Cige Engine

  When it comes to communication more advanced than the Safranj Homing Beetle network, the premiere option of choice among the Rainbow Lands and Ultraviolet Grasslands is the pourpre clam network. The backbone (or distinct lack thereof) of the network is the pourpre clam, a species easily identified by its purple-hued shell and native to the violet lands.  Pourpre clams are not individual filter-feeding invertebrates, but are, in fact, the small parts of a larger trans-dimensional being intersecting with our reality in order to feed on small invertebrates and zooplankton.  It is this property that makes the pourpre clam so useful. Through use of careful flesh-crafting, it is possible to thread a wire through one clam and have it emerge from another.  This procedure is costly and time consuming, requiring precise use of trans-dimensional mathematics to target the emerging clam, but the end result is a messaging system with seemingly no spatial limitations.  The c...

    The Stone wants to return home.  It wants to take its rightful place in those black halls, from where it was once torn.  It wills movement, ever Westwards.  It is not unreasonable, if something can be gained by taking a step back that is fine, as long as it is followed by two steps forwards. The Stone wills you to move it.  Your first mistake was when you touched it.  Your fate became bound to it’s will.  You became it’s thrall. The Stone has many servants.  They linger inside it’s impossible black halls, waiting for their turn to carry it westwards. The purpose of the black capstone is to allow for players to easily join, quit the game, or miss sessions in my Ultraviolet Grasslands campgian.  Essentially, the stone is the in-universe excuse we will use when a player isn’t present or somebody new joins.  It also acts as an overall goal for the campaign, a reason why everybody wants to reach the black city.  I do...

     One thing I've been museing about for quite a while, dispite having no real use for it in my games, is names for demonic entities. I was always very interested in the nature of the demons described in The Screwtape Letters, and why exactly they would have such strange names.      The form of naming presented in this article is mostly tied to the nature of demons in the Age of Odds setting that I've been running, which is fairly divorced from the Christian background of the idea. Technically the Age of Odds is science-fantasy, but I'll strip the idea down to more of a fantasy idea.      Demons torment mortals. They torment mortals because they believe that mortals deserve to be tormented since they come up with ideas such as war and it's ilk. Demons are actually quite nice to each other, as long as the other demon hasn't aided a mortal. To do so is unforgivable, and deserves the same torment that demons unleash on mortals.  ...

The TTRPG medium has a glut of different initiative systems, this one is my current favorite and I hack it into most things that I run. 1. There are only two alternating turns - the player turn and the enemy turn. 2. The players get the first turn. 3. Only players who pass an initiative check get to go on the first player turn. 4. Players and Enemies can take their actions in any order on their turn. 5. Allies of the players move on the player turn, neutral parties move on the enemy turn. That's it.  The main advantage of this system is that it has nothing to track and it is very simple to teach.  Normally I let players break up their movement and actions as needed by their strategy, but if a game has strict rules for the phases of a turn it is easy to just sub-divide the player turn into several character turns. So, how did I reach this method?  Let's start by looking at some orders.  Numbers will represent enemies and letters will represent PCs. B 2 A...

The Age of Odds is kind of my dream campaign, it is the culmination of a large number of ideas that have been floating around my head for years. I describe the setting as "Spacesuits and Sorcery."  It takes place an uncertain time in the far future, after post-human gods abandoned the rest of the universe and fled into their own domains, leaving the interstellar societies they managed to collapse in an event known as the Schism. The Eridu solar system is the focus of the campaign.  After the Schism, the High Ways, which allowed for faster than light transit, were closed to mortals.  Due to this, there is no FTL travel in the setting.  This means that I had to cram what would normally be a sector's worth of complexity into a single star system. This is my method for making a map of a single star system.  It is somewhat limited to the setting, since it assumes a solar system, where the planets have been moved or constructed in a way that produces more habi...

Well, I've been working on a lot of tabletop rpg stuff recently, so I figured I should start a blog. ongoing projects: The Prismatic Hack - A Post-OSR (POSR) game that resembles 5e, Whitehack, and the GLOG.  Will it ever see the light of day? ongoing campaigns: Age of Odds - a Stars Without Number campaign, hard-ish sci-fi, but with magic. Ultraviolet Grasslands - run with the UVG GLOG hack