast Silver Raiders, which is dope, and I'm really, really enjoying the game's whole approach to magic. It accomplishes a couple of things that most iterations of D&D have completely whiffed on and even other OSR/NSR games tend to struggle with, which are making magic feel dangerous and forbidden (but still powerful and seductive) and simultaneously making the game world feel hostile to magic-users without turning them into an albatross around the necks of the rest of the party. Rituals are awesome, and worth the trouble because they're so much more powerful than what anything else can do. And yet the sorcerer's basic spells, though much weaker, are still gnarly, flavorful, and quite potent in a setting that has very little magic but does have lots of nasty problems that are hard to solve without magic. Great take on magical healing, especially.

But it's actually none of that that got me thinking about tinkering with a magic system. The way magic works in Raiders strikes me as being really well suited to the game, the setting, and the tone, and I don't see any need to hack it. But Raiders also uses usage dice for a bunch of stuff, and that got me thinking about how different dice could be used to represent a magic-user's powers in a game with a more conventional spell list. I've seen usage dice proposed for spellcasting before, and of course we've all seen a zillion different takes on dice pools, but I don't recall ever seeing this exact concept. Behold!

* * *

The basic procedure: Pick a die and try to roll over the level of the spell you're casting. If you fail, the die is exhausted and can't be used again for some time. You can't cast a spell unless you have a die larger than the spell level; you can use a d8 to roll a 6th-level spell (with a 1/4 chance of keeping the die), but you cannot use a d6 to do the same.

My first thought was that you'd start with a d4, each level would give you a new d4, and you could combine two like dice to get one of a higher level (i.e., 2d4 = 1d6). There are some obvious problems with starting at d4 (brand-new characters can cast 3rd-level spells, for instance), but d2s and d3s are fussy, and the problems aren't insoluble. This gives us the following progression:

Level 1: d4
Level 2: 2d4 / 1d6
Level 3: 3d4 / 1d6 + 1d4
Level 4: 4d4 / 2d6 / 1d8 / 1d6 + 2d4
Level 5: 5d4 / 2d6 + 1d4 / 1d8 + 1d4 / 1d6 + 3d4
Level 6: 6d4 / 3d6 / 1d8 + 1d6 / etc.
Level 7: 7d4 / 1d6 + 1d4 / etc.
Level 8: 8d4 / 4d6 / 2d8 / 1d10 / etc.
Level 9: 9d4 / 4d6 + 1d4 / 2d8 + 1d4 / 1d10 + 1d4 / etc.
Level 10: 10d4 / 5d6 / 2d8 + 1d6 / 1d10 + 1d6 / etc.

There are some nice dynamics here! Even at fairly low levels, casters can specialize into very different styles. You'll get about five 1st-level spells out of a single d8 on average, about nine out of 2d6, and about 14 out of 4d4, or roughly half that many 2nd-level spells out of each, respectively, so there's a distinct advantage to keeping your small dice and not just going straight for the heavy artillery (also, you stand a decent chance of losing your die on the very first cast if you only have one).

But there are more and bigger problems here. It works pretty neatly with a system where spells go from 1st to 9th level (5E, for instance), except that in such systems 7th-level spells, which a level 4 character can use in this system, are extremely powerful. We can make a custom spell list, of course, and save the really crazy stuff for 8th and 9th level, but that's a lot of fussy spell-list granularity for what's supposed to be a simple, elegant system, and lack of easy compatibility with other systems is a bummer. Also, a level 4 caster being about to semi-reliably shoot off 14+ Magic Missiles (or equivalent) is pretty nutty too! Any way you slice it, this is just too much power even for a high-fantasy setting.

Happily, it's easy to slow the spell-dice progression. Let's give our caster one new d4 at each odd-numbered level only:

Level 1: d4
Level 3: 2d4 / 1d6
Level 5: 3d4 / 1d6 + 1d4
Level 7: 4d4 / 2d6 / 1d8 / 1d6 + 2d4
Level 9: 5d4 / 2d6 + 1d4 / 1d8 + 1d4 / 1d6 + 3d4

This both makes a much more reasonable power progression and gives the player more interesting choices. In the middle levels, you really have to specialize in favor of quantity or quality, and even at the highest levels (assuming level 10 max), you have very limited access to really powerful spells and have to sacrifice a lot of lower-level power to get there.

