Quote from: AsenRG;859623OK, that's the best one so far, as far as I'm concerned, but I'm going to need a couple days to mull over it.

The rest of them up until here? You can easily do it with other systems, in fact cursing the oathbreaker is an explicit rule in at least one system I can think of, LotW.

Yeah, although in theory I'm going to build a fairy tale OSR hack from the ground up, realistically considering how much difficulty I'm having squeezing in enough time for doing this WIR that's a long long way away so having things that I can easily do with other systems is fine. Little stuff like a vorpal pen knife could be lots of fun to add.

But I agree with you, that bit's my favorite thing as well.

Basically I'm coming at social skills from the other side.

Most systems with social skills try to model how good PCs are at bullshitting people into doing what they want. Instead what I'm trying to do is build a very simple system for deciding "will this NPC take this course of action"? You can plug in courses of action that the PCs suggest but there's nothing special about the PCs suggesting them, you could plug in any sort of proposal into the system.

Think it works especially well in a fairy tale context since in fairy tales people's desires are so close to the surface and the characters seem to have such a thin filter of rationality and foresight that desires get pretty much instantly translated into action.

Moves the standard PC/NPC interaction away from PC bullshitting and towards negotiating agreements, which I think I like better in any case.

As far as the point of building what amounts to a simple AI sub-system, I really like the kind of OSR DMing in which the DM is a referee who steps back, shuts up and mostly lets the game run itself. Having a simple AI system to help me decide what NPCs do is good for the same reason that morale systems are good as they take some decisions out of my hands and let me referee instead of being a story teller. I think it's also cool to be able to put things like:

Desires
-The Moon.
-Magical harps.
-The Death of Any Humans Who I Smell.

On an NPC stat line.

Quote from: Daztur;858647Fairy Tale 9: The Twelve Brothers
This is a weird one.

There are twelve princes and the queen is pregnant. The king says if a girl is born he`ll kill all of his sons. So the queen tells the boys to hide in the woods and that she`ll signal them when the baby is born.

It`s a girl so the princes decide to live in the woods and kill any girls they meet. The princess eventually finds out she has brothers and goes into woods and meets one.

She talks her way out of getting killed and agrees to do all the housework in their cave and proves to the brothers that she`s their sister.

Things go well until she picks twelve flowers which are really her brothers which makes them turn into birds. The only way out of this is to not talk for 12 years.

So she decides to stay in a tree. A king meets her and decides to marry her. Her mother in-law bad-mouths her and because she can`t speak to defend herself her husband plans to burn her at the stake.

Then at the last minute the 12 years run out and her brothers become human agan and everything gets explained and her mother in-law gets thrown into a barrel of boiling oil and poisonous snakes and everyone except her lives happily ever after.

OK, first of all WTF? there so much stuff that gets thrown in here without any explanation. Why is the king so randomly murderous? Why does picking flowers turn people into birds? Why do kings keep on marryng random mute girls they find in the forest (this happens again and again in fairy tales I haven`t got to yet)? Why is being mute important for breaking curses? Why put poisonous snakes and boiling oil in the same barrel? Wouldn`t that kill all the snakes?

Not sure about why he decides to kill them. There's probably a detail missing. Even something like "they were all born after he came back from trips" would explain it.

Picking those specific flowers was likely a geasa. She might not have known about it, if it was part of a prediction/curse, but it was there.

Kings marry random mute girls because...pick one.

• They're mute and don't have apparent mothers, so calm is assured.
• They're weird and interesting, and finding them yourself in the forest makes them feel some kind of accomplishment.
• The princes themselves believe that nothing happens without a reason, and if the new one is nice enough, it's possible the gods have sent her to you for this very reason?
• This is a tale women have been telling to each other and their kids to pass the time during work and the prince marrying the random girl appeals to them?
• Some combination of the above?

Muteness is serious business. Such motives exist in our (well, mine) folkloric heritage, too, so these are probably better explanations.

• Muteness means contemplation, purifying your spirit to reject the curse.
• Muteness is denying yourself something important, putting yourself at the mercy and understanding of strangers, and thus is a kind of redemption (for transgression against the geasa).
• Muteness repulses evil spirits which are attracted to the sounds of talking and laughter, and vice versa.

They're not thrown in to kill her. In China, a Snake is one of the Five Odious (or repulsice) Creatures or the Five Poisons. So it's symbolic for "killing her poisonous words with her" and "you're dirty bitch and will rest with the fried dirty animals".
It's not enough to kill the body. You need to hurt the spirit beyond it, too. Be thourough.
Let me see how you're going to do that in a game.

QuoteAnyone have any explanation for any of this?

Hope the above helped.

QuoteThis got me thinking about the nature of fairy tale kingship and Korean geomancy. Bear with me here, I`m going somewhere with this.

Way down in the hyeol

If I understand pungsu jiri (Korean feng shui) correctly, the earth itself has chakra points from which gi (qi) flows. Building your house on these is generally a good idea (the first Korean geomancer directed a temple-building project to harness the gi of the entire nation, which is a lot more badass than finding the best place to put your sofa).

HOWEVER, if bad stuff goes down on top of a hyeol it gets corrupted and becomes a fountain of bad mojo until it gets cleansed.

OK, let`s translate this into fairy tale terms. The king is the land and the land is the king. This is central. A king`s castle is then a fountain of good mojo that sustains the land and keeps Chaos at bay. The king has an instinctual knowledge of what happens around his castle and limited power over his land (think the king and the jewel of Amber). By hunting and patrolling the borders of their land, the king can push his civilizing influence into the surrounding wilderness.

BUT if tragedy strikes the royal family or if the king loses his way this mojo becomes corrupted and the land becomes twisted and Chaotic.

This also works the other way, bad things happening in the land twist the king`s mind and pushes him into madness and evil. This is partly why so many fairy tale kings are such aasholes.

Also royal corruption can be cleansed but this is hard. It often requires bizarre conditions or strange quests, which explains by suitors have to do all kinds of crazy shit in fairy tales.

The role of the queen is important here too. The king`s rule is a marriage to the land so the queen is a stand-in for the land. Perhaps this is why what appears to be the main way that kings find brides it to stumble across random women while out hunting. Have to develop this more, but it`s a start. If the queen is the land at least as much as the king, you want a badass queen who can survive in the land.

