Mutation Megapost

There are three main problems with mutation charts I have been bumping into lately, so I made my own (with judicious amounts of ripping other people off of course)

Problem #1 was the style of mutation that just makes you ugly and persecuted by villagers (or at least have bad character design) but is otherwise largely pointless and easily forgotten because we don't have visual feeds on the theatre of the mind. DCC was pretty bad for this. 
Such mutations have a little more place in campaigns where mutations are basically just a punishment not a fun random table, but the problems of being easily forgotten due to no visual feedback persist.

Problem #2 was the style of mutation that gives you magic/superpowers with no physical component. It's kinda neat occasionally, but I prefer the sort of mutation that has drawbacks & a physical explanation to aid commonsense understanding, not just 'you're Jean Grey now I guess.' Allowing stuff like 'water control' makes players a bit too willing to become the X-Men by scumming mutation tables. On the other side of the coin, lots of mutation tables have entries that are more like curses, mutilations, or diseases, which I don't like for intruding on the design space of other tables.

Problem #3 was stuff that, well, suffice it to say that some things in the Metamorphica Classic don't read as 'mutations' so much as 'LotFP edginess fallout.' I didn't notice them for a long time but hoo boy.

MUTATION GENERAL RULES
There is a max # of mutations a character can get, to prevent them from becoming overly complicated/incoherent. I've been using CON as the cap, but level could also work if you wanted mutations to double as a corruption track that you can resist the more badass you are.

Exceeding this limit will transform a character into a monster, kill them, or most mercifully, simply replace existing mutations with new ones rather than adding to the character.

MUTATIONS
If something does damage and you roll it again, upgrade it by a dice class.
Poison can be 1d6 damage, death, paralysis, confusion, hallucinogen, etc, but only affects equivalently sized targets, requiring more doses per volume (about x8 dosage for x2 height/width)

1-Hands/Feet/Lesser Area
2- Legs
3-Arms
4-Lower Torso
5-Upper Torso
6- Head

1. Blob- Body becomes gelatinous. STR & DEX reduced to 3, but immune to blunt damage and can squeeze through things. If rolled again, become an ooze who splits if hit by slicing damage instead of taking damage normally.
   
2. Unusual Coloration- Albino, night black, leaf green, pumpkin orange, gradient pink/indigo, etc. Advantage to hiding in appropriately colored areas, disadvantage in high-contrast zones. Rolling again adds chameleon powers, which can provide nigh-invisibility, but probably only if naked and unmoving.
   
3. Terrible Claws- Bird, lizard, mammalian, hooves, crustacean claw, fingernails, etc, replace 1d4 hands/feet. Deal 1d6 unarmed damage, 1 attack per free claw. 1/6 chance of feet instead of hands, 1/6 chance of both. Fine manipulation is difficult at 1d8, and impossible at 1d10+
   
4. Fangs/Beak/Jaws/tusks/- Bonus 1d4 unarmed damage bite attack. Is a bonus attack in addition to other attacks if grappling/fighting unarmed. Rolling again increases damage.
   
5. Armored Scales/Shell/Hide/Boneyness- Unarmored AC changes to 10+1d6. If combined with armor, add half of armor bonus to new unarmored AC. +1 AC if rolled again.
   
6. Spiky- Armor must be specially made to allow for spikes to function. 1d4 automatic damage to beings that strike/grapple you with a vulnerable body part.
   
7. Furry/Feathery- Counts as winter clothing. Requires x3 time to clean off gunk. Rerolling makes one 50% cold-resistant, but prone to heat stroke in non-arctic conditions.
   
8. Tentacle- sprouts somewhere random. Acts as bonus limb.
   
9. Lengthy- Body part can stretch/is 20 feet long. x2 Size on reroll
   
10. Monstrous Pupils- Pupils change shape. Conscious refocusing allows shifting into infrared vision. Reroll can see invisible with conscious effort.
    
11. Extra Eyeball- Increased field of sight, flanking penalty requires alternate angle of attack such as from above or below. Rerolling grants 1000 eyes on handy/inconvenient areas, making some tasks sensitive but making surprise nigh impossible.
    
12. Giant Ears- hear enemy behind door, take 1 nonlethal damage from yelling/other loud noises.
    Surprise chance reduced by 1 if method of ambush mostly based on sound reduction. Extra magic ring slots in the form of earrings may be had.
    Rolling again allows for echolocation.
    
13. Venomous- 1 unarmed attack mode can poison equivalently sized enemies, requiring about x10 doses per doubling of size to take effect.
    
14. Gliding Membrane- as flying squirrel. Glide 1 horizontal per 1 descended. Rerolls double horizontal glide.
    
15. Horns- Bonus 1d4 unarmed damage headbutt attack on charges. Free if grappling/fighting unarmed.
    
16. Wings- Flight! 1/2 speed at light load, can't fly with heavy load. Weight restrictions removed if rerolled, but are notably large (30' wingspan)
    
17. Fins- Swim speed as run speed. Doubled if rerolled, but replaces other limbs, RIP.
    
18. Tail- Neat, mostly aesthetic, but other mutations may inform it being that of a scorpion, fox, lizard, etc. Rerolling adds prehensility, or an attack form.
    
19. Quadrupedal- Can run on all fours at full speed. Slowed in bipedal stance.
20. Giant Brain- +5 Int, but each point of bonus INT counts as 10 pounds/1 slot weight.
21. Giant In General- x2 size. Doubled carrying capacity and melee damage against smaller beings. Needs everything special made at x10 cost.
22. Poison Sacs- bulges spill poison if ruptured. Nearby targets save vs poison, with a +1 per point of AC from worn armor, and a -1 per point of damage if they bit you.
23. Redundant Organs- If you are killed by piercing/poison/damage likely to kill via internal damage, survive, once.
24. Nature's Pocket- +1 Inventory slot (internal).
25. Eyestalks- Good for peeping around corners, under wide doorframes, etc. 3 foot initial length, x3 on rerolls.
26. Exoskeleton- No bones, but exterior is hard. Lose -X max HP per level, but gain +X AC.
    
27. Extra Head- Roll a new character to represent the head's skills and personality.
28. Big Hands, gecko feet, spider legs, etc etc- Can climb at run speed on vertical surfaces and overhangs. Light load makes overhangs too dangerous, heavy loads make vertical surfaces too hard.
29. Frog/grasshopper/bunny legs. Can jump run speed distances, horizontally, half vertically.
30. Hump, fat deposits, etc. Excess food/water can be devoured and stored for up to a week without.
31. Leafy- Leaves replace hair, or skin becomes green. 8 hours sunlight counts as a ration (but not water). Reroll includes flowers/fruits which are a poison/potion or at least a ration.
    
32. Scrambled- Appendages/features in unusual spot. Commonly referred to as Zongism.
    
33. Oh Worm- become worm. See if people REALLY love you, or if you must Shai-Hulud alone
34. Tentacle Transformation- Hair, Arms, Legs, or Head become single/multiple tentacles. They are either small and poisonous, or large and strong.
    
35. Extra Arms-2d4, keep lowest
36. Centauroid- Fast but oddly shaped. Double carrying capacity and run speed, worse at climbing, turning quickly, squeezing.
    Reroll becomes Centipede-like.
    
37. Cyclopean- Big eye collects light well (see twice as far in torchlight/starlight/lowlight) but has no depth perception (-4 to hit with ranged, double scatter distance for thrown oil, fireballs, boulders).
    Reroll- Entire head is eyeball.
    
38. Smol- Half damage, carrying capacity, movespeed, etc. Can fit in lots of places. Stacks on rerolls.
    
39. Petrified- Immune to physical combat damage from nonmagical weapons, level 1 spells, and monsters under 5HD (or anything deemed incapable of harming a statue able to defend itself). Cannot heal HP without Stone Shape/Stone to Mud/Mud to Stone shenanigans. Each reroll increases level of immunity by 1 stage.
    
