Beast-Kin

Across the web of worlds that the Enfae Envorae claimed, they deployed first their inferior simulacrum, the Elvorae, but as the forces of the Titan were encountered, the need for local forces grew, and so the Elvorae tapped into their primal legacy and wove the lattice of life, forming minions to bend to their will and martial as armies against the giant minions of Titan.

So, the beast-kin were made to serve as cannon fodder, bred for war. They rarely exist in realms outside of core conflict where the giants and fae battled at great lengths. On those worlds, the beast-kin with traits and temperaments best suited live still. In the intervening ages, the beast-kin more often than not gave in to most of their beastial natures, forming tribal bands of nomadic raiders or burrow dwelling clans, living according to whatever predilections their ancestry dictated with the augmentation of a humanoid proclivity for tools and whatever social structures suited their beastial attitudes. They bear no true relation to either fae or beast, being made in parts from both, but belonging to neither, uniquely suspended between.

Gnoll Defenders by Ben Wootten 

There are many creeds of beast-kin, as they were formed of whatever stock seemed capable of violence or industry in whatever niche their fae masters required such services. Many have become extinct in the interceding ages, others have withdrawn to whatever environments and niches that suited their kind, and some, formed from aggressive and adaptive animals, flourished and became plagues in the realms to which they were introduced.

Among the most successful of all such beast-kin are the nefarious Gnolls, who took up some shade of the name of the Enfae overlord caste, the Gnuae'Moblae (who became the Gyo-blunn, the Goblin forebears). The Gnolls were vicious and effective, and were brought to many worlds where their hyena-like progenitors were entirely alien. They now form warlike clans of raiders and nomads, scouring the lands for prey.

And One More Thing...

... on Attributes.

In a recent G+ post on the topic of Charisma as a dump-stat and ways to beef up it's importance, I was pleasantly surprised to see somebody else had made an effort to treat the mental stats the same as the physical. Their term for Strength and Charisma's type was 'Force', and their term for Dexterity and Intelligence's type was 'Finesse'. I am not terribly excited about 'Force', but I am going to be borrowing Finesse. This line of thought made me examine the nomenclature once again, and I have come up with some other name changes for the Finesse attributes:

Type:	Physical	Mental
Strength	Brawn	Presence
Finesse	Agility	Intellect
Endurance	Constitution	Willpower

The use of Finesse as a type name liberates Agility, which is a more encompassing than dexterity, which has a distinct hand-eye connotation outside of RPGs. Intelligence is changed to Intellect to create a little separation from the old attribute name and the assumptions that entails, while still sharing the abbreviation INT with intuition, which captures the other aspect of the stat.

• Brawn (PS): raw muscular development and capability.
• Agility (PF): physical reaction speed and coordination.
• Constitution (PE): overall bodily health, and resilience.
• Presence (MS): strength of personality and charisma.
• Intellect (MF): instincts, perception, and problem solving.
• Willpower (ME): personal resolve, focus, and concentration.

I had hoped that these entries would be more akin to a final-state summary, but obviously, this has become more of a design journal, capturing the flow of thought.

An Antarctic Mystery

Thought it was about time to get this off my desktop. I pulled this unattributed image from the web recently, for inspiration or future use. I did a bit of research, and discovered it was cover art for Jules Verne's An Antarctic Mystery.

More on Attributes

An alternate six attribute system I considered, but did not document in my previous post about the 3x3 stat-grid, would treat Intelligence as Mental Agility, Wisdom as Mental Endurance, and Charisma as Mental Strength. This would eliminate the need for the Spiritual category, and maintain the dynamic I observed among the physical attributes. With some minor nomenclature changes:

Type:	Physical	Mental
Strength	Brawn	Presence
Agility	Dexterity	Intelligence
Endurance	Constitution	Willpower

This retains the more familiar six-stat block, with the names of the poorly understood attributes of Wisdom and Charisma renamed Willpower and Presence respectively, clarifying the mechanical and descriptive differences between the old attributes and the new. Intelligence is not the most precise name for what it now encapsulates, but sharing the abbreviation Int with Intuition works to it's advantage, and so it was kept as is.

