Platonic ideal potions

Alchemists of old used to work with materials. They tried to turn iron into gold and find cures for ailments. These are still valid pursuits, of course, though medicine these days is left to the apothecaries and creating valuables from trash tends to require more magical capability than most are willing to sell their soul for.

Modern alchemy focuses instead on the abstract. Rather than distilling and modifying things, the art has moved on to distilling capital "T" Things. The ideas and concepts of our world rather than mere substances that exist within it. Ask a carpenter if you want a chair. Ask an alchemist if you want the very essence of chairness.

What's in this health potion? Why, health, of course.

A potion is the purified, liquified, and conveniently bottled essence of a concept. Drinking a strength potion simply makes the imbiber become more like the concept of "strength". A love potion makes a person love, and a health potion makes a person healthy. It is that simple. It's not always necessary to drink the potion - a bottle smashed open to quickly coat a substance can have the desired effect. This is a much more practical use for a potion of burning than drinking it. Trust me.

Potions of water breathing are often actually potions of fish. It is imperative not to screw up the dosage on that one.

It is even possible to brew a death potion - a substance which will kill, but will not show any signs of poisoning or any discernible cause of death. The drinker simply becomes dead. Equally possible and significantly more horrifying (or hilarious, depending on your perspective) are the results of drinking a potion of chairness.

The very same mechanism that allows potions to work is also what makes them so dangerous. Typically, ideals will come from a variety of ingredients and must be carefully distilled. Any number of other ontological contaminants can distort the effects, giving the appearance of chaotic unreliability. In reality, the reason your luck potion accidentally melted the person who drank it was because water is a primary ingredient, and wateriness was the concept that ended up being distilled. Honestly, it was an amateur mistake to even attempt to distill luck.

You can use a list of random concepts such as the one I threw together for freeform magic to come up with endless ideas for potions.

The Make Potion spell (DCC RPG p. 223) is one method of distilling concepts into liquid, though as with all magic, many of those casters of the spell do not understand what it is truly doing.

Making Immortals more DCC-ish

I've written before about my fascination with Immortals from early editions of D&D and a little of my own vision of them. While there is a lot I do enjoy about them, there's also a lot of room to improve. Here are some things about the original versions of Immortals that don't quite fit the DCC vibe, and how I might use some of DCC's design principles for Immortals in my own games and worlds.

All Immortals are the same

When one becomes an Immortal, they gain a bunch of the same powers as the other Immortals all at once and their old life becomes suddenly irrelevant (besides, apparently, the Immortal's personality and some fond memories). Immortals are not all identical, of course, but there is a core set of abilities that they all just have. These abilities are largely unrelated to each other besides being the kinds of things you expect godly figures to be able to do.

What if each ability critical to being an immortal had to be gained independently, and thus not all Immortals have all powers? The first step is, obviously, immortality itself. Bringing yourself to a state in which your death is no longer a guarantee. From there, all the other powers are just a matter of time - after all, you have endless years to achieve them. Characters could undertake multiple quests to gain the powers of divine spellcasting (truly creating their own spells, rather than borrowing them as Clerics and Wizards), various forms including ethereality and mortal avatars, teleportation, planar creation and dominion, and resistance to magical effects. Each and every one of these powers that is simply granted upon ascension could be an entire story of its own. Quest for it.

To be fair, it makes sense for Immortals to be so similar because there is only...

One road to Immortality

You might argue that there are multiple listed paths, but in the end they all amounted to finding an Immortal sponsor and doing some grand test or display of power to get your sponsor to grant you the gift of Immortality. This implies that you could draw a family tree of all Immortals, from the first of all time right down to the player characters. This set of powers is a gift that has been passed down.

This is way too straightforward and structured.