That's true.
And it's a possible angle. You should talk to a real scholar about it, though.

Quote from: Daztur;859663Yeah, although in theory I'm going to build a fairy tale OSR hack from the ground up, realistically considering how much difficulty I'm having squeezing in enough time for doing this WIR that's a long long way away so having things that I can easily do with other systems is fine. Little stuff like a vorpal pen knife could be lots of fun to add.

Check Sorcerer and its supplements, as well as Legends of the Wulin. Don't hate me for the latter:D! It's worth it when you manage to plow through the mechanics.

QuoteBut I agree with you, that bit's my favorite thing as well.

Basically I'm coming at social skills from the other side.

Most systems with social skills try to model how good PCs are at bullshitting people into doing what they want. Instead what I'm trying to do is build a very simple system for deciding "will this NPC take this course of action"? You can plug in courses of action that the PCs suggest but there's nothing special about the PCs suggesting them, you could plug in any sort of proposal into the system.

It was time someone did that. That's all I'm going to say.
(Now I just want someone to adapt a similar system for combat. But that can wait, really, focus on the social stuff now:)).

QuoteThink it works especially well in a fairy tale context since in fairy tales people's desires are so close to the surface and the characters seem to have such a thin filter of rationality and foresight that desires get pretty much instantly translated into action.

People in the Middle Ages had this trait more prominantly than we do today.

QuoteAs far as the point of building what amounts to a simple AI sub-system, I really like the kind of OSR DMing in which the DM is a referee who steps back, shuts up and mostly lets the game run itself. Having a simple AI system to help me decide what NPCs do is good for the same reason that morale systems are good as they take some decisions out of my hands and let me referee instead of being a story teller.

Agreed. I came up with this system of GMing when trying to run a White Wolf game. Actually I only got interested in the OSR when I heard it's the assumed default for GMing, up until then I was starting to think it's something I've discovered;).

QuoteI think it's also cool to be able to put things like:

Desires
-The Moon.
-Magical harps.
-The Death of Any Humans Who I Smell.

On an NPC stat line.

That helps, too:D!

Fairy Tale 11: Little Brother and Little Sister

Quite a bit of D&D-able magic to chew on with this one.

A brother and sister have a terrible step-mother so they run away. Unfortunately their step-mother is a witch so she uses magic to make a cursed stream come out of the ground.

The brother drinks it and gets turned into a deer. After crying for three days the sister makes a nice home for them in a cave and camps out there for several years with her brother the deer (who doesn't seem to age, strange that).

Later the king stumbles across the girl while hunting and decides to marry her and they soon have a son. The step-mom is shocked to find that her step-daughter hasn't been eaten by beasts after all and decides to go kill and replace her with her own daughter illusioned-up to look like the queen.

The works but the queen comes back as a ghost three times to check on her son and brother and on the third night the king finds out what's been going on and "embraces" her, which causes her to come back to life.

The witch gets burned of course which breaks the curse on the brother.

What can we get from this one?

Polymorphed people don't age.

They never get any older. That random ferret that's always hanging around the inn might have been a prince that was polymorphed CENTURIES ago.

Fairy tale magic-users

Well this has clearest example of a D&D-style magic user yet: the witchy step-mom. She can summon cursed streams and create illusions. But both of these come with a catch, the sort of catch that'd be interesting to insert into a lot of D&D spells without necessarily telling the players about them...

The illusion spell wraps the witch's daughter with the appearance of the dead queen. The down side of this is that it appears to anchor the queen's ghost to the location and allow for the possibility that the queen can be resurrected.

The catch of the cursed stream is that the curse is broken by the witch's death. Interestingly the number of days (3) that the girl weeps for her brother is the same as the number of days (3) that she comes back as a ghost. If the king hadn't revived her on the third day she would've faded away entirely. Human emotion is vital here.

But how to D&Dify this? This most obvious way is to have the magical effects of casters die with them. A simple way of doing this is tying lasting effects to spell slots: you don't get the spell slot back until the lasting effect is gone. And if you're dead you don't have any spell slots left and the effect goes *poof.* That gives casters the power to do all kinds of cool stuff without having them let loose all kinds of crazy fire works every single day: most of their spell slots are tied up maintaining the duration of various spells.

But what about the interaction of human emotion and magic?

Still have to work out the details but maybe give PCs and NPCs the ability to invest very powerful emotional bonds with magic power by dedicating a spell slot to it that can then be used to do powerful things (like resurrect yourself) if that relationship is attacked (for example you being forcibly separated from your loved one).

This could work in an interesting way if run as a complete black box (especially with an adult DM and child players). Have classes labelled strong (fighter), smart (thief) and lucky (magic-user) and don't tell the player with the "lucky" player a thing about how the magical system works but count any emotional outbursts on the part of the player as the character casting a spell and put in place some guidelines about how to do that.

For example: a third level Lucky character has two first level and one second level spell slot. The player really loves their character's pet dog so the DM decides this counts as casting a second level Emotional Bond spell. This spell is always on (which means the second level spell slot is filled in and out of commission as long as the player still loves that dog) which provides benefits like the dog being really smart, absolutely loyal, really easy to find if lost or kidnapped, etc. etc. The death of the dog would provide a powerful one-time magical effect of some sort (powerful angry dog ghost?). The character is also an ordained priest which allows them to cast the Sacrament spell at-will (see post 25 of this thread). The character then has one free first level spell slot that can be used daily to do things like Appeal and call in favors from talking animals (see post 8 of this thread).

All of these mechanics whir away in the background without the player knowing all of the details: they just know that they have an awesome dog, if they bury people they won't come back as ghosts (usually) and often lucky stuff happens when they get upset.

I'm inching towards a spell slot economy in which spell slots can power a lot of fairy tale-isms, including stuff that people don't usually think of as magical. I like where this is going, I just need to nail down the specifics eventually.

Marriage to the Land

One thing I touched on in post 28 of this thread is how I want to emphasize Fisher King mechanics ("the king is the land and the land is the king"). A part of this would be a symbolic marriage to the land and in these fairy tales we see kings marrying random beautiful girls they meet in the woods again and again and again and again. And always while hunting. We also see people being shocked (like the evil step-mom) in this story be shocked the said girls don't get eaten by wild beasts.