And so:

• Brawn (PS): raw muscular development and capability.
• Dexterity (PA): physical reaction speed and coordination.
• Constitution (PE): overall bodily health, and resilience.
• Presence (MS): strength of personality and charisma.
• Intelligence (MA): instincts, perception, and problem solving.
• Willpower (ME): personal resolve, focus, and concentration.

Relative to the 3x3 Stat-Grid:

• Intelligence is a contraction of Intuition, Acuity, and those aspects of Knowledge governing learning potential. All cognitive and intuitive work is combined, eliminating the need to speculate what attribute handles various mental gymnastics and guesswork.
• Presence becomes the singular contributor to mental strength. Knowledge or Intelligence was a poor fit in this type: existing knowledge is covered by class and/or skills, and the learning potential is sufficiently captured by mental acuity.
• Willpower absorbs what was Focus. This again, removes the need to make distinctions about how one maintains focus or resists influence. This attribute can also be used to generate Mana Points for casting systems and/or psychic or magical damage, using the same formula used to generate Health Points from Constitution.

My initial reluctance to use this layout was motivated by a desire to stake out unique territory and differentiate the new attributes and their roles from the established muddle of the D&D rulesets. The 3x3 stat-grid seemed to do those things. Getting into the finer details of spell casting as either skill or class based mechanics, I realized that the division of mental and spiritual was too nuanced to build solid mechanics around, causing the mental attributes to be relegated to more mundane skills and actions that most players in adventure gaming do not engage in frequently, and when they do, it's often during downtime and between game-sessions. Ths was a grievance I had with the mental attributes of classic D&D style gaming, so clearly the 3x3 stat-grid was not serving the intent of making all the attributes pertinent in play.

Attributes

Dungeons & Dragons, and most D&D based retro-clones, divide attributes (stats, ability scores, traits, etc) into physical and mental groups, presumably on purpose. The physical attributes are Strength, Dexterity, and Constitution; while the mental attributes are Intelligence, Wisdom, and Charisma. The physical attributes are clearly beneficial with mechanical applications that passively enhance players who invest enough in them. Mental attributes are ultimately useful only for specific classes. As a result the mental attributes are typically deemed dump-stats where low scores can be placed to favor more useful attributes.

D&D Attributes

Listed in order of overall utility, notwithstanding class requirements or personal preference, including descriptions of the attributes and overviews of their mechanical advantages:

• Constitution measures physical resilience and overall health. It is universally important for the extra Hit Points a high score can provide.
• Dexterity measures physical agility and hand-eye coordination. It is also universally important for Armor Class, and to a lesser extent ranged combat, never mind the other advantages poorly armored thieves gain for a high dexterity.
• Strength measures physical capacity for lifting, pushing, and other exertion, namely combat. Its value for any potential combatant is undeniable, and it offers escalating advantages to fighters by way of the exception strength sub-attribute (1e & 2e).
• Intelligence reflects general knowledge, learning potential, and arguably thinking and reasoning. It grants extra languages in 1e, which converts to additional non-weapon proficiencies in 2e, making it useful, but not crucial; but does allow extra spells and easier spell training for magic-users.
• Charisma reflects leadership, charm, and social skills, and is erroneously used as a measure of physical appearance. It is useful for those who often parley with NPC's and intelligent monsters (bringing the extra languages of intelligence into play) or for those gamers who utilize retainers or followers.
• Wisdom is variously considered common sense, reasoning, judgement, spiritual awareness, perception, empathy, etc. It offers a boost to mental saving throws, an oft forgotten perk. It also grants clerics some extra spell capability.

The mental attributes, namely wisdom, are a bit muddled, and provide few overwhelming advantages that cannot be adjusted for via player agency. Most of the mental attributes tend to affect things that happen off the clock, like training time and cost between gaming sessions or the price of room and board and return on fenced spoils, all of which are easily written off as the cost of surviving. Up until non-weapon proficiencies were introduced in 2e, there were few meaningful mechanics that relied on mental attributes, and even those were not significant enough to warrant making an undue investment in mental attributes that were not core to the character's class.