Being granted immortality by a higher being should be but one possible path toward immortality, let alone capital "I" Immortality. Perhaps it's the appropriate path for a Cleric to follow, the ultimate reward from their deity for acting as their Chosen, but here are some alternate ways to become immortal:

• Lichdom. Sure, this isn't complete immortality, but "immortality, unless..." is more fun anyway. Have players attempt to pull shenanigans like Voldemorting themselves into 7 phylacteries or dropping their phylactery into a black hole to make it inaccessible.
• Reincarnation. Give your soul some way to move bodies after your death and you even get fun new forms every lifetime.
• Discovering or creating the Philosopher's Stone.
• Regenerative immortality. Develop some magic, tech, or mutation which allows you to recover from any injury, given enough time and energy.
• Rewrite the annals of time such that your death is no longer destined, or that your existence is a universal constant.
• Pledge your soul to multiple afterlives and they'll use their power to keep you alive so they can avoid going to cosmic court over custody. This will piss your patrons off for sure.
• De-age yourself every couple decades. Magically, medically, whatever.

Some of these are even almost possible using spells in the core rules.

Immortals totally aren't Gods

To any peasant, even the weakest of Immortals would seem like a god. The original version of Immortals simply doesn't bring up the elephant in the room with this one. Gods presumably exist, as Clerics regularly receive divine intervention. In fact, Clerics will serve Immortals, so the reasonable conclusion seems to be that Immortals are in fact gods. But BECMI simply doesn't bring up gods at all, and the particular lack of any mention of particular aspects of religion appears to be a result of the backlash received by D&D during the Satanic Panic. Can't blame the publishers for not wanting to pour fuel on the fire there.

In DCC, it's not entirely clear what deities are exactly. Among the suggested Clerical deities in DCC RPG are proper gods, a demigod, an Old One, a demon prince and a demon lord. From this I would suppose that a deity in DCC is any being powerful enough to grant a Cleric their power. Any one of those creatures are likely immortal and thus classify as an Immortal.

It's not so much that they are gods necessarily, but they may as well be because who even knows what a god is anyway?

Immortality follows a clear and structured hierarchy

I'm not sure whether it turned out this way for the sake of game mechanics or whether the authors fell into the design traps many of us do while world-building - that old human obsession with labelling things and putting them neatly into a box. Whatever the reason, the Immortals set goes well out of its way to tell you exactly how many Immortals there are at which levels. To reach those levels, you specifically have to compete with and usurp existing Immortals.

A lot of mystery and variety is removed by this structured approach. On top of that, it bakes a lot of cosmic world-building into the mechanics of the game, leaving little (if any) room for the Judge and players to do their own thing. I have my own ideas about what the cosmos looks like with Immortals in it but it's very freeform and would likely be different in a different campaign world. BECMI gives you one version of the cosmos to play with, and it's not a very mysterious one. There's little to explore, which is odd given that exploring the secrets of the universe is supposed to be what Immortals do. I guess the authors thought that meant there needed to be answers.

How this all ties together

If we these things about Immortals, we end up with something that looks a little more appropriate for a DCC campaign. The advice given in the core book includes keeping things mysterious and unknown, having variety, and achieving great power through questing. That's all totally possible at the cosmic hero tier of play too.

I guess the next step is to create that tier of play.

Using Story Cubes as an Oracle

It was my birthday recently and my wife gifted me a bunch of Story Cubes. Specifically, four sets of them: Classic, Actions, Voyages, and Fantasia.

A version of this concept for those who do not own these dice exists here.

Left to right: Fantasia, Voyages, Actions

Four sets gives me 36 dice in four colors, for a total of 216 possible random pictograms if I draw dice from a bag. Very nice. My immediate thought was that this is effectively a d666 table (see below), but there's more than that. Let's look at what we can do with these.

Spark tables based on the dice

I wrote down what each face of each die looks like to me. Some are a little subjective and there's definitely word-association to be done with the visuals, which makes using the real dice far more effective at providing inspiration. But in lieu of owning the dice, you can use this as a spark table. Some of these are modern and don't necessarily suit all genres, but for a spark table I genuinely don't think that matters. If you roll "airplane" in a fantasy medieval setting, surely that still gives you some idea you can work with!

Result 266 was the rightmost pictogram in the above photo - I found this one particularly hard to interpret. Let me know if you know what that's actually supposed to be.

