Another souls-like heartbreaker to the pile

This is something I had worked on very lowkey whenever an inspiration happened to strike, and roughly a month back I felt like I finally had something solid enough for it to be put through some testing.
Said testing kind of fell through so I'm instead sharing the draft for the game as well as the notes I had prepared for what adventuring the PCs could have gone through in the test game.

The basic idea I had for this little mess of homebrew was to try to write rules for a world rather than make up a new system.
Something relatively modular that could be dropped on top of most roleplaying systems to shift the game towards the type of mood and themes I had in mind for my take on the whole souls-like vibe.

Blogposts without pictures are boring,
hence you get this thing I edited together

I wanted to go pursuing that kind of warm fairytale-like feeling horror, a world where memories work as currency as well as a way to make yourself stronger but will also unavoidably shape you as you claiming memories that aren't yours will ultimately result in you becoming something and someone totally different than the person who you were at the start of your journey.

That being said, the current draft for that "system" can be found here should you wish to see for yourself what I had managed to cobble together:
https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1i17NqpKaWPS7BahEJ98NPKl_g20NC2Fv3WdoxDoQmZk/edit?usp=sharing

Obviously it will still need a lot of messing around with to get it to produce the desired feel. For example currently the Bad Blood idea isn't really doing much unless the PCs are already cleawing through villages worth of people so the treshold for gaining levels of bad blood should probably be lowered significantly.
Another potential idea to make Bad Blood more of an inner struggle between your violent urges and humanity would be to change it to something like this:
"Whenever you consciously cause the death of another self-aware being, roll under your current level of Bad Blood. On a failure, gain a level of Bad Blood."
That would probably lean towards the other extreme, where the PCs would accumulate bad blood way too fast though.

The idea of using solely memories to give the PCs any "advancements" or even special moves and skills was something that I really enjoyed in play both because it was fun to come up with small snippets of lore and special effects to accompany them, but also because with memories I could dictate the speed at which the PCs would get more powerful, as well as in which manner they would get more powerful.

The Adventure Notes

As mentioned, here you can also find the notes I had scrabbled together for myself to run this test game before it completely fell apart due to lack of players:
https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1Ae_-8ZmWTckEJd3xTNsWIeW9gur30ZOS4CF8Jq_HaMk/edit?usp=sharing

This will also require me to share the ideaboard I had been slowly gathering for this game over several months so you can get a better idea of what kind of imagery and base ideas I had been working with since the notes were not really written for someone else to run things off of:
https://jamboard.google.com/d/1gchK_8IJU46hn1WHvBVBISkNMf6Q7_5VaUmQHVLJ5q0/edit?usp=sharing

I hope that you will get some use out of these, and if you do I would love to hear what you managed to make or run off of the stuff presented here.

Another LotFP styled weird magic spell

 So I recently remembered a tracklist that I put together with some friendly people for us to eventually make spells out of each one of them.
Unfortunately the original effort to do so kinda died down a good several months ago, but hey there was some music in there that I hand't listened to before and the song titles were really interesting, so I thought to myself "Hey, why don't I use some of these to make more spells. Maybe even complete this as my version of a spell list based on these tracks."

And that is what I'd like to present to you all today, another spell made from that tracklist. The spell in question is based on a track titled "I Don’t Want to Drink Tea So Tasteless That Even the Intent to Kill Will Not Come to Mind While Drinking" by Keiji Haino, Jim O’Rourke and Oren Ambarchi.
For those interested in checking it out, here's a youtube link.

(This is the second spell out of the tracklist by now, the last one can be found here.)

Camillia Sinensis, Tea (Russian) by Sue Snell
 - Wellcome Collection,
United Kingdom - CC BY.
        https://www.europeana.eu/en/item/9200579/x85czpnv

(I Don't Want To Drink) Tea So Tasteless That Even The Intent To Kill Will Not Come To Mind While Drinking

It is rumoured that the original intent of this ritual was to detach one's own senses from the physical world so that they may drift to the domain of spirits and otherworldly powers in order to consult them. Commonly accepted theory is that either through the failings of whoever conceived of it or from the failings of those who taught and passed on the ritual to others in their craft the results of it became less and less reliable.

