The Fantasy HighTech Cocktail

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 So I saw the trailer for FF16 (or FFXVI) .

It looks like they are rushing out a new Final Fantasy using the engine for the remake of ff7 and heavily drawing inspiration from Dark Souls and Game of Thrones hoping to hit the zeitgeist in doing so.

But it got me thinking about Final Fantasys mix of fantasy and high tech and Lo! made the following table. It makes most sense being a straight d6 and read across table, but you have the option of doing a split result table and trying to draw it all together

 EDIT: I had a table here pasted from google drive and it shat itself . It was okay in reader viewer, but I've crudely converted it to a .jpg below and give you the link to see it as a google drive document here:

https://docs.google.com/document/d/176NwTwlrCLwFkuQk7NG41fiZqzOFAsGrfgltVw1He_M/edit?usp=sharing

The Fling

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there's those campaigns where everyone is fired up to try a new system or setting or someone wants to be the DUNGEON MASTER

but for whatever reason , 2-4 sessions later it just sorta ends.

But What If when we did such undertakings we framed it as limited run, to have something to finish with rather than just moving on?  Both an ending to aim for and an ending to happen if you just stop playing

Please consider the following and note I've included a possible angle to turn each into an ongoing campaign:
(fuck knows why I've listed them in a table)

1. A elritch alien warship, pride of a degenerate alien empire, has been struck by a vast void beast mid void-warp, and crashed back into real space, now warped and crippled, the alien crew dying and maddened from the ruptured void shields, and is now in a decaying orbit towards a blackhole.
You and your fellow players have broken free of your containment  and search desperately for escape among the cruel amusements , maddened guards, and fiendish security systems
You are: captives used as the payload on psychic cannons, genetically engineered geisha, P.O.W, malfunctioning robots, pragmatic alien serfs
The Aim: Get to an escape pod with enough supplies to make the characters future lives comfortable
The Default: You all are crushed beyond all understandings of the term crushed
The Over-achiever: You get the ship going and start your own LEXX-life

2.
Murder Mystery Mansion Time Machine::
 A smug despot of a time-lord has thrown a dinner party for his peers , and further more as a delightful touch , he plucked "guests" from out time and space to join their esteemed ranks.
But he turns out MURDERED and now his mansion/time mansion is freaking out. BUT THE MURDER IS NOT YET DONE. The Mansion itself it not without its dangers, escaped terrors, bizarre traps et cetera  et cetera

You Are: Elites of an advanced and apathetic society, fellows plucked from time for their wit or lack of it
The Aim: To not get murdered, to get back to their own time, to discover Murderer
The Default: forced to live in wrong time line and wonder WHO WAS THE MAKER OF MURDER?
The Over-achiever: The murder is solved , the mansion mastered and now the fabric of space and time is yours to saunter forth upon

3.
A HAMLET, A DOOM, AN OCEANIC CONTEMPT WOKE!
A mysterious mist has surrounded a village, everyone but you is got a fish plague and increasing waves of fishy monsters are coming for you
You Are: Simple practical folk , travelers, tourists, fly-by-night grifters
The Aim: To get out
The Default: you got dead or barely got out and are crazed beggar with 'Oribble tale
The Over-achiever: the secret of the Curse is uncovered plus riches too. But is it but one pebble fore-towing a occult landslide?

4.
DEATH RACE:
you are all convicts given a car and some weapons and sent across the Cursed Earth to try and win years off your sentence , battle other HARDENED KILL CRAZED CRIMINALS and the MUTANT HORRORS and CANNIBAL YUPPIE GANGS of the Cursed Earth, all before the drone eyes of a jaded and cruel LIVE AUDIENCE
You Are: Convicted criminals from a variety of backgrounds with a range of skillsets
The Aim: To make it to the finish or remove your bomb collars and commit to life in the cursed earth
The Default: assumed MIA and eaten or back in the slammer
The Over-Achiever: rebel and build a bandit kingdom and lay siege to a mega-city

5.Babes in the woods:
Lost in the faery woods! Will you make it home? Will you find what you seekth here?
You Are: Lost children, questing knights, talking animals
The Aim: make it out
The Default: Lost forever, as animals, fey servants , or living wood
The Over-Achiever : Riches! An Elf Bride! The Favour of the Seelie Court! Human Form! Further intrigues and quests? Maybe!