We can slow the progression down a little bit more, too, by separating "get a new d4" from "combine two like dice." You get the former at odd-numbered levels; you do the latter at even-numbered levels. This pushes the big jumps in potential power level back from level 3 and level 7 to level 4 and level 8. It also spreads out the player's choices a bit, giving them something to think about every time they level up:

Level 1: d4
Level 2: d4
Level 3: 2d4
Level 4: 2d4 / 1d6
Level 5: 3d4 / 1d6 + 1d4
Level 6: 3d4 / 1d6 + 1d4
Level 7: 4d4 / 1d6 + 2d4
Level 8: 4d4 / 1d6 + 2d4 / 2d6 / 1d8
Level 9: 5d4 / 1d6 + 3d4 / 2d6 + 1d4 / 1d8 + 1d4
Level 10: 5d4 / 1d6 + 3d4 / 2d6 + 1d4 / 1d8 + 1d4

You can combine any number of like dice you want at any even level (otherwise, you wouldn't be able to get a d8 until max level, which is boring). Can you separate them later? Probably not. At the GM's discretion, maybe.

* * *

Either way, we're getting somewhere. I see two major problems remaining (although there are probably others I'm not seeing). The first is the spell list; maxing out at 7th level is an improvement over 9th, but it's still a lot of different tiers to sort spells into, it doesn't line up very well with other systems (6th being the max level in older editions of D&D, and 5th being common in newer games), and it still lets brand-new characters chuck 2nd- and 3rd-level spells around.

There are a bunch of potential solutions here. One is to step down from a d4/d6/d8 progression to d2/d4/d6. This works very neatly with systems that have five tiers of spells, making the system easy to use with Shadowdark or WWN or whatever. On the other hand, flipping coins (or using custom dice, or using larger dice as ersatz d2s) feels clunky, and this would really limit the number of spells a character could cast without resting or otherwise refreshing their dice. More on that below, but I don't love the d2s no matter how you slice it.

Another solution, of course, is a custom spell list. Could be a great choice if we were building a system for some specific setting—you can squeeze a lot of lore and flavor into a spell list!—but as a module to try jamming into other games, or as part of a bare-bones generic system that we can plug other games' spells into? Not so great.

The best option might be the laziest one (other than adding cantrips): Just let caster power levels be a little wonky. No magic-user knows how to cast Fireball or Fly right from the jump, but if they loot an evil wizard's tower during their very first adventure and find a tome with those spells in it, why shouldn't they be able to try them out? This requires a paradigm in which casters only learn new spells diegetically (through study, from mentors, by looting scrolls and spellbooks, etc.), but that's my preference anyway. As for 7th-level spells, the system doesn't even need them. Getting one d8 in your pool lets you cast a 6th-level spell or two, something that's already very potent at level 8. For a bespoke setting, we could still cook up a partial or complete list of original spells, including 7th-level ones, while maintaining easy compatibility with other systems.

* * *

So that just leaves one other (obvious-to-me) problem: It's really easy to burn through your spells in this system. A max-level magic-user can pop off one 6th-level spell and one 3rd-level spell and be totally spent—in fact, it's more likely than not. We need some way to mitigate this. We also need a process for refreshing exhausted dice; maybe they can go together?

That was my first thought, anyway. There are a lot of knobs and levers here; refreshing bigger dice could require longer rests, dice could be refreshed sequentially (biggest first, or smallest first, or at random), we could roll to refresh dice, etc. That last option could be available even on a very short timescale. A magic-user could take an action, even during combat, to "focus" or "concentrate" or something like that, getting an opportunity to refresh one die—like a monster rolling each turn to see if it refreshes an exhausted power. Could be a good approach for a system that's very granular with skills (Arcana, Concentration, etc.), especially in a high-fantasy setting.

I like simplicity more than granularity for something like this, though, and I like magic being rare, costly, and unpredictable more than I like it being something a highly trained expert can master. A better solution, for me, brings this whole post full circle by actually drawing inspiration from Outcast Silver Raiders (rather than flying off on a free-associative tangent that barely ends up having anything to do with usage dice at all).

If you ever roll a 1 while casting, the die is automatically exhausted. If you roll above a 1 but below your target, however, you can pay in blood for better odds. Need a 7 but rolled a 3? Roll again and add the second die to the first. The total counts toward your target, but is also deducted from your HP. Better hope it's a 4 this time and not another 3! (I think you just roll again if you still aren't at the threshold, and risk going way over; forcing the player to take damage but still automatically lose the die seems harsh without being much fun. They should have the choice to back out with partial damage, though, because that creates interesting situations. If you went into the above scenario with 12 HP, for instance, even an 8 on your first blood-magic roll couldn't kill you outright…but if you rolled that second 3, it might be better to stop at 6 HP than to take a third roll, where a 6, 7, or 8 would drop you.)