From that we can tell:
-The woods are a dangerous place full of dangerous beasts.
-Kings go hunting there all the time. Part of the job description.
-Some girls can spend YEARS there without being harmed. They must be really badass.
-Kings really really like to marry said girls.

On the flip side when random nobodies marry princesses then always:
-The king has no sons (conversely some kings have only sons and flip out murderously when a daughter is born to them).
-The random nobody generally comes from far away.
-The random nobody has to do some crazy-ass task to win the princess's hand. The princesses mostly seem to prove they're worthy by being able to survive unscathed for years in scary places.

I feel like I'm this close to coming up with a royal marriage/fisher king sub-system for fairy tale D&D but I can't quite make it all come together. There's obviously some gender essentialism baked deep into the metaphysics here, just need to tease how how it's operating here and D&D-ify it.

Think brain, think. Will sleep on this and try to take another wack at it tomorrow. Interesting that most all royals either have only sons or only daughters and the only exception to this results in murderous madness. That's got to be the seed here. Think, think, think.

Up next: Rapunzel

Posted at the same time. Let me delay sleep a bit longer and respond to you as we seem to be working in parallel.

Quote from: AsenRG;859682Not sure about why he decides to kill them. There's probably a detail missing. Even something like "they were all born after he came back from trips" would explain it.

Picking those specific flowers was likely a geasa. She might not have known about it, if it was part of a prediction/curse, but it was there.

For the king who wants to kill all of his sons if a daughter is born, it's interesting that he says he has no interest in killing them if a thirteenth son is born. There seems to be some crazy need for gender-matched royal offspring.

For the flowers, in the story it seems a bit deeper than just a curse as the girl is told that those flowers ARE her brothers.

I love all the things in fairy tales that don't make any sense. Some of my best world building has come from screwing up and contradicting myself in front of players and then, instead of backtracking, making up some crazy explanation that explains away the contraction. Fairy tale dream logic taps into the same part of my brain.

Quote from: AsenRG;859682Kings marry random mute girls because...pick one.

• They're mute and don't have apparent mothers, so calm is assured.
• They're weird and interesting, and finding them yourself in the forest makes them feel some kind of accomplishment.
• The princes themselves believe that nothing happens without a reason, and if the new one is nice enough, it's possible the gods have sent her to you for this very reason?
• This is a tale women have been telling to each other and their kids to pass the time during work and the prince marrying the random girl appeals to them?
• Some combination of the above?

Muteness is serious business. Such motives exist in our (well, mine) folkloric heritage, too, so these are probably better explanations.

• Muteness means contemplation, purifying your spirit to reject the curse.
• Muteness is denying yourself something important, putting yourself at the mercy and understanding of strangers, and thus is a kind of redemption (for transgression against the geasa).
• Muteness repulses evil spirits which are attracted to the sounds of talking and laughter, and vice versa.

For the first list I'm inching towards third. Marrying random girls you find in the woods because god(s) sent them matches in with the "marriage to the land" stuff I'm trying to puzzle though better than marrying some girl because she has great tracts of land.

Love the second list. For fairy tale-ify D&D you really need to muddy the water between magical and mundane stuff, a line that's often much to clear in D&D. You can do that by making mundane stuff (like not talking) have magical power and have magic that's subtle and not obvious (like making love magical).

Quote from: AsenRG;859682They're not thrown in to kill her. In China, a Snake is one of the Five Odious (or repulsice) Creatures or the Five Poisons. So it's symbolic for "killing her poisonous words with her" and "you're dirty bitch and will rest with the fried dirty animals".
It's not enough to kill the body. You need to hurt the spirit beyond it, too. Be thourough.

Oooh, I like that. My idea of breaking a curse by just killing the witch is not fairy tale enough, you have to kill her spirit. Exactly! The explains all of the insane deaths of witches in fairy tales (like the dancing in white-hot metal shoes until you die). Many thanks, that goes into the pile.

Quote from: AsenRG;859682And it's a possible angle. You should talk to a real scholar about it, though.

I have some books on Korean shamanism sitting around, will have to hit them next. Mixing them and the Brother Grimm at random would be a lot of fun.

QuoteCheck Sorcerer and its supplements, as well as Legends of the Wulin. Don't hate me for the latter! It's worth it when you manage to plow through the mechanics.

From what I know about Sorcerer it has a lot of the kind of abstraction that gets under my skin in a lot of games. Maybe I should take another look at it, one of the reasons I like OSR stuff so much is it makes the specifics matter so much more than in a lot of other RPGs but there's a lot of things to learn elsewhere.

Don't know LofW. *Google searches* Aaaaah, its basically Weapons of the Gods II, have heard a lot of interesting things about that game but have never read it. The TvTropes page about it has some interesting tidbits and a lot of overlap with Korean metaphysics (of course massive influence here from China) so useful if I make a weird German/Korean/Russian(?) fairy tale melange.

Quote(Now I just want someone to adapt a similar system for combat. But that can wait, really, focus on the social stuff now:)).

Hmmmmmmm, build off morale mechanics and make a simple AI system for helping GMs determine NPC combat actions? Or are you thinking along a different track?

QuoteAgreed. I came up with this system of GMing when trying to run a White Wolf game. Actually I only got interested in the OSR when I heard it's the assumed default for GMing, up until then I was starting to think it's something I've discovered;).

What I've noticed is, as a general rule, OSR games are a lot more about the world than about characters. In a lot of OSR games its perfectly OK for characters to be complete cyphers or even not have names while that would completely hamstring a lot of indie-type games. You can just see it looking through the page count of, say, OSRIC vs. FATE. The bulk of OSRIC is about what the world does to your characters while the bulk of FATE is about what your characters do to the world.

If you look at old school social mechanics (reaction rolls, morale rules, even goofy little rules like the (in)famous Random Harlot table say things like prostitutes have a 15% of making up random BS in an attempt to get a reward. None of these rules are really about what PCs can do, they're all about what the world is doing to them.

Now look at indie social mechanics, they're ALL about what the PCs can do. They generally focus on giving mechanics for the ability of PCs to influence people.

