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.

Review: A Zero-Level Grimoire

A Zero Level Grimoire can be found on DriveThru RPG.

I saw this one pop up on the Goodman Games store several months ago. At the time it was available in print and had limited stock. I hesitated to get a copy because I live in Australia. Shipping here is insane at the best of times, and Goodman Games in particular seem very expensive in this regard. I almost had it sent to a friend who could ship it to me for cheaper, but alas, I ran out of time and A Zero Level Grimoire ran out of stock.

I was rather disappointed, and I wasn't the only one. Several commenters in the DCC subreddit had their eye on it too. Eventually I noticed that it was for sale again - this time digitally over on DTRPG. Good enough! I just wanted to get my hands on those spells!

A Zero Level Grimoire provides exactly what it says on the tin: 20 spells based on folk magic out of popular media (along with some fun little quotes from source media). All of the spells are just barely useful - which if you ask me is the perfect amount of useful for a 0th-level spell - and they all have a magical effect you could imagine of some sort of hedge magician. Beer Magic in particular is a fun inclusion, which reminds me of medieval women brewers being accused of witchcraft for being too good at beer.

Worth noting is that the opening page says all listed spells take more than an action to cast, though two of them are explicitly only one "round" long, and at 0th level a round and an action might as well be the same thing. Furthermore, these two spells are the ones that might be most useful in combat, so I found this to be initially confusing.

The mechanics given make 0th-level casting an interesting addition to the early stages of a campaign, although most actually scale fairly well into the later game as well. Each spell is given an "adjuvant", a spell component that can optionally be added to grant higher chances of success. Given the success rates and the fact that non-Wizard/Elf characters only get a d10 to cast (which happens to align with my alternate magic skills), these adjuvants are a welcome addition from both a mechanical and narrative perspective.

Something I was left wanting for was a method for 0-level characters in a funnel to have a selection of spells they know. This is A Zero Level Grimoire! However, all it provides is a recommendation that characters need to have learned these spells through study. This precludes brand new funnel characters from having any. My personal recommendation is that if you're going to allow these spells in your game, 0-level characters get their INT modifier (if positive) in 0th-level spells to begin the game, selected randomly. Players with a relevant occupation might be able to argue their case for why they should have a spell of their choice, INT notwithstanding. 

A Zero Level Grimoire delivers on its promise and I'd recommend it to anyone who wants to add a little lower-level magic to their DCC games.

Review: Wasteland Without Epithet

Judge Toast has given me a copy of Wasteland Without Epithet to review. Sorry it took so long, Toast.

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The Joys of Worldbuilding

Worldbuilding is one of the great joys of RPGs. For many of us, it's the thing that drew us toward RPGs. As a kid, I used to doodle maps of islands and mark where there were monsters and treasure. I had no idea RPGs existed, it was just something I liked doing. I never really stopped.

As the DM/referee/judge, the joy of worldbuilding can be a lonely one. That isn't entirely a bad thing - it's nice to have that outlet and be able to "play" solo in a way that will eventually come to fruition at the table. On the flip side, it often doesn't come to fruition. It's something that is difficult to share with the players in a way that they can enjoy it too. Nobody enjoys a lore dump, so you usually have to give them the juicy details the long way around by making them matter to the game. This can take weeks or months and sometimes the players never discover the things you've invested yourself in.

Wasteland Without Epithet gives you a process to do it the other way around; make the players a part of the setting's creation and then build the game within the world they want. I first learned of this concept from players of Dungeon World, which is presented as almost being more narrative than game, so the players being invested in the narrative is far more important there. It's a powerful concept. Your players go into the game already attached to the world and any detail you add automatically becomes an interesting twist.

How to Play

The introductory section says that you can run through the activity with anyone, jokingly suggesting that you "accost strangers on the bus". I decided to use this tactic, and the people I accosted were a colleague, my wife (not the same person) and two friends. I ran into a roadblock toward the latter end of the activity when one step asks you to "go around the table" and to have discussions about each answer in turn. I did not have a table to go around, so this took me a long time to do as I asked people one by one individually and had to relay answers along to the next person. It technically still worked, but I suggest that if you're going to use Wasteland Without Epithet you do it in a session-0-like setting, with the players you intend to play with.

The Questions Within

There are a few questions in there that ask you to assign points to categories - one of those is the classic Law, Good, Evil and Chaos, which I initially wasn't a huge fan of because of my preference for three-point Alignment but it doesn't necessitate actually using Good or Evil in your game, so it still works as a way to develop a world's cultures. The other question had 7 categories to do with aspects of culture, but what I really liked about these was the use of numbers that aren't easily divisible so my victims players were forced to think a little harder about how they wanted their points divvied out. Oddly, all of these seven categories are positive other than "Paranoia". This doesn't really matter either, it just seemed strange to me, but I see what Toast was going for.

In the above sections, my players all assumed you needed to place at least 1 point in all categories. This doesn't seem intended, because all that really does is give you less points to spend while making the baseline 1 instead of 0. Wasteland Without Epithet doesn't explicitly mention whether or not you can leave a category at zero, which seems to be an oversight because it does give examples that are impossible otherwise - but those examples aren't visible to the players.

A few of the questions are a bit difficult for players who aren't used to building worlds of their own, but everyone came up with interesting answers. Occasionally, later questions were already answered by previous questions - in those cases we chose to simply expand further on the concept or shuffle the answers around. By the end of it we had a world with unique twists on Drow, Centaurs, Goblins, and some sort of primitive society of madly religious geese (thank my wife for that one - she hasn't much experience with RPGs but she certainly got into the spirit of it!), on top of at least as many adventure hooks and plenty of room to create more.

Closing Thoughts

You can just about guarantee that if you run a group of prospective players through this, you'll end up with an interesting world that they are all attached to. This might even be the thing that convinces my wife to try my hobby, though she insists she'll only play if she can be a goose. Perhaps I'll have to give her the Invincible Chicken class.

Check out Wasteland Without Epithet here!