This has to be tuned according to how many HP casters get, how much magical healing (if any) is available, the tone we want for the system/setting/campaign, and so forth. Maybe you only take damage from the extra die (or dice), not the original roll; maybe your attribute bonus or an appropriate skill bonus can partially mitigate the damage. Maybe you can get advantage on the initial roll sometimes. But I like the core idea a lot. Adds some danger, and a push-your-luck element, to casting.

Randomness is great, but it's best when it presents players with difficult choices rather than just imposing outcomes on them. We still have automatic successes and failures at the top and bottom of the range; letting players hedge against bad luck by taking on a different kind of risk is more interesting than taking spell dice away fully at random and then restoring them equally randomly with the focus/concentration action described above.

Random Rules

 

A bunch of dice-rolling rubrics I've adopted for stuff that keeps coming up in our campaign:

 

SEXUALITY (AND GENDER, HALF-ASSEDLY)

Certain of my players want to know how attractive everybody they meet is, what their sexual orientation is, and whether the PCs can try to seduce them or at least gainfully flirt with them. So I'll roll a d8 and…

1. This person is a 0 on the Kinsey scale (they are strictly heterosexual)
2. Kinsey 1
3. Kinsey 2
4. Kinsey 3 (bisexual, or maybe pansexual—our man Kinsey is a bit of an antique at this point, after all)
5. Kinsey 4
6. Kinsey 5
7. Kinsey 6 (strictly homosexual)
8. This person doesn't land anywhere on the Kinsey scale. Maybe they're asexual; maybe they don't fit a gender binary and so “heterosexual” and “homosexual” don't apply to them (in which case I might reroll and substitute gynosexual/androsexual, or just figure they're pansexual, or whatever; this is very much a “make it up by GM fiat” result).

This is all then filtered through a cultural lens. In an egalitarian, civil-libertarian society, people will just act on their desires as they please. In a more restrictive one, some people will accommodate themselves to social mores and expectations. On a low-tech planet with a quasi-medieval society that's big on hierarchy, patriarchy, “traditional values,” etc., everybody from 1 through 6 is probably going to be “straight,” or at least strongly present that way. Only those who cannot accommodate themselves to heteronormative relationships at all are going to be out enough, or indiscreet enough (or miserable enough), to be perceptible to the PCs.

For the most part, trans men and women are just subsumed into superordinate categories here: men are men, women are women. If I were trying to publish this table in some manner of Official Rules, this would probably gnaw at me (big “on the one hand…but on the other hand” feelings re: representation, erasure, segregation) but for a home game where some of my players just want to be louche horndogs, it works fine. We are tastefully fading to black before anybody's genitals enter the picture, at any rate.

 

SEXINESS

When they ask, “How hot is this guy?” I just roll a d10 and give them the result. Would it make more sense, anthropologically speaking, to come up with some die roll that generates something like a normal distribution and then convert that to a 10-point scale so that most people are in the 4-to-6 range and actual 10s are vanishingly rare? Yes. But 1) that's more work and 2) it's more fun when every tenth guy they meet is a total smokeshow and Mustang and Sarai start fighting over him.

 …on the other hand, even as I write this, it occurs to me that doing something like (3d6+2)/2, rounded down, might be kind of fun too. That way, a 10 is incredibly rare, nobody suffers the indignity of being a 1, and the average person is a solid 6, which experience has taught us is good enough for Sarai, assuming they have a nice personality / know all the best restaurants around here.

 

WHAT TIME IS IT HERE?

We have a universal 24-hour clock for our space adventures to make timekeeping simple and comprehensible. Universal time is used on ships, on stations, in underground arcologies, etc. But on planet surfaces, people are probably going to have local timekeeping, and even if they don't, we want to know the position of the sun in the sky, how much daylight is left, etc. Thus, a d6 roll:

1. The middle of the night (~0200, in a 24-hour day)
2. Around dawn (~600)
3. Late in the morning (~1000)
4. Early in the afternoon (~1400)
5. Around dusk (~1800)
6. Late in the evening (~2200)

 

THE ORACULAR d20 (OR 2d6 SOMETIMES)

Everybody does this, right? On a 20, it's exactly what the players want to hear; on a 1, it's pretty much the opposite. In between, all sorts of shades of “no, but” and “yes, but.”