6.
Post-Adventurer Fun-House Dungeon:
They've come , solved or brutalized puzzle and trap, slain many, found the cackling undead wizard and took from him his undead continence and his tome of big man spells. But what now for those of rooms not visited as his spells twist and die and the less bold crawl in for the scraps left behind?
Factions are unbalanced and guardians amok!
You Are:  Monsters, Undead, Abandoned Henchmen, Former Servants, Escaped Captives, representatives of underworld tribes or dungeon factions
The Aim: To get out without being immediately hunted down due to the dungeons nearest to civilization.  To have a means of survival.
The Default: you get adventured or are still there preying on treasure seekers
The Over-Achiever : you are now the lord of this sinister peak, you have ravaged the nearby out-crop of civilization forcing it back away from the free wilderness, you have got out with a means of power and agency . OR SUCH LIKE



IN ADDITION:

A fling-campaign like any of these could have a table and/or conditions to determine the fates of characters if the campaign just ends.
So for Deathrace if the character has a bomb collar at the end of the session sequence , they are assumed back in slammer, if they are sans-collar there's a table to determine their fate, if they have earned the respect of cannibal gang then they assumed a member .
You could get involved as you like here with tables and sub-tables. I'm sure the above example is already suggestive of more elaboration.


THANK YOU FOR YUR TIME

Guest Post by Pliny The Elder

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 I mean DISPLACER KLAUS brought me this and he says it's from Pliny The Elder and who I am to doubt that chuckling rascal?

GREATER HOOT-BEAST

 The lovely and solemn Hoot Beast roams the plains , sustained only by smells . It is thus dependent on the numerous wild flowers and fragrant trees in the pyrrhous  lands. Unusually it does not  sniff the flowers like a thoughtful man or suckle at them like the bee, it instead draws them down their scent from the wind, numerous leagues away from the source.

It is thus provoked by unpleasant smells , sometimes chasing down and trampling the source of them , though when encountering the dense reek of man's settlements they will flee .

The nomads of the Pyrrhous  Plains lure them with perfumed youths and shear the wool from them after the winter months which they use for many purposes,  most notable their spherical hats, which they keep birds of various martial and social purpose.

SATAN

Here is a Satan , its appearance here has been crafted wading through a vast river of soul chyme where it plucks the juicey congealments that have made it through the mastications of the Gnawing Gates.

A Satans size is variable , and is known to be both like a common wading bird and a striding colossi. Its temperament is like most in New Plymouth ; cruel and disagreeable.

It is provoked by hats of all kinds and will make great fuss before commencing violence, plucking at limbs and flinging such grasped great distances .  It however is known to vastly over-estimate its ability to riddle

TABULARAPTOR

 This bird is fierce king of the Pyrrhous Plains and unlike other avian, strikes not with beak or claw but its flattened body, which is like a single blade.

A eagle or hawk will descend directly on its quarry , but the Tabularaptor will descend first at distance and come low , slicing through leg. It returns then when exsanguination  has rendered the struck into a stupourous placidity .
Its method thus forewarns by the falling of grass and stalk at a short distance.

Its nests are not made in cliff but hollow tree, rolling itself like scroll to rest such in.

The Nomads here thus fear dead trees yet strangely do not take measures against them. It is said that they owe their freedom from horse raiders to the Tabularaptor, as a single walker can lie prone evading the bird , but a ridden horse has no such recourse and will surely be victim .

The borders of the plains are indeed marked with short towers , constructed with horse skull and bisected femur to serve as grim reminder of the bird's great feast that was the end of every cavalry lead expedition here.


HUSKY GOBBLER


A simple sand sifting beast, that travels in herds among the many dead rivers along the plains.

