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Tuesday, December 31, 2019

"You Sprout a Bouquet of Gun Wielding Arms" (Shiva of Guns GLOG Class)

Shiva of Guns

For each template of Shiva of Guns you have, guns you hold gain +1 ammo capacity

A: GD +1, Cantrips, Gun Power (Bullethell)
B: GD +1, Curve the Bullet, 2 Gun Powers
C: GD +1, Trigger Happy, 2 Gun Powers
D: GD +1, Fastest There Ever was, 2 Gun Powers

Starting Skill: 1. Gambler, 2. Gunsmith, 3. Law

Equipment: Hat, pistol, lantern

Cantrips

1. Transmutagun - turn any handful of material into a pistol with d6 shots. Materials like sand, mud, flesh or leaves may not be able to withstand firing as many shots as things like stone, metal, or wood, at the DM's discretion. 

2. Detect Guns - you are innately aware of the presence of guns at a radius of 10 yards x the number of Shiva of Guns templates you have. 

Gun Powers & Gun Dice (GD)

Gun Powers are abilities unique to the Shiva of Guns, they are activated and cast like spells, but are not spells. Gun Dice cannot be spent on Wizardly magic. 

To use a Gun Power select a number of Gun Dice (GD) you wish to invest, roll them, then add the numbers together if the power asks for a (Sum), (Dice) means the number of dice invested. Dice that roll 1-3 return to your die pool and can be used again, but dice that roll 4+ are removed from your die pool until High Noon, at which time you regain all expended dice. 

At template A you automatically gain the following power, Bullethell. At each subsequent template gain two more powers randomly. 

Bullethell: You sprout a bouquet of gun wielding arms and become a whirling fury of gunsmoke and hot lead. Deal (Sum) + (Dice) damage to all foes within a 20' radius 

D6 Gun Powers

1. Jammer - Use your magic to jam (Sum) guns you can see. It takes a number of rounds equal to your number of templates in this class to unjam a gun affected by this power. 

2. Back Breaking Dodge - When you take damage from a missile weapon you may use this power to reduce the damage by (Sum)

3. Teleportagun - You may teleport to a place you have shot before and can visualize clearly within a radius of (dice) miles. 

4. Gunslinger's Judgement - Make a regular gun attack. Reroll the attacks' damage (dice) times and keep the best result. 

5. Ethereal Sniper - Target takes (Sum) damage from an unseen sniper each time it attacks. This effect persists for (Dice) rounds. 

6. Speak With Guns - Lasts for (Sum) minutes 

Curve the Bullet: Your gun attacks ignore cover and do not require line of sight.

Trigger Happy: When you roll max damage on a gun attack, not a power, regain a GD. (This can be triggered by Gunslinger's Judgement)

Fastest There Ever Was: If you are wielding a gun you always have first place in the initiative ladder, even if the rest of your party lost initiative. You also always act in the surprise round. 

Sunday, December 8, 2019

Buns in the oven, aka Games I want to run

I've got a couple ideas for future games I'd like to run. Most of them are still in the embryonic stage, consisting of an elevator pitch or less.


The continued adventures of Dog Blart

Set in the crowded streets of a Bastion-like super city choked with smog, grime, and sweat, an ever rotating troupe of unlikely treasure hunters seek fortune and freedom in the deepcountry tombs and back alleys. With a bludgeon in one hand and a tome of eldritch power in the other, steel yourself against the horrors that lurk where the light of the streetlamps dares not reach. 

Player Directives
  • Pay off your hideously gigantic debt to Don Fabliousa
  • Seek out magical artifacts to give yourself an advantage
  • Develop a network of contacts to find jobs, potential scores, and cheap goods
  • Engage in your vices to cope with the stress of adventuring
  • Trust no-one

Mausritter, the 3 kingdoms

Beneath our feet, out of sight and mind of most people, is a tiny, sprawling world of adventure. The folk of the numerous Beast, Bug and Fairy kingdoms live in hiding from the wider world of massive giants, fire-breathing cats, soulless unfeeling birds, and other aberrations. If one hopes to defy these dangers and return home with plunder, they should seek the safety of numbers, the strength of a warband.

