A Fistful of Ideas: Day/Night Alignment, Magic Items as Class, and more!

Coming off of a high of a long streak of nearly daily blogging, I realize that I have a great many projects which need my attention (books to read, books to write, games to prep). Blogging may be slightly less frequent due to all this backlog but I will endeavor to keep on posting several times a week.

On to the ideas!

Day and Night Alignment

An alignment system but instead of Law and Chaos it is Day and Night. Why would you do this? I don't really know but it feels like the edge of something. Day folk stride about in the sun, building and growing in the light of day, preferring the open fields and the hilltops and shying well away from the darkness of the woods and the deep places. These are where the Night folk live, the faerie people, fair and monstrous alike. In the Night, the boundary between this reality and others is less certain. Dreaming and waking become less easy to differentiate. Form is less certain and change is constant.

This is definitely coming to me from my time reading the Moon & Sun books by Holly Lisle when I was younger. They were really quite imaginative fantasy and I ought to revisit them.

I feel like this system would break up the races. More fey races like elves would likely be Night Aligned while humans and maybe dwarves would be Day aligned or we cut the traditional races entirely and just have Dayfolk and Nightfolk. Dayfolk would be more human looking with fewer variation, but some would still exist while Nightfolk could come in various forms and have different abilities. I think a typical "Elf" type Nightfolk would likely have their main power be shape-shifting. Magic focused Nightfolk would have illusion and enchantment magic while Dayfolk magic users would have more conjuration and abjuration type magic, probably some evocation too.

Day and Night wouldn't necessarily be at war with each other but there would likely be some distrust and each folk would be out of place in the other's domain.

I think adventure would be about, trying to get around the magical snares in a Night Lord's trippy court, hopping between worlds dreaming and waking to raid them of their wealth, and discovering the lost remnants of ancient Dayfolk magitech lost since the ancient war between the two folk.

The cover of the first Moon & Sun book

Magic Items in place of Class

Each character has little to differentiate themselves from each other innately, indeed this mirrors reality because humans really aren't such dramatically purpose-locked creatures when we get right down to it. Especially as this generation is showing how very many different careers people can have, it is fairly realistic to say that most humans could do each other's jobs given a surprisingly small amount of training.

What would differentiate characters, in this game, would be magic items. Player characters would be human beings who stumbled across items mostly by accident: a dusty grimoire containing the secrets to bending space with your mind, an intelligent magical sword wielded by heroes throughout the ages, a symbol blessed by a deity with holy purpose, the preserved hand of a thief twitching with the tormented spirit of its original owner.

Each character would start with a randomly assigned magic item and each item would have levels of mastery that you could trade in xp gained from adventuring to unlock. These would not be a full level system with each item only having three or so levels, encouraging players to go out and discover new items to add to their collections. It makes a lot of sense to me for players to be able to unlock more abilities of mysterious items that they gather as they experiment with them, making them a step more powerful than regular people. In reality, if you found a magical item, it would come to define you as you mastered its power, such would be the central mechanism of advancement in this game.

There might also be some possibility of dangerous items corrupting their users, turning them into something less than human. Enemies could be villains turning their items to selfish gain (like the pcs!) and monsters transformed into their states by the use of such items. That would make hunting down said enemies especially desirable, considering they have the items you want. And you will use them wisely, right? You'll never fall prey to the fate of the last owner... surely...

Building an Ideal OSR system

No real idea here except that it is something I want to do. I really haven't found a system that checks all my boxes and it is something of a source of frustration to me. I don't want a system where any class feels like it lacks identity or is boring. I don't want magic types feeling useless when their spells are used up, but I like casters having a more definite idea of how many spells they have. I don't want too high a power level. Keeping PC's fragile has always been more funt o me than when they get hard to kill, it takes away a lot of the thrill and fun for me as a GM and as a player. I like unified "roll high on a d20" systems, I really do.

Honestly part of the game for me is also how it feels. I feel like I have to create and publish the system with art that suits my tastes because a game for me is as much about the aesthetics of the book and the general feel as much as anything else. Maybe that is an overstatement but it is part of why homebrewing my own system has always felt a little off, though I do love tinkering with them.

If anyone knows a system that seems to check my boxes, let me know, I will be in your debt.

Running a Hill Cantons Game

The Hill Cantons, a blog and setting by Chris Kutalik, has always drawn in my imagination since my early exposure to the OSR. I would love to run a Hill Cantons game but allow the world to develop off of the published materials for it organically, letting it expand with play just like how the setting came to be in the first place. I would love to then compare how my setting matches up with the world as originally presented and see the differences. It would be a blast. It is these books that I am trying to read through because I have recently bought the last published one. There is a Patreon for a new one he is trying to write so you ought to go support it.

Loadouts for Repeated Dungeon Delves

One of my favorite things about playing a drunken Russian Orthodox Priest in Ben L's Through Ultan's Door playtests is his rule regarding entering the Dream Lands. The party has been making repeated trips to the Catacombs of the Fleischguild, an Egyptian-inspired temple of a meat cult, to take all of its loot. One of the rules he has is that whenever we enter the Dream Lands, we become just a little more heroic and so can roll another hit die and pick another spell.

The cool thing about that is that if I need a spell to tackle a certain obstacle, I can take in a new one each time. This seems like an awesome possibility to me, having specialized kinds of inventory that forces players to essentially choose their loadouts when trying the same dungeon over and over again. It adds a lot of strategy to the game and varies up each run, though a good dungeon is always a joy to revisit. I got to think about 5e's attunement rules. In D&D 5e, you can only have so many magic items attuned to your person. In a lot of games, this seems silly and kind of arbitrary, punishing players by taking away earned items and forcing out more fun items for more mechanically sound ones. However, attunement makes a certain amount of mechanical sense for games where you are making repeated delves.

Because your archived inventory will be immediately available to you to choose from for the next session, nothing would really feel lost and more situational magic items would find a special place as being items to fall back upon when you encounter certain obstacles and make a note to grab that item next session so you can tackle the challenge.

The reason behind actively using too many magic items could be explained with attunement or with say, magical watchers in the dungeon being attracted to the scent of too many items, forcing more encounter checks if you take more items. Players can take the risk if they like and that would become a very interesting session.

Make all spells of 1st level accessible to change out for magic users and clerics so they can build their loadout of spells each session. Item slots ought to be a little tight to really emphasize the gameplay of choosing more tools or more treasure.

Hard choices and varied session ensue. Fun is produced.


And so this Fistful is completed. I hope you enjoyed getting my brain load in your face.

Yep, nothing wrong with that sentence.