The players ask, “Did our mark walk to the same bar we met Ms. Whomever at?” Figure there are probably 10 bars around here, at least, but even if there are 20 or more, higher odds are more fun, so if we hit a 19 or 20, yes, it's the very same one. 15–18 will be (practically?) next door. A 3? It's halfway around the space-station ring (or fully on the opposite end of town). A 1? Maybe it's not even open to the public.

Did the guy whose hotel room they're snooping around in just leave his compad on the desk, power on, logged in, no security? That would be quite a stroke of luck for the PCs—only a 20 will do it. But maybe on a 19, he writes all of his passwords in a paper notebook that he left in his unlocked desk. On an 18, maybe the desk is locked but easily broken into. On a 17, maybe he didn't write the password down, but it's just really easy to crack. On a 1, of course, he took the incriminating compad with him.

Sometimes the oracle takes the form of 2d6, like a reaction roll. How'd these aliens like Sarai's cooking? Well, on a 7 they thought it was fine, on a 12 it was the best thing they've ever eaten, and on a 2 they'd be throwing hands if they weren't busy with some form of extraterrestrial emesis. (I guess that is a reaction roll, really.)

The Ends of the World

We're all freaking out, right? We're all coping in different ways. One of my least productive, most unhealthy ways of coping has been to trawl through some of the darker corners of Reddit not actually looking for concrete advice about how to arm myself or how to prepare myself for disaster but just sort of…window shopping for unhinged behavior. Determining that if I did belatedly decide to become a gun guy, I would get a Mini-14. That if I did decide to gird my proverbial loins for the crumbling of American society, I should have two months' worth of rice, beans, and water down in the basement.

That's right: I've been on r/preppers. And you know what? They have lots of good advice! Good advice about first aid training and water purification techniques and home gardening and lots of other stuff I intend to learn about. But you know what else they have? Well, yes, guns. Way too many guns. But also jargon! Jargon for days. More initialisms than the DoD. And there are several initialisms they particularly love that communicate something dark about the prepper mindset (and maybe about the American mindset in general): SHTF, WROL, TEOTWAWKI. These are when the Shit Hits The Fan, when we are living Without Rule Of Law, and The End Of The World As We Know It.

SHTF is a bit vague, kind of an all-purpose label for “things get bad enough that I actually get to put my preps into action.” Not so sinister on its own, but in light of what it turns out many preppers' strongest fixations are, the yearning for that moment starts to feel ugly. WROL is probably the most telling one, because “rule of law” actually means something, and it's not this—a society without rule of law is something we've struggled with, to a greater or lesser degree, for pretty much the entirety of civilization, or at least the part of civilizational history that actually aspired to establishing rule of law. We're definitely living without rule of law in the United States right now, in a particularly significant and dangerous way. But to the gun fetishists, the survivalists, the far-right fantasists, a state “without rule of law” is, in short, one where they get to shoot Black people without consequences. Or, excuse me, rioters and looters. Bandits. Criminals breaking into their houses.

It's an imagined emergency scenario that blends the fictions of postapocalyptic games and zombie shows with the quasi-history of the American frontier and decades of deranged right-wing news coverage. It's not something that has ever really happened in human history; periods of true anarchy tend to be extraordinarily short, because there's always some wannabe government (a barbarian tribe, a rebel general, a gang, a guerilla army, a crime syndicate, a militia) ready and willing to step in, for better or (usually) worse, when the preceding government recedes or collapses. Looting is something soldiers do in wartime; it's not something neighbors do to each other in emergencies, even prolonged ones. The preoccupation with “looters” and “scavengers” is closely tied to news coverage of American riots and natural disasters (as well as films, shows, and games that have reproduced the concept, often in even more lurid form), and that news coverage is propaganda. People steal the occasional TV, sure, but they mostly take essentials—food, sanitary products—that they have no other access to. And they take them from abandoned stores, not from each other, not from family homes.

But we have a lot of people yearning for this fantasy scenario, itching for a lawless state in which they can become the law (and gun down dangerous dark-skinned criminals). They keep dreaming even as actual rule of law dissolves and the Republic with it.

