The town of Zamość

Petwia's House of Refuge

Petwia's former residence now functions as a house of refuge, a place for the destitute to find a meal and a bed.

As Petwia is Jewish, the Catholic Church, which normally underwrites such enterprises, won't provide any aid, so the fiscal support needs to come from Petwia, summing to 8gp a month. This money covers food and upkeep costs for the boarders and caregivers.

As this 8gp a month goes towards tikkun olam, Petwia will receive 160xp each month (the value of the donation in silver pieces).

Tarot Crawling

I've uploaded a new set of rules to itch.io that use Tarot cards to prep and then run a wilderness area for exploration. The reason I'm linking it here is that the last page of the zine describes the primary function of bells within Gelgelim.

I've written about bells before. As a quick recap, bells ward off bad things (thieves, storms, spirits, witches, bad luck, demons, etc.), but it is difficult to model that at the table unless these warded-against forces actually plague the characters. And I'm not interested in making my players' lives more stressful in their urban interactions. However, by assigning 'bad luck' types of events to Tarot cards, which I present in the zine as an alternative to random(ish) encounters, I find a use for bells.

Bells make traveling more safe by reducing the chances of bad things happening. Different modalities and melodies ward off different things, and better bellringers can choose to weave together these modalities and melodies to abjure against more things at once. At the table, the player chooses some number of cards to avoid from a pre-selected list (boginky, spirits, delaying circumstances, catastrophe, traveling accident, and a few others). If I would reveal that card while the characters travel, I instead shuffle it back into the deck. If I draw that card again, the bells have no effect.

Silver bells repel boginky, both the card that invokes them and, if encountered anyways, will keep them at bay as long as the bells sound.

A New Beginning

About two weeks ago, I shuttered development on the Sea of Shadows. Questions of cultural appropriation had hounded me from the beginning, but seeing JB's new project, I realized that 1) the Sea of Shadows was, no matter my care and attention to detail, an appropriative project and 2) there are some phenomenal designers already working on places and spaces like what I wanted the Sea of Shadows to be (Zedeck Siew's and Munkao's http://athousandthousandislands.com/ is an excellent example). I felt an ethical need to refocus my (colonizing) attention away from the Sea of Shadows. I'd love to return there with other, better qualified designers, but that is a dream for another time.

Instead, I have started work on a new region within the same world: Gelgelim, from the Hebrew word for wheels. As a Jew and a Pole, there is a vast treasury of Slavic, Ashkenazi, and Polish folklore that is weird and interesting and worth exploring. My players agreed to take the plunge with me and we created new characters and begun a new game within Gelgelim a couple of weeks ago.

The following is the description of the setting as it appears in the Core Book. I'll have posts on bears, birds, boginky, bells, and kabbala coming out in the next week or so (I'm on a half-vacation with WiFi, so I've the time to bang all of this out).

“Gelgelim channels Polish, Slavic, and Ashkenazi lifeways with a dollop of Irish and Welsh folklore into an area some 360,000 square miles large (about the size of Germany or Japan). To the north lie the toxic ruins of the Azintheen Empire, filled with bronze monstrosities and powerful magics. The rugged lands to the west resist exploration. And Chornilis, the black woods, blocks southward and eastward travel.

“The time is a century after the Scorching, a man-made cataclysm that destroyed the Azintheen Empire, boiling the land and souring the sea. In Gelgelim, the forest responded to the Scorching by expanding hundreds of hectares in a single day, consuming towns and cities and blocking passage east. The remaining towns and villages of Gelgelim have yet to fully recover. Toxic ashfalls and contaminated water have claimed many a would-be explorer, and the bears roaming wild have claimed many more.

“For money, fame, power, or the good of your village, you have decided to brave these dangers and explore the wilds. Good luck.”

