Cap & Co., part 2
down and out in the magic township
part 1 is here, though I include a little starter summary below.
Newmarket!
So for this little solo RPG experiment I wanted to start small. I popped open the PDF for a world I already know to some extent, Rick Barton’s The Halls of Arden Vul. I took three linked characters I had already made for another game set in that world:
Cap Doffer, the Goblin Gourmet;
his secretary, a dark elf currently calling herself Laudanum;
and their guide Colmund Thatcher, aka Cosmos the Barbarian, wandering roofer and psychonaut
and dropped them on the road to a market town called (creatively) Newmarket. I had played in that town almost ten years ago, so I was surprised to find that it was barely included in the book. However, it did say that Newmarket has all the same factions and temples as the much more detailed Gosterwick, only bigger.
Mythic’s core mechanic is what they call Fate Questions, which are similar to the questions you might ask a GM, but confined to Yes/No answers:
Can we hook up with a caravan for safety? YES
Do the bandits accost us on the road? YES
Before or after the turn-off for Castle Burdock? NO (I mean AFTER)
Whenever I needed to, I dropped down a level of detail into Old School Essentials to make a skill check or a reaction roll. I am less a fan of that system, but it is the one the three characters were made with, and the basic version is free and more importantly searchable online.
For instance, Cosmos is a Thorcin (think Saxon, historically), and so are the bandits — actually rebels, members of something called the Tharbrian Recovery League (not to be confused with the People’s Front of Tharbria, or whatever). When we encountered them on the road in broad daylight, he rolled his -1 Charisma and got a 7 (uncertain, confused). Confusing people is not at all uncommon for Cosmos, as he is something of a mystic.
Therefore they didn’t attack, which was what he wanted.
And what I wanted to know as the player.
Mixing the prose and the game stuff like that seems messy to me, and maybe breaks the narrative flow, so as started last week I’ll confine dice rolls to the purple block quote format and put any prose or dialogue in pull quotes, and my metagaming commentary in regular text.
Cosmos rolled his -1 Charisma and got a 7 (uncertain, confused).12
The City of Townsville . . . I mean NewMarket
From Rick Barton’s written description:
Newmarket: The largest community in Burdock’s Valley, Newmarket lies on the Swift River and is home to over 4,000 people. It is a free town, exempt from the lordship of Lord Burdock and governed by a mayor and council of aldermen. Although at least three days walk from Arden Vul, it is a good site for adventurers to heal, train, resupply, and trade. The major Factors and temples all have a presence in Newmarket. The local villages sell their surplus in Newmarket, and merchants from Newmarket trade downriver to Narsileon.
We open in town having arrived the evening before. I skipped all that “where are we staying?” stuff as I wanted to get to a storyline. Mythic’s mechanic for this is called Threads, where we write down a list of character goals and roll to see which one the present Scene is about:
Cap: find a buyer for a Pigeon Post franchise
Cap: find some wolves
Cap: make some money
Cap: work on his book
Laudanum: find some Malice3
Cosmos: get L off the Malice
Cosmos: find some mushrooms
Cosmos: learn more about the TRL bandits
Note that this conveniently matches up with one of the canonical die types (d4, d6, d8, d10, d12). As is my habit in other writings, I feel free to switch between point of view characters whenever I want, so even though the first scene was technically about Cap’s first goal …
At the Yellow Cloak Inn
Laudanum was hiding from the sun in an upscale bar, where she found an herbal liqueur very much like what the French called chartreuse. They called it something else, here. Noone here spoke French, or any of the dozens of other languages she had learned during her time in the City of Brass. They all had the same basic structures, however — nouns, verbs, descriptors. After a while it became easier to pick up new ones.
She held the glass up to her eye and considered the color. Cap’s skin was a little more yellow.
Why was she still following him around? He paid well, for one thing. More importantly, he didn’t ask questions. He was happy to do most of the talking, always full of grand plans and clever schemes. Today he was out selling the family business, trying to find investors who would front the money to build a dovecote so he wouldn’t have to do it himself.
“Any luck?” she asked, as the little goblin huffed his way onto a stool and slung his bag of birds onto the bar. They made little liquid sounds inside the bag.
“This town wouldn’t know a good idea if it pecked their eyes out,” he grumbled.
“Well, I’ve been listening to the rumor mill grind all day, and there’s coin to be made finding the head of the Temple of Mitra.”
“What, she took off with the tithes?”
“Somebody snatched her, supposedly.”
That’s going around. A band of gnoll slavers grabbed the local leader of the Thorcin rebels last week. I may need to roll that person up at some point.
I never understood why D&D assumes you have to have above-average intelligence to speak multiple languages. Everybody in Europe speaks multiple languages.4
Chaos Factor 4: This determines which column of Mythic’s Fate Table we roll on. Higher numbers mean more randomness.
Starting Scene Expected test 7 > 4 so
Can Cap find a buyer? 90 Exceptional No
Can L find Malice? 50/50. 42 No
Can Cosmos learn more about TRL bandits? Likely. 85 No
Do they hear about Lilian? Very Likely. 42 Yes
Do they go to the Temple of Mitra? Almost Certain. 05 Exceptional Yes
so they do not get immediately brushed off as amateurs
Do they get help?
Cap’s OSE Reaction Roll (+0 Charisma) → 8 uncertain → Unlikely. 22 Yes
Any double (11, 22, etc) whose first digit is under the Chaos Factor (<4, in this case) triggers a Random Event.
I rolled Move Toward a Thread → d8 (5) → L moves toward finding Malice.
This seemed weird, at a temple for a god of light, law, and purity, so I asked a confirming / clarifying Fate question.