Next Steps

Several steps need to be taken to address this dump-stat mentality and attribute irrelevance in actual play. I feel the first step is resolving the idiosyncratic nature of mental attributes by making their nature consistent with the physical attributes, which I observed followed a model of potency (strength), adaptability (agility) and vitality (endurance). Below is my first effort at uniform attributes following this model:

Type:	Physical	Mental        D&D Equivalent
Strength	Strength	Knowledge   Intelligence
Agility	Dexterity	Acuity           Intelligence/Wisdom
Endurance	Constitution	Will              Wisdom

The first obvious issue with this is charisma no longer is on the matrix, which is unacceptable as charisma provided some of the most obvious opportunities for mechanical application in the form of reaction checks for NPCs. Also, this breakdown illustrates the fickle double duty shared by intelligence and wisdom, and the latter, being full of so many intangible aspects, only compounds the problem. 

My first thought, and presumably the obvious idea, is to add Appeal as a fourth type:

Type:	Physical	Mental
Strength	Strength	Knowledge
Agility	Dexterity	Acuity
Endurance	Constitution	Will
Appeal	Comeliness	Charisma

The problem here is that the corresponding physical attribute is physical attractiveness. Even granting aspects of grace and poise to this, and not just passive 'beauty', it is a highly subjective trait that I don't see as a numerically relevant for adventure-based gaming. It is also practically guaranteed to become a dump-stat: An ugly warrior or haggard wizard? No problem!

So I reexamined the basic model, and it's assumptions, but focused on the mental attributes mutability, particularly the ill-defined boundary between intelligence and wisdom, and the nebulous hints of dominion wisdom claimed over so many other traits. The more I looked, the more clear it was Wisdom was doing too much work, which made defining the roles of other mental traits difficult.

Epiphany

This brought me back to thoughts of other systems that separate the supernatural from the natural aspects of intellect, usually in the context of one or two attributes. What if I added a category covering the more ephemeral aspects of human capacity? Charisma certainly falls into that category, the art of inspiring and manipulating is not a learnable thing so much as a gift. One can learn skills to augment poor charisma (oration, et al), but there are those who lack such skills that are remarkable leaders or confidence men.

So I narrowed the scope of the mental category to testable mental capacities like calculation speeds, knowledge, pattern recognition, etc; and put the fuzzy bits that were left over into the new spiritual category:

Type:	Physical	Spiritual	Mental
Strength	Brawn	Presence	Knowledge
Agility	Dexterity	Intuition	Acuity
Endurance	Constitution	Will	Focus

With the addition of a third category, I gain a set of attributes explicitly for all those things that wisdom, intelligence, charisma, or even dexterity (as luck!?) often got inconsistently tasked with resolving in the golden age of gaming, or were managed by other mechanics like saving throws, or handled as class-based abilities.

• Brawn (PS): raw muscular development and capability.
• Dexterity (PA): physical reaction speed and coordination.
• Constitution (PE): overall bodily health, and resilience.
• Presence (SS): strength of personality and charisma.
• Intuition (SA): instincts, luck, and non-tangible perceptions.
• Will (SE): personal resolve and resistance to trickery.
• Knowledge (MS): learning potential and recall of information.
• Acuity (MA): perception of details and problem solving.
• Focus (ME): attention span and concentration.

What Next?

The next step, now that I have this matrix locked down and documented, is to establish value ranges for these attributes, and flesh out the mechanics that handle how to apply those numbers for opposed and unopposed checks. 

This attribute matrix is robust enough that it, possibly combined with a level or skill mechanic, is sufficient for use as saving throws. I also intend to detail a tiered, broad-to-narrow scope skill system, wherein all applicable skills add to the applicable attribute and a dice roll, and are compared to either a target number or opposed roll. I want this system to rewards skills without making them mandatory to make an attempt. I also expect the combat mechanics to be a uniform part of the skill system, so no single aspect of game play has a mechanical advantage, giving it the impression that one behavior is preferred over others.

Although I have increased the number of attributes by 150%, by doing so I have made things simpler. By standardizing the nature of the attributes by type and category, I have made a uniform system where every attribute has a discernible purpose; unlike attribute systems with multiple arbitrary or ambiguous stats and setting specific jargon.