40. Vampiric/Trollish- Regenerate 1HP per round, but each HP recovered counts as a day without food which must be compensated for quickly to avoid starvation undoing all the healing.
    A human is about 10 days of food, roughly. Double rate with rerolls
    
41. Fever- Body temperature can keep up to 8 people warm in cold weather camping. If rerolled, 1d4 heat damage from skin-to-skin contact.
42. Thick Skin- Wrinkly, or toadlike, or blubbery. Unaffected by contact poisons. If rerolled, 1/week can shed skin to cure self of skin-based problems. Those wearing skin look like you as a disguise for a week of regular use, more if carefully preserved, less if used in strenuous activity.
    
43. Sticky/Grasping Cilia/Prehensile hair- Things touching the mutant are automatically 'grappled.'
    If rerolled, mutant is so sticky that they cannot unwield or throw things. Gluey secretions ooze through clothes/armor.
    
44. Slimy/Smooth- Mutant too slippery to be bound or grappled, escaping at the end of their turn.
    If reroll, can't grasp things effectively, climb or stand on smooth floors, near-frictionless.
    
45. Gills- Breath water! If reroll, ONLY breath water....
46. Acid blood. Reroll, Potion Blood. May also be lava blood, bug-blood, ice blood, etc for variety.
47. Cold Blooded- Lose initiative in cold weather, Slowed (as spell) in very cold weather or if you take cold damage.
48. Electric Generation- Can zap people for 1d4 damage on contact/conduction through water/metal.
    If rerolled, can arc 5' through air.
    
49. Hermaphromorphic- Can change sex to various configurations.
    
50. Musk/Pollen/Spores- Notable scent may attract or repel certain types of monsters (reroll CHA to determine opinions by species). Rerolling makes musk have poisonous effect. Leaves a trackable trail for those who find it repulsive or attractive.
    
51. Hollow Bones/Lightweight/Gas Buoyancy -etc- Mutant weighs 1/10th of normal. -1 max HP per HD.
52. Battle-Form/Adrenaline/Berserker- Upon entering combat (ie, making an attack roll or being attacked), effect is as potion of heroism. Exhaustion afterwards causes bonuses (save for temp HD) to be reversed until sleep can be had. 1/day, rerolling doubles uses.
53. Bioluminescent- Glows as torch if nude, candle if clothed. Rerolling increases light radius.
54. Mitosis- Can reproduce by splitting. Each resulting split has half HP and level but retain all characteristic and are distinct individuals.
    If rerolled, the splits may instead be drones
    
55. Mighty Nose Hair/Dwarf Beard/Non-hairy filters- Protected from inhaled poisons, gases, smoke, etc.
56. Silk- Can make silk rope, 10' per HP expended (metabolically intense). 100' of string, or 1000' of thread. If rerolled, silk rope can be extruded sticky or slippery.
57. Elemental Affinity- 50% resistance to Fire/Cold/Electricity/Acid/Other Elemental Issue
    Reroll- Immune. Reroll again, heal from.
58. Mighty Breath/Lungs- Can hold breath for an hour, and shout very loud and long. If rerolled, you can inhale tuns of air and inflate like a balloon, the sudden size increase frightening animals and surprising others (check morale).
    
59. Hibernation/Cocoon- Mutant may sleep for set times, and cannot awaken. While in this state, food/water is not needed, healing doubles. If rerolled, lost limbs may be regrown, diseases cast off, etc etc, at a rate of 1 such healing per week.
60. Herbivore/Carnivore- May only eat plants (but can eat things like grass) or may only eat meat (but may eat it raw/somewhat bad safely). If rerolled, both apply in super-omnivorousness. Rerolling again allows consumption of anything organic safely. Rerolling again, anything physical. Rerolling yet again, anything.
    
61. Worm Mouth/Mole Claws- May tunnel through soft earth/sand at half speed. Rerolling means hard earth/soft stone may be burrowed through, rerolling a third time allows for even worked stone/bedrock to be bored through.
    
62. Acid Expulsion- vomiting,  range as thrown dagger. Previously swallowed objects/liquids act as projectile. Rerolling adds 1d4 acid damage.
    Getting hit in the stomach forces a save vs poison or vomiting.
    
63. Eyeless- Blind. Reroll becomes faceless. Grues will not hunt you.
    
64. Breath Weapon- 1/day, random type. Deals 1 damage per HD. Rerolling adds 1 use and 1 damage per HD. Save for half.
    
65. Steam/Ink/Smoke/Dandruff- may emit an obscuring cloud 5' radius. 
66. Piezoelectromagnetism- Can sense magnetic/electric fields with concentration. On earth-like worlds, allows for finding north. Rolling again grants 30' range ferrokinesis (with INT as STR)
    
67. Transparent- Invisible flesh. Only really works if not carrying anything at all. Handy for seeing parasites, effects of swallowed potions, etc.
68. Fungal- If killed, explode in spore cloud, 10' radius. Those failing to save are infected by you and you live on in them, able to make them take 1 action per day. If the infection is not cured, you replace their brain in 1d6 weeks. On reroll, corpses are also infected and raised as fungal zombies. Multiple copies of you are philosophically troublesome.
69. Hideously Ugly- Those beholding you must check morale or flee in terror, and may assume you are some kind of monster. If rolled again, it's a save vs magic or fear.
70. Manticore Spines/Fingerbone spurs/Blowgun tooth- You may attack for 1d8 unarmed (range as throwing dagger) by throwing bits of yourself. Ammo regrows slowly, so each shot costs 1 CON damage. The first time you do this to someone it counts as a sneak/surprise attack.
    
71. Nerve Interface- Touching another creature for 1 whole turn allows you to link to its nervous system and feel what it is feeling, and vice versa. On a reroll, you may read its mind clearly, and if rolled again, you may control it.
    
72. Enhanced Vocalizations- You can be loud, musical, a mimic, or a ventriloquist with ease. On a reroll, you may shriek for 1d4 damage, syattering glass and similar.
73. Egg- Assuming you are well-fed, you lay an egg every week, much like a chicken. Counts as a ration, is not cannibalism unless fertilized and allowed to develop significantly.
    
74. Corrosive Sweat/slime- Metal rusts, corrodes, and crumbles if touched by you in stressful/exercise situations. If rerolled, this extends to organic substances like leather, cloth, etc.
    
75. Sucker/Elephant/Duck Feet- Wide distribution of weight foils many pressure-plate type traps. Unfortunately, still a bit slow- 1/2 speed.
76. Skeleton- Vital organs and functions retreat inside bones, making flesh redundant. Attacks that cannot break bone cannot kill you (though they still do damage otherwise) and enemies are likely to believe you dead at half-HP or lower.
77. Fire Extinguisher- Upon taking fire damage, pores shoot forth expanding white foam that cannot burn and smothers flame in a '5' radius. x2 Radius on rerolls.
    
78. Homunculi Colony- Internal organs replaced with 1 little person who has 1 giant appendage for each appendage you have, forming your arm, your head, mutant tails, etc. They may separate to perform important tasks, but are misshappen and better off working together as 'you.' If slain individually lose 20% max HP, XP, statistics, etc.
    
79. Pseudothanatism- Albinism, 1d6 damage per turn from sunlight, undead can't tell you're alive until they touch you.
    
80. Udders- Can feed most baby mammals milk. Other creatures probably allergic. -1 Con=One Ration's worth.
    Rerolling increases efficiency, allowing 2 creatures to be fed for -1 Con.
    
81. Long Tongue- can grab things like a frog. Rerolling makes it prehensile as a hand. Tends to not fit in your mouth. 5' length by default, doubles each reroll.
    
82. Vents- Tube growths that can expel poisons, diseases, parasites, curses, etc affecting the mutant (they are not cured, only spread.) On a reroll, the range increases to that of a trebuchet.
    
83. Flammable- All bodily fluids function as lamp oil (1HP per hour of light for blood). Always catch on fire when taking fire damage. On a reroll, functions as napalm.
    
84. Extra Mouth- Back of head- Talks, demands food, or, Stomach- huge, can eat a whole chicken. Hand- Spooky, convenient for eating.
    Reroll- 1000 mouths all over. !d6 bite attacks each round in grapples, 1 damage each unless you have fangs etc.
    
85. Turtle Appendages- All appendages can be retracted into the body, protecting them from being targeted (or used.) If rerolled, body can be retracted into appendage.
    
