Monster Descriptions 4-9

As the muck falls from this humanoid beast, its scales shine in transcendental patterns. One of its four arms plucks a fish from the swamp, wriggling desperately.

The eagle-headed lion shakes its wings like a wet dog, flinging feathers and fur everywhere. Its eyes glitter with a cruel intelligence that encompasses all it sees.

Bright red, this bird stalks the reeds. Its golden beak shines in the sunlight as the bird gobbles a small frog.

The sun abruptly vanishes as the bird flies overhead. Its large yellow talons seem well-suited to carrying cattle, and this bird looks hungry.

This deer appears rather ordinary, until it steps into the sunlight and its crystalline antlers shimmer. The blotching on its chest wriggles into a series of arcane glyphs.

Spines hang haphazardly off this warthog, each several inches long and razor sharp. Saliva drips from its tusks as the beast scrapes at a rotting log.

Home Ownership

My players have bought a house in the city. Bamboo makes houses inexpensive, and they are tired of needing to pay for an inn each night. This makes me happy as a Facilitator - my players are literally investing in the city, investing in the setting. Their buying a house is a sign that I am doing something right.

This does invite a new and interesting question. Given my framework of blocks and neighborhoods, how do I make rules for owning and managing a household?

The first thing I want to address is how the neighborhood affects the price of the house. The number in my price list is for the construction itself, not fitting it into an existing urban space. It seems reasonable to multiply the house price by the number of blocks within a given neighborhood, a reflection of how scarce space is within the area. Furthermore, not all types of buildings are available in all neighborhoods.

Now, to make this choice more interesting, what advantages does owning a home in a neighborhood provide? There is first an important distinction between having a home in a neighborhood versus having a home in a specific block. Each block is a space made up of not only streets and buildings but also of people, people who have known each other a long time. Adventurers are not likely to become members of a block, but their home's nearness to them should confer some sort of mechanical benefit.

Establishing a home requires more than simply purchasing a building. After moving in, the inhabitants must spend a week meeting and greeting their neighbors to unlock the benefits of their chosen location. This involves a lot of eating and drinking and costs double the daily rate. If the party waits more than a month after purchasing the home, the neighbors' first impression is negative and the benefits will be lost.

Assuming the players spend the week, they may access all blocks within their neighborhood at half-price. This benefit lasts a full year. By spending a month socializing (spending double the daily rate), this benefit can be renewed and extended another full year. This benefit is conferred per character, not per household - each principal character (excluding hirelings, followers, and henchfolk) must either directly participate in the socializing or have one of their henchfolk represent them.

In the city, it is customary to have two people tending the house. This ensures that someone is always present in the building even if errands must be run. The two will ensure that food is purchased and ready to eat when the house's other inhabitants return.

This will do for now, but I'll return to this in the future with rules describing how decorating the house can provide benefits for those who live there.

Paying per Day

Now that I have players wanting to spend time doing stuff in the city, I needed to price out the price of activities in the city. Most of my prices revolve around the cost to physically manufacture a good, but services by their nature aren't products. Their value requires a different pricing logic.

The markets reference in a city reflects the amount of monetary exchange happening within the city environment. We can use it to reflect how affluent the city is.

market references * value/reference gives us the money that trades hands in one year of the city

Dividing that value by the number of days in the year and the number of citizens gives us the amount of money an average citizen spends per day. Thus, if the player is out doing stuff in the city, they ought to spend at least that amount, and so this daily rate is the fee to access city services like arenas, casinos, etc. 

Monster Descriptions 2 and 3

Right out of the gate, I missed my monster description for yesterday, so here are two.

The burrow descends into the hillside, just large enough to crawl inside. Upon entering the dark, a menacing croak rumbles through the passage, and two yellow eyes stare balefully out.

The clearing is pitted with large holes, wide enough to swallow someone hole, but what commands attention is the great worm stretching out of one, whistling out of its circular maw. Its red skin glistens with some sort of fluid, a fluid that lingers at the edge of each hole.

Persuasion Examples

The previous post on Persuasion rules was concise, but needs some illustrating.