None of its dead form can resist decay, crumbling to dust in days. Therefore no part of it can be used for construction or craft.

It is said that raising a Husky Gobbler on food that is not the silt on which it customarily consumes will mean it will not have this property .

The theory is that rocks have a "solid essence" giving them their form , and as fire has cold as its opposite, the silt has an "erosive essence" which is stored in the Husky Gobbler's body.

Indeed the nomads will serve the meat as poison to those that abuse their hospitality.
Eaten, such meat will sustain for a day or 2 , but then create 5 times the hunger it abated, causing such horrors as men eating all their clothing and then biting their own fingers off.

While peaceful , harassing the Husky Gobbler will cause it to sneeze a fine dust with such force , that skin will be abraded off muscle and muscle off bone.

VERY BAD PIG
 


It is stupid except when it is cunning, and cowardly except when it is audacious.

It is so appalling that it vomits from its rear and coughs up dung like a cat does hair.

Rank corpses arose its carnal passions and a Very Bad Pig sow will need to anoint itself with the most putrid of decays in order to distract the male from shit-fighting.

It is said that it was made with all that is terrible of the bear , wolve, cur , boar and bigamist.







 Updated to have sources and change the name of purple plains to pyrrhous plains because that was a place holder that I went with and then went , nah yeah that's fine , and then 20 minutes later hated it

art sources:



Hoot Beast https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Macrauchenia
(originally Robert Bruce Horsfall)

Satan
https://store.safariltd.com/collections/sale/products/wild-safari-wildlife-spoonbill-figurines-224829


 Tabularaptor:
it's a Argentavis magnificens and the image is everywhere 


 Husky Gobbler:
stock art of platybelodon herd , originally by Corey Ford

Very Bad Pig
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Daeodon
by Jay Matternes

WHY IS IT THERE? WHY??? CAN'T WE MOVE?

Print PDF SO YOU WANT A ROOM BY ROOM DEATH LAND IN YOUR CAMPAIGN AND NONE OF THAT PESkY WILDERNESS CRAWL

I mean the Sewer Beneath the City or the Ruined Ward is a classic. Though the Ruined Ward needs more love. Big old chunk of the city all wrecked and full of woe and they just put a fence around it and try and stop people from nicking things. Good times.

Here's some other ideas for the dungeon being some fucking dumb :

1: THE ATTICS AND ROOFS : like those medieval towns where they kept building up until the buildings leaned into each other and then insane birds started building nests ontop and flying ships kept crashing into the pile and now up is bad and another civilization might of even been started up there? 

2. BIG FALLEN OVER WARMACHINES like giant monuments and colossal colossi. They are place around the city , fallen on the city, and buried under the city. They are full of treasure because the crews manning them were like every army ever and loved to loot.

3. DREAMLAND : if you are awake when the city sleeps , it's an alternate city with bad shit everywhere. and LEWD PEARLS OF THE NIGHT

4. CRAWLSPACES: Dungeon is condition like Rising Damp or black mold , but one that makes impossible amounts of space underneath your house or skirting board. Technically the treasure you drag out of there is a fruiting body that spreads spores but no-one has wised up to that yet.

5.  METROTUNNELS: Like big ass underground railways that used to connect citys and overland travel is not an option so everyone is really keen on someone making the trip and clearing them out but you know molochs and shit.

6. THE SKY + MOON : really it's just a big ladder away

7.  MANGROVES + SWAMPS: though it's basically a forest right around a city that's awful to log and has shipwrecks in it.

8. SHIPWRECKTOWN: So many shipwrecks they've formed a solid structure around the little island y'all call home. Variants include it's in space and they are spaceships. 

9. LORD MAYOR MUD: The old city gotten entombed in mud and the new one is just a couple of 100 people sweeping out some tower rooms at the top. The deep river below is emptying out the very bottom levels and things are getting in below too. So it looks like a hourglass if the top bit was some small boxes and the bottom was a wide bottomed triangle

10. THE CITY IS ON A BIG DISC AND THERE'S REVERSE CITY ON THE OTHER SIDE: both citys keep having groups sneak into the other and steal and fight shit. Both citys are mostly wrecked from this. Good one.

