Defying Death - Because being unconscious is boring

So after brainstorming the Diabolist class into existance together with a friend of mine, I found myself really liking the option that you could cheat death by essentially ruining your character. 
The idea of having the player make a decision of "Do I keep playing this character and pick up some negative things to it and eventually turn into a problem for the whole party, or do I let it go and accept that this character is now dead?".

Thus I present to you my little project from past few weeks, the Defy Death rules!
This is yet another not at all playetested set of rules, this time for handling PC deaths. I have covered all the base classes that Lamentations offers and should you wish to adapt more classes to this system the base template of all human classes is as follows:

LotFP God That Crawls, Art by Jason Rainville

- When you would die for the first time, instead you can choose not to and take a negative character trait.
- When you do die your "second" death you are dead and that becomes a problem for the whole party.
- You may cure yourself back from the negative trait you picked from defying death by doing XYZ, after which you are treated as never having defied death in the first place.

Ruleset can be found here: Defying Death - optional way to deal with PC death  

The idea is to get rid of people sitting out battles by being unconscious as well as give them incentive to go and pursue personal goals in the world should they choose to defy death as they now have to do something specific to not make things worse for the whole party when they do die for real as well as to rid themselves of the negative characteristics they pick up when they defy death.

If you wish you could even attach some sort of dismemberment system to this that every class would roll on when they choose to defy death, in which case the fighter disfigurement roll could obviously be ignored.

The sacred places of the earth

 As per Nickorsh_inck's (blog here)challenge where some of the residents of the OSR discord server would hit others with prompts and we'd write a blogpost based on then.

I demanded Kahva (blog here) for a promt to a post and was hit with this:

And thus we get to me finally getting around to writing this post for which I actually did have some ideas for already, but I've now once again had to flex those brain muscle things and either expand on the ideas I already had or make up some new additions.
With that being said, if you're reading this post then here's what I've got:

The sacred nature and church of Varchic

Varchic is the God-giant who lead his people out of a pit in the earth, creating land amidst the endless sea wherever he stepped and bestowing gifts of knowledge to his people so they may inhabit this new world he had led them onto.
It is said that Varchic has laid to rest after a hearty meal and having bestowed his people the means and knowledge to survive and thrive, with a whole mountain range having grown to cover him as he's slept.

The Foundation

The creation myth of the church tells that Varchic now lays sleeping under a range of mountains, and the commonly accepted on resting place for him among church officials is the holy mountain range of Foundation, named after the fact that the father of all land and stability is what these very mountains have formed upon and around. 
Each winter pilgrims make their journey as deep underground into the mountains as they can in order to be closer to the father of all mankind, hoping that that way he might hear their prayers over the howling wind and falling snow covering the mountain range. These pilgrims may spend even weeks underground depending on their devotion to Varchic, or the desire and need to have their prayers be heard.

The Sacred mines and tunnels

As discussed earlier, land is exclusive something bestowed by Varchic and thus considered a symbol of stability and the domain of the followers of Varchic.
For this reason, any mines must not be dug without first receiving the blessing of the church upon it. Long rituals where priests inquire Varchic for a permission to mine deep into the earth are required before any major digsite can be properly established, and it is not unheard of for prospective mining forays to get shut down after such inspection and ritual consultation about the area from priests of the church.

While requiring the blessigns of the church to begins excavations only a handful of mines and tunnels have been proclaimed to be truly holy in nature, but those that have are still to this day near limitless in their yield of whatever resources they had been established to mine for. 
Several of such mines are located along the mountain range of Foundation.

The holy church-capital, Ecclesiarchy of the Pit

Both the capital of faith and it's own church-governed state, the Ecclesiarchy of the Pit is said to have been the first site of worship for Varchic. Established around the pit that this God-giant first crawled out of and eventually grown into both a city and an amalgamation of chapels and cathedrals, it now completely surrounds an endless hole deep into the earth that spans nearly a mile in diameter.
Entry to the pit itself is considered the highest possible offense to the church and several people have been publicly tortured for weeks for such blatant disrespect against the Father who lead us all out of the pit in the first place.

The Pit itself is both revered as the most holy place on this continent save for Varchic himself sleeping under the mountains but also the largest taboo within the church for it represents the origin of where we came from, where our ancestors were lead to this land from and where we must never return lest we go against the will and intent of Varchic himself who clearly had deemed the Pit a place not suitable for him and his kin to continue living in.