Attribute Naming

I have obviously adopting alternates to some standard attribute names, and conversely, kept several existing ones in place. These choices were not made lightly, no matter how capricious the results appear, and were all made respecting this rule:

No attributes, categories, or types can have similar names or abbreviations.

I wanted the names of both Attribute Categories and Attribute Types to be easily understood while also encompassing their entire domain. Physical, Spiritual, and Mental are practical givens, ideal for their categories. Strength, Agility, and Endurance; using the categories as modifiers make perfect sense in every case, capturing all applicable subsets while clearly communicating the nature of each type. Individual attribute names are provided for flavor and were selected for their descriptiveness and simplicity.

The D&D mental attribute names Intelligence and Wisdom were rejected because those attributes are no longer represented by a single attribute, but by the Mental and Spiritual categories, respectively. Charisma has been combined with some interpretive aspects of Wisdom to form Presence, and the name change reflects this. Strength became Brawn to avoid confusion with the type name, per the rule, above.

Goblins

"Becoming Troll" by Velkis Erk

These images were intended by their creators as depictions of trolls, but these are more consistent with what I think of as goblins.

Long ago, the Enfae warrior castes known as the Gnuae'Moblae, in their lust for power, trifled with dark powers and became corrupted. Over the centuries, as their culture became more barbaric and their language degenerated, they came to call themselves the Gyo-blunn. But in the common tongue of men, they are known as Goblins.

Goblin have long pointed ears, sharp elongated noses, small eyes, high cheekbones, and tusk-like teeth or fangs. They have little if any facial hair and body hair, and their heads are covered in thin hair, though balding is common. Head ridges and goat-like horns are rare and marks of strong fae-magic potential. Their bodies are lean and muscular.

"Troll" by Alexey S. Lipatov

Goblin coloration is fairly consistent in any given clan: typically shades of olive green, tan, or gray. Their hair, if they have any, is usually black, dark green, brown, or less often, coppery red, graying with age.

A fair matrix of Goblin skin tones,
but I doubt those are the names they
would use for those colors.

The more degenerated goblin clans and subspecies have rounder, larger, and less pointed features: larger eyes; broader, longer noses; and thicker, longer ears. Their bodies are thicker and gnarled, their skin mottled and darker with lumps and lesions, and little if any hair. The less fae-influence, the more pronounced these traits, and the weaker their magical aptitudes.

Most goblins have affinities toward elemental magics, but those strengths are normally rudimentary. Strong elemental affinities are rare, and those with them become the craftsmen, bosses, or shaman of goblin society, depending on the strength and nature of their affinities.

Goblins with affinities toward the life-force and mind influencing powers of their fae ancestors are few, and are normally found in the less degenerate clans and individuals. Individuals with particularly strong fae affinities are typically marked with ridges or goat-like horns on their heads, or even more rarely, tails or other animal like manifestations. In goblin clans, such goblins are occasionally killed to protect power structures, but more typically, they become commanders, shaman or seers, or even chiefs and kings.

The Shhee-Veld, image attribution unknown

Some of those with fae affinities can find the veils between the Enfae dreams and see through from the fifth (the dream or realm of human activity) and into the sixth dream' that the goblins call Shhee-Veld or The Ghost Land. Shhee-Veld is a darkened world full of spirit beings, strongly charged with black energy. It is there, that the few remaining original goblins, those corrupted Enfae warlords, eternally young, dwell in their fortified palaces, commanding armies of elite goblins. Those goblin god-kings are worshipped by the lowest castes of goblinkind, a belief that if they prove their worth, they will be revived in the Shee-Veld to join those grand armies, waiting to amass the numbers required to emerge forth and reclaim all the dreams for goblin glory.

Three More Decanters

Here are three more containers I found images of on various auction sites that look like they should either contain some special sauce, or have some mystical powers associated with them. Conjure waves, grant fiery breath, produce elixirs of water breathing and/or swim speed... 

Vase of Waves

Dragon Pitcher

Sea Horse Flagon

Decanter of the Cloud Dragon

Source culled from G+

This begs to either be made into a bong, or a magic item.