86. Long Nose- good for sniffing, or using as a breathing tube. Common target of slashing weapons.
    Reroll- prehensile like an elephants, counts as appendage.
    
87. Gobbler- Can unhinge jaw and swallow things up to twice your size given a turn, though you still must count their weight for encumbrance.
    
88. Bloody Eyes- Weep blood. Can also shoot blood (-1 HP) from eyes to blind people briefly (1 round, automatically hits the first time you trick someone with this.) If rolled again they act as pressurized water cutters, only deal 1d4 damage but can punch through metal.
    
89. Antennae- Very sensitive. Can detect air current movement of invisible creatures/drafts.
    On a reroll, they can ID illusions and imposters (like doppelgangers) with investigation.
90. Unstable- Reroll one other mutation every day.
    
91. Exotic Presentation- Reroll 1d89 twice, combine results into new, single mutation.
    
92. Malignancy- Reroll 1d89, it manifests in a highly detrimental way, even reversing function if need be
    
93. Solidarity- Reroll 1d89, there is a mutant colony, decrepit noble lineage, secret bloodline, etc etc of which this mutation is a hallmark.
    
94. Contagion- Reroll 1d89, this mutation is contagious due to being symptom of disease, curse, etc
    
95. Beneficial- Reroll 1d89, it manifests in a positive way, regrowing limbs if necessary, not interfering with other character quirks, and if nothing else being healthy and good-looking rather than grotesque and unsightly.
    
96. Path of Evolution- Reroll 1d89. All future mutations upgrade, enhance, or otherwise follow a chain of logic based on this evolution, seeking to transform you into a new kind of being. Could be an existing monster or not.
    
97. Chimera- Become fusion of [YOUR_SPECIES] and a monster, ideally based on existing mutations if there's any theme.
    
98. Final Form- Upon death, immediately explode into a full-strength monster, ideally based on existing mutations, otherwise random+ existing mutations.
    
99. Darkspawned- Every player present comes up with a mutation. 50% of picking one randomly, 50% of gaining all. 
100. Ok Fine A Little X-Men as a Treat- Find a 'random superpower generator' and roll on it, or just have everyone pick a superpower and then select one.
     

Prep for Starting Campaigns

 Players wanted this post so I vomited it forth in like a few hours, I'm mildly dissatisfied with it but oh well

I definitely had my share of campaigns dying after 3 sessions back in the bad ol days of being 12 years old. But in my time as an online GM, I feel like I've had a pretty good success rate in terms of campaigns I make being fairly long-lived and usually reaching conclusions of some kind rather than fizzling out. Part of that is simply that, apart from random freelance word and art stuff,  this is what I do, so I have far more time and energy to devote to a campaign compared to people who have jobs or relationships or children or whatever. 'Become a minimalist neet freegan D&D ascetic' isn't really applicable advice for most people, but I feel like it should be mentioned as a caveat or disclaimer.

I have an advantage of having slowly grown a group of regulars, one or two from each new game, who seem to generally enjoy my GMing style. There is a level of trust and shared experience here that random roll20 or OSR discord pickup games don't have, heck, even when my players run for each other, the dynamic changes and so there's more chances of flaking. It could be that there's no meaningful procedural difference in how I start games compared to how others start games, and it's more a matter of social dynamic than anything.

And as final caveat is that players will sometimes just lose the ability to play for whatever reason. We've all been in games killed by scheduling, I've been the player in games who just came less and less due to diminishing interest even in games I thought were good (Acodispo and Spwack's games come to mind), etc etc. Games are not immortal* and I think a good step one when making a campaign is to think 'what would be a good point to end this game on' because if you know roughly where it is going, you may get an idea of where a good place to start it off at might be.

*the open table flailsnails multi-gm shared universe meta-game my server engages in might be immortal as it doesn't have the same death-conditions as regular campaigns but I digress


But for what it's worth, here's the process I've gone through

Initial prep for campaigns usually is a sort of slush pile of handwritten notes written while I donate plasma. This initial slush is anything... 'anorexic centaur noble shamed for her natural weight by human villain who is a toxic friend' 'alternate dungeon entrance is gay pirate brothel' 'time loops for free character revives' 'biomechs actually are nanite swarms mimicking life' 'hot frog' etc etc

I think it's helpful to get these half-formed ideas noted down, so your brain can either move on, or properly start to develop them further. My brain, at least, can chew on a half-formed thought for a very long time without really advancing it anywhere or seeing problems to fix.

Then comes the more serious prep- where 'castle overrun by frog cult' has to actually become a map with notes on what's in each room and so on, 'fairy forest' has to actually get an encounter table and some hex fills, and so on. While you can go wild with big hexcrawls and megadungeons prepped in advance, I think it will usually pay off more to go more in depth with nearby stuff first- prep some town NPCs in the starting village instead of the next town over, add some small 'quests' the players can do, and let distant lands be more vaguely sketched so as not to expend prep.

Also, have minidungeon modules and/or procedural content generators ready for when the players go somewhere less-prepped. Random encounters go here I suppose, but I think they're very good shorthand for populating a world. If I could only prep one thing, I would prep a wandering monster table and treat everything I roll as though it was something I placed on purpose, with motives and backstory and connection to other known things.

Similar advice applies to games with more linear story arcs- prepping the whole thing in advance leads to railroading, so having a vague idea of story beats, but only actually prepping 1-3 sessions in advance lets you keep things reactive to the PC's actions and allow for them to execute their own plans, while still generally heading towards things like 'defeat Ser Hotsalot in the Volcano Tower' or whatever without being opposed to 'players ambush Ser Hotsalot at the pub' instead because you already had Volcano Tower prepped 6 months ago.

I think it's easier to prep as a campaign is being run rather than in a void, because your ideas bounce of the players and they inspire you and you can insert personal moments to shine as things go on.

Uh... speaking of ideas in a void, I'm just going to throw down some specific prep examples for games, then see if there's any keyrecurring features.

Esoteric Oroboro (Or Esoboro)  had some procedures I could start off with, rolling an underworld, both as dungeon map and faction relationship web. Esoteric Enterprises has a LOT of tables that help carry the weight of ensuring there is a world to interact with, and was actually a fairly low-prep game thanks to that. I was able to use my older campaign's lore as prep for this campaign, which is such a neat trick that I highly recommend GMs try to set their subsequent campaigns in the same universe unless you absolutely must discard it for a fresh start. 

As mentioned, I had a megadungeon and many factions rolled up via tables.

I had to make spell lists for my local gods for the sake of Mystic (Cleric) players, which doubled as spell lists for potential rival cultists.

I had a bonus 'ancient evils escaped from the Reliquary super-prison' running wild through the city- essentially a random encounter table that made a new major threat each session. I was fairly excited for all of them, which is good advice for encounter tables- if you the GM aren't thrilled to roll a result, maybe change the tables to be less realistic and more dramatic.

I had 3-5 jobs lined up for the PCs to introduce them to factions, get them into the dungeon, and get them paid.

Heleologos Academy
Prep for this game took about 2 months and included the following-
A poll offering different campaign choices to the players to ensure there was buy in to the premise before prep started in earnest
A map of the island and mainland, re-used from Betrayal at Queen's Coast
Encounter tables for all regions
Weekly 'events' for the school, a 1d20 table I would roll on 3 times
A megadungeon beneath the school, just some sloppily generated online dungeons maps populated with a simple '1/3 chances of monster, trap, or treasure'
Monsters being drawn from a custom wandering monster table to give the depths a wizard-school basement being raided by supernatural thieves' vibe- animated furniture, flying books, sneaky fey gremlins, and nightmare wizards hinting of something more
Traps being a similar list, and treasures being from my own treasure tables, which were just modified AD&D/BFRPG tables
The incredibly tl;dr glog wizard post a few posts back, made to make glog wizards less self-contained gimmicks and more like a 'wizard' who can potentially learn more things, as well as offering some milestone goals to incentivize behavior beyond money grubbing to increase personal power
Some playtest games with the players to ensure said glog wizard post wasn't complete hokum
A list of tasks they were to complete by the end of the year- 12 spells to form the new 'true' glog class, various dangerous wizards to defeat (again drawn from a past blogpost), 3 abstract goals of solving mysteries and teaching students, and a couple of bonus side quests
And a list of students they were to teach

Betrayal at Queen's Coast
Had a map and random encounters, to make traveling the land recruiting noble aid more exciting
Had a starting scene of being pursued across the land, only to be caught in a haunted mansion and the menaces of the haunted mansion ready
Had some 'villain' counterparts of the heroes ready as minions of the villainess

But then mostly prepped ahead of the players 1-3 sessions in advance as mentioned, reskinning modules and dungeons, making or improving scenes...