Lesser places of holiness

While the Pit and the mountain range of Foundation are the two focal landmarks of worship, there exist several other structures and location that are likewise condisered to be holy by the church and it's followers.

River crossings, particularily bridges, are the most common of these holy sights and those tasked with maintaining them are exempt of taxation. Such bridge keepers are religious men or women, for the act of looking after the bridge is a form of prayer in itself.
Just like Varchic created land to fill the endless sea, his followers erect bridges to cross rivers so they may travel further and spread their civilization.

Natural caves that lead deep underground also hold some small signifigance to the church, seen as an open invitation to examine the work the God-giant Varchic created in order to separate the sea, and thus the Deep from his people and to give them a place to live.
These are not quite of the same significance as man-made digsites and mines and are often believed not to hold many resources as they rather are opporturnities for his followers to admire Varchic's handiworks.
Some smaller sects of the church would argue that such cave formations are indeed to be held in higher esteem than man-made ones and have made small shrines in some better known cave systems, but such believers are but a minor branch within the vast church of Varchic.

Burial sites are also considered sacred ground. The hole dug by funeral laborers that every child of Varchic gets lowered to at the end of their lifespan represents their return to where they have come from.
While the act of trying to descent into the Pit is considered heretical in life, in death the symbolism is that of returning to where one's ancestors once lived and from there being able to climb back to the world of living like the great God-giant Varchic once did as he lead his people to this world.

Diabolist - An attempt at a doomed spellcaster

 So I have hinted at this a few times in earlier posts, but last night I finally got the opporturnity to sit down and talk about the class idea with the person who gave me the base for the idea to begin with, and boy did we end up tweaking it in ways I could not have thought about by just myself alone.

This take is based on a blogpost I found while looking at what other people had done for adding extra classes into LotFP, which for the time is my system of choice.

I thus present to you, the Diabolist. A class where you share your body with an extradimensional being in exchange for power while the things inside your head try to shape their new flesh vessel to something more suitable for their tastes.
Here be link to the class: *clickety-click*

All of it is still largely un-tested with the first application of this class into a game will be on this coming friday, where the player who helped coming up with some of the class features will be taking it for a test drive to see how it handles in a dungeon.

Occultist from Darkest Dungeon

The church is rotten - The church is stability

 I really liked the implied religion stuff that spillway came up one night by just hurling all sorts of mad accusations at each other in the guise of believers of two different factions and have been considering implementing some version of the religions derived from it into this world that I'm currently plotting little oneshots or few session adventures.

While trying out world building by first coming up with a huge map and then trying to populate it I got the same frustration that I've felt before while trying to make something too big.
It seems like small things and their inevitable implied sum is what would probably work better, and that would also leave more gaps for players to fill in as well which I'm a big fan of, so here we have me coming up with some ideas extending from the Church of Varchic and it's offshoot cult of the Deep.

As with any conflict, there need be at least two sides opposing each other.
To possibly introduce a third one to the mix I will likely add in the perspective of nobles or some ruler when I get around to thinking and writing about those - likely on the occasion that I find myself needing my first larger settlement, but for the time being here are some rather opposing views of the Church of Varchic.

The church is rotten.
They collect tithe  from their followers so they may send it to Varchic who now rests beneath a mountain range where he's said to lay in rest and collect treasures of his people in proud admiration of what he has lead them to be.

The church is rotten.
They have bound us and our fellow countrymen to the ground that their whole church is built upon, ground that will surely one day crumble into the sea.
Advancements onto sea and sky are forbidden and heretical, leaving nothing but wagons and carts for us to build our commerce upon.

The church is rotten.
They're like parasitic organ to the society, feeding on their beliefs and fears as the obedient drones follow whatever they feed them.
The church keeps growing, ever bigger and expanding but what do they give to the people in return? Nothing but reasons to fear and follow them blindly.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

The church is stability.
They unite the loyal countrymen under a common belief and teach them lessons about Varchic, giving the masses a sense of someone watching over them and someone they should strive to make proud even when none others are looking.

The church is stability.
They look after the community, teach the masses and keep men in check so that our own curiosity doesn't drive us towards danger.
The heads of the church are wise men who know secrets from past generations passed from one to another and make wise rulings upon that knowledge.

The church is stability.
Where there is church there is civilization, and where there is civilization the men of Varchic strive and need not fear the Deep or it's echoes.
Thus the church is a symbol of safety, and where you see one you can rest assured knowing that you're being looked over.

