Birthing Horrors

Got the guide to creating Horrors written today. It took a while, because I want to do a "how-to" guide for each of the elements of adventures: Places, Adversaries, and Treasures; and so the Horrors one has ended up being the template for them. The idea is to give as much practical, concise information as possible to make adventure-building as easy as it can be.

With that in mind, I think it'd be useful to get opinions on it, particularly as regards clarity and language. So here it is; let me know what you think.

BIRTHING HORRORS, A PRACTICAL GUIDE

Horrors do two useful things. They embody the ‘weirdness’ of sword and sorcery, reminding its heroes that the cosmos is wider and more awful than they can ever know, and they provide a serious challenge to people who - let's face it - are used to being the most dangerous thing in the room.

Traditionally, a Horror has one of three origins:-

1. Old: it survives from a previous age of the world, when other laws held sway.
2. Alien: it came to this world from another one: a different planet, or some hell under the skin of our own world.
3. That Which Should Not Be: it is the consequence of a forsaken branch of evolution preserved in some isolated pocket of the world, or a blasphemous mutation of sorcery.

There's no table to roll your Horrors on. They work best when they're tailored to the adventure, and allowed to slither/flap/thunder straight from the nastier corners of your brain. Here's how to build one.

Look back over the adventure so far for things to tie it to. A Place can be a Horror's lair, temple, or hunting ground. An Adversary can be a Horror's master, quarry, or worshipper. A Treasure can be a Horror's binding, possession, or dinner. Decide what sort of threat you want it to embody. Something lurking and sudden? Bellowing, frenzied brute force? Something that armies would break upon? A menace to mind and soul as well as body? The list of Horror qualities might be useful, here. Think of something about it that you find scary. It might be the hideous speed of a great serpent or the way a shadowed thing croons to you in the voice of you first love. Horrors should freak the players out a bit, and that's easier to communicate if it does the same to you.

Now the mechanics. A Horror doesn't have aptitudes. It simply rolls three dice (plus a bonus one if its descriptor applies) in any challenge, unless it has a quality that says different. It does have a descriptor. Make it vivid, and stress the scary thing about it. For added authenticity, garnish liberally with adjectives. Don't be shy. Throw a barrelful at it and see which ones stick.

Next, choose one to three qualities from the list on page XX. Note that some of them can be combined in deeply unpleasant ways (Power, Savage Blows, and Huge, for example). This can be fun in play, but make sure to unleash such beasties first on heroes that haven't used their mortality (or expendable Adversities), so everyone can see what they're up against without anyone being knocked prematurely out of the game.

Finally, choose a weakness for the Horror from those discussed on page XX. This says a lot about it - a tentacular monstrosity that can't leave its pit represents a different challenge to one that is more mobile but can't abide the touch of fire, or one that is blind. Very specific weaknesses (like a specific place or object) will tend to funnel play toward themselves, while more general ones (like being weak in Cunning challenges) are good for mobile Horrors you want to be able to drop into a variety of different scenes in order to increase tension.

There you go. One writhing, appalling monstrosity, ready to be loosed upon the world.

More Horrors

Finished up the rules for Horror Qualities, a couple of which use some new mechanics I might do more with if they turn out well in play, or might expunge if they seem unnecessary. The qualities look ok for a first draft, but they're going to need some thorough playtesting.

Also wrote the initial version of rules for Horror weaknesses, which can manifest in a nice variety of ways. Being vulnerable to a specific substance is a type of weakness, for example, but so is not being able to leave your slimy, noisome pit, and having your heart on the outside of your body for pesky heroes to menace. Each weakness is abolute, too. If a hero can work out a way to leverage them, it's well worth it.

Here's some quick Done and To Do lists for the current draft:-

Done
Hero Creation
Drives
Challenge Rules
Conflict Rules
Fortune Rules
Adventure building (step-by-step, plus Adversary, Places, and Treasures lists)
Horror rules and qualities
Mortality Rules
Plights

To-Do
More hero tricks!
"How to build..." guides for Horrors, Adversaries, and Treasures.
New Adversaries rules
Treasure rules
Gear rules
Tinker with Glory to incorporate Adversity as well as Fortune
Advice on writing your own Age
GM advice


Er...Yikes!

Horrors

In Age of Steel, Horrors are the giant snakes. The carnivorous man-apes. The blasphemous wossnames from the underbelly of the world.

The monsters.

Every Age of Steel adventure needs a Horror. The "weird" elements were a big part of the appeal of sword and sorcery tales (hence "Weird Tales", I guess). If you want the Sword, you need the Sorcery.

In the first draft, I just treated them as standard Adversaries (NPCs), but I've been rethinking that. Partly because how Adversaries work in the game has changed, and partly because Horrors serve a different role to the Adversaries in the source fiction. Even sinister manipulators like Nabonidus (in 'Rogues in the House') are terrified of the Horrors (Thak the man-ape, in that story).

So now Horrors get their own set of rules. They get access to special qualities that are more potent than heroes' Tricks, they get a big buncha dice in all their roles, they aren't dependent on the GM spending Adversity to make them tough (as is the case for Adversaries), they cause Terror, and they each have a weakness that cunning heroes can exploit. The idea is that a Horror can be avoided, but that overcoming them will require a lot of resources and potentially concerted effort on the part of the heroes. The single, hapless Horror in the playtest got utterly smushed. It will not have died in vain.

I think balancing their qualities is going to be the tricky bit. A couple of them look like they could combine in some deeply nasty ways.

A thought: Can a Horror be an Adversary? This might that be a way to handle truly nasty figures like Xaltotun. (Despite his importance in the Conan mythos, Thoth-Amon would definitely be an Adversary in Age of Steel, not a Horror. Or he'd be a PC).

Oh, and I know There's a Lot of Capitalisation Going On, Here. I'm tinkering with how it should work in the game text but I'm thinking each of the components used in adventure building - Places, Adversaries, Horrors, and Treasures - should always be capitalised for clarity. Still deciding what other bits should be.

Getting started

So I've been working on a little story-game called Age of Steel, a sword-and-sorcery thing intended for pick-up-and-play, one-off sessions with a potentially fluctuating group of players. I built the bulk of it months ago, and posted about the early playtest here and here, but then I let it fester for a while.

Now I'm back to it and want to get the damn thing finished, so I thought I'd put up a blog about the design process so it's public and I can be mocked if I slack again. The aim is to do a bit each day on the game, and get it to a state where it can be properly playtested.

The game has a few specific design goals:-

1) To encourage action-packed, self-contained sessions.
2) To hit that Conan vibe of non-continuous stories that bounce back and forth between different points of a hero's career.
3) To encourage player input, particularly into the development of the campaign and the start of play.
4) 15-minute adventure creation, so a session can be played the same night as characters are created. (This is the tricky bit)
5) An atmosphere in play of boisterous, slightly competitive cameraderie.
6) Allow specifically for one-on-one (the lone hero) and one-on-two (the hero and his sidekick, or two boon companions) play that feels like the source material.

Its inspirations are primarily the Conan and Fafhrd and Grey Mouser stories, which I've been rereading and taking lots of notes from for the adventure-building chapter, although I recently came across Charles Saunders' Imaro books, too. They're interesting stuff, an attempt to correct some of the classic failings of traditional sword and sorcery.

Working on the section on Horrors at the moment, so that should be the subject of the next post.