Pamphlet Up and Other News

I've been spending a lot of time browsing the ttrpg materials on itch.io, and I'm somewhat impressed. Itch.io is a game distribution platform primarily for software, but there's a fairly robust ttrpg community doing good work there, mostly micro-RPGs, ttrpgs for groups of 1 or more people to be played in a single session. These games often focus on exploring interpersonal relationships and collaborative storytelling rather than the tension-release cycle of adventure games like Alexis' or mine.
Itch.io's most significant feature, however, is the game jam. Anyone with an account can host a jam, which is an open submission forum for games dealing with some topic decided by the jam's creator. Some of these topics are thematic, some are structural. The game jam allows you to find and follow other creators who do similar work and to give your submitted work some publicity. Itch.io handles payment if you want to charge for your material. My account page has my first 'published' product, a free-to-download pamphlet describing a sequence of 7 nights by a crossroad. I'd love feedback, if you wanted to give it a read. Itch.io gives me a place to publish material that won't see the light of day in my regular game for a while (we had a TPK last session and are starting a new game in a different region, so much of my private brainstorming on the Stone Cult won't be immediately useful). I can build a body of work outside these blog posts with the Stone Cult and practice some skills that need honing (like dungeon design).

In other news, I've changed the name of my game from Prodigy to Saharjin. Ultimately, this is because there is another roleplaying game called Prodigy on the market, and although our games are completely different, I took this as an opportunity to find a name that speaks more to what my game is about: Saharjin is the name of the magical rainforest that dominates much of my setting.

Thanks for sticking with me. Now that I've my ADHD medication and it's turning into summer, I'm looking forward to being more active and posting more content.

Cultural Capitals

[This is an excerpt from the Prodigy Book]

Prodigy takes place in and around the Sea of Shadows, a mystical place south of the equator, where myths and legends lurk just beyond city gates. This world is diverse in peoples, places, creatures, and beliefs. Consequently, there are many ways to wealth and secrets to uncover for the bold and clever.

         For ease of use, the Sea of Shadows divides into several cultural capitals, urban locations that represent the confluences and conflicts present within the game’s setting. Chapter 14 discusses each in more detail. Games should start in or near one of these cities, moving elsewhere as the players desire.

Blyth is a hotbed of anti-Tarluskani activity. Rebels flock to the city, whose Tarluskani overlords grow increasingly draconian in response.

The Catacombs are the underground holt of the Archivist people and home to the best libraries and research apparatus imaginable. The Catacombs sponsors teams of scholar-explorers to acquire new knowledge and bring it home.

Glenden Wood is the home of vice and free enterprise. Almost anything imaginable can be found there, for a price.

Hackerith Hill straddles the two territories of the Tarluskani Empire: the Khanite cities and Deliverance. Yet its proximity to the jungle and Nithya have weakened the Tarluskani Empire’s hold over the city.

Jask is home to a deeply divided Tarluskani population. Many have grown comfortable in their role as people of property and bureaucratic power, but nostalgia for a nomadic past is rapidly rising. The enslaved Khanites sit precariously between these two factions.

Korg hosts the dreaded Pirate Sovereigns of Korg, with their gem-hued magics, who protect the islands from the Tarluskani’s advances yet also terrorize the indigenous peoples who were there first.

Ophir is the largest city on the Wildlands, the capital of the Yanera tribes, and one of the few places in the savannah welcoming of foreigners.

Reyjadin, once named Avondon, is the heart of the Tarluskani Empire’s expansionary efforts. The Tarluskani reforms have brought new wealth and prosperity to the city, some of which have trickled down to its inhabitants.

Sha’aryam is both a ruined Azintheen city and the nearby encampment. Glory seekers brave the city’s metal defenders for untold wealth and long-lost technologies.

Tarlusya, capital of the Tarluskani Empire, is a decadent place, having grown fat from the sweat and blood of the enslaved Khanites.

Yrsh sits on Saharjin’s edge and is just as mercurial as the magical rainforest. The jungle’s ever-present threat has forced an uneasy alliance between the Tarluskani authorities, Nithya forest-worshippers, and Azintheen explorers.

Prodigy Character Creation Rules

I've been reworking the Prodigy book, making a clean .word document and copying over content in its near-final form. For those who are curious, I'm attaching my character creation chapters. They contain all of the information necessary to create a character for Prodigy.