Our initial encounter is fairly straightforward: the party has been caught wandering the city after curfew. There are 4 watchmen and 6 party members. The watchmen are Novice Ascetics while the best Orator in the party is Apprentice.

The watchmen draw a Jack of spades but, because they have no ranks in Ascetic, draw a replacement card: the King of diamonds. I keep drawing until we get a number card: the 9 of diamonds. Even though the Orator is a Novice Grokist, I still play this card faceup. I shuffle the deck before the players draw. The player draws 2 cards, the Queen of diamonds and the 9 of clubs.

The player chooses the Queen, and the players succeed - they pay the requisite amount (the daily wage) and may be about their business. If they for some reason chose the 9 of clubs, they would fail and must pay 512 * the daily wage (this is less terrible than it might sound: in the players' current city, Tal Afar, the wage is 8 bronze pieces, making the required bribe equal to 17 gold pieces). If the players cannot or will not pay, the watchmen in question will hound the party for the next 9 days. Regardless of whether they pay or not, the watchmen insist the party return indoors (and will fight if the party refuses).

As a second example, a new party wishes to access the University of Reyjadin's archive on ritual magic. The attending archivist is a grumpy old woman who has no time for dirty adventurer types. She is a Professional Ascetic, while the party's best Orator is but Apprentice. Because the player cannot play enough cards, the attempt ends immediately, with no consequences for the party (although, consequences will certainly follow trying to access the archive anyway).

If the party then spends some time developing their rhetorical skills and return once their Orator is a Specialist, we draw cards. The party's Orator is an Apprentice Grokist, which reveals the first two of the archivist's cards. I draw faceup the 10 of spades and the 10 of hearts, and then draw facedown the 5 of spades. The first card, the 10 of spades, determines the trump (spades).
The player then draws their four  cards: the 9 of diamonds, 6 of hearts, 10 of clubs, and King of clubs. They may only use 3 of their 4 cards directly against the archivist and must choose their 3 before the archivist's final card is revealed. They choose both clubs and the 6 of hearts, since it matches suit with one of the faceup cards. The 9 is removed - it can be used to modify the played cards, but can't directly attack one of the archivist's cards.
I reveal the archivist's final card, the 5 of spades, and the player now must decide how to allocate their cards. They can't beat all of the archivist's cards and are now trying to mitigate the damage from failing. Because each undefeated spade will remove one of their cards, they can't avoid the penalty from the 10 of hearts. Consequently, the players are stuck outside of the archive until the archivist cools down (10 days later).

For a third and final example, our now-Specialist Orator encounters the same watch patrol as before. The watch draws an 8 of diamonds, played faceup, while the player draws 4 cards: the 7 of hearts, Joker, ace of spades, and King of spades. The player chooses the 7 of hearts to oppose the watch's card. They discard a card to transform their heart into a diamond, and, because the card is now a diamond, they spend double the daily rate to increase the 7 to an 8, which defeats the watchmen's card. The players pay the watchmen 18 bronze pieces and go about their way.

Persuasion, redux

I wrote previously about my rules on persuasion, a set of rules designed around brokering deals. In my last running, the party was asked to relieve the sadness of the inhabitant of a mysterious tower. My players were unaware of the rules, and I totally neglected to teach them to my players. As I was thinking about it, I came up with a different approach that feels cleaner, well-differentiated from combat, and also far more specific.

I already have a deck of cards as part of my running materials, as we play blackjack whenever my players gamble. That let me to think about other ways I could use the cards during play, and the application to persuasion came in one of those post-midnight flashes of insight. The following approach is indebted to the Russian card game дурак and Zak Sabbath's use of the tarot deck in Demon City.

These rules come into effect whenever the players make a reasonable request of an NPC. Reasonable here means the request is not inherently absurd, impossible, etc. Asking a city watch member to let the party pass is a reasonable request, while asking an innkeeper to believe the party are incarnated gods is not.

Representing the NPC's resistance to the suggestion, the Facilitator will draw, facedown, a number of cards from the deck equal to the NPC's Ascetic tier (1 for Novice, 2 for Apprentice, and so on). The first card drawn represents the NPC's fundamental resistance to the request. If an ace, the attempt fails. If not an ace, the card's suit determines the trump for that person. The player's Grokist skill then allows them to flip cards over, in the order the Facilitator drew them (one card revealed per Grokist tier).