Classic	1	2	3	4	5	6
11	walking cane	mobile phone	weighing scales	expressionless mask	diagonal arrow	lightning bolt
12	ID card	rainbow	stone tower	pyramid	open eye	tree
13	planet	flashlight	apple	friendly face	modern tower	airplane
14	keyhole	comedy and tragedy	parachuter	striped fish	chaos symbol	sunflower
15	open book	bee	bridge over water	abacus	crescent moon	magician's wand
16	question mark	fountain	key	sad face	shooting star	teepee
21	sheep	padlock	learner plate	magnet	footprint	fire
22	house	speech bubble	sleeping face	light bulb	arrow (weapon)	clock
23	open hand	a six-sided die	magnifying glass	scarab	menacing shadow	turtle

Actions	1	2	3	4	5	6
24	push	falling object	press button	steal	set alight	think
25	listen to music	enter door	hide	falling person	play with dolls	hit ball
26	sore thumb	read book	surprise	gift	turn	touch (blindfolded)
31	climb tree	thumbs up	counting	kick ball	catch butterfly	eat lunch
32	drying laundry	reach high	point	knock	build wall	awaken to alarm
33	bounce	cough	walk	carry	light weights	lead the way
34	dance	break/snap	dig hole	shout/call	fight	fill hole
35	jump down	scissors cut paper	drop ball	cry	knock down vase	drawing
36	fork in road	ask question	hang from bars	throw ball up	rocket collision	laughter

Voyages	1	2	3	4	5	6
41	torii gate	dino skull	coin bag	tunnel entrance	waves	beans
42	backpack	monkey	goblet	cactus	sunrise/sunset	gauge/meter
43	skull and crossbones	six pointed star/sun	spotted mushroom	submarine	raincloud	gears
44	cauldron	spectacles	camera	pointing/accusatory	pill	elephant
45	rice bowl	stairway down	bandit	horned helmet	pouring flask	bacterium
46	exotic city	jewel pendant	octopus	crab	miniature person	mirror
51	circus tent	angry	cracking egg	opening chest (facing away)	road to mountains	puzzle piece
52	"ping"	crown	treasure map	snake	whip	ray gun
53	crow	scared	musical note	telescope	ladder	axe

Fantasia	1	2	3	4	5	6
54	frog	flute	bindle	slinky cat	shadowy imp	old crone
55	Zeus smiting	summit temple	sailship	minotaur	giant brute	last stand atop high ground
56	maze	harp	trojan horse	hypnotized/entranced	sly/convincing/hiding dagger	Icarus flying too close
61	monk	princess with sword	market stall	jester cap	pig on a spit	quill and inkwell
62	trident	opening jewelry box (facing away)	Charon the ferryman	Medusa	hermes' winged boots	high throne
63	wolf howling at moon	robed figure	birdcage	Gnome miner	path into forest	baby basket
64	bow and quiver	tankard of ale	crusader helmet	cart of hay	morningstar	longhouse
65	dragon	troll/ogre	shackled prisoner	castle gate	potion	wizard
66	tiara	hand mirror	path to hilltop tower	figure inside swirl	fairy	well

Yes/No Oracle

Draw three story dice from the bag and roll them. If the pictogram is something that would be beneficial to the situation or question, count one "yes". If it is not beneficial or is negative, count one "no". Majority rules.

You can get "yes, and" results if all three are positive rather than just a majority. If you use five dice, you can create a sliding scale including "no, and", "no, but" and "yes, but". Three positives or negatives is a softer yes or no, while a unanimous result is stronger.

You could theoretically play an entire storygame using this and only this. Do the heroes beat the army of orcs? Abacus, lightbulb, morningstar... It looks like superior intellect, strength and a brilliant strategic idea bring the heroes a decisive victory!

Character Generation

In games based around tags, traits, or aspects drawing a few dice and rolling them is all you need to generate a character. In any other game, you could use this to come up with the character concept and then use the usual generation methods to get there.

Four elements

You can also associate the four colors with the four elements and use that as your oracle, an idea that I got from the solo RPG Diedream. The colors of the sets I own are grey, blue, green and pink, which map closely enough to air, water, earth and fire. The tables above are colored as such, but you might as well roll a d4 if you're doing it that way. Sometimes these broader categories might be all you need, or they might color your interpretation of the images.