It becomes difficult to reconstruct what was prepped before-game and what was prepped mid-game as I gaze upon older campaigns, but there does seem to be some reliable markers of what I prep

What I Prep
-A starting SCENE to start the players in the action without mucking about getting to know each other in a tavern
-A starting DUNGEON, usually tied to the above, to give the players something familiar to do immediately.
-Starting CHARACTERS and/or FACTIONS for the players to roleplay with and be made aware of existing power structures and motivations
-A starting TOWN with SERVICES or at least downtime activities, so the players can prepare
-a MAP and ENCOUNTER TABLES to give a sense of a place and a buffer of content to allow the players freedom of action.
-EVENT tables, or a TIMELINE of expected events. At a minimum this is a weather reaction roll and my calendar blogpost to track time, but events of politics, looming threats, or local flavor all are useful.
-An OVERARCHING GOAL,  that, while not immediately pursuable, gives direction to the game. It is essentially the diegetic version of the pitch for the game- if you the player want to play this game, you the character should be interested in this goal somewhat.

Esoteric Enterprises is Great

 So I just finished a short but spicy game of Esoteric Enterprises, playing roughly 20~ sessions (the players played more but more on that later.)

As usual, it was warped heavily from the core concept, so there were certain mechanical and thematic inconsistencies with 'vanilla' EE that did somewhat erode some of the goals of the system.
 

The setting was in a fantasy world turned modern, as opposed to a modern world with secret fantasy elements. The inconsistencies with magic and nonhumans being woven into the setting could mostly be handwaved away as 'there are nonhumans who are basically just humans, but nonhumans who are persecuted due to extreme heterogeneity and perceived danger levels are the 'spooks' described in the book.' and magic being known, but illegal due to the usual reason of 'wizards(especially Player Wizards) have proven themselves awful and irresponsible every single time.' The real stickler was having a setting which was not assumed to be a real world capitalist hellscape. Money was an obsolete concept, the police never existed, most petty criminals were not actually criminals because the legal system wasn't derived from Abrahamic morality, etc etc. I 'solved' this by having the 'cops' be the Suppression Bureau immediately- there was no sliding scale from racist rentacop to Mr. Smith, any cop-like figure knew about magic and was committed to suppressing it. Money was also handled via ignoring the details- ones resource level still allowed to you get a hold of things, it was just assumed you got it via community favors, warehouse depots, criminal connections, and sometimes even actually using the obsolete copper/silver/gold/platinum coins once used by adventurers, now used by occult criminals.

Setting aside, the premise of the game was also at odds with EE core- the city was underlockdown due to a SCP-style breach of the Reliquary, so various ancient evils were wobbling around the city. Putting the players in the role of 'superheroes (soon to degrade to supervillain) created tension- if they didn't stop the ancient uberlich from casting Zombie Plague 1000 times and destroying the city and wiping out all humans, the campaign would end, but if they DID stop the ancient superlich, they had to gain Notoriety by casting spells and firing illegal firearms. I'd say the wear of being thankless vigilantes turned them into supervillains, but really certain players just liked being murderhobos so that's more an excuse for them dragging the rest of the party down the notoriety track, not a reason. Still, 'emergence of the first concept of superheroes and supervillains as a prologue to the REAL superhero game' was a theme that definitely goes beyond typical EE fare.

Finally, my server is absolutely popping off with FLAILSNAILS style interdimensional adventures. The influx of magic spells and items not 'native' to Esoteric Enterprises, as well as the whole concept of extradimensional travel being a thing provided another departure from core EE assumptions. There were checkpoints for stopping the influx of dangerous magical items, but they were both understaffed and ineffectual against smuggling for the most part- I could have been more hardcore about it, but that would've made the inter-campaign and one-shots harder for people to run.


Anyway, so there's the disclaimer of how this was different from core EE. Now I'll really start talking about the system...

The living cast at the end of the game, more or less

The Classes
The classes in EE are pretty cool, LotFP-style.
Bodyguards were generally viewed favorably as the tough defensive class, and their ability to avoid surprise when party leader is very useful to prevent deaths (sneak attacks being even more dangerous in EE than otherwise, but more on that later.) Their ability to use Combat Maneuvers without penalty helped them feel relevant when violence broke out too.

Criminals were also viewed favorably, being able to just 'do' stuff with an abstracted roll instead of getting bogged down in plans. Charm and Contacts were definitely the favored skill, as it was important both for encounters and getting a hold of items. Personally, I'm still not convinced skill systems add much to the game, but this is basically a LotFP specialist which most everyone I've met agrees is better than a Thief.

Doctor is, imo, the best class of Esoteric Enterprises. A dedicated 'healer' who is not also a religious zealot is a great addition, ties in well with horrible injuries, flesh, and bleeding out rules, and provides a wacky sort of advancement to the party outside of levelling up by being able to graft monster parts to people. The only thing our Doctor player bemoaned was how he had to spend his own downtime on the other players to enable their dreams of monstrous might, and how flesh healing became completely obsolete after the occultist found Cure Wounds as a spell.

Explorer was a class played by two players, one of whom had rolled up an 18 dexterity and so had a very good time riding that +3 bonus making up for any class deficiencies. For the most part, it felt mostly like an inferior Criminal. This class and its focus on stealth and athleticism would be better in two ways, I think- firstly, the Undercity 'dungeon' generation could do with having a lot more hazardous terrain to make the Explorer more valuable, and secondly, Grit being able to regenerate with a 10 minute rest means combat is usually a safe enough bet to engage in rather than worrying about stealth too much, so the stealth approach is less popular. More on EE character durability later tho.

Mercenaries were well received- the Fighter Class, essentially, the only ones with scaling + to hit, but not as tough as the Bodyguard. Mercs had a bit of extra appreciation due to the inter-campaign flailsnails adventures, where enemies tended to have higher AC than base EE enemies did. Players did feel like they fell into the usual fighter trap of not having anything to do besides hit things, but my fighters have been somewhat spoiled by secret techniques in the past so I think most tables will find Mercs to be a fine fighter-types.

Mystics were definitely the second-place magic user class, but I actually quite enjoyed them. Starting mystics having only a 1-in-6 chance to cast a spell is a bit rough, and making Charm (and therefore Cha) a source of 'attribute dependence' made your starting stat rolls a bit too relevant for my liking. BUT! The way mystics work is that you have a small spell-list, but can cast infinitely (assuming successful charm rolls.) However, failures tend to have compounding and permanent effects- our level 6 mystic, before he was eaten by a dragon, had to have sacrificed a sheep every day for 2 days straight or spellcasting would be turned off, he had to shed informational pamphlets and small idols constantly, he couldn't use the magic weapons he recovered, he had to pray twice a day, etc etc. Now, while I like the idea of incautious mystics being saddled with what amounts to a procedurally generated ritual system, in practice the precise results tended to either fade into the background, or cause that character to be a black hole of needing to be catered to lest they lose their spellcasting and become barely worth sharing loot with.

Our other poor mystic only ever managed to cast like three spells due to not having good charm rolls and being saddled with 'double XP from underground treasure, none from aboveground', so she was basically just a gimpy mercenary with a sword who had a hard time levelling up from all the aboveground shenanigans in my campaign and in others.

Finally, though it basically never got used, the Blessing system was pretty good- basically anointing another person lets them cast a mystic spell later, like they had a scroll ready almost. It was unclear if the requirements for ritually blessing someone were rolled at the time of casting or at the time of blessing, but I think this idea would translate well into other systems to make clerics more community/cult oriented.