It's TEOTWAWKI that really gets me. Child of the 90s that I am, the phrase never fails to conjure up for me the REM classic “It's the End of the World as We Know It (And I Feel Fine),” and specifically the Roland Emmerich classic Independence Day. Alien invasion! The White House blowing up! Mass destruction across the world, governments decapitated, military forces obliterated. This is essentially what a lot of preppers seem to have in mind as TEOTWAWKI—maybe not the literal aliens, but some cataclysm that obliterates all governments and most of the world's population. Global nuclear war, or in recent years an impossibly virulent and deadly pandemic. A vanishingly improbable event that, if it does come, they will almost certainly not survive.

Meanwhile, the world is ending every day, in ways large and small. The change is usually gradual enough not to feel jarring, but the world never stops turning. Think back to just 10 years ago. How inconceivable did a Donald Trump regime and all its attendant absurdities and humiliations seem? Think back 25 years. Could anybody imagine the erosion of American hegemony, the failure of the new international order, imperialist or revanchist states invading each other across the globe in naked attempts to impose puppet regimes or seize territory? Go back 40 years. Forget the fall of the Soviet Union; who could have imagined the internet? Smartphones? Machine translation?

There's some worldbuilding advice here, something to keep in mind when putting a TTRPG campaign setting together: There is no such thing as global collapse. The Black Death didn't do it; nothing short of complete annihilation will. We will not reexperience the Dark Ages and see worldwide technological regression. (The supposed Dark Ages weren't really all that dark, anyway, even in Europe.) There's arguably not even such a thing as regional or civilizational collapse. The histories we have of collapse, of decline and fall, of civilizational ruin, are nearly all elite narratives. If you were a Roman patrician in 476 CE, the Ostrogothic conquest of the city surely felt like the end of the world. If you were a plebe, or a slave, you could have been forgiven for hardly having noticed. Local government didn't change. The Senate didn't go away. Everybody still spoke Latin. No perceptible catastrophe occurred. The world kept turning. It always does. Things change, and often for the worse, but often in dreary, grinding, unspectacular ways.

There are lulls in history, too, of course, but they're shorter and more contingent and more localized than you might think. The European Middle Ages, particularly in Western Europe—the basis for the traditional fantasy settings that underpin so much of the TTRPG world—seem fairly socially and technologically static to many contemporary observers, but at the same time than England and France were slogging through their Hundred Years' War and building the zillion frontier castles that dot our imagined fantasy landscapes, enormous changes were taking place as nearby as Iberia, and of course French and English people were sailing off to the Crusades (and extraordinary things were happening in the Americas, and in Africa, and in Asia).

And there are counterparts to even the relative lulls. “There are decades when nothing happens; and there are weeks when decades happen,” as Lenin actually probably never did say. The shit is mostly definitely hitting the fan now. None of us were prepared.

Flyover Country: Chapter 8

"Investigation" by Maxime BiBi

Continued from Chapter 7.

* * *

Faisal Rao, director of the Sokhna office of GeOpis, is as good as his word. The PCs have a big-wheeled all-terrain transporter at their disposal, plus a cover identity that'll get them within mere kilometers of Nana Malik's estate before they have to get sneaky about it. They've loaded a bunch of weaponry, too, including a sniper rifle. They suit up: Light armor, filter masks for the sometimes-unpleasant atmosphere, and hooded jackets or ponchos for protection against acid rain and ashfall.

Krissa has used her precognitive Oracle ability to scout things out. The path of least resistance, an old service road to the west, seems to lead to an ambush; Krissa had a searing vision of the transporter being ripped open by an anti-vehicle laser and the crew sheltering, pinned down, behind a cyclopean hunk of concrete by the desolate roadside.

They resolve to take a different approach: They'll drive out to a GeOpis monitoring station near the edge of the restricted area, drop in on the scientists there, and then maneuver down into the tangle of ravines and volcanic hotspots between the station and the abandoned suburb; there's another old road through there. Much of it has collapsed in seisms or been buried by landslides, but some tunneled segments appear to be intact, and taking this route will obscure the PCs' movements from any observers.

Along the way, as they exit one of the tunnel sections, they're hailed by radio. The man claims to have been ambushed and stranded out here; he says he's a homesteader who was trying to squat in one of the abandoned estates, but was run off by bandits. Mistrustful, the crew refuses to meet him, but they do promise to drop some supplies for him if he's still there when they return to the city. They pass a smaller ATV, carved apart by a heavy laser like the one in Krissa's vision, which partially corroborates the stranger's story, but the players remain divided about whether to help—maybe he's in league with the bandits. Maybe the ATV belonged to somebody he killed.

