more spells

exofoliate
v,s
bones crawl out of our skin to form an exoskeleton. armor equal to plate, however damage you take is doubled. duration: until dismissed.

witness

m: a bar of chocolate (melted okay)

duration: 1 day

conjures a living (illusory) witness who assumes credible local garb and will testify to whatever the wizard wills. 

screw over

v,s,m: any document, torn up during casting

target: a business deal in sight. 

target business exchange-- either a sale, an employer/employee contract, any exchange credibly defined as “business” (but not “government”, so no arrests, but a slave auction, sure) immediately fails. employer will fire employee, sellers will retract offers, contracters will walk off the site. any participants must save or refuse to do business with the others ever again.

small

v,s,m: powdered sugar

target object is destroyed and instead replaced with a miniature version, delicately manufactured. it is not the same object as before, but a new smaller object finely crafted to resemble the target. 

dimension

target: one nonliving object mass of a piano or less

adds another dimension to target. playing cards will become 3D, non-flat objects will exist at every point in their timeline, which means they look like long worms extending from their origin to their current point to their final future destruction point.

infinity wall

duration:  1 turn/levl

range: wall covering 10ft/caster lvl

wall made of infinity, meaning everything, appears. interactions with the wall will spark all possible responses, which equate to a dull grey matte look and a humming noise. magic has no effect, can’t be dug through or climbed. 

animate books

v,s,m: 1.5 shelves of books per caster level.

books can be capricious, and the targets of this spell either work together at the request of the caster or do something else, depending on the quality of the shelves. books of fiction for instance might act out any of their dramas at the caster’s command or simply fall apart. it is really a capricious spell and the only good prepatory measure is to have a quality bookcase involved.

big axe

summons a big axe, can be used by the wizard rather impressively, deals 10 dmg each hit. killed creatures are knocked unconcious instead but their brains also explode so they still die probably.

miniature time machine

m: 2,000gp in expenses and two weeks isolated effort

spell is cast at the end of a long ritual construction of a time vehicle, which will function once, then explode (dealing no damage but scorching everyone’s eyebrows). times available to jump to: 2222 AD, -14 BC, the birth of christ, the present but five minutes from now, and -111 BC (the birth of the universe, recommend having a space suit)

time machine (proper)

m: takes 10 months to construct and 30,000gp (less if industrialized)

when used this time machine jumps either forward or back, much as h.g. wells’s. if you deaccelerate at a time when there is no open air (or vacuum) for your machine to fit in it explodes probably killing you (6d6 damage). if it doesn’t kill you you get to land wherever the explosion fits. 

the time machine can be reused but if you return to a present after a past you’ve visited you probably will notice countless differences yr meddling has caused.

evil time machine

m: takes 10 minutes and forty-five dollars cash and some scrap wood

jumping in this time machine will send you to a dimension where everything bad is your fault from meddling. if you try to jump back the machine falls apart and is apparently made of paper and rice. 

magic toss

targets: up to two randomly chosen people in the room, one caster-determined target to throw them at

swarms of purple energy swarm over the room, isolating one or two individuals, who are lifted into the air and bodily thrown, head over heels, at some target. as the hit the target they explode forcefully into confetti-like sparks, dealing d6 dmg/lvl of those thrown. d6 rounds later they reincarnate with a loud popping sound and fall onto the spots from which they were lifted (no memories of being thrown).

finger fire

v: a scream

duration: 30 seconds

blistering heat forces your fingers to burst off your body and zoom around. they can poke things, distract people, whatever. on your command they fly onto someone else’s body, and then you can wiggle them around. these losers can chop the fingers off but they do damage to themselves, 2 hp/finger chopped.

to get your fingers back, you have to re-cast this spell on someone else (‘s fingers).

those targeted get to save to grab the fingers out of mid-air, they only get d4 fingers tho

instant market

range: 30ft

duration: until at least 5 things have been bought or sold. casters can multiply-prepare this spell to square the number.

this spell makes people behave as if at a market- they’ll look around for opportunities to buy, sell, or otherwise trade goods and services. if there is a combat happening it’ll cease, each particpant must save with disadvantage to continue (if any one continues, the spell fails). if no combat is occuring no save is allowed!