11. BIG TREE: it's a big tree , everyone lives up high in the upper branches go down and it's bugs and rot and rotten gods. Pretty sure this is where Chewbacca came from?

12. GOD : he dead and rotting in the middle of town. He's got stuff in him though.

Small Clustered Things

Print PDF more ideas I couldn't expand much further than a couple of paragraphs



Godzilla campaign:

Put some stupid large monster on the map and have it wandering around smashing things from the very start of the game, so the players can have an end game right there in front of them , and it keeps things changing and basically randomly moves around and destroys whatever it wanders on.

Players might just tail it , looting the chaos in its wake.

I had this idea before I read Broodmother Sky Fortress btw, and Broodmother Sky Fortress is a lot about this so that's a plug for it.



Player types:

there's these 2 player types, it's not an either/or thing though, it's just 2 contrasting behaviours I've noticed.

-one will turtle up and do as little as possible as to avoid risk, and you need to give them a clear goal and try and kill the shit out of them. When you do that , they get amazing creative and engaged with the game.

-this other type will immediately find stuff to do or make plans in the campaign (and often are not-directly-linked to character advancement) and be super engaged and creative etc, but interpret any obstacles put in there way by the g.m as the g.m punishing them for something.

I lean more to  that second type btw.


Which kinda leads me to this other thing

Powered By The Apocolypse :
I keep reading these books and feel even more confused about how you are supposed to play them. It's like a play style like a hybrid of those two I just mentioned, the g.m just sets some token stuff up and the player's start thespianing around it and then the g.m tries to make as shitty/interesting as possible for the characters/players.

Like it sounds like my thing , but I can't help feel like I should be doing my best to not trigger moves , it like feels like just bull-shitting ideas with friends but with bear-traps thrown around, but you aren't meant to avoid the bear-traps?


I'm still not over the "pick a name" thing. It's messed up.




So no-one had seen an elve or dwarve that close and just described what they saw using what they knew existed, but actually

The things growing out of the face of dwarves:
From a distance it looks like a beard. But that's not hair , it's
1.Fungal Hyphae
2.Barbel
3.Synapses
4. Filter Feeding Tentacles
5. Worms
6.Eimer's organ
7. Kept Promises that participate to a physical form
8.Tongues, randula
9. Tongues, pseudotrachea
10. Bristles, stinging
11. Old Teeth
12.Ancestors DNA

The things growing from the sides of the elf heads:
not an ear, an error
1.The flesh pinches off into space, like distorted 3d model. This is where the animating force acts on them.
2.Skull knives
3. Antenna
4. Fruiting body
5. Moth
6.Wings (bat, insect, other)
7.Photosynthesizing fern fronds
8.Suckers for remora style attachment
9. Flower Labellum
10. Fractal Whorl of All Previous Bodies
11. Minaret
12. Cooling Fins







Ninja dragon:

this is one of the stupidest things I could think of as a base concept, but say there's this whole country that is fearful of a secret society of assassins who do this whole horrible secret police bit
 , pulling the strings of the government , killing both politically and seemingly arbitrarily.

Expert poison users, only shadowy figures glimpsed etc . All kinds of theorys and stories about who they are, where they came from , what they want etc.

In truth they are literally shadow of a vast crippled dragon lying deep beneath the land.

The dragon who was said to have been killed by the founder-hero of the country.

But it's not dead , and it extends its poisonous shadow into every patch of darkness, hearing everything, seeing everything, and twisting the legacy of the founder hero into a vast tortured mockery.


It's from a thread here which also has some solid gold ideas by other people on using fantasy cliches


One more thing
 I just watching something that had the amazing pun "Salt Rifle"

from here

1. Salt Rifle (naturally) :
Squeeze it tight and a crack starts and propagates like anti-lightning to the end of it , and a shard snaps off and is carried impossibly by the crack as it extends past the rifle .
In addition to the damage a subsonic hatey triangle will do , it will pull salt out of the body to expand into a beautiful, flesh destroying salt crystal formation.