This is really out of step with OSR-style play so a lot of people are really leery about social mechanics, period. But that doesn't mean that you can't make OSR social mechanics that fit an OSR game, you just have to make them all about what the NPCs decide to do to the PCs and not about all the cool stuff PCs can do.

In fairy tale terms you can't really influence NPCs in the first place. They all have really strong desires and no real barrier between desire and action. Getting a fairy tale NPC to ignore the things is wants most because the PC is really good at BSing, is like derailing a train with a toothpick, it's just not going to work.

So you can't influence them, not really, but you can cut deals with them, mislead them with half-truths (but not outright lies, unless they're in writing of course...) and screw them over with technicalities.

Before hitting the next fairy tale, I want to flesh out some of my previous ideas.

NPC Desires

This is what I posted about before as a replacement for social mechanics.

In fairy tales characters have strong desires and few breaks on them. In game terms, each NPC has three desires representing the things they're most obsessed with, with especially single-minded NPCs having fewer.

Examples of a Desire could be anything from "peanuts" to "the whole world and everything in it" depending on an NPC. A random desire table would be a useful tool here.

Generally if an NPC sees a way to obtain something they desire they'll grab ahold of it almost immediately. The only thing that gives NPCs pause is if their desires conflict.

How the PCs come in contact with NPC Desires is when they want NPCs to do something. Look at what the PCs are proposing and add up the following modifiers:
+1 Fulfilling a desire (for example giving a goblin who has a Desire for peanuts a bag of peanuts).
+2 Satiating a desire (for example giving a goblin a peanut farm).
+1 Friendly reaction
-1 Hostile reaction
-1 Resisting a desire (for example if the PCs ask for the goblin's bag of peanuts).
-2 Eliminating a desire (for example if the PCs ask the goblin to join a religion with an anti-peanut taboo).
-1 to -3 Ordeal (the PCs asking the NPC to do something that doesn't conflict with their Desires but which is difficult, dangerous, time-consuming or just annoying, -1 is something bothersome while something bordering on suicidal would be -3).

Just add up the modifiers and if the result is positive the NPC goes along with what the PCs want them to do. If the result is 0 it's a toss-up and which way the NPC goes is determined by PC demeanor/persuasiveness or by the PCs offering to give the NPC something that is nice but not really one of their Desires.

NPCs will generally trust the PCs to live up to their side of the bargain because NPCs are EXTREMELY good at spotting lies (unless they're in writing) and breaking a sworn promise brings down curses on your head. NPCs will generally do their best to weasel out of their side of the bargain without technically breaking it.

One up-shot of this is that there's little need to apply modifiers to reaction rolls. A friendly dragon is still terrifying. For example if a dragon's desires are:
-Gold.
-Delicious human flesh.
-Princesses.

Then if the dragon meets the PCs it will desire their gold and tasty flesh. Even if the PCs roll a friendly reaction from the dragon and try to negotiate "please don't eat us" with the dragon it'll be tough going. They'll have to give the dragon gold or a princess to get the dragon to resist its desire for their delicious human flesh and even that's a bit of a toss-up.

Because of this generally the best way of getting an NPC to do something isn't to go against their desires directly but to redirect it. For example the younger two Billy Goats Gruff don't try to get the troll to resist its desire to "eat goats" but give that desire a different target. You see a lot of fairy tale protagonists doing this, often by trying to redirect the antagonist's desires into the future (by offering first born children etc.).

Navigating this system takes a good bit of player skill since the players don't know what the NPC's desire are or (how I'm going to run it) even know that this whole Desires mechanic even EXISTS.

As for as what the point of having a system like this instead of the DM just making shit up, it's for the same reasons that D&D has morale rules, reaction rolls or the hundred and one little rules scattered around the 1ed core books about NPCs have such and such a percentage chance of doing such and such a thing. It's to help the DM take a step back and be a referee rather than a hands on story-teller.

This system pretty much completely runs on player skill rather than character skill but it's pretty easy to add in elements of of player skill in the form of proficiencies like "know lies" or "blood pact" (raises the stakes of breaking a promise) or "smell fear." This wouldn't replace the ability of a player to talk and be social but would give them more information to go on when figuring out what to say.

What I like about this system is that it emphasizes the specific over the general. Players can't break out any one hammer to knock down every nail, they really have to focus on what makes each NPC tick when trying to manipulating.

Think that's a fairly functional system, maybe add some more of an element of chance to the whole thing.

Royal Marriage

Royal marriage is really central in fairy tales and I really want that to matter with ""the king is the land and the land is the king" mechanics a la the Fisher King.

To merge D&D and fairy tale ideas, each King and his castle is a font of Lawfulness that spreads like light into the world. Around each King's castle things are more stable as the mad dream logic of fair tales abates. Think of each king's castle as a miniature Amber. Just like in the Amber books, each king has a sense of what's happening within their kingdom and some degree of control over it (like weather control).

In order to expand the kingdom's island of Lawful sanity, a king must hunt in the wilds at the borders of his kindgom, drive out threats (good old-fashioned D&D hex clearing), be healthy and go on bizarre quests (have to figure out some logic to those quests). When choosing a prince to marry his daughter, a king wants someone who can do that sort of stuff and do it well, hence all of the "if you want to marry the princess you must..." plotlines.

Now where does the queen come in?

Well let's look at what kind of person the kings in fairy tales want to marry again and again and again: random girls (often mute) who live in the wilds. Kings hunt in the forest but queens can LIVE there for years on end without injury. Considering how scary fairy tale wilds are, that's as badass as the bizarre quests that would-be kings have go on.

By why would fairy tale kings want that specific flavor of badass in their queens? Well if the kings maintain the kingdom and basically ARE the kingdom then the queens represent the surrounding land and by marrying the queen they make a pact with the land. A good queen gets knows the wilds and can maintain good relations with it as sort of a Foreign Minister to the wilds of fairy.

OK, if kingdoms are Lawful and the wilds are Neutral then what is Chaos? Chaos comes from royal families fucking up and corrupting their kingdom. As the royal family sustains the kingdom then the most damaging evil is family evils: eating your kids, incest, that sort of thing.

That explains some things in fairy tales: mute queens constantly getting slandered with accusations that they're eating their kids, the stories about kings getting tricked into eating their children, etc. Maybe that's why the king with the twelve sons didn't want a daughter: incest poses a very potent threat to the whole kingdom. Can recall some fairy tales where the threat of incest is explicit (Mordred and one fairy tale whose name I forget in which the queen dies and king wants to bang daughter because she looks like her mom).