glue-lord

range (of sleep gas) 30ft

duration: 5 rounds/level

thrown up goo dribbles from d4 random people in the room, or just the caster. the vile bile emits gas putting everyone who fails a save to sleep. those asleep and those awake but willing are drawn together by the puke to create a giant mecha-like creature which is able to yell and punch things hard. the creature will target anyone who has not fallen asleep.

the creature: d6 hd/particpant (roll once and multiply -ed), damage: start at d4 move up a die per participant max d100, speed 80ft, if slain the participants do not retain damage but slide apart and wake up unremembering

herr fantastic’s portable servant spell

v,s

shrinks any willing particpant down action-figure size. they look like a doll, and if not moving appear inanimate and carved. 

duration: 3 hours or until ended by subject

worm juche

v,s,m: at least one sock

a big bag of socks will fall out of the air and split open on the ground. large worm-like things will emerge and begin crawling frantically all around. a great distraction, they will also trip up any who attempt to move faster than 5ft/round.

7 worms/level

worms: hp 1, no attack. cannot be commanded

duration: worms last forever and never die unless destroyed

blanket fingers

v,s,m: a large straw hat, thrown onto target (ranged touch attack)

large straw hat falls onto someone. if they fail a save they are utterly consumed by the hat and shoot out of it’s pores as long, many fingers. thereafter they are a bunch of long fingers poking out of a hat!. they may still act normally but only after about a week of training; up until them they’re just a skittering fingers-monster.

fingers-monster: same stats as original. finger length = target’s former height. **destroying the hat means the fingers separate into different masses and concicousnesses, the target may command as many as their intelligence score. after a while these fingers regrow a body and the new body has as many fingers as the intelligence retained.

VISION'S OF HELL: INFERNIUM and STEPHEN"S SAUSAGE ROLL, bonus: instadeath: nights

Both of these games I found via bennet foddy's twitter. There's a bit of an alternate history of games there, puzzle games, if you're familiar with Increpare you get the general vibe, Stephen Lavelle's puzzlescript, just a few essentials like Getting Over It: one mechanical difficulty, a series of obstacles.

It's easy to assume that brand of games, singular-mechanic-puzzles, has its heyday now as alternative to the mechanically overloaded Assassin's Creed 2 stuff. There is only one way to solve the problem in Stephen's Sausage roll, just about (not actually true -ed), it's a puzzle box everytime, and so you get a very clear, focused message portaled into your brain.

I dunno, what was Portal compared to Infernium? That stock asset vibe, where everything is a self-conscious arrangement of assets, although Portal had surprising departures (as was the point maybe) and Infernium does not. I've talked about that "vision of hell" thing before, what with devil daggers, or really the critical work of Winter K. and Stephen Thecatamites, specifically Winter K:

“I wanted the player to feel the absolute despair of brick labyrinth, the deep cavern with no rope for climbing out. I envisioned a place of infinite width and depth—dark, yet illuminated. The softly glowing walls cast no guiding light into absolute void. They leer, useless. It is life, eternal, on the precipice of a pit, falling into the pit, scaling the pit’s rough wall, becoming irretrievably lodged in the canyon crack, in nowhere. This was my sketch of what I thought might be a 21st Century psychology: a mental world reduced to a skeletal arrangement of a maze-maker’s traps, and the obsessive drive to feed them both body and brain in hopes of purchasing escape. It is indescribably erotic.” - Shigeru Miyamoto (a fake quote by Winter)

Infernium specifically sets out to be prisonworld, as the designers and foddy said it's based on pac-man, "a maze with no exits" and although there is a consistent, jerking jump-scare every time you lose a life and a very real and very difficult "perma-death" system, I find the hellishness of the game to be centered in the sheer volume of work here, accomplished by a thin spread of creative effort, an absolute abandonment of video-game AAA density. If you can imagine Metal Gear Solid 2's reckless application of detail on one end, Infernium is much more on the single-developer unitygame just five assets end. But it's as large and as complex and *more* difficult than MGS2.

There's something obscene in a sheer volume of deathmazes, like one of those puzzlegames where every puzzle is four different colors and there's 299 levels. Moreover Infernium actually asks you to continuously harvest a fresh supply of lives or start all over again. I'll add that all this is mitigated by the unlock system, so there's uhh progression.