My thought:

When uncorked, it will rapidly vacuum away all mist, fog, clouds, and smoke, including noxious vapors and poisons while breathing out fresh air from the dragon's mouth, maintaining a five meter radius of fresh air around the decanter, save for the gentle vortex drawing down into the top.

While corked, the dragon's mouth will breath forth one of the following when prompted with the correct command word or phrase:

• A quick burst of pressurized water effective at up to 10 meters: capable of blinding, disorienting, or knocking over an object or foe.
• A brief, blasting cone of steam, 20 meters long with a 5 meter radius at it's extent, that causes temporary blindness, blistering of exposed skin, and damaging throats and lungs of those caught in the blast.
• A sudden cloud of obscuring fog about 10 meter radius around the decanter, that can be expanded by 5 meters of radius every minute, up to a maximum 50 meter radius.
• Creating a cloud bridge, capable of being walked upon. This bridge will only last for about 5-10 minutes
• Creating a small cloud capable of being traveled on, akin to the divine clouds of chinese myth or a flying carpet for the chinese myth impaired.

This item probably has charges, and if it does, it might be rechargeable, perhaps simply by absorbing clouds or mists, or it may require more effort, filling it with water from a special pool or font, divine liquor, the blood of a cloud dragon, etc...

Xiombaca WiP

As detailed elsewhere, Xiombaca. This is a WiP, started in '92. Yes, some projects move very slowly.

The Hunt

“Hound!” Whipping robes stirred dust as a tall lean mage strode hastily into the weapons hall where the young mute was looking up from his reading, waiting expectantly for orders. “My old enemies have an agent in town again… are you up to another hunt?”

Setting his book aside, the tall youth grinned in affirmation as he stood up. The scant details of his victim’s identity were provided while he donned his heavy cloak, hooked sword to belt, and pulled on his boots. As the patriarch of the guild provided the last of the details, the mute was stepping out the door.

The silent killer stalked the streets, intently seeking the subtle signs of his quarry. For the years preceding his acquisition and training by Master Fraekryss, these hunts were handled by the master himself.  The agents of the dark mages that pursued him were not easy prey for the ill prepared, and the mute knew that his assignment on these missions was a mark of great distinction.

He stopped as he stepped into a large cobbled intersection. A trickling fountain babbled in the center of the circle as the twilight sun left its pale orange signature on the high stone and plaster walls of the buildings, while the cool shadows crept ever upward. The clattering city sounds of a chill fall evening faded as the mute hunter’s senses bent on the identity of his prey. The mark was close.

He quietly made his way down the shadowed road to his right as he loosened his sword in its sheath. His fingertips trailed along the rough stone of the walls as he stalked up the road, his pace slowing as he sensed his quarry close by. He leaned back against the cold stone wall next to a doorway and prepared himself. His senses tuned, he heard through the thick wooden door the unmistakable mutterings of the dark mage’s secret tongue. Steeled to the violence he was about to commit, he slowly pulled his sword free.

In one motion he stepped into the doorway and threw his weight at the door, causing it to shatter off its hinges, exploding inward. He stepped in and saw not one but two shrouded mages look up alertly from their huddle over a glowing crystal ball on a table askew with scrolls and books. The intruder silently cursed at the unexpected double threat as he continued into the room toward the mages, who straightened and began to chant.

Taking the hefty sword in a double handed grip, the stoic swordsman swung it backhanded in a giant arc, bringing it up into the nearest mage’s groin.  Bone, cloth, and tissue rent as the mightily swung blade tore up through the torso of the mage, finally swinging free of flesh as the blade cleaved the breast bone of its victim. The assassin’s stroke continued fluidly as he spun to face the other mage, the graceful arc of his sword spraying a trail of blood across ceiling and walls.

The dark, bloodshot eyes of the remaining mage fixed intently on the killer’s as his chanting stopped, and a burning surge of energy tore into the warrior’s body, followed by an explosive blast of fire. The mage laughed in triumph as the room filled with smoke and the wreak of seared flesh, but his cackle was cut short as the warrior emerged from the smoke and vapor, bloody sword arcing toward a shocked face.