Occultists were initially unpopular, as the second translation roll the starting occultist ever made just straight up exploded her head. That player wasn't ever exactly aligned with most game scheduling times, but I feel she probably didn't feel encouraged to try to show up after such an ignominious beginning either. These sorts of table results are the sort of reason why I'd encourage GMs to maybe tweak the tables before running EE, just a little.

However, after the initial reluctance to touch arcane magic with a 10 foot pole, some party members rolled up occultists, and it soon became apparent that Occultists are BUSTED. Cavegirl wrote a post about how balance shouldn't really be the main concern for roleplaying games, but I don't mean busted in the sense of 'linear warrior quadratic wizard' I mean by level 6 the occultists were basically playing Godbound, having gotten ways to improve Translation such that they didn't really have to worry about dying like the first one (and an unfortunate later level 1 one did). It was a good thing the flailsnails games other GMs were running were so hecking dangerous and kept the players on their toes, because there was not a lot that standard EE encounter tables could offer to challenge the occultists. It is not the ability to memorize level 6 spells in level 1 spell slots and cast dangerously that made wizards busted. (I do think the 'dangerously cast' table was way too heavy on 'annoying mental compulsions' compared to 'warped magic result that makes things exciting now' tho.) It's not even the ability to memorize a spell every 10 minutes that really broke open occultists- trading encounter checks for refreshing a spell was usually an ok deterrant. But the ability to book-cast, to cast spells reliably and safely every 10 minutes if you have the appropriate spellbook on hand, that was what really made things spammable.
Problem solving in the Undercity basically boiled down to 'we could think hard, or we could wait 10 minutes to book cast something to magic away the problem.' which was a shame. I think it woulda worked if these rituals required translation rolls and/or reagants, but could be done by anyone with a grimoire perhaps...

While low translation rolls could theoretically keep occultist versatility and power down, in actuality what happened is some unlucky occultists died, boohoo roll a new character, but the ones who didn't became the absolute core of party strategy, with the other players mostly being relevant as meatshields and occasional sources of skills.

As you can tell, I have THOUGHTS on the magic system, so we'll return to it later.

Spooks- Basically everyone agreed spooks were a bit of a trap option. Lots of people played them though, because it was cool, but having no Resources sucks, they take a lot of XP to level up, and they are heavily dependent on good stat rolls to have skills to lean on, or to have some bonuses in combat. Our most successful spooks were a ghost-shadow who spent HP to phase and were mostly immaterial, making them the superior scout, a clockwork maid who was speedy and charm-y, a battletoad who was arguably mostly effective in combat due to doctor mad science gluing bonus attacks to him, a good STR score, and Enlarge support, and a psychedelic mushroom-nymph who wanted to be a pseudo-occultist but ended up as a skill-assist for the real occultists.

I think spooks would be fine if they got some other benefit for combat or noncombat, or if they just didn't level up so slow. After all, a doctor or occultist can use mad science/magic to give people spooky powers anyway, so it feels off that spooks should be treated like having claw attacks (or whatever) naturally is that big a deal.

Equipment
The players felt they had to engage in a bit of 'mother may I' with regards to whether they could buy something with base resources or if they had to roll contacts+resources to get a hold of something. My rule of thumb was if something was occult, notably expensive, or related to violence it required rolling in downtime to get. I think EE might have been meant to have downtime that was closer to a day long than my week long downtimes, because the players felt like they could barely buy anything. I think the 'Black Market' undercity result is the sort of place the players should find early rather than late (as mine did) to help alleviate this feeling of being underequipped.

That aside I think the equipment list is pretty good, and I like how weapons deal higher damage- helps make up for stat rolls if bad, just like how the Aim action makes up for a lack of attack bonus.
I think the 'Helmet, Heavy Gloves, Heavy Boots' items should protect against certain 'Horrible Wounds' results

Grimoires, I think, should not start translated and copied into occultists spellbooks, but should be things that occultists can roll Translate on when they feel they're ready to up their game, replacing 'free' level up spells. But I once again digress into my 'occultist magic is bananas broken' tirade.

Cold Iron, Silver, and Blessed weapons (which deal double damage to various foes) were a little odd in that they showed up a lot in starting equipment but less so as 'loot' to find, but their inclusion was very urban monster-huntery and made up for the lack of common '+1' weapons, which exist on the treasure tables, but just aren't that common. I think my entire undercity had bout 3 magic weapons generated 'naturally' by EE in it, and I don't think the players found any.

I liked how encumbrance worked in EE, with both movespeed and an increased inability to dodge AoE hazards.

Flesh and Grit
This was my first time using a Flesh and Grit system, and while I kinda liked it in terms of my campaign being about proto-superheroes/villains, I'm not sure it's a good fit for an intended 'street level' campaign. It makes combat theoretially scary even if the players are high level, because crits, sneak attacks, and being shanked while grappled all go straight to flesh, making any attack potentially lethal.

However, this can delete beloved long-term characters somewhat unceremoniously, and definitely may lead players and/or GMs to lean very heavy on the 'grapple, then have buddy bypass grit' strategy, which feels a bit cheap compared to the narrative requirements to make stealthy sneak attacks or distract someone with biting words.

Also, Grit recovering after a 10 minute rest can make high con+level characters feel like a FPS videogame protagonist, with regenerating 'shields' protecting them from harm. So they can both afford to be contemptuous of HP damage because they can heal it all back, making the idea of being 'worn down' by long expeditions mostly useless, but also randomly killed now and again. This feels like it discourages strategizing to avoid damage, because the 1/240 chance to instantly die from an attack is just too unlikely to try to take preventative action against without dragging the session to a halt every time you see someone with an assault rifle, when 99% of the time you'll just wade through a combat and heal to full afterwards. Ironically, I liked Grit best in Ynn, where twiddling your thumbs for a turn causes an Event, making waiting to rest more of a question.

Painkiller drugs can restore Grit, but since lazing around for 10 minutes can do so as well without consequences, no one ever used painkillers.

There is a little-expanded upon condition, 'fatigued' which occurs if your flesh is 0, which makes it so that your grit stops recovering. If this condition became more widespread as a means to shut down grit recovery until a more serious rest was taken I think that could solve things... but in the end I think standard HP with horrible wounds (but not certain death) at 0HP is how I'll run things still.

As a minor quibble I feel flesh recovers too quickly, but this may well be a case of Cavegirl intended downtime to be more like a few days, rather than my default of a week. Speaking of time and returning to my occultist nerf proposals, it is typical that a dungeon 'action' like searching a room, picking a lock, etc, is 10 minutes. With book casting and grit recovery also being 10 minutes, that contributed heavily to 'just Disintegrate the problem lol' issue that obsoleted many approaches.

Skills
Inoffensively implemented. I prefer not using skills in games, and some players complained about how skills felt like they added too much weight to ones initial stat rolls, but I don't think the popular X-in-6 approach to skills makes or breaks a game.

Combat
The list of combat maneuvers helped counteract starting statistics and lack of attack bonuses causing combat to be a boring whiff-fest of ineptness. I could take or leave the melee stuff, and grappling allowing those not in grapples to attack flesh is a system that I think ultimately is too spicy for me, but I like the maneuvers for guns especially- a multi-attack system to account for automatic bullet spraying, and an aim maneuver to set up slow but accurate shots was nice. I think Aim could honestly be like 'aim at a target, if they don't get to cover you can automatically hit them next round' would not be overpowered, as a +4 to hit led players to mostly just shoot each round and hope to highroll instead. Still, I appreciate EE's attempts to keep to-hit and AC fairly low to prevent numbers creep and to keep enemies easily 'hittable.'

The Horrible Wounds(aka Death and Dismemberment tables) are interesting in that they don't care how far below 0 flesh you go, but how big the attack that brought you to 0 flesh was. Despite my earlier complaints about characters instantly dying, barring max damage hits from guns and big melee weapons, most the time characters will start Bleeding Out rather than dying instantly, allowing Doctors time to shine. I like the bleeding out rules having both an immediate risk of death in rounds, then a secondary risk of death over the timescale of turns if you can't get to safety, with the treatment of each level taking time to treat according to the timescale of the bleed out. These Bleeding Out rules could be expanded and given additional levels to Days or even Weeks in wilderness games to simulate infected wounds and severe internal injuries that necessitate a return to society.