I guess the end point of Stephen's Sausage roll's depth came when I was able to visualize and complete the puzzles in my literal sleep. Not because they were easy, but because the sheer regard to mechanical action was enough to solve them, rather than a continuous & difficult visualization (like sweeping all the pieces off a chess board would require). The whole game is the exploration of about five moving parts; they interact in ways that are upsetting and confusing in their deepest as my brain churns and revolts at the ideas; you got to let the stupid shit go heh heh

two games by a solo developer: stephen's sausage roll by stephen lavelle and inferniuim by carlos coronado


* * * * instadeath: nights presents: was Portal (2007) all about stock assets? * * * *


this an essay which would be better done with pictures alone, but, if you can consider an essential stock-assetyness which happens every time you are gripping and pulling and grinding a metal folding chair and it makes the clankityclankityclank source engine sound as it tries to not clip, can you consider how much of that game was carefully re-arranging giant balls of energy disguised as hollow sheetmetal objects?

I think about "challenge" in video games as the reward when you get the thing in the thing. There's a clunk as it slots in. If you had to think it out before hand that's all well and good but there's still the careful, tedious process of slotting it in (especially with 3d controls). The thing so often resists being pulled in.

thunk thunk thunk bezowoop thunk

Then there's that careful, often magnetic attempt by the developers to help you out when you're close . Magnets, tractor beams always the easiest way to handle 3d-space objects . In Sausage Roll you have instead a precise and precisely non-abstract method of handling, non-abstract because the basic methodology of piercing, pushing, and sliding the sausages is so completely and depravedly explored.

You may begin to view 3D games as an arrangement of assets which all share these assety qualities, like, provisional friction. Speedrunning techniques common among several engines expose this. And how much of our imagination of these spaces gets quietly informed by the assetishness of assets. so many times where you're hoplessly sliding around a room full of superlight objects, uhh see lilly zone's geometry falls 

CERA & KNOPE

2010's "Scott Pilgrim": at once, a legitimate ballad to video games, the showcase for about 10-15 of ppl born in the late eighties-nineties, a visual spectacle and faithful adaptation of the (decent and fun and a little deep) graphic novel. And also completely ruined by Michael Cera.

Look at this excited, confused little asshole. Look at his stupid face. Sure, he's projecting a mix of misery and determination, he doesn't have the acting skills to back it up tho... maybe when he's fifty.

.

When he looks like a sad sack of shit, like he is. Michael Cera is a nebbish. A schlemiel. He doesn't deserve the girl. He's a much a son of a bitch as Leslie Knope was. 

Don't get me wrong. I think Leslie Knope is a decent character. She's a schlemiel, and she's lucky. But I don't like the show's treatment of her. It gives her too much success. And not only that, but her success is aspirational. I don't want Michael Scott to succeed either.

It's because I like my comedies dark, and I don't want them moralizing at me. And I don't want the butt of the joke to get ahead. Comedy is for the suffering. 

So who could have played "Scott Pilgrim"? It is Paul Dano.

Paul Dano isn't a schleimel. He just plays one on TV. He actually can act. It's 'nuff said. But basically things have some dramatic weight when you can show real suffering, the comedy is good, baby!! Also... it takes a chad to play a virgin... a winner to nail the loser.

THE OPPOSITE OF GHIBLI

in studio ghibli films:

the environment is primal and besieged

magic is akin to a wild animal

the young and courageous are righteous and win, usually

innocence usually (although not always) translates to friendliness

everyone including villains has good intentions

even forces of seeming pure evil can be turned for good (and vice versa

so the reverse would be:

the environment is technological and dominant

magic is like a civilized person

the young are ignorant cowards

innocence usually (although not always) translates to cruelty

no one has good intentions

forces of pure evil and good never intermix

soooo
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veins of the earth at the table: a review now that the campaign is over

the good:

