Elephant Machine

This wondrous apparatus cranks out RPG ideas and diaries from my games.

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Playing Good - Designing Games to Teach Virtue

on June 22, 2020

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Mind Flayers

“Seeker” by Vera-Rei. https://www.deviantart.com/vera-rei/art/Seeker-618704858 For a while now, I’ve wanted to write a medieval(-ish) fantasy hack of the amazing Blades in the Dark system. I know Blades Against Darkness exists, but I’m looking for something in a bit of a different style. The amazing thing about the Blades line is that it conflates setting and a certain genre with a set of mechanics specifically well-suited to the kind of story the game in question tries to tell. It’s an approach I much prefer to making modules for a ‘universal’ system. The latter always feels kinda clunky to me. So here I am, designing mechanics for my politics-in-a-city-with-a-huge-dungeon-under-it Blades hack, and I think to myself I should throw some of these ideas up on the blog. I don’t want to make a whole post that’s just about a specific system, though, so we’re combining the whole thing with a take on my favourite classic RPG monster. My hack, currently bearing the working title ...

Giants in Two Adventures

Giants in mythology are strength incarnate. They are you, but beefier. You cannot defeat them. Goliath is an enormous man, as strong as an army. If Goliath is in a straight fight, Goliath is going to win it. They might be clever, too, but cleverness is not their defining feature (rather, it’s often their downfall). Fighting a giant is nothing like fighting a lich or a dragon. They don’t have fancy spells or flaming breath to make things interesting. It’s more like standing up to a cavalry charge, or an elephant. It’s ridiculous. It’s overwhelming. Suddenly you are faced with the awful reality that you are really damn small, and size turns out to matter a lot. Nobody would blame you if you ran away at this point. Historically, many have. In many RPGs, fighting a giant doesn’t go like that. You roll initiative, the giant rolls initiative, and you start beating each other up. The one who runs out of hit points first loses. It’s a problem I’ve heard quite a few game masters bring ...

32 Object-Oriented Spells

Here’s a list of spells that I’ve written for a number of systems over the years. I’ve transferred them to the GLOG magic system to make them compatible with most OSR games. They were designed to have a lot of presence in the world A lot of these spells have a physical presence in the world that characters can interact with. This means they have a high hi-jink potential. There's lots of creative uses and ways to mess around here. Let me cover a few assumptions before we start. - Spells are generally able to choose the caster as the target, as long as they can target creatures. - The caster can terminate spells with a duration other than ‘Instantaneous’ early, unless the spell description says otherwise. - Most spells are cast as a standard action. 1. Sol Illictus Range: 150ft. Target: A point within range. Duration: Instantaneous All targets within a 20-foot radius surrounding the point take [sum] fire damage. Save halves. 2. Soul Arrow Range: 150ft. ...

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