* * *

The suburb is on a long, fairly smooth slope that rises gradually to a soft ridgeline in the north and east. To the west, it sinks a little farther to a dry riverbed and then rises across much rougher terrain toward a higher, more jagged ridge. To the south are the tangle of ravines, pocked with fumaroles and scarred by landslides and ashfall, that the PCs have just traversed. High points several kilometers away are visible to the west, but sightlines in the other directions are much shorter. They pass a few other houses on their way to Malik's, and a few more are partially visible off to the southeast and northwest—the grounds were arranged so that each estate was invisible to the others, but with the vegetation that screened them from one another reduced to desiccated stubble and a few charred tree trunks, the illusion is broken. Still, it's a pretty isolated spot.

Mustang and Krissa disembark to scout ahead on foot; while they observe the Malik estate, and the rest of the crew trains the transporter's limited sensors on it, they are hailed yet again. This time, their interlocutor is a middle-aged woman, and she's up front about ambushing them: Her team, she says, have a rocket launcher trained on the PCs' transporter, so no funny business. They don't want any trouble, she explains, and aren't trying to hold the PCs up—she wants their help, in fact. She just doesn't want to negotiate from a position of weakness. The players, of course, don't like this; Mustang and Krissa promptly begin stealthily maneuvering for a firing position. The rest of the crew, however, follow the woman's instructions and emerge, hands in the air, from the transporter.

The woman, who introduces herself as Lorena, and her team, five in total, are also here to loot the Malik estate. They approached on foot, and their technician tried to interface with the security system and shut it down. She thinks she managed to isolate it from the regional network, but in the process, she alerted a veritable swarm of security bots to their presence. They disabled a few of the machines, but one of their number was badly injured, and they beat a retreat. They don't have a medic, unfortunately, and their comrade will die if he doesn't get assistance soon. Do the PCs have any medical expertise? Any stims? They can offer weapons in trade, and they're willing to cooperate in a renewed attack on the house. Time is of the essence, after all—they're pretty sure they cut the house's system off without tripping any alarms, but who knows. Security might already be on the way. And there are bandits around.

The PCs are always ready to wheel and deal. How many rocket launchers do these guys have? Can they get one? Two rockets to go with it? Scratch that—make it three. Lorena is amenable. And they have a shopping list, Sarai explains. There are five things they need from the house. “Six, actually,” says Krissa. She's used her Oracle power again, imagining a future where they take all the loot for themselves and get the pieces appraised, so she knows that there's one painting in Malik's collection more valuable than any of the items Stephanidis sent them for. That, too, is fine with Lorena; there should be plenty to go around.

Krissa takes the injured man, Sunil, into the transporter to work her biopsionic magic away from prying eyes. She doesn't merely stabilize him but gets him on his feet again—Lorena's group probably suspects the use of a pretech cosmetic—and the two parties team up for the heist. Lorena throws the still-tender Sunil's arm over her shoulder and helps him limp his way toward their group's transporter, which they parked in a hollow nearby, out of sight from the house and most of the surrounding area. The other three squeeze in and ride along with the PCs.

* * *

The house itself is grand in an austere, rectilinear way. It's just two stories with a basement, but its footprint is huge. It faces south, so the transporter is approaching the front. There, the lower level is nearly flush with the ground—the driveway slopes down only slightly to two big garage doors that open straight into the basement. The first floor stands at ground level on the northern side but is well above grade to the south and must be approached via a long staircase. There's a first-floor deck around the west side and southwest corner, and a second-floor deck on the north and east sides. The two aboveground levels are clad in a durable glass-like polymer, wrapping most of the space in floor-to-ceiling windows, and a few more private areas in translucent panels. The security bots, canny enough to avoid being picked off from range, have retreated into the house.

BQ drives right up to the house's garage entrance; the six PCs, supplemented with a little NPC firepower, rush in and make short work of the remaining bots. The two groups begin their inventory of the house, and the PCs realize that the three NPCs who came along with them are little more than kids—19, maybe 20 years old. There's plenty of stuff for their group: Sixteen notable ceramic pieces, four more major paintings and a host of lesser ones, a couple of big sculptures, a pretty nice wine collection, and more.