• generally all the pariahs were cool and functioned like a charm. even very weird ones like the arachnopolis rex. spotlight dogs were a good awesome introduction! many interesting moments from pariahs like these.
• light as initiative: simple, gave the PCs a much needed boost, drove home the importance of light. they loved this
• inspiration: you can fit anything in the veins, and moreover, I felt inspired by the mix of off-realism and dirty fantasy to design a lot of cool shit like dvargir tanks. with the pariahs and the flavor and everything a definite original tone came across, like one player said repeatedly, "this isn't dnd".
• I created so much content on the backs of this setting and tone, you can see it on my blog under the "veins" label or compiled here
• I genuinely feel that the chaotic nature of anything-goes OSR style play was really supported by the alien architecture of play. I threw a modern day mall in, it was a little kitsch but it was also uncanny. They had troll teeth that could grow infinite food and several infinite sources of light; they had vehicles; all of these things came to ameliorate and negotiate a series of disturbing and perhaps impossible challenges which created very varied play.
• quoth skerples: "You'll carry a sword that can cut a syllable in half but your face will be streaked with clay and muck. You'll cut your hair off and file your teeth into points, but you'll also find a machine that spins music into cloth."
• players enjoyed the effects table and constantly asked to roll on it

the middling:

• I only used two of the cave systems. I made a lot of them, put a bunch of hours into designing many and many different representations thereof, only used 2. Mostly because:
• wasn't exactly sure how to link them up with the overland travel system
• I felt trepidation about caving; climbing or squeezing challenges specifically
• In retrospect I wish I had tried to use 'em.
• overland travel system was a mixed bag. it works ok but some standing questions like how do you navigate weren't really answered and I didn't feel like the quad-directionality of the charts ever came up. Moreover, what the routes looked like was only lightly detailed in the book and this left me with little to use frequently.
• some ambiguities were particularly bad, like the patterns of broken underground cities across the two segments of the map don't seem to match
• the exploration table: both good and bad. good because it was good at generating consequences and it would direct you over to the "one hundred encounters" table which was great but bad because some of the consequences were tricky to implement or repetitive. "Separated by a traverse/pitch" or "one player gets lost" came up a lot and coming up with a climbing challenge or navigation difficulty on the fly was a struggle. I usually ignored "act as one level lower" results because they're all level 1 heheh.
• I was frustrated by the ambiguity of when the table should came into play since it had such severe consequences for the players.
• I wish I used the rapture more.
• lumes and inventory mostly were in the background.

the bad:

• over time I ended up not liking the stiffness of the pages of the book and I thought the art was printed murky, ironic, I know. I first got to know the book through PDF and I had a lot more appreciation for the art at that point. Like I've said before I wish the book was A4 although you gotta take what you can get
• I wish I had some framework for designing settlements and regions, at least a little. It's my fine conclusion that part of the essence of the veins of the earth is a big question mark when it comes to things like "economy" and yeah you can slot whatever you want in, it does indeed function like an ak47 as the back of the book says. that being said there's virtually no starting point in the book for designing locales
• Ultimately the method for designing cave systems is pretty shitty. Lots of long, thin tunnels, no dead-ends, it's even kind of awkward to roll the dice and note where they go. I found it's easier just to sketch a bunch of caves
• As regards the book's races, I only ever used the Aelf-Adal (at least up close, the dvargir did most of the architecture of my campaign, the knotsmen were in the distance but not encountered in person). Honestly it was hard to roleplay Aelf-Adal from the included texts, didn't feel like I got a big juicy bite. Most of the time I just used "humans". w/e

conclusions:

• biggest complaint: overland travel was ambiguous. second biggest complaint was cave systems seemed kinda inaccessible. the other stuff (no details for settlements, fucked up nature of the economy) sorta just threw me in the deep end and I learned to swim.
• undeniably this was a successful hexcrawl. I had a great moment about 2/3 of the way through where I had written enough and I could just let the rest play out. there was this ultimate selection of priorities that the players had, they could choose between weird things. and everything was very weird. plus they actually managed to survive, for a while
• you definitely have to hack a bunch to make veins work (as intended)
• the excellent off-realism/dirty fantasy tone fucking functioned