OK, that's a good outline, will have to fill in specific mechanics later.

Quote from: Daztur;860582Before hitting the next fairy tale, I want to flesh out some of my previous ideas.

NPC Desires

This is what I posted about before as a replacement for social mechanics.

In fairy tales characters have strong desires and few breaks on them. In game terms, each NPC has three desires representing the things they're most obsessed with, with especially single-minded NPCs having fewer.

Examples of a Desire could be anything from "peanuts" to "the whole world and everything in it" depending on an NPC. A random desire table would be a useful tool here.

Generally if an NPC sees a way to obtain something they desire they'll grab ahold of it almost immediately. The only thing that gives NPCs pause is if their desires conflict.

How the PCs come in contact with NPC Desires is when they want NPCs to do something. Look at what the PCs are proposing and add up the following modifiers:
+1 Fulfilling a desire (for example giving a goblin who has a Desire for peanuts a bag of peanuts).
+2 Satiating a desire (for example giving a goblin a peanut farm).
+1 Friendly reaction
-1 Hostile reaction
-1 Resisting a desire (for example if the PCs ask for the goblin's bag of peanuts).
-2 Eliminating a desire (for example if the PCs ask the goblin to join a religion with an anti-peanut taboo).
-1 to -3 Ordeal (the PCs asking the NPC to do something that doesn't conflict with their Desires but which is difficult, dangerous, time-consuming or just annoying, -1 is something bothersome while something bordering on suicidal would be -3).

Just add up the modifiers and if the result is positive the NPC goes along with what the PCs want them to do. If the result is 0 it's a toss-up and which way the NPC goes is determined by PC demeanor/persuasiveness or by the PCs offering to give the NPC something that is nice but not really one of their Desires.

NPCs will generally trust the PCs to live up to their side of the bargain because NPCs are EXTREMELY good at spotting lies (unless they're in writing) and breaking a sworn promise brings down curses on your head. NPCs will generally do their best to weasel out of their side of the bargain without technically breaking it.

One up-shot of this is that there's little need to apply modifiers to reaction rolls. A friendly dragon is still terrifying. For example if a dragon's desires are:
-Gold.
-Delicious human flesh.
-Princesses.

Then if the dragon meets the PCs it will desire their gold and tasty flesh. Even if the PCs roll a friendly reaction from the dragon and try to negotiate "please don't eat us" with the dragon it'll be tough going. They'll have to give the dragon gold or a princess to get the dragon to resist its desire for their delicious human flesh and even that's a bit of a toss-up.

Because of this generally the best way of getting an NPC to do something isn't to go against their desires directly but to redirect it. For example the younger two Billy Goats Gruff don't try to get the troll to resist its desire to "eat goats" but give that desire a different target. You see a lot of fairy tale protagonists doing this, often by trying to redirect the antagonist's desires into the future (by offering first born children etc.).

Navigating this system takes a good bit of player skill since the players don't know what the NPC's desire are or (how I'm going to run it) even know that this whole Desires mechanic even EXISTS.

As for as what the point of having a system like this instead of the DM just making shit up, it's for the same reasons that D&D has morale rules, reaction rolls or the hundred and one little rules scattered around the 1ed core books about NPCs have such and such a percentage chance of doing such and such a thing. It's to help the DM take a step back and be a referee rather than a hands on story-teller.

This system pretty much completely runs on player skill rather than character skill but it's pretty easy to add in elements of of player skill in the form of proficiencies like "know lies" or "blood pact" (raises the stakes of breaking a promise) or "smell fear." This wouldn't replace the ability of a player to talk and be social but would give them more information to go on when figuring out what to say.

What I like about this system is that it emphasizes the specific over the general. Players can't break out any one hammer to knock down every nail, they really have to focus on what makes each NPC tick when trying to manipulating.

Think that's a fairly functional system, maybe add some more of an element of chance to the whole thing.

This requires more thought than I have time to spare right now. Suffice it to say, there's stuff I like a lot, and stuff I think is generalising too much.
More later, as I said.

Quote from: AsenRG;860761This requires more thought than I have time to spare right now. Suffice it to say, there's stuff I like a lot, and stuff I think is generalising too much.
More later, as I said.

Would appreciate feedback whenever you can get around to it. As you can probably tell I'm doing a lot of rambling thinking out loud and when I eventually bring this stuff together into something playable it'll be a hell of a lot more focused.

In no real hurry though, I'll be playing in a CoC campaign that's starting up soon and won't be DMing any D&D for a good while. Might have to use my son and his friend as guinea pigs for some of this stuff when I can get his reading level up to second grade or so.

Fairy Tale 12: Rapunzel

I don't think I have to rehash the plot of this one in too much detail as it's such a famous fairy tale. However, it's interesting to note that in this early version Mother Gothel is a fairy rather than a witch (the first fairy we've hit so far!), that the fairy figures out that Rapunzel has been meeting the prince because her pregnancy is making the clothes too tight and that Rapunzel is able to restore her lover's lost eyes (injured by falling out of the tower somehow) with her tears.

We see here the continued theme of kings/princes wanting to marry random girls they meet in the wilderness, but what else can we do with this one?

Fairies

The fairy is able to convince Rapunzel's father to trade away his daughter for some lettuce. She's obviously got some good bargaining skills there. How I'm imagining fairies is that they're not very good at straight-up violence but very good at threatening or tricking people into horrible bargains or arrangements. If the father hadn't agreed to give up his daughter for the lettuce what would the fairy have been able to do? Perhaps surprisingly little.

Fairies are very good at making threats but unless you enter into a bargain with them they have very little power to do anything to you, but they're quite adept in convincing you otherwise.

Also, unlike in the Disney movie there's no real motive given for why the fairy wants Rapunzel or why she shuts Rapunzel up into the tower in the first place. In the story she only shuts Rapunzel up in the tower when she turns twelve (puberty, obviously) but what was she doing with Rapunzel before that and why does the fairy seem to care a great deal about her captive's virginity? Something to think about. When I think up some answers to those questions I'll have a some good ideas about what makes fairy tale fairies tick.