There is a 'Complications in Combat' section that deals with shooting into melee, bystanders being hit by stray bullets, cover, vehicles, and so on that gives a good sense of how shooting bullets is DIFFERENT than just waving swords around.

Adventuring Hazards & Procedure
While as mentioned, the undercity generation doesn't really match up to the dangers of say, a D&D dungeon, the book does provide rules for fire, digging, falling, poison gas, drowning, not sleeping, etc. It's not comprehensive but has some gems, like saying if you fail a roll in darkness it's failed 'dangerously' and something could go wrong like 1d6 damage from an accident or equipment breakage.

Additional kudos goes to the book for describing surprise, initiative, encounter distance, morale, reaction rolls, etc. Notable changes were rolling for surprise only if it's appropriate and using party leader Perception instead of flat chances (important, given that surprise attacks go to Flesh) and reaction and morale being on 1 1d6 instead of 2d6. This made charisma and charm a little too important sometimes I felt, but also made encounters tenser and swingier than 2d6.

Downtime

Linking purchase of certain items to downtime(DT), as well as doctors and occultists requiring downtime to do their blasphemous experiments and research, made DT a coveted resource in this campaign, as it would often be 'wasted' by a failed skill roll (though I usually took a failed skill roll to mean 'bribes required' or something in similar failing-forward school of thought).

Occultist magic took up the main bulk of downtime actions, as players needed to ask about their schemes to get moss from a poets grave or the tooth of a child or whatever due to reagents. Again, I'd just recommend GMs go through the tables and tweak them to their preferences. The Reagent table in particular can come off as 'pointless nastiness and busy work' and some of the mishaps can come off as 'haha your character is now incredibly annoying to play' rather than really actionable and gameable results, especially when you're rolling a lot on it.

Still, I like the incremental, almost 'roll to failure' nature of the process of transcription and researching new spells. The bigger the spell or scheme, the more likely it will hit stumbling blocks that then require solving actively rather than passively in downtime.

Magic
EE has a fairly 'standard' spell list, with a couple of very cool new ones that feel like they define the setting well. However, since these spells are not level-gated or particularly time gated, some spells that would be innocuous in AD&D or whatever become campaign warping. While you could try to tweak every spell, I think it is easier to take one of two approaches.

1- You can embrace the authors chosen philosophy of 'Fuck Balance' and just shrug and carry on. This is what I did, in order to try to get a fair viewpoint of the system. The downside of this is that your Undercity will probably feel like slumming it in a level 1 dungeon you're way too strong for once the Occultists get going, with rare and random spikes of difficulty against like, god-avatars cults (if they have antimagic, anyway...)

2- You can slap some limits on Occultists. Here;s what I'd probably do if I ran EE again.

• Spellslots require sleep to refresh fully. Spells of any level re-memorized in a slot that has been used since you last slept are memorized Dangerously.
• Memorizing a spell or book casting a spell takes 1 turn/10 minutes per spell level.
• Book Casting can be done by anybody, but they have to roll Translation as per a non-occultist reading a scroll. Alternately, you can spend 1 reagent per spell level to avoid a translation roll.

Anyway, the spells that proved very busted were as follows. I'm sure there's plenty of other game-warping effects that would result in you looking at your undercity factions and dungeon maps and going 'welp this is pointless now' but I will limit this to what actually happened, not just hypotheticals.

1. Cure Wounds- being able to heal flesh instantly and infinitely (given enough 10 minute breaks) made the party immune to attrition, basically. Magical reagents that required the magicians skin or blood in the form of Flesh damage becomes pointless.
2. Any Information Gathering Spell- Casting Augury on anything you consider doing, or Locate Object on anything you want to find, and so on is very useful, has no drawback, and gameplay wise is one player asking the GM questions for interminable periods of time while everyone else shrivels to dust.
3. Dopethrone- This spell really falls into 2, but deserves special mention. So basically, you can get a mulligan, an undo, on any action you do, if you're high on something. So what you do is, you have the wizard do everything. If they stand in a daze drooling instead of doing it, you know it was a bad idea. This spell also makes you immune to compounding effects of continual drug use, so instead of becoming a blackout drunk drooling wizard husk, you just book cast dopethrone early in the day, devote some inventory slots to drugs, then go through the day with a -1 to three stats and a godlike ability to see into the future briefly. It's not completely foolproof, but it slows gameplay down immensely, basically demanding triple attention for the wizard player, and is a one-size fits all solution to many problems of information gathering and uncertainty. Depending on your ruling on how it works with regards to random rolls, wizards may be able to use it to exploit miscast tables and either be consequence free on the low end of things, or on the high end of cheese, they may be able to fish for 'the dream of snake people and gain a level' crazy miscast result and level the entire party to the level 20 for the price of a bunch of cheap booze.

GM Advice
This is a jolly good section on running combat, respecting randomness but also your own judgement, respecting player feelings, tone, emergent narratives, yadda yadda.  EE is a nice product both for crusty grogs who live only for rolling dice on random tables, and for people just picking up a RPG book who haven't ran a lot of games before who need some of the basic ideas spelled out for 'em.

Reputation and Notoriety
EE details a way to track faction relations, and relations with the law. Faction relations go both ways, relations with the law only ever deteriorate and can only be somewhat mitigated by reducing their interest to half your all-time high score by covering up crimes or lying low.

One thing I wasn't sure of  was if notoriety should be tracked in the form of 'you cast 5 spells and ran two people over in a car chase, +1 notoriety for spellcasting and +3 for murder' or if that example would be +5 notoriety for each spell and +6 for double murder. I ran it as the former, more conservative estimate, and the players still ended up quite notorious by the end of the campaign.

Another thing I noted with faction reputation tracking was that the biggest bonus is probably the + or - X, where X is highest party level, and it being a + or - is reliant on either you NEVER having been hostile to that faction to get +X, and having majority hostile interactions to get the -X. It's hard to actually get reputation up or down enough to have a faction be your best buddy or worst enemy with interactions and jobs alone, because those probably take a session each or so, and with all the other factions presumably in play, you're not gonna have time to do 15 jobs for True Neutral Tony before the campaign is over... Though I admit, I had too many factions (30) in my city, which definitely contributed to thinly-spread faction interactions.

Heists, Jobs and Events
The described challenges for doing CRIMES are great for improv session construction or informing prep. The tables for Undercity events keep things fresh if you roll on 'em after giving the players downtime, and honestly are 10/10 tools for making a citycrawl seem lively, with factions gunning for each other, random misfortunes, in media res starting points to open up sessions with a bang. I am absolutely stealing and reformatting these tables for my own games in the future and combining them with some of Lungfungus's stuff.

Hazards, Sicknesses, Curses, Undercity Hazards, Subway Tunnels,
This is just a list of diseases and slime molds and poison gases. It probably shoulda been back with the other adventuring hazards, but I can see why it wasn't, since these are more 'undercity specific.' My main complaint about the book is stuff like this- weird formatting choices, and occasional typos and wrong page numbers for where a table is- very much feels like more stuff was added on in later drafts and put nearer to the end without a meticulous lookthrough to link things up. Bookmarks in the PDF woulda been nice too. Still,formatting problems is a forgivable sin when the content is this good.

Treasure
Treasure tables are mostly cosmetic forms of 'things you can sell for cash,' though there's the occasional useful item or even a VERY useful item in the form of magic.  My players were kept sedated by a supply of treasure from their flailsnail protocol adventures in other dimensions like Ynn or whatever the other GMs were running... but all in all I'd say base EE does not drop enough treasure in its undercity for it to sustain XP demands as a megadungeon alone, which will make doing jobs for factions the primary source of income. I find using a d30 with the first 10 results usually being 'this much cash x100' sort of annoying, but I run my games digitally so I can roll a d30 without issue.