THE OPPOSITE OF GEOGRAPHY: A VEINS OF THE EARTH VISUAL ESSAY

some spells

1st level spongebath eviscerate demonstrate // vividness color scheme 2nd level diamond hand brash neo dynamite powder the lesson is learned, by the damage inevitable 3rd you can’t keep coming here anymore the nose imagine // siamese twin the breaks spongebath 1st level wizard s,m: a sponge cleans any identical surface, makes it so you can see the larger void beneath them- essentially peering into it, whatever it is. you can even reach in and take something out or put something in. after d4 minutes the hole closes. does d4 damage to a living surface. eviscerate 1st level tiny hands come up and pull at the feet and other organs of any creature touching the ground. d4 points of damage/body part touching the ground. great on prones demonstrate makes an invisible object appear visible for d8 minutes. can be prepared and cast interchangably with vividness. v,s vividness small hands emerge from a point of your choosing (they’re illusory) and point to any nearby invisible auras, persons, objects, such as magic auras, whatever. more hands appear if the thing/person/aura is stronger. can be cast interchanbly with demonstrate. v color scheme all the colors on a person or object of up to house size are rearranged, brightened, whatever. does d8 damage permanent v,s,m m: a magazine or other small publication with colored ink casting time: 1 action DIAMOND HAND v,s yours or another’s hand becomes immune to damage and in fact can produce unlimited amounts of force for a short time. this means you can push pull, or otherwise lift anything of any size, albeit don’t expect most large things you pick up to hold together under the enormous strain of your powerful hand. used as a fist this attack does 3d10 damage (you still need to roll to hit). duration: d4 rounds rolled secret by gm BRASH target: one subject, save vs. magic to avoid someone is teleported far away, and then back again at high velocity. there is enough time wherever they are teleported to do one round’s worth of actions. you choose the destination- it either is familiar to you or fits a general description. when they come back they have 30ft of momentum, which if slammed into a wall/floor will produce 3d6 damage. teleporting to somewhere very dangerous such as the inside of a volcano: works but then the subject plus some of the dangerous stuff are aimed at you the caster on the return v,s,m m: 100sp in currency, casting time 1 round neo dynamite powder v,s,m. m: broken up pieces of either a coin or a banknote of any value, 1 ounce casting time: 2 rounds your material component is transformed into very high power gunpowder. explodes when you snap your fingers. total of 5d6 damage, x3 dmg if carefully packed inside someone/thing. THE LESSON IS LEARNED, BY THE DAMAGE INEVITABLE v,s,m level 2 m: book of common prayer, focus, not consumed a wave of force, 15’x15’ wide, passes through 30’ of space, tracing either a straight line or an arc of no more than 30*. everyone caught within the wave forgets the last 30 seconds of their life, save vs. magic to avoid. if you save you forget 5 seconds. if you crit fail you forget 8 hours. confused people will probably take at least one round to figure out what is going on. casting time: free action (this is clearly a cleric spell -ed) YOU CAN’T KEEP COMING HERE ANYMORE save vs magic to avoid. if u save heal 1 hp the emotions within one subject boil up and create a tumor, which will activate dealing 1d8 damage per round if some condition is met. the condition can be anything; even “existing”. if you roll an 8 for tumor damage it bursts and then the subject has cancer. cutting out the tumor? need to make a heal check = to spell’s save dc, d10 damage per attempt the nose summons a large nose shaped demon. it will do your bidding but it is easily distracted by such as delicious pies. the nose: 8hd, two attacks: inhale (save vs. para to avoid) then grapple for 8 auto damage/round. fly 30ft ml 7 v,s,m, m: a large slice of a pie baked with human hair casting time: 3 rounds imagine acts as a minor wish, meaning you can conjure up some minor effect, like “all the walls in my house turn to glass”. if the effect is lethal: it is illusory, lasts only d4 rounds, save to disbelieve. can be cast interchangably with “siamese twin” v,m. m: an adult cat siamese twin for the duration of the spell, you have two sets of arms, two sets of legs, two sets of eyes, ears, two mouths, double genetalia, double organs. you get an extra save to resist any effect that gives you a save. you get two rolls to notice anything, hear anything, or otherwise use your senses. you can hold double the amount of stuff and your speed is doubled. you can still only take the usual amount of actions per round. duration: four hours v,s can be cast interchangably with imagine the breaks v,s m: 700 identical wooden boxes all of the boxes flap and begin gnawing on something, chewing it to bits. if they are succesful they then store the bits of whatever it is inside of them. thus you can only effect matter equivalent to the total volume of the boxes. each box: 1hd, 1hp, 1dmg, speed 10ft