All of the pre-Scream objects and alien artifacts Stephanidis wanted are here too, proudly displayed in vitrines in a small gallery: a collection of bronze and electrum implements that look like darts and scalpels; a levitating force plate and control glove; a toy composed of 26 miniature cubes that can be rotated, nine at a time, around three different axes (like a Rubik's cube, but with a uniform metal finish), with each configuration causing the device to play a different tune; a shifari polearm and an ornate shifari breastplate; and some bony-looking bits and pieces of betaal manufacture. BQ immediately starts smashing and grabbing. The three kids start stacking up paintings and vases in the garage, waiting for their group's transporter to pull up. Outside, not far from the house, there's an explosion.

It's the bandits from Krissa's earlier vision, and the anti-vehicle laser mounted on their armored car has just obliterated Lorena, Sunil, and their vehicle. The players' transporter, parked right up against the lowest level of the house, is sheltered from the armored car by a berm, but the car is coming down the slope to the west and maneuvering for a clear shot. It's over a kilometer away, out of range of nearly all of the PCs' weapons. Mustang grabs her new rocket launcher and slips outside to take a shot at the armored car from behind the berm; Batias takes his sniper rifle out on the second-story deck to try to cover her from any dismounted bandits. Two dismounted bandits who have approached the house from the north duly draw a bead on him; one sends a mag rifle round ripping through his meager armor, taking a (non-essential) chunk of him with it. He falls prone, getting out of their line of sight.

Mustang's first shot at the armored car connects squarely with the vehicle but fails to disable or destroy it; her second rocket is a near miss. Good thing they bartered for three of these! Heavy laser blasts spray dirt, dust, and chunks of concrete all around. Mustang heaves the launcher over her makeshift parapet a third time, aims carefully, fires…and blows the car to smithereens.

With help from the three young NPCs, the others have all this while been shoving everything they can into the transporter's cargo hold. There's a heated but brief debate about whether to dispatch the two bandits to the north so that they can finish looting the place at their leisure, but pragmatic heads prevail: There might be more bandits, and at any rate the two who have Batias pinned down are firing from cover with weapons that slightly outrange, and significantly outclass, the laser rifles that represent the crew's best long-range weapons (other than the sniper rifle trapped on the deck upstairs with Batias). Besides, they've got a lot of valuable loot already, there's only so much room for it, and with the bandits' vehicle knocked out, the transporter represents a distinct advantage mobility advantage. They should just leave.

Unwilling to retreat back into the house, whether out of fear of being perforated while fumbling with the door or for other, less explicable reasons, Batias insists that he will rappel down from the deck, run around the west side of the house, and hop aboard the transporter there. Nobody can persuade him otherwise, and nobody's willing to go and physically get him, or get into a shootout with the bandits for the sake of covering his withdrawal, so off he goes. Unsurprisingly, he gets shot again, and hurt pretty badly this time, but he manages to lurch to his way into cover around the side of the house, stumble to the transporter, and submit to Krissa's healing touch.

The PCs don't forget to stop and drop off some supplies and a spare oxygen tank for the guy who claimed to be a stranded homesteader…but Batias, ever mistrustful, shoots the oxygen tank from the back ramp of the transporter as they drive away, destroying it and probably damaging the supplies. The guy was in cahoots with the bandits! He's sure of it!

They pass by the GeOpis monitoring station on their way out of the restricted area and pay the scientists another visit, passing around a couple nice bottles of liquor and thanking them for their assistance, assuring them that Director Rao will be glad to hear they were so helpful. Their return to Sokhna is otherwise uneventful.

* * *

This was the first proper adventure I mapped out and planned after the construction-site caper back on Morrow, and it was a nice change of pace after a bunch of free-form wandering and improvised social encounters. I drew up a simple map of the area, rolled up some hazards and potential complications (bandits, rival looters, a stranded civilian—yeah, he really was just an innocent squatter—some scientists, a security post to the east that never came into play), showed the players potential routes they could take to and from the estate, and let them loose.

It worked out pretty well! Their hostile and mistrustful natures nearly got the better of them (a loud minority really wanted to counter-ambush the other looters) but they ended up doing a good job tempering their classic TTRPG player greed and bloodlust with pragmatism. The bandits were formidable, armed with much better equipment than the PCs had at this point (mag rifles and an anti-vehicle laser) and attacking from advantageous positions. I'm not entirely sure how the PCs would've fared if one of the looters' rocket launchers hadn't ended up in the hands of a warrior-class PC. But I'm certain they'd have figured something out!

Next: Chapter 9.