Blog Graveyard vol X: Appendix M

I was inspired by this post to write my own entry to the Blog Graveyard.

The subject of today's eulogy is Appendix M, whose last sighting was the 28th of January, 2020. Appendix M was started by bygrinstow as a way to get back into drawing by publicizing their practice. Art being a worthwhile endeavour on its own, this had the very respectable side effect of providing us all with a ton of creative creatures to steal for our own purposes. Thanks from the future, bygrinstow.

Bygrinstow, by the way, also brought us the brilliant Monster Extractor series, which has inspired me before.

What does Appendix M offer us? Monsters! More than you can swing your sword at! You could choose an article at random from this blog and be almost guaranteed to land on a post containing a monster you'll want to throw at your players. If you didn't, it's because you happened to land on one of the few posts that doesn't contain a monster.

Testing this theory myself, I got the Dirt Diver, the House Beetle, the Forgotten Soldier, and Nearly People. Surely one of those names makes you want to go check it out for yourself. In amongst these original creations are well-trodden monsters such as Kobolds, Mermaids, and rival adventuring parties, but these sit between the more unusual beasts like whatever a "SCARLSNIPE" is, and gelatinous shapes that aren't cubes.

The absolute highlight for me personally is DRYAD, TRUE, which helped me to ease my players (and myself, as a new Judge) from module content to homebrew sandbox-style content by being the subject of the hook at the end of Portal Under the Stars. According to Appendix M, the dryad is like the forest's immune system. She comes into existence to protect it from evil, and attacks intruders with the remembered mental anguish of victims of evil. The sister monster to this is the DRYAD, FALSE - something the locals might think is a dryad but truly is just a monster.

If it's not monsters you're looking for though, there is a handful of other content such as the MURDER HOBO class - a class that manages to capture the flavour of the murderhobo concept while actually being something I'd potentially allow at my table. It might even be fun to run a whole party of these guys as a chaotic one-shot or campaign.

Whether you're looking for stats for a monster so you don't have to do them yourself, an interesting twist on a known monster, or something entirely new and bizarre to throw at your players, it's worth casting Consult Spirit to commune with this dead blog and retrieve some of its wisdom.

12 months in

Wow. It's been a year.

Twelve months ago now I posted my first post to 19 Sided Die. It was a reddit post I put together more or less on a whim, and once I posted that it just kept flowing. I couldn't stop writing. After the first post I jotted down a list of all the ideas that came to me and I still have some of those original ideas left.

But it's slowed down in recent months. At least one person has asked me why - that person being Toast over at Scrolls from the Toaster, who recently celebrated his 100th post and shouted me out. The feeling is mutual, Toast. Our side-by-side growth has been very encouraging for me.

As for why: nothing is wrong, I've just been writing less. I reached a point where I had to tell myself that was okay, after I missed my first weekly post in over nine months. Since mere weeks after I started this blog, I've had a son to look after. That means he's almost 1 and my spare time has only been shrinking as he's increased in both mobility and appetite. Because of this, I've had to be choosy with my hobbies - especially those involving sitting in front of a screen.

I don't always get a couple of hours spare time in a week to write a post, and my backlog ran out a while ago. I still have plenty of material to work with though, so if anyone else is out there waiting for me to post each Wednesday, stick around.

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In December I started what I called the blog100 challenge. Out of the series of 100 questions by d4 caltrops I completed 9 before falling off the wagon. Along the way, at least 3 others started their own blog100's. I'll consider that a success - although I really should get back to it!

I'm still struggling to answer that tenth question. It's one of the few that doesn't feel relevant to me, but I'll find a way to do it. These posts may move from the Sunday slot to the Wednesday slot in order to keep a weekly pace if that works out better for me. We'll see.

I also recently came to learn that Throne of Salt did something similar in January, independent of the challenge, by answering all 100 questions across four posts. Very cool!

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Six months ago I talked about the goals I set when starting this blog and how it felt to stick to those goals. In as much time again, I had double the readers with far less effort. I'm not sure what the lesson is there, if there is one. I'm happy to be taking it more casually than I was, but at the same time I miss the schedule and the regular discourse. I'm glad people are still around, reading my stuff. In fact, within just the last few months I began to hear back from players who had actually used some of my classes - in particular the Ranger (whose skills have received some reworking) and the Dragon. On that note, the Dragon might be the most polished thing I've put out there, so it's nice to see it continuing to get some attention.