In it's current form, this evocation is more often used as a powerful sedative than means to consult with otherworldly powers, although some people claim to have met beings not of this world while under the effects of the brew procured by the ritual.

To perform the evocation, the magi should first start by preparing tea in whatever fashion they or the effect's intended recipient would prefer to drink it. The drink is to be prepared in a container reinforced with a magical ward, lest the powers evoced be prone to intruding with additional or unintended effects.

Once the drink has been brought to boil, seeds of three poisonous plants are to be added in, one seed from each. The type of plant matters not, as long as the species are distinctly different, as this only serves to loosen the bond between the body and the consciousness of the drinker.

The magi should then gently address the power they are evocing, asking them to join whoever partaces of the drink in the activity.

Once all of these steps of preparing the drink are complete, the otherwise unassuming batch of tea will have transformed into a brew capable of reducing even the fiercest warrior or sharpest of strategist into an empty husk barely capable of independent action and completely unable to feel any sensations on their body for the short duration that their consciousness corrodes away untill it starts to slowly reconstruct itself.

This ritual also has the added effect of removing any taste from the brewed tea, which is why it is often adviced to prepare it with the smell of the ingredients in mind in attempt to trick the drinker's mind into simulating a taste for the brew.

Note: The brew only works if served warm. It doesn't matter if it is re-heated, the magick will still remain within, but if served cold it is nothing but regular poison.

For the hour following the ingestion of the tea, the following effects take place as the magick slowly wears off:

• Initial Effect - Unable to think, completely blank, forget any current intentions and planned courses of action
• 10min in - Able to move a limb or speak in slurring voice with great effort (1-in-6)
• 20min in - Move a limb or speak slurred 2-in-6
• 30min in - Move a limb or speak slurred 3-in-6
• 40min in - Move a limb or speak normally 4-in-6, feeling returns
• 50min in - Able to move entire body very sluggishly w/o a test, 2-in-6 for any quick movement
• 1h in - Freed from the effect
  

Mishaps - (In addition to regular causes for mishap, these can also happen if the container the tea is prepared in lacks a sufficient magical ward)

1. The magical ward was faulty, the power evoced found an imperfection in it and managed to slip in through the cracks. Whoever drinks of this tea for the first time will find the magi's chosen power pouring in a fraction of itself into them, turning the drinker into a puppet for the evoced power to act through in the physical world. 
2. Not content with just one person to share the moment with, the power evoced in preparing the brew compells the magi to partake in the drink whenever they serve it to someone.
   Disposing of the drink if there are still servings of it left would risk upsetting the power evoced in it's preparation.
3. Something went wrong with the preparation of the brew, either the evocation was a total failure or the process had a flaw in it. Whatever the case, the magi has only managed to procure common poison rather than a concoction that would sever one's consciousness from their body momentarily.
4. The evocation wasn't a one-sided commanding of the chosen power, instead it set it's own condition. The magi is made aware that the prepared batch of tea must be all served as a lavish tea party, one serving per guest, if they wish to keep on the good side of the power they had chosen to evoce.
5. The tea works as intended as far as the magi or anyone in the physical world is concerned. However, the consciousness of whoever partakes of the brew is whisked away to wherever the evoced power may lay. Depending on the type of power evoced, meeting it may result in anything from the collapse of one's psyche to a pleasant conversation with it for a short while.
6. In addition to becoming entirely tasteless, the tea takes on a foul and muddy colour and slightly acrid smell.

Musings about running games and the stuff I like and dislike

For the last few days I've been thinking a lot about what kind of games and play I find myself enjoying, what kind of games I run currently as well as the crowd I am running those games for, and I caught myself in the thought of my running of games for people has been shifting from what it used to be when I started this whole gamemastering thing.