There are both vague tables to make magic items (you could roll a Camera that does Emotional Manipulation when used with 3d10 charges, for instance) and a short (compared to D&D) list of magical items that are a mix of standard stuff like invisibility cloaks and a martian lamp that puts you in contact with an alien researcher. Regrettably I either missed all the results in undercity generation that would have generated these items, or there's no procedure that will place them without GM Fiat, but I think this short list is more than enough to supply a campaign with wondrous items- maybe by your 3rd EE game you'd need to get new magic item lists.

I think magic items are meant to be somewhat rarer in EE, but my campaign (due to intercampaign GMs throwing items out often) was absolutely bloated with magic items from other dimensions, so in this aspect I can't really speak to how treasure REALLY feels in EE, apart from there probably not being enough to support pure undercity delving as though it were a megadungeon.

Undercity Generation
In this prep, you throw a bunch of dice onto a sheet of paper, then furiously consult tables, then each dice is a minidungeon where you do the same thing. I rather like this generation method, and there's a lot of content for different types of areas like caves and complexes.

I would say the methodology used to construct the undercity, while gimmicky in a good way, does lack a certain potential to make compounded, complex problems. You can roll the giant sinkhole, or the kitchen full of propane tanks, but you can't roll a kitchen full of propane tanks teetering precariously out into a giant sinkhole, for example. It's a minor quibble, but the undercity is simply a bit too realistic for my taste- I'd like it more if it was more of a nightmare mishmash where traversal required more problem solving than locked doors and occasionally climbing gear or scuba gear.

While baseline generation is certainly fine and I got good scenes out of it (like a gelatinous cube cornering the party in a kitchen full of leaking propane) I would advise GMs who want to focus on the undercity exploration to roll it up, but treat the results as a 'first step' after which you do a second pass over the rooms, roll up encounters before hand, and spice up some of the rooms to turn them from having just a 'feature' to having a potential 'problem' to puzzle out, and to complicate either prerolled or potential encounters if any. To use another of this author's work as an example, the dungeons here feel like a 'location' in Ynn, without the added 'Detail' to spice it up.

Still, I don't want to be too hard on this- fantasy dungeon generation has like 50 years of disparate development supporting it, while 'modern urban occult undercity' dungeon generation, and my players certainly liked delving it well enough, epecially when they started looking at locations as potential bases for them to take over and refurbish as their own.

Undercity Faction Generation
THIS on the other hand, completely slaps and I have no reservations. With the same 'throw dice on paper, consult tables furiously' method, you can whip up factions and their entangled web of politics, as well as roll how many goons, exactly, the crime families have, which spellbooks the occult librarians are translating, etc etc. My city setting of Oroboro has the weight of like 3 campaigns behind it so I had great fun making these factions references to past factions, but I think this is a great way to roll up a new area with no context to it to produce this sort of lore.

One thing I caution GMs against is getting caught up in how fun this is and rolling too many factions- I made 30 factions, and 10 would have been fine, and for the length this campaign ended up being, 5 would have been fine too if I condensed similar ones and kept the focus more narrow. Factions are complex entities and provide far more than one sessions worth of content- at the minimum, they could provide an intro session to show who they are and their interests, 3-4 sessions based on their rolled interactions with other factions, and probably a session per 'leader/subleader' type if you put in the work to give those NPCs faces and stuff to do. In my own campaign I tended to make things like 'Mob Lieutenants' be minor super-types for extra drama and flashy interest, but if that's too off-genre for your game, stuff like giving them a fancy car, or a flamethrower instead of a pistol, or goons with grenades is a simple way to break up the masses of 'fellas with vests and pistols.'

some undercity complexes

what the faction web looks like with 30 factions

Encounter Tables
Apart from encountering faction agents and the fuzz, there's also your standard undercity dungeon denizens like giant rats and stuff. One odd thing about the tables is that the more dangerous encounters do not roughly correspond to 'depth,' but more to random chance, or location. So there is a bit of a sense of being in a 'starter dungeon,' slapping bat swarms, petty crooks, and sewer animals until suddenly something really horrible shows up. This is a fine mood for low level characters, but higher level ones or larger parties may be bored by such 'filler' encounters as a swarm of bats  hen their grit will replenish from chip damage, making violence a fairly consequence-free action (barring random flesh hits of course) which seems at odds with the intended tone, perhaps.

One thing the encounters do well is that, the way the undercity is set up, the tables that reference each other also serve as local encounter tables to make areas feel different from each other, so they serve the role both as generic encounter table and specific encounter table, but they're all linked so there's always the possibility of 'unusual' encounters that don't quite fit an area.

The Bestiary Itself
A mixed bag of critters, refreshingly succinct. One thing I like is that there is a fair degree of randomness in terms of powers and such to many 'traditional' monsters, so Lycanthropes,  Vampires and Dragons are unpredictable, rather than cliche. This plays really well with the intended setting, where people don't believe in monsters, so you can't be sure what they're actually going to be like when you find one.

While initially some entries feel a bit like filler and 'seen it before, meh', I think it's important to note that EE monsters have different math assumptions, so using an AD&D bear instead of a EE cave bear will have mixed results. And also, if you read the bestiary in full instead of just skimming it and noting familiar entries, you will find there's a lot of very fun and quirky monsters in this bestiary with their own gimmicks and powers and weirdness, like ferret-hydras, concrete nymphs, a ghost of a subway train crash, and more. I regrettably didn't get to use many of them in my own campaign, but there's a lotta neat stuff here.

Review as a Product
I don't buy things very often, surviving as I do on plasma donations, dumpster diving, and generous  patronage for art or games. So when I say Esoteric Enterprises is worth the price, know this is the serious and thoughtful pronouncement of a trash-dwelling gremlin creature who weighs the pricetag of ~10 bucks quite seriously, and made sure to play a whole campaign before declaring it good and great, not some mere casual thumbs up for a game my butler bought on a whim while shopping for weekly monkey jpeg NFTs.

Oh, that aside, the art of the book, done with, I assume, makeup, LARP costumes, and maybe some photo manipulation (as well as some drawn/painted art now and then) was pretty neat I thought, and gave the system a very punk and modern vibe, as appropriate for its described setting.


Lessons Learnt
I think this campaign showed that I don't need to have THAT many things going on at once, and that I can focus deeply on one aspect of a game world rather than trying to spread my focus broadly. This isn't really a new lesson, more like a reiteration that scope creep sneaks into all projects.

Similarly, with regards to focusing on my players, I think the time has come to split my open table into smaller tables with different themes. I can put all the people who wanna be baddies in one group, and the people who wanna be the hero in another group, and have a third group for luck, and then they can all operate in the same general campaign without interfering with each others fun.
Hopefully this will solve another problem with fast-paced open table play, where the people who play a lot get ahead, and those who play less lose the thread of the game, fall behind, and drop out. It's fine to say 'oh it doesn't matter if you're level 1' and that's true, but it does matter if you're so far behind that, as one player put it, "it gets to the point where people seem to be talking in a different language"

This campaign was also an interesting foray into how having Flailsnail Protocols (where characters can drift between campaigns) affects things. It allows players to advance character dynamics with other party members without the presence of a particular GM. It also tends to complicate characters when they pick up mutations and weirdness that isn't the sort of thing you'd make yourself, so you have to decide to either play it straight, adapt to your campaign, or neutralize it somehow. While the go-to explanation since the 80's has just been that magic is unreliable across dimensions and so Sam's +5 Sword of Slaughtering only works in Dave's Monty Hall game, being inert in other dimensions, I found it interesting to try to have more in-universe explanations for why problematic items might not transfer over- security checkpoints at portals confiscating such goods was a pretty fun one, as it allows some counterplay and potential problems.

It's not all fun and games for the players though- I can't be certain, but I think more people died in other dimensions than in their home dimension, and they brought back quite a few awful things with them as well as extraplanar treasures- curses, stalking beasts, plagues. Not all game groups have enough willing GMs to foster this sort of environment, but its been very, very interesting to have multiple worlds linked together via runic portals, dream-projection, and Ynn.