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What's next for 19 Sided Die? I dunno. There's a lot on the backburner. Tell me if any of this sounds neat.

• OD&D has been a fixation of mine for a while. I want to talk about a lot of OD&D related stuff.
• That list of ideas from the beginning still has a dozen topics remaining, and I've jotted down about three dozen since. Each of these is at least a post's worth of content, some of them have expanded beyond that.
• One of those topics, I could fill a book. This isn't a promise - if anything, it's the opposite. Scope creep may just kill this one.
• Another one of those topics feels like it should be in zine format. This one is more likely to see the light of day.
• Anybody interested in Obsidian related content? I've used it to prep and keep session notes since before beginning this blog, but I've really only just recently taken the deep dive into what it can truly do. For here I'll most likely keep it to the TTRPG space, but Obsidian for TTRPGs is a whole beast of its own.
• Send help, Obsidian is taking over my life.
• A ton of old posts that need to be revisited.
• Downloadable PDF versions of my content.

Variable Rate of Advancement

Something OD&D did that doesn't fly with most groups today was variable rates of advancement. It did this in two ways: not only did different classes use different advancement tables, but characters earned experience at varying rates depending mostly on their "Prime Requisite".

Don't even get me started on the limits for demihumans.

In modern games, it quickly becomes unbalanced if players aren't all on the same level. Furthermore, balance is held on a pedestal. To be fair, in some cases that lack of balance is a legitimate problem. I've played in a campaign where one player character constantly far outshone the rest and it kind of sucked for everyone else. I think it's very much worth noting though: that party was all of the same level and it still happened.

Despite the title, the table continues with other bonuses not related to advancement.

The Prime Requisite system appears to me to be oft misunderstood. Modern players see this as restricting certain classes to only the players who rolled high enough ability scores. When combined with the way scores were rolled randomly and no choice was given to adjust them, it feels like someone is locked out of playing, for instance, a Fighting-Man if their Strength roll wasn't very high. This couldn't be further from the truth. It's perfectly viable in OD&D to play away from a character's natural aptitudes and simply be one level behind the party most of the time.

Dial it back there Gary, you're not helping my point.

A point is made here that a player does not need to choose the "optimal" choice if it does not suit the character they want to play. This is a tricky thing. People are natural optimizers, so it feels bad to throw away a potential 10% experience bonus permanently. And the 20% penalty? Well that just feels awful in comparison. There's one more thing to take into account here though.

Because of experience gains varying depending on the character's level, a party operating together will cluster toward a similar level. Higher-level characters will slow down in advancement while the lower end of the party shoots upward rapidly to meet them. What mathematically looks like (and more importantly, intuitively feels like) a permanent penalty is, in reality, a stipulation that your character will sit slightly behind their expected level for a short time before catching up with the party. That actually isn't so bad (though it still feels bad).

We can do something interesting with this concept. Let's look at pros and cons of this system and create a new mechanic, trying to squeeze out the pros while mitigating the cons.

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The upside of this system is that is encourages players to work with what they've got. Those of us who enjoy DCC's funnel system will agree that this is the best way to play. You don't choose what position you are born into, and the fun is making something great out of it.

This goes hand in hand with reduced player agency, as it punishes players for choosing to play against those randomly decided characteristics. Major player decisions, such as a character's entire class, can feel forced.

How am I going to mitigate this? Aside from just making the bonuses smaller and more granular, I'm going to make them a player option. Here's how the concept works: The player rolls their random features. Ability scores are an easy example; let's use the traditional 3d6 down the line. The player then decides whether they want to stick with those characteristics. They may swap ability scores around, but for each one that remains unchanged they get an additive +2% bonus to all XP gains.

You can take it a further than this. Other randomly chosen attributes (such as occupation or birth augur in DCC) can be kept random for an additive +2%, with the option to choose one instead for no bonus. Race and class can be determined randomly, for a much more significant +5% bonus each - all players should roll randomly and then decide whether they want to take that race/class with the bonus, or choose any other. Some players will be lucky and get what they wanted and the bonus. That's fine.