Any ideas on for this one?

Magical Healing

Unless I'm missing something, Rapunzel's tears healing the eyes of the prince is the first instance of magical healing we've come across so far.

Like a lot of things in fairy tales, this healing seems to be directly powered by human passions. Going along with the mechanics I've been talking about before, the prince is certainly something that Rapunzel has a Desire for.

Looking back at Post 33 in this thread I proposed that Magic-Users be able to imbue their relationships with magic (by sacrificing a spell slot) so that they'd be able to use the power of their relationships to achieve magical ends. Being able to heal people you love of afflictions that are (at least partly) you own fault would fall into this. Rapunzel can heal the prince because she loves him, with some other random dude her tears would do nothing.

Thinking on the power of love in these fairy tales, having something that you Desire being completely negated has a very negative effect on fairy tale characters. For example the servant in the very first fairy tale (the frog prince) had a desire to protect his prince and that desire got turned to ash when the prince got turned into a frog and was lost. When that desire was negated the servant was so distraught that he needed iron bands installed around his heart to keep it from bursting with sorrow. So if you want to kill a fairy tale character a good way of doing it is striking at what they Desire as that could result in a useful saving throw vs. broken heart, unless of course they have a something with a heart-band installation NWP on hand...

Up next: The Three Little Men in the Forest

Fairy Tale 13: The Three Little Men in the Forest

A girl's mom dies so her father pours water into his boot. Because his boot is able to hold the water he decides to marry a widow with a daughter of her own.

The girl's step-mother and sister are, of course, evil so they send her out into the forest in the middle of winter in a dress made out of paper to gather strawberries.

She stumbles across a house where the three little men live (elves?) and because she's nice they give her berries, beauty, the ability to spit gold coins and a king to marry her.

When the step-mother finds out what happened she sends her own daughter to cash in as well. But because she's bad the little men instead give her increased ugliness, the chills and a miserable death.

This pisses the step-mom off so she goes to visit her step-daughter in her castle and, after girl gives birth and is weak the step-mom chucks her into a river. The girl comes back as a ghost duck to check on her baby and later her husband resurrects her by waving a sword over her head.

The step-mother is sent into the forest to get eaten by wild animals.

Never seen ghost ducks before. What can we do with this one?

More Magic

We've got a couple different magical effects here:
-What basically boils down to the D&D augury spell despite the weird format of putting water into your boot.
-Strawberries out of season.
-Beauty.
-Gold coin spitting.
-Making someone cold no matter how warm clothes they wear.
-Death curse.
-Possessing(?) a duck after you die.
-Resurrecting yourself.

I'm also going to count the girl being able to stumble across exactly the people she needs as magical. The mundane and the magical aren't neatly separated in fairy tales so the ability to randomly wander and hit exactly where you need to go is as much of a magical effect as any.

It's interesting here that the format of the resurrection (king resurrecting his queen) is exactly the same as we saw a few stories ago (see post 33 in this thread). In both the queen comes back as a ghost and her husband's love is able to bring her back. This ties into our discussion earlier about the crazy ways fairy tale people kill each other, those are needed to kill the spirit otherwise the spirit comes back to haunt you or even to life.

A lot of these magical abilities seem fairy permanent. To keep people from spamming them, I like my old solution: you don't get your spent spell slot back during the duration of any magical effect that you cast. So if you want to use magic to make coins fall out of your mouth all the time you can do that but you won't get your spent spell slot back until the effect ends (which might not be easy).

Fairy Tale Queens

Here we have a perfect example of what I was talking about earlier about what makes someone a good fairy tale queen. They're able to easily survive in the wilderness (while the unfit get snacked on), have magical beauty, and are able to secure help when they need it.

Being nice enough so that people help you willingly seems kind of boring but think of Elric of Melnibone. Pretty much all the magic he does is ask various supernatural critters for help because they owe his family favors, here it's basically the same deal: the main character is really really good at asking for and getting help which in fairy tales is probably the single most powerful ability you can have.

Also she's able to do something that's more powerful than most any fantasy protagonist I can think of: manifest as such a potent ghost that her husband can easily resurrect her. That's a damn good trick if you can do it.

Up next: Nasty Flax Spinning

Fairy Tale 14: Nasty Flax Spinning

This is a strange little story. For some reason a king is obsessed with flax spinning so he commands the queen and his two daughters to spin an incredible amount of flax while he's away on a trip. To get out of this annoying work, the queen and princesses get three ugly spinsters to stand in for them and tell the king that their deformities (big lower lip, one giant finger, giant foot) were caused by spinning to much flax.

The plan works. The end.

The Palace-Industrial Complex

Pretty strange to have the royal family engaged in drudgery. Maybe the king is just crazy but maybe the kingdom is so tiny that it's more of an overgrown farm than a country and the farmer's wife and daughters have to pitch in like everyone else.

Having fairy tale kingdoms be pocket sized makes a lot of fairy tales make more sense and fits in well with D&D-style points of light. But what would a culture with a slew of tiny independent kingdoms look like?

A good source of ideas is Viking Age Iceland. While there was the Althing and various "chieftains" who could provide protection for a price each farmer was incredibility independent and was able to run his own affairs much like the king of a tiny kingdom. The Icelandic Sagas are an incredibly rich source of D&D fodder so being able to use them for ideas is great.

Of course fairy tale kingdoms wouldn't be quite as small as Icelandic farms but they'd tend to look like large manors more than historical kingdoms so you'd get a lot of Saga-like features like incredibly personal politics in which the scale is small enough for a couple of regular dudes with swords to make a difference.

The Icelandic farms were also too small to be self-sufficient so they loved it when foreign merchants stopped by and competed to host them (so that they'd get dibs on the best merchandise). Fair tale kings would be similarly dependent on foreign trade.

However, unlike Icelandic farmers who had no problem with mercantile endeavors fairy tale kings would look down their nose at business. So what do you get when you have a bunch of people who need trade but don't want to get their hands dirty with it?

Simple. Gift giving. These micro-kings would give each other gifts (of roughly equal value) so that kings would be able to barter for the goods they needed to keep their manors running without officially being engaged in trade. That's why kings like the one in this story "had to take a trip."