Still Protean Things

Print PDF here's some ideas I couldn't expand that far


Uncanny:
they look nearly like a person. Neaaarly .Something is off, the elbows maybe too low? shouldn't their be bone showing or not showing , the eyes maybe? Something not right. They were shapeshifters, doppelganger, mirror escapees, not any more. They quit, they got out , they wanna be real and have blessed coherence , have an I inside. So they took a form and made it them and... it's not right. They can't make it right. Something is always off. They observe and observe and observe and every little thing they think they might be doing wrong they write it down in book they keep instead of a heart. They are always learning and adjusting and almost almost almost . They are never found together. They can see everything they are doing wrong so clearly,  an agony mirror.

Cultural Apoptosis:
A culture is under severe threat. Their military (if any) has been shown to insufficient to resist the invaders. They will not be called the invaders , it will not called an invasion, they have brought new words with them, and they will make sure that their new words are used instead.
Theft  Proof of ownership , Violence  Law,  Murder  Justice, Child Abuse  Education, Slavery Productivity

The invaders will always offer the chance to be like them, but it's never to be equal to them.
Everything the invaders don't take as theirs will be made to less than exist.

The enemies of the culture. The old enemies who would call themselves enemies, who would describe themselves in the old words, who always conspired in the dark , and hungered for child and light. They are also under threat. They will be made to be less than exist.

Do they realise this? Will the Famine Ghost realise they will not find purchase in the new thoughts of the invaders? Or will the Famine Ghost glut themselves on the vast psychic wounds poorly protected behind alcohol, unrealising their famine will come too?

Will the Nether Giants realise their land will be stolen even further from them and ally with the resistance? Are they vulnerable to the promises of the invaders?

Is the Old Women crafty and ruthlessness enough to insert herself into the stories of the invaders? Or will she find herself a mere alley ghoul?

The Winged Sickness ,  might be virulent enough to settle down in the heart of the invaders, starting a rot that will reveal itself in a century.

Might there not a few that the invaders ignorance does not protect them from? Malarial spirits, Night Tigers, Dream Cages?


Will there be an under council?  A great meeting of the night? Every bitter thing realising there will be no darkness left to hide?


Jungle vs Forest
so I've gm-ed a few player deaths that surprised me , the level of caution I've come to expect did not happen, and while likely it was an attack of the button-press-imp on their behalf , or some poor explains on mine, I have another theory.

If you put the players in a forest they will "know" the trees won't kill them and the wolves and bears will.
If you put the players in a bug-fuck psy-jungle they will not really know what the fucks going on and walk right into obvious danger because their base level of understanding just got too bamboozled.
"Shock and Awe" kinda.

No real conclusion here, just a possible observation.




Being Small:

If you ran a game where everyone was tiny it should be a thing that everyone feels tiny.

Main things about being tiny (let's say mouse or insect size) that seemed to be a thing from my crude understanding of physics:

-Water is basically glue but slidable on.

-falling 100 times your height isn't really a problem , nor being thrown an equivalent kilometer from wind (well okay maybe for a mouse. I don't have a mouse handy sorry) Climbing is easy enough that anything remotely rough is basically a horizontal surface.

-the proportion of force applicable to self-loading or whatever means pincering seems to be the prefered weapon of choice, though if you were doing borrower sizes and setting scalpels and needles would totally be viable. Just nothing seems to give a shit about being kicked at that size is all.
So it's all stabbing and slicing .

-You could literally make the play surface there infront of everyone , like the stack of boxes and sticks or whatever is what the characters are actually moving around. Or go outside and move plastic dudes around the grass and leaves.

-if it was an actually campaign book someone should someone to try and get a jeweller or some other tiny artist to  make equipment and weapons  out of stuff and then scan and put them in book. Little scalpels with human hair wrapped hilts ,  scrub cloth armour, fishing hook grappling hook etc



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