Player Directives
  • Always be on the hunt for plunder. The human city is endless and fat with treasure, but extremely dangerous
  • Use your wealth to recruit cronies and put together a warband. Numbers are your greatest asset
  • Retire as a fat noble

Something Witchy

You've seen some shit. And I don't mean you've had one or two troubling encounters, I mean the entire world has gone down the shitter and you see something horrible almost every day. It's the modern day, or somewhere close to it, there's no way to be sure. Society is in the death throes of what we understand it to be, and the supernatural underworld that has always been there is eagerly bubbling to the surface. The bureau of paranormal research and defense was exposed to the public and shattered into secretive warring sects, fighting with one another as often as they fight against the encroaching darkness. If you want to stay alive in this hellscape of eternal-night and hyperviolence, you've gotta be the scariest thing out there.

Player Directives
  • Make that money any way you can. Hijack shipments of donated blood and sell it to vampires. Clear quarantined neighborhoods of zombies on behalf of the CDC. Rob wizards and sell their grimoires to demons, or vice versa.
  • Rub elbows with cults, government agencies, covens, mafias, hunters, gangs, and outright freaks. Just remember that you can't make a friend without making an enemy.

Automatic Weapons & the shooting of them

Someone on discord the other night suggested a really cool premise for an Esoteric Enterprises game. The MIB or BPRD or whoever your paranormal hunting government agency might be has splintered off into warring cells named after the major tarot. The Tower are a group of agents who found their way into the underworld and never really came back out, The Chariot are a hyper-religious, hyper-conservative sect with itchy trigger fingers. You can see how this is some cool shit. 

So now my brain has been abuzz with how to hack some modern Esoteric Enterprises type elements onto my Into the Odd/GLOG hack. It's been slow going so far, but I think I've landed on a rule for automatic weapon fire that really shines. 

"Firing an Electrical Gatling" The telegraphic journal and electrical review, November 28, 1890


Firing an Automatic Weapon (Or, the ol' Spray n' Pray)


Roll up to 3 damage dice and keep the best result, then roll your ammo usage die once for each damage die you rolled, one die step at a time.

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Now that I'm writing this out, maybe this should just be the core rule for shooting a gun. Like, you don't take a special action to do this with certain kinds of guns, this is just how shooting guns functions, and maybe special guns deviate from this. 

I'm not sure how I would want to handle the ammo die. In the black hack your ammo would be represented wholesale by the usage die, and you would roll it at the end of a gunfight. That's a solid rule, and it would function fine on it's own. But I feel like the rule I wrote implies that you roll the ammo die every time you attack, so if the usage die represented all of your ammo you'd be running out pretty quick. I think I would rather it represent the ammo left in the gun. 

I use item slots, but I'm unsure what an item slot's worth of ammo should be. Should it fill your gun entirely? That's what I'm leaning towards. 

I break weapons down into 3 categories, Light-Medium-Heavy. This determines their damage die, the number of item slots they take up, so why not their maximum ammo usage die size? Maybe it could just be equal to the size of the weapon's damage die. I keep thinking to myself "but then shotguns will have a weirdly high amount of ammo" and the cognitive dissonance prevents me from making any headway on the idea. 

But, now that I'm looking more at this black hack blogpost about guns and ammo, I think defining the kind of gun you're using by slapping a special tag onto the standard light-medium-heavy weapon statblock would be a cool way to handle it. 

So you would take one of these tags (These are just a few examples)

Shotgun: Increase weapon's damage by one step, decrease max ammo usage die by one step. 

Sniper/Scoped: If you do not move this round, increase weapon damage one step

Arrow: Max ammo usage die is d12, but you cannot use the Spray n' Pray maneuver 

And apply it to one of these 



Weapon Type
Damage/Max Ammo Usage Die
Encumbrance Slots
Heavy (2 hands)
D10 
3
Medium
D8 
2
Light
D6
1