But it's a hell of a lot easier if your fellow kings to visit you and exchange gifts in your parlor than if you have to travel about and schlep your gifts across scary fairy tale wilderness. Even if you have something that everyone needs that's really annoying since it's hard to drive a hard bargain when the person you're bargaining with isn't officially buying anything.

How do you do that? Well, that's where all of the fancy fairy tale castles, the dresses and the balls and all the rest come in. One big part of their purpose is to make the people who have the stuff you want have a good reason to come by your place and trade gifts with you so you don't have to go there. If you have a beautiful princess who attracts loads of suitors so much the better. It might even be worth it to string those suitors along as long as possible by demanding crazy tasks so you continue to get guests showing up with useful gifts.

Up next: Hansel and Gretel

Fairy Tale 15: Hansel and Gretel

This story is pretty much the same as your standard adaptation for kids. What's interesting is that later editions by the Grimms added a whole bunch of filler about how Hansel and Gretel get home that everyone then cuts out or ignores. The only real difference is that the step-mom who wants to leave the kids in the woods is the children's real mom in this earlier version. Annoyingly the book just cops out and said she died by the time the kids came back home again without any details. Oh, also the kids only take two trips into the woods rather than three.

What can we get from this one?

A few small things first:
-Magic can preserve cookies from the elements.
-The witch seems to have a kind of Cause Fear spell that she uses on the kids if you stretch things a bit:

Quote...they heard a shrill voice cry from inside:
"Nibble, nibble, I hear a louse!
Who's that nibbling on my house?"
Hansel and Gretel were so tremendously frightened that they dropped
what they had in their hands, and immediately thereafter a small, ancient
woman crept out of the door....

-Female characters are far more active and enterprising than in stuff like the Icelandic Sagas or the Arthurian Romances. Gretel is the one that kills the witch after all.
-Hansel tries to lie and fails every time. Lies don't work in fairy tales (unless you write them down).
-The dangers of the wild beasts of the forest get mentioned again. Of course they never bother Gretel. She's awesome like that.
-The witch's house is stuffed with gold and jewels. That reminds me of a Dunsany story in which monsters intentionally leave gems around to ensure a constant stream of edible treasure hunters. That's as good of a reason for dungeons to have treasure in them as any.
-The witch is burned to death in her own oven, that's the kind of symbolic death that's necessary to destroy a magic-user's spirit and ensure that she doesn't come back after death (like in the last story) or have magic that survives her.

For stuff I want to go into more detail about:

Hunger

People have gotten so used to cutesy illustrations of Hansel and Gretel eating a cookie house, that it's easy to forget just how dark this story is. All of the action is driven by starvation and hunger with a mother so far gone to starvation that she'll abandon her kids in order to make the last loaf of bread go a little bit farther.

Because of this modern retellings of fairy tales that are self-consciously trying to be more "dark" or "mature" than classic fairy tales get under my skin, the old school ones are plenty dark and it makes the authors sound like they only know the modern bowdlerized versions.

But if you're kicking off a sandbox campaign "you have no food" makes for a great way to get the ball rolling as it's concrete, open-ended and doesn't allow for the PCs to turtle up or be indecisive. It also helps fix in the players' minds just how vulnerable first level PCs are and allows gameplay to change once being able to buy food becomes trivial.

Cannibalism

Cannibalism comes up a lot in fairy tales and even in stories where it doesn't happen you have heroes accused of it (usually when supernatural forces are taking their kids).

We've touched on gluttony before with the wolf and the witch seems to be driven by much the same forces. She doesn't NEED to eat people. She lives in a house made out of freaking food. So why is she eating people? Again she seems to be driven by a vice that doesn't give her any of the usual pleasures associated with it.

The wolf cannot digest the kids it swallows and the witch is starving in a house made out of food. Evil makes a mockery of human pleasures.

Another way of looking at cannibalism is by comparing it to the nine-tailed fox creatures from Asia. In order to take on human form they need to eat 100 human livers. Perhaps to maintain their human form inhuman creatures of Chaos need to eat people and the longer they go without eating people the more inhuman they appear.

This ties into the old idea that Satan cannot create ANYTHING but can only corrupt (for example by itself an incubus could not impregnate a woman as creating life is impossible for a devil so it would have to take on succubus form and have sex with a man, get sperm from that, corrupt the semen, change into incubus form, have sex with a woman and impregnate her with the corrupted semen). This works right on down to the cellular level. Human bodies can turn milk and bread into human cells but creatures of Chaos can't create anything so they need to get their hands on human cells directly if they want a human appearance.

You Can't Map Fairie

Hansel leaves a trail of stones to mark his way through the forest and later a trail of bread crumbs. When the bread comes are eaten he and his sister become hopelessly lost despite it not being far from their home and a place he'd just been to.

This sort of thing happens over and over again in fairy tales and you get things like king's going hunting and running across strange castles they'd never seen before. How they hell are there castles they'd never heard of within hunting distance of their home?

Well obviously you can't map fairie and distances are deceiving. You can't make a hex map and track where the players are. You need something more sneaky.

I'll be stealing some ideas from there: http://forum.rpg.net/showthread.php?620342-D-amp-D-Cosmology-My-extensive-rework-of-the-Planes

But I think that what's really important is to have a path or a guide. If those fail when you're out in the wilderness it's virtually impossible not to become immediately lost. But in fairy tales you don't need to go through a mirror or through the back of the wardrobe to get into fairie, you just need to take a walk in the woods. It's right there. All the time. Right outside your house (the fairy in Rapunzel lives right next door to Rapunzel's parents after all).

Will be returning to this topic more in future posts.

Taking Three

One change between this version and one's I've read before is here Hansel and Gretel only get taken into the woods two times while in other versions they get taken three times. Three's obviously an important number in fairy tales (three brothers, three tasks, three doors, three little pigs). So what I'd do is use 5ed advantage/disadvantage rules like so:
-If someone has done something successfully twice in a row they get hit by disadvantage on the third time.
-If someone has failed at something twice in a row they get disadvantage the third time.

This also gives you advantage if your two older brothers have failed at something, etc. etc.

Would be more fun if you don't tell the players about this rule, just roll the advantage/disadvantage dice behind the screen and tell them that the 19 they rolled failed or the 2 they rolled succeeded. Good to keep the players on their toes.