If you are doing this in DCC however, you might need to start using more granular numbers for XP - otherwise those 1-4 points per encounter are going to start requiring decimals.

Odd Goblin, a GLoG hack, does this but with one-time flat experience gains. That's where I got the idea - sort of combining that with OD&D's Prime Requisite bonuses. It is my hope that implementing a system like this will provide both the reward for rolling with what you get given, but also allow for full player agency as there are no explicit penalties for playing against your rolls and only minor bonuses for taking the random option.

I realize this is essentially the opposite of my previously posted progression mechanic, but as always I like a lot of game mechanics and different things have their place at different tables.

Hiding your Plans

This post is an analysis of a player behaviour I've noticed: scheming behind the referee's back. I don't mean this to sound like a pejorative, but I do believe it's a net negative for the table even though I understand why it happens and have even participated.

There is a tendency for players to cook up clever plans that the referee has not foreseen and spring them at the last moment. Sometimes this is purely narrative. Sometimes this involves exploiting chains of game mechanics and in these cases the players will execute their actions one by one in the required order, letting the referee resolve them piece by piece. It's almost as if the intent is to trap the referee in the logical conclusion of their own rulings up until that point.

This is potentially problematic for two reasons. The lesser problem is that the referee isn't prepared. This is already part of being a referee anyway. The referee should expect to have to handle this from time to time, though it's slightly unfair and potentially embarrassing to put your referee on the spot on purpose.

The greater problem is that you don't afford the referee the opportunity to help you do what you are trying to do. That is the referee's job. You're not there to thwart each other. You are collaborators. If you came up with a good plan, a good referee will want your plan to succeed (or at least sensibly play out). Instead, when the referee does not know your plan, it may fall flat when something does not work as the player intended. I have had this happen in my own game, after a player refused to answer, "What are you trying to do, exactly?"

It's possible that this is a symptom of adversarial thinking, but there's another cause. This cause is a problem that I'm not sure how to solve. It persists through any amount of player-referee collaboration.

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There is a common trope that is so crucial to storytelling* of all kinds that calling it a "common trope" is frankly insulting. I'm talking about The Reveal. These are often the pivotal moments in a story, the most memorable scenes and the most impactful beats.

In a TTRPG, the players are the story. The referee is too, and the degree to which each is true depends on the campaign. But no matter the table, thanks to the structure of play (the basic procedure), only the referee ever gets to do The Reveal. The master plan, the twist, and the flashback origin story - these are all forms of The Reveal that players attempt to execute while explicitly avoiding stating their intent to the referee, and they are all things that can fall flat on their face without the referee's support. They want the referee to enjoy The Reveal as much as the players do when one is sprung on them. Unfortunately, it's often a lot of work to make these work, and that work is best worked out together.

I wonder if it subconsciously creeps in that in movies, if the audience knows the plan they know it will fail - that's where the drama comes from. Conversely, if the audience does not know the plan, everything goes according to plan - that's The Reveal. The opposite is true in TTRPGs however, where the player requires the referee to make it work. There are any number of things that the player doesn't know, but the referee could weave into the narrative if they were just given some warning. Rules may need to be bent or particular judgements made. In extreme cases, established lore and prepared events may need to be thrown out to avoid messing with the player's master plans.

In those cases, the referee is stuck with a choice: change what is established or tell the player they failed. That sucks. Better to collaborate rather than try and pull a fast one. The referee is there to make the game work for you, after all. The players actually enforce an adversarial relationship here by expecting the referee to attempt to thwart them, and preemptively thwarting them in return.

*I don't think it's correct to call TTRPGs "storytelling". However, storytelling is the piece of TTRPGs within which this problem resides.

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I don't know how to solve the problem of players not getting to do The Reveal. In a sense, everything that the players do is The Reveal to the referee. I get that feeling constantly when I run games. It's all about seeing what my players are going to do and incorporating their ideas and I am always surprised. Changing the way players think doesn't seem like a viable solution though - I can only change the way I run the game. It's something I'll be ruminating on.