Making a distinction between clerics and magic users

After toying with adding a new spellcaster class into Lamentations I ended up hacking the existing magic user a bit as well to differentiate them from how clerics cast their spells, details of which I'll explain to you below after catching you up to speed. 

This all began when a friend of mine mentioned that a warlock-like character class would be really cool to play in the kind of setting that LotFP implies which in turn led me to find this really cool post about hacking the elf class into a "diabolist", a person who acts as a host body for otherworldly beings and is thus able to cast magic-like effects.
So of course I went and put together a version of it which reads almost exactly like the one in the blogpost, except for the fact that I dropped all the dipping into fighter class that elf would normally get. The other difference I added to the hack was that when casting a spell the diabolist doesn't have enough points for they roll on the mutations table, save vs magic and on a failed save roll on a miscast table instead of straight up taking damage.

Oh, and I did make a neat little 1d20 table of random mutations that advance to up to three different stages for the diabolist which I'll probably share at some point.

With that done, I was thinking to myself that this diabolist would now be a spellcaster class which could gamble for way more powerful effects if they didn't care so much for their safety, but also wanted to come up with some way for magic users to roll on the miscast table as well.
After having let that thought sink somewhere to the depths of my brainstuffs I came upon ideas that other people had had for magic being just that bit more volatile and powerful in their systems and toying around with some ideas this is what I came up with:

When magic user goes to cast a spell, roll 3d6. Target number here will be 10 + (spell level - magic user level) - int modifier. If the Magic User fails by five or more they roll on the miscast table. If the Magic users fails but not by five or more, the spell fizzles OR they can choose to cast it and roll on the miscast table afterwards. On a successful test the spell is cast normally. Magic users can cast their memorized spells any number they wish per day.

 I might add in an extra bit about casting non-memorized (read: prepared) spells from spellbooks and such takes one extra action as they need to flip through the book to find their notes.

The purpose of this is to neatly give each caster a distinct feel to how they cast their magic: 
Clerical magic is reliable but not nearly as readily available, it was left untouched and as it is in the base rules..
Magic Users can weave spells as much as they wish but there will always be a chance of things going south.
Diabolist ended up as the middle ground where they have a pool of points to spend on reliably casting spells, after which they too can risk themselves (and potentially their party) to squeeze out more magic.

With that the chaotic magic now has less limitations but does include chances of it going out of control, while the lawful magic is very strict and limited but always acts as expected.

Tale of Mermaid - a play report

 I ran the thing. I applied players to my oneshot and it didn't absolutely get blown apart. They even claimed to have enjoyed it at the end.

Should be obvious but if you're looking to play through this at some point, maybe don't read any further as we're about to go over what happened in the three hours these two people took to play through the adventure.

Tale of Mermaid - An investigation based oneshot

We began the game as dusk was turning into night and the PCs arrived at this small port town by the sea. They were guided towards the tavern by some locals and walked in to notice that the place was packed absolutely full of sailors. A large fishing vessel had just recently pulled in and these men were now entertaining the townspeople with tales about mermaids they claimed to have seen.
The PCs found themselves a table and got a room for the night but hanged around on the tavern-floor of this establishment, taking in conversations and rumors these sailors were telling.

Before heading off to get their rest for the night, an old sailor was sent crashing against the table the PCs were sitting by as a result of some more-or-less drunken fighting and disagreements by the sailors of two different opinions on how these alleged mermaids they had seen had looked like, angelic or horrific.
The man gathered himself as he left the tavern, muttering something about showing just how beautiful the mermaids had been.

Next morning the players woke up to a pair of guardsmen knocking on their door, demanding to know where they had been last night.
After properly waking up the party headed downstairs for a breakfast and to figure out what these guards were waking them up for as they had almost gotten through the most heavily scripted part of the intro to the adventure.
A short time after getting their breakfast, an older woman rushed in to the tavern asking the tavernkeeper if he had seen her daughter who was supposed to have been out last night with the sailor who had turned up dead (this sailor had been why the guards had had interest in the PCs). After the tavernkeeper hadn't been able to offer the woman much help, she quickly scanned the room for anyone looking like they would be of help and turned towards the PCs, pleading for their help with her missing daughter and explaining the situation a bit better to the players. They now had a drowned sailor and a missing woman who was supposed to have been with the sailor last night.

The pair decided to head towards the beach where the drowned body had been found to see if they could find anything useful, and after arriving there decided to question a fisher mending his nets which lead them to learn that the body had indeed been found here and that the sailor and the missing woman had been in love with each other.
Not getting much more useful information out of the man, they now headed towards the docks to question some of the other sailors.