Up next: Herr Fix-it-up

Into the Woods

Have been letting the issue of how to map faerie turning over in my head and I think I've hit on an idea. In RPGs when things are too complicated to model with rules or catalog by writing down setting information it's time to break out the random tables. Here's what you do.

First you draw a hex map and label each hex Lawful, Neutral or Chaotic.

Lawful hexes are the points of light in a mad world, where things make sense and where (at least somewhat) benevolent kings and queens reign.

Neutral hexes are faerie where things are dangerous is not really malevolent and things follow a surreal dream logic. Don't worry too much about spending a long time seeding weird shit across the neutral hexes, the random tables will do that for you when you need it.

Chaotic hexes are lawful hexes that have been corrupted. They're perverse slices of hell on Earth, although not always obviously so. The wilderness is dotted with these festering corpses of dead kingdoms.

There's an ebb and flow of these affiliations. Lawful hexes can be corrupted (usually by striking at the royal family, although in some cases the land can be corrupted directly which poisons the mind of the king) or redeemed to lawfulness by an act of cleansing heroism.

Meanwhile neutral hexes tend to gnaw away at Lawful (and weakly Chaotic) hexes unless kept at bay by vigilance and hunting while strong kings can push the alignment of the kingdom into the Neutral hinterland through questing, diplomacy with faerie and killing shit.

On the ground level what this means is that when you go into the woods you step into Neutral territory and its mad dreamworld logic starts to take hold.

How this is modeled in the game is that whenever the PC step into a new Neutral hex the DM counts how the PCs are from the nearest Lawful hex and then rolls a d8 (or maybe a d6 or d10, have to think). If the result is the distance to the nearest Lawful hex or lower then something strange happens (so the deeper you get into the woods the more weird shit happens). If the PCs spend a night within a Neutral hex then the DM should similarly roll a check for one of these strange Hex Events (have to think up a more creative name).

These Hex Events cover all kinds of weird shit that happen in fairy tale woods from running into buildings/terrain/features/roads/etc. that weren't there the last time you walked through that hex, to unique creatures, to strange weather to being transported to a hex a thousand miles away or one that isn't even on the map at all. Many would be specifically geared to getting the PCs horrifically lost.

Of course players following a set path or a supernatural/animal guide would be generally immune to those teleportation events, (but if you leave the path for just a minute...) but those paths or guides wouldn't necessarily be following the hex map in the first place. With the right guide you can skip across a continent-spanning wilderness in a day's march.

But what's important to keep in mind is that fairy tales aren't Lovecraft. In fairy tales humans wants and desires matter and the universe orders itself around them. So instead of one Hex Event chart there'd be several corresponding to various human feelings and drives. The DM would roll on whichever one they judge the characters are exhibiting most strongly (another rule that'd be especially fun if the players don't know it exists).

For example Hansel and Gretel are hungry, very very hungry so they'd be rolling on the Hunger Hex Event random table which is full of trees bearing strange fruit, elf feasts, creatures even more hungry than they are and, yes, cookie houses. You'd get a different set of events for fear, greed, sadness and right on down the line. There'd be enough vagueness to the random events so that the DM could tailor them to what's been going on but they'd also respond directly to player desires in a way that fits fairy tales better than a "weird shit completely out of the blue" Weird Tales vibe.

Of course the best Hex Event random table to roll on would be the Noble Quest one. Lots of good stuff there to help the players along, unless they're jerks to random dwarves asking for help or are open to temptation of course...

Back to fairy tales next time.

I really like that random encounter mechanic you have there! Flavorful, simple, gets the job done.
Maybe the roll also determines the 'severity' of the Hex event; 'chaos' wants to roll as high as it can under the PC's distance from a lawful hex. This way moving farther from a lawful hex doesn't just make events more frequent, but also more dangerous!
You were trying to decide if the die should be d8, d6, d10, etc. If you don't mind an extra bit of mechanical fiddliness, maybe it starts out at d4 but steps up to d6, d8, etc. depending on factors like time of day, or ... I dunno, how long it's been since a party member has been to confession or received communion or something?

I like your idea but I`m going to tweak it a bit:

For hex events in Neutral hexes there is always SOME kind of event but sometimes so subtle that players might not even notice it. The DM would always roll the same dice to determine what the hex event is (d20 probably) but the list of hex events would be about 40 items long with mild stuff being low and the highest numbers being really weird shit. Being farther away from Lawful land would provide a bonus to the roll with maybe some other modifiers as well (like recent Communion) or maybe not. Want to keep this simple.

Different random hex event tables depending on the emotional state of the PCs, not really on the terrain. So a "hungry" event table, not a "mountain" one. Hex events would be different from random encounters and would include things like "mist rises and when is burns off you find yourself in a hex on the other side of the map" or "you notice a mountain in the distance that wasn`t there last time, there`s a giant figure of someone you know carved into it." Or just simple stuff like plunking a cookie house down in a hex that doesn`t normally have one.

Like before you get a hex event when crossing into a nuetral hex or having dawn break while inside one. Chaos would work differently, Chaos is more specific...

Also my approach towards alignment is a bit different than in Elric or Three Hearts and Three Lions:
-Lawful: human civilization. Much nicer than lawfulness in Elric (but still not really GOOD) a lot like Three Hearts and Three Lions.
-Neutral: fairy and the primal worls in general. In Three Hearts and Three Lions and standard D&D the PCs stand on the frontier facing off againt chaos. Here rhe dangerous wilds are basically Neutral. As PCs are often bearers of civilization they`ll probably tangle horns with primal untamed Neutrality. Not as evil as Choas in Three Hearts and Three Lions but a good bit more dickish than standard D&D or Elric neutrality.
-Chaos: Chaos isn`t the scary stuff in the forest, it`s the scary stuff in the human heart. While Neutrality is primal and basically inhuman, Chaos is just as human as Law, just twisted and perverted. Human civilization gone wrong. In many ways it`s more familiar than Neutrality, after all the cancer that`s killing you has the same DNA as you while the bear that`s chasing you doesn`t. Chaotic hexes are all there because of tragedy, each one was created by a monumental human fuck-up and there`s a lot of them out there. Chaos is usually evil and always bad news.

TL: DR

Law: Arthur
Neutral: Green Knight
Chaos: Mordred