The requesting player will then draw a number of cards equal to their Orator tier, reflecting the arguments available to them at the moment. The player must then choose a number of their cards to play against the NPC's resistance. If they can't match the number of NPC cards, the check immediately fails. If they can match the number of cards, the Facilitator will reveal all of the NPC's cards. In order to succeed, the player must be able to "beat" every displayed card.

In order to beat a card, the player's card must match suit and have equal or greater numerical value (aces are high) or belong to the trump suite.

Each suite corresponds to a persuasion tactic, and the trump suite reflects the strategy to which the NPC is most vulnerable.
Hearts - charm or seduce
Diamonds - bribe
Spades - rationalize
Clubs - threaten

Accordingly, the players can modify some of their cards.
Hearts and Spades values are immutable, but the player may discard a card (either played or unplayed) to change the suite of a card within color (heart to diamond) or to raise an immutable card's value as though it were the other suite (increasing a spade through the mechanic used to increase a club).
Diamond values are increased through spending money. Playing a diamond card requires an initial investment based upon the day rate of the current city, and doubling that amount increases the value of the diamond by 1.
Club values are increased by the persuading character's companions. Each companion with at least 1 rank in Combatant can be used to increase a club's value by 1, once (that is, if the player needs to increase two different clubs by 1, their character need two companions, one per card). However, the number of companions unused must always exceed the NPC's number of companions (if attempting to persuade 4 guards, the persuading character must have more than 4 companions to spend them increasing club values).

If the player beats the NPC's cards, the NPC accedes to the request. If the player fails, the consequences depend upon the undefeated cards.

Hearts leave the NPC embittered towards the PC, and the value on the card represents the feeling's intensity. A number card (2-10) indicates the number of days the NPC will remember the incident - anytime the party encounters the NPC's faction, that NPC will be present and interfere as much as possible (all tests are hard).
Jack: the NPC hires a band of imposters to tarnish the party's reputation.
Queen: the NPC hires a band of brigands to waylay the party and take their stuff.
King: the NPC targets the party's followers and hirelings, forcing them to make a morale roll. If they fail, their morale increases by 1.
Ace: the NPC allies with an enemy of the party or becomes a new antagonist.
Diamond failures require the party to pay through the nose to avoid the Hearts result. The value on the card equals the number of doublings of the daily rate required to assuage the NPC (so, a 4 of Diamonds means the players must pay 16 * the daily rate). The Jack, Queen, King, and Ace are equal in value to 11, 12, 13, and 14, respectively.
Clubs make the NPC belligerent. For number cards (2-10), if the NPC has Combatant ranks, roll 1d10. If the result is less than the number, the NPC and their group attacks until someone has taken an injury or another group of individuals intervenes. If the NPC does not have Combatant ranks, they will find someone who does. The number on the card equals the number of people they find interested in teaching the party a lesson.
Jack: the NPC trashes the party's lodgings.
Queen: the NPC motivates a new faction to take action against the party.
King:the NPC attempts to kidnap someone about whom the party cares.
Ace: the NPC commits everything they have into subduing the party.
Undefeated spades neutralize the player's cards. A number card removes a player's card of lesser numerical value (player's choice).
Jack: neutralizes two cards below Jack
Queen: neutralizes three cards below Queen
King: neutralizes four cards below Queen
Ace: neutralizes all cards and copies the penalty of the highest red card.

Final notes
If there are multiple failures of the same suit, all penalties stack if possible. For clubs, roll for each card. Each additional roll indicating combat attracts an additional fighter to the fray.
NPCs with no ranks in Ascetic cannot defend with face cards or aces - if such a card is drawn, return it to the deck and draw again. This ensures there aren't inordinate penalties to interacting someone without the actual capacity to hinder the party.
Shuffle the Jokers into the deck. If the Joker is trump, the NPC agrees to the request immediately. Any card defeats a defending Joker, and Jokers cannot be played to defeat other cards.
Until the consequence of the persuasion attempt has occurred and a new day has begun, the party may not attempt to persuade the same person(s) again.