At the temple? Very Unlikely. 94 Exceptional No
which I interpreted as the cleric noticing her withdrawal and compassionately casting a 1st level Purify Food and Water spell to reduce her cravings. A full recovery might have required a Remove Curse, which is higher level and more expensive. He wasn’t feeling that compassionate, if he even had that much mojo.
Does the cleric know who took Lilian? Unlikely. 72 No
What the hell. Swing for the fences. From Rick Barton’s description:
Klimt: A strange, possibly bodiless, wizard with a ‘tent’ in both Newmarket and Narsileon. Visitors to the tent swear that it is bigger on the inside than the outside, even though it is somewhat hard to tell, since the tent is pitch black until Klimt’s many ‘eyes’ appear to inspect and question the visitor. Klimt speaks in a sibilant tone, and appears to have knowledge of events dating back many centuries.5
Cap was skeptical. “A wizard. Who lives in a tent.”
“A really cool wizard, one who understands the structure of the universe. Like me,” said Colmund.
“And this wizard will know where to find the missing Lilian? What will he charge us for this valuable information?”
“Ahh, he trades in favors, not gold. Doesn’t care much about material things. Like me.”
“As long as we can get out of the damned sun,” Laudanum hissed, and ducked inside the tent. Her good temper from the Mitra cleric’s spell had not lasted long.
It was indeed dark inside the tent, pitch black like the depths of a cave, with no light seeping in through the cloth walls. “Hey, Klimt!” Colmund called, “I’m back, and I brought friends.”
An eye, round and orange like an owl’s, opened in front of them. It was hard to say whether it floated or was attached to the cloth of the tent. “Oh, Klimt sssees you, little Thorssin.” Other single eyes began to open and close all around them — staring, squinting, blinking — all different shapes and sizes, none synchronized with any other. What kind of mind could handle such uncoordinated inputs?
Colmund seemed completely unfazed by this display. “So there’s this lady named Lilian from the Temple of Mitra —”
“Oh, look at thisss one!” the wizard interrupted. “Djinn-touched, Klimt thinks. The sstories she could tell Klimt would be delicssious, yes? Oh, but ssick she is, sick with Malice. Thisss Klimt does not like. Plumthorn’s fault, thiss is.”
Klimt knew the drug’s maker? Another rumor going around town was that Lady Alexia would pay two thousand gold, each, to the parties who stopped that traffic. Two thousand each was more than five thousand split three ways. Lilian, wherever she was, could wait.
One of the things I like about this system is that it does allow for unexpected twists and turns to the plot.
Do they ask Klimt? Unlikely. 00 Exceptional Yes, 0 < 4 so Random Event
Move Away from a Thread → d8 (5 again!) → L moves toward finding Malice
Does Klimt know about Malice? 42 Yes
Is Klimt against Malice? 50/50. 05 Exceptional Yes
Does Klimt know who is making it? 07 Exceptional Yes
Does Klimt want them specifically to stop it? 50/50. 20 Yes
Does Klimt give them a boon? Likely. 26 Yes
One of the eyes, about the size of a lemon, dropped to the ground and rolled across the sandy floor to Colmund’s feet. He picked it up and blew a few grains off of it. It blinked at him. The eyelids had tiny teeth embedded in their edges.
“Yess, that’s a good one!” Klimt chuckled. “Take care not to ssquish it, or Klimt will have to take one of yours in trade.” The other eyes all blinked out, leaving the chamber completely dark except for the sliver of daylight at the door flap.
spell level d6 (4) → Wizard Eye (chosen, not rolled), which seems thematically appropriate
From the Alien Species Descriptor table, d100 (59 and 90) → Odd and Toothy
Is Cosmos carrying it? Likely. 32 Yes
Can he talk to it? Very Likely. 45 Yes
Does Klimt suggest hiring help? 50/50. 42 No
Does he want the formula? 50/50. 02 Exceptional Yes
Buy it? 50/50. 98 Exceptional No
Steal it? Very Unlikely. 13 Exceptional Yes
So Klimt is sending them against Plumthorn’s criminal crew of Cockney halflings by themselves at level 1. That’s blinkin’ crazy.
So much for starting small.
The Ludological Alchemists call this The Most Powerful Ability in the Game, rarely made use of by bloody-minded players, whose favorite song goes “let’s go kill something.”
We are fascinated by these Monster Actions/Reactions rules. They seem to point to a different type of dungeoneering philosophy than the typical idea of the game. Any group that refrains from going forth with swords-a-blazing at every encounter in the dungeon has a ~3% chance of finding “enthusiastic friendship.” Through this result, I once witnessed an unlikely bond form between an elf and a minotaur. Suffice to say it was life-changing for both.
I really like their semi-scientific statistical approach, which I may borrow towards the end of this series.
Using Substack’s code format for the dice rolls makes it look more different from the rest of the text and also strikes me as a little bit funny.
I know that Rick calls this poison / drug Mortality, but I like the name Malice a lot better. Sort of drips off the tongue.
OK, not everybody, but more than half.
https://www.statista.com/statistics/1426025/share-citizens-europe-speaking-foreign-language/
Klimt is clearly based on Fritz Lieber’s Ningauble of the Seven Eyes, memetically, but as far as I know s/he has no AV counterpart like Sheelba of the Eyeless Face. I am personally convinced that s/he is a serpent-person, but that’s based on no fictional evidence other than the way Rick Barton does the voice in-game.
Must say I don't understand the system, but it's pretty cool how you're navigating the world. There's a slightly more developed (but still skeletal) write-up of Newmarket available on the FB site.
poor cosmos!