Arriving at the docks, they mostly heard more tales about the mermaids but also a mention that the older sailor who got knocked into their table last night hadn't been seen anywhere today either.
After their little success with the sailors they decided to try the ship's captain, who they with some help from the sailors found from his cabin.
The poor man was woken up by their arrival and in a terrible condition that only got worse as they explained the situation with the dead sailor and missing woman, but couldn't be of much help apart from giving the PCs some more information on the drowned sailor and advising them that the guards around this town were not people to put too much faith in.

By this point the investigation had come to bit of a standstill so the PCs returned to the tavern for a meal and a hope at another angle of approach.
The people at the tavern weren't as lively as last night as almost everyone in the town had heard the news by now and from what could be overheard about the conversations was that the few townspeople in the establishment were starting to suspect Grahm, the old sailor who was involved in a fight last night.
The players quickly picked up on this and decided to question the sailors, now armed with a new lead and it did quickly become apparent that Grahm had indeed been involved in the fight but so had the dead sailor as he was one of the people on the "winning" side of the little brawl.
They then proceeded to ask all they could about this old sailor and learned that he had always been bit of a weird one that nobody really got along with and that he supposedly still lived at a fishing hut he owned just outside the town whenever the shipping vessel came in to dock.

This of course lead the PCs to head towards the fishing hut, near where they found the occasional heavy footprints leading to the hut but none leaving it.
The place reeked of dead fish as they got close and the inside of the hut was dark and rather barren, but a low humming or chanting sound could be heard from the basement.
After a bit of creative thinking the PCs picked the hut's window open to sneak inside, revealing dozens of crude drawings of women, fish and the combinations of these two laying on surfaces of the room and a trapdoor in a corner where the song or chant was coming from.
They came up with a clever plan of trying to cause a ruckus outside to trick whoever was down there to come up and had they continued it past their first attempt that might just have happened, but after kicking some barrels together outside the hut all they got was heavy footsteps from the basement floor, a pause, and another short pair of heavy footsteps before the low chanting picked up again.

Now all they had left was to go down the trapdoor if they wanted to find out what was going on.
A quick peek to the basement before descending down the ladder revealed a mound of something as well as a shelf littered with books and illuminated by faint candlelight .
Going down into the room itself the mound revealed itself to be a pile of fish guts, these piles seemed to litter the room that was nearly surrounded in shelves filled with strange sea creatures in jars as well as more drawings and books. The middle of the room was a table with even larger pile of fish innards, and there on the other side of the room was a dark figure hunched over another table with several candles and some sort of shape laid on the table.

Approaching as sneakily as they could, a creaky floorboard gave the PCs away and the figure turned around, revealing him to indeed be Grahm the old sailor who was now looking a mixture of surprised, scared and angry as he demanded to know why these people were in his home.
Grahm promptly turned back to grab a rusty harpoon from the nearby shadows that he brandished, demanding that the PCs leave his home as they shouldn't be there.
An attempt at peaceful questioning was had by the PCs, but Grahm was having none of it and charged at them with his harpoon.

The fight was over almost disappointingly fast. Grahm missed his initial charge and the specialist rushed in to wrestle the weapon out of the old man's grasp, followed by the fighter pummeling him while trying to keep within non-lethal means.
The following rounds consisted of the specialist performing more wrestling actions against the old sailor and holding him in place as the fighter went on to give him a beating, and promptly after Grahm had given up and been tied up and gagged as all the PCs were getting out of him was a lot of cussing and crazy claims about the beauty of the mermaids.
The fighter went off to inform the local guards of this man's deeds after the two of them had witnessed the spectacle on the table that Grahm had been facing when they first entered the room;
The missing woman, head drowned in a basin full of sea water and her lower body mangled and half sewn into a tail end of a fish with fish skins.

This is where we ended the oneshot, the PCs came out of the adventure with seven silver pieces they had found by going through the old sailor's hut for valuables as our adventurer's were nearly broke.
Other notable loot was a spellbook that they couldn't read that Grahm had supposedly used in whatever he had been doing, some remedies and herbs from the mournful apothecarist form delivering news about her daughter, as well as a reward of 1,000 silver pieces from the guard for apprehending Grahm.

Overall it felt like the session went over smoothly, which I was rather pleasantly surprised by as this was the first thing I had written so far and I'm glad the players enjoyed their little investigation adventure.

Definitely will try to run this again for some other people, or maybe include as a side adventure in a campaign if I ever get around to having one of those.