I'd say this campaign was more of a 'palate cleanser' after the heavy tactical cronch of Lancer than anything that was really intended to be a longform campaign. But it doubled as worldbuilding and backstory for when I run a superhero game in Oroboro with the old party as the supervillainous tyrants ruling the city for their own magical enrichment, so that's nice. That's not gonna be next campaign though- the players voted, at last, on the perennial second-favorite campaign pitch, the Wizard School. That's going to be another campaign that exists more for testing purposes than for being one of the longform campaigns, I think- I'm going to bash out a bunch of different magic systems, try out the thematically separate player groups, and have a bunch of Unseen University esque shenanigans by using all those wizard school posts from Skerples and so on.

Rambling Thoughts on Lancer

 

So for about half of 2021, I ran a Lancer campaign. Lancer is a game about giant fighting robots, set in a future that, while not perfect, is characterized mainly by the idea that humanity, after nearly destroying itself multiple times through greed and hate, may be finally creating a society that is actually good, learning from the lessons of the past and vowing not to repeat them. A bit like the original vision of Star Trek's Federation. Setting-wise my own campaign deviated from standard Lancer canon on account of being set on an artificial world-construct from my own sunset-realms that had interdimensionally jumped into the lancerverse because reasons, but the interaction between my own accursed world and the larger setting still demonstrated the tone of the base setting I think. All in all the tone of the game is a welcome change from the usually crappy space-futures other sci-if games offer, so it's no surprise that I see some intersection between the osr-dream type communities and Lancer.

Mechanically, its very much a 'crunchy tactical combat' game, a departure from OSR, closer to perhaps 4e D&D where diegetic reasoning and flavor takes an explicit backseat to the mechanical and mathematical interactions. While there are resolution mechanics for on-foot adventures, they are highly abstract and storygame-styled, and sessions that do not have a 3-8 hour robot punching section are more freeform RP than, say, a PbtA style thing. That said, I think the simple downtime actions in lancer are really good- I like having between-session downtime for the players to relax and roleplay in low-stakes situations, and having what are basically carousing tables for preparing for the next mission is great.

Lancer wouldn't be nearly as playable without the player-facing content being free, and there existing a character-tracking tool called COMP/CON. Being able to track characters on automated character sheets online streamlines the learning process for players for a game with a lot of moving parts, and makes it easy to tinker with character builds on your own time.

If you don't care too much about the system nitty-gritty, feel free to jump straight to Closing Thoughts.

I don't think I could have run/played this game online without comp/con being offered as a free service. Also check out Retrograde Minis, another great service with pixel art for lancer PC and NPC mechs

Character Building
I sometimes complain that 3.5 and pathfinder, character creation has less to do about character, and more to do with building a mathematically optimal battle robot. Ironically, the game where you literally ARE building a mathematical combat robot doesn't annoy me nearly as much.
In some part, I think there is an advantage in Lancer's disconnect between your character, and their combat. If you are a Half-Wagon Half-Dulcimer Hexsinger Bladelock or whatever in pathfinder, the profane blasts and whirlwind cleaves and +4 strength and whatever are all locked into your character sheet as an integral part of them. In Lancer though, you will go through many mecha frames. You will change out their loadouts, retrain your personal tactics and change your strategies. In D&D terms, it would be like being able to pick your class and so on again every time you levelled up. Your ability to do violence in various flavors is just tools you pick up and discard, and your pilot's identity is more separate from their frame's identity, which is further exemplified by how the pilot has a name, a Callsign used on the battlefield, and a name for their mechs.

That's very high-concept explanation for why I don't dislike the entirely combat-based character creation of Lancer but spurn D&D when it does the same thing. But onto more nitty gritty details that are basically just me complaining about the half-campaign I was a player in, and the full campaign I gm'ed for.

All in all, character creation and tinkering and evolving your build over time is great fun in lancer. You don't build the character at level 20 and grind your way there, you have to build for where you are right now, adapting to what the GM's style is, what your fellow PCs are doing, what you find you enjoy, etc etc. One player I had started as a hacker and then ended up as a giant fist punchy robot instead. Another player liked variety and basically had a new build every mission- and unlike D&D they didn't have to change characters to get the variety they craved, they just needed a new robot. Though I may come off as quite picky as I work through the text, Lancer is a top-tier game for players who enjoy detailed charop. (On the negative note with regards to Looking For Group dynamics, this leads to a similar problem as later editions of D&D, where everyone wants to play their super cool character, but no one wants to be the one behind the screen enabling everyone else's character.)

STATS
My problem with the stats in lancer is that, compared to the easily swappable gear and talents, the stats of the mech (tanky, dodgy, hacker, and (roughly) action economy) feel a lot more baked in, with fewer ways to get around not having them, and wildly different levels of efficiency. It takes 1/3rd of your career as a lancer to maximise your agility, but within any given enemies toolkit it probably has at least two ways to make your EV (AC equivalent) basically irrelevant. If you don't put points into hacking you will soon find that hacking, even as a side-strategy, becomes futile except against the explicitly easy to hack enemies compared to your naturally improving gun accuracy, which requires no stat investment. Hull has such an insanely dramatic effect on survivability that the first ~2 pointss should honestly be mandatory and built-in-. In D&D terms, playing without Hull investiture it feels akin to playing with 3 constitution, not simply the lack of a con bonus.


Talents
Similar to feats,  these are a bit of a mixed bag. There are talents that enable you to do new things, and there are talents that allow you to do things better, with +1d6 to hit. While all-in-all I'd say these are much better than 3.5 style feats, I feel like some of them feel like obligatory filler. The "shotgun" feats just make you more accurate, then finally do something new by letting you shoot enemies who enter your threat zone immediately, instead of being a more 'attack of opportunity' style deal. I really like that last one, but the weapon-based accuracy feels a bit like a 'feat tax' that is pervasive throughout the design, and one that is easier to lean into than any attempt to focus on the talents that change how you play, rather than how powerful your play is.

Core Bonuses- Even moreso than talents, these rare and valuable character upgrades have a lot of interesting options... and a lot of 'do thing +1d6 better' and those mathematical bonuses are really, really hard to say no to for the sake of flavor, because Lancer is a pretty spicy tactical game and without some degree of optimization your 'flavor' may well be 'I'm the guy who dies a lot.' These effects also are tied to licenses (See below) which has a tendency to encourage picking either the powerful 'Generic' bonuses because you don't qualify for the one you actually want, or picking one of the clearly optimal specific core bonuses from a certain set, and then not being able to choose a more flavorful second one from that same set without feeling like you are intentionally making a decision to lose more.

License Levels-  The real appeal of the system, each LL is associated with a different robot frame, along with associated guns and systems. Each one is, to use an OSR analogy, like templates 1-3 of a glog class. You unlock these slowly and mix and match what you unlock, rather than using it all at once, and since you can swap them out this allows for versatility in character building, variety in how you mix and match, and a very digestible flow of information for new players. The best part is, I think, how most of this is a side-grade, or something not directly comparable to the default equipment list every character has access to from LL0. It is not only possible to stick to the 'starting' mech and associated systems, but it is low-key a pretty powerful and versatile choice to do so, the other mechs being for more specialized roles like slow shield tank or whatever.

While some of my earlier complaints may sound like I have a terminal case of 'not being able to pick everything I want,' the restriction works quite well for license levels, as it prevents analysis paralysis, but still provides progression goals without being a straitjacket as 'classes' sometimes are.

Actions
Lancer uses a fairly familiar kind of game action economy. You get a basic 'free' move, then two more moves, or a single 'big' move. You can 'overcharge' to take another move, at the cost of increasing heat and maybe eventually exploding or becoming vulnerable. Actions available in combat are quite good and valuable in many ways, though at later levels, the 'attack' option gets better and better by virtue of the scaling math on both sides of the equation making other options less appealing. But that is a minor complaint- you can shove mechs around, you can self destruct, you can hide in smoke, you can assist your allies, it's pretty great from a tactical combat sense.

Damage and the problem of the destroyed mech
Taking serious damage in lancer causes you to temporarily lose access to systems and weapons until repaired (or, sometimes to shrug the hit off, and sometimes to eat shit and die instantly/lose turns/both). If you are taken out completely, the cost of becoming operational again is prohibitive in the extreme. Basically, every time a players mech was destroyed, they had to choose between negotiating for a mech in better shape somehow (normally the party only 'Full Repairs' every 2-4 mission, but