And it wasn't exactly a positive thought either, an analogue that lingered in my mind for a day or so as I felt it around and tried to fit it into words went along the lines of me having found myself running games more and more to meet player expectations and wants much akin to how one might try their best to seek out acceptance and lick up to others in high school, trying to do one's best to not offend or upset anyone over the fear of getting tossed out of the group.
A disgusting thought really, which has lead to me trying to air out and re-examine the way I run games at my table so that I could get that initial enjoyment of doing my own thing and shifting the games back towards the things I enjoy rather than trying to cater for people.
After all, I've got two groups that I've been running for for over a year and they claim to have enjoyed it since the beginning.

Another thing that's prompted looking at things a bit differently and re-examining what exactly I find so fun and interesting about roleplaying games is the sudden influx of 5e-minded players that my ongoing West Marches game has been getting.
There's just something about people gushing about what they can do within the confines of a rulebook and reciting me these super exciting rules interactions and spell comboes that has been steadily eating away at my interest even to the relatively rules-lite Lamentations of the Flame Princess that I run the game with.
It is the exact thing I ran away from 5e for, at least every other session I would play in one of the players would start going on and on about this cool build they are going for and how in two more levels they can do this stupid rules interaction to break this or that at which point I always have to wonder if the player even is interested in playing with the fiction presented in the game or if they are just playing with the rules and trying to break and bend them to the best of their ability by themself.
Kinda like playing solitaire when everyone else is trying to play poker, they make that game for themself about nothing but themself.

... I suppose this turned out as more of a rant that I intended, but airing out thoughts and grievances is good for oneself I've heard, or something along those lines

Because blogposts without pictures are boring - image manipulation by me

 The actual self-reflections and such

Yes, to keep this from just being a case of "old man yells at clouds" I should try to articulate some conclusions I had landed at based on these last few days of mulling over this stuff.

First and foremost, for me a rulebook is a fallback. What I mean with this is that I read the entirety of LotFP Rules & Magic book back when I first acquired it as I was getting into the OSR, but since then I've barely flipped through it other than for spell descriptions as I believe I've got the general logic and feel of what kind of rulings to lean towards.
The actual rules of a roleplaying game are the last thing I want to discuss about, especially when the fiction is unfolding at the table.

This hadn't come up in the context of OSR games before because I feel like a lot of people in this sub-genre of ttrpgs shares the same or at least similiar approach. The fiction dictates the play and what happens, not the rules.

On the flipside the more 5e-leaning players I've come to run games for confine themselves within the rules, anything not written in them isn't given a second thought and only things written in the rules can be done seems to be their approach to roleplaying games.

I also find that I tend to lean towards running what I had in one conversation likened to "walking simulator adjacent" games, games where combat is sparse and the pace of the game isn't exactly a fast one. The players are on the driver's seat and dictate when they want to move to a next scene or towards doing something rather than me pushing them along to hurry them up in order to keep the game going, which is something that the West Marches style rubs against in fact, as every session should be a self-contained oneshot so I often worry about trying to add atmosphere taking up too much of the play time.

This might be another contributing factor to why the West Marches games I run tend to feel to "hollow" to me, but it's also an issue that I don't know if I could start to address in the format of that specific game.

Another thing that I kind of touched in the above rant is the stuff that I myself find fun and interesting in roleplaying games.
Personally I am really in love with the idea of what I like to call "misery porn". People going through absolutely hellish situations, making sacrifices as they go and clinging to life with gritted teeth.

There are of course ways to convey this at a table, either with or without rules and procedures specifically for reinforcing or enforcing that kind of play, but the one issue I always have with is that I keep pulling my punches out of concern that the players won't like it or will feel it unfair or whatnot.
I want to inflict absolute misery on the player's characters, but I am afraid that will upset the players.

This is of course one of those "just talk with your players" thing, but even when I have done so it's still not managed to get me out of that high school mentality I mentioned earlier of wanting or needing to make sure I don't accidentally upset or offend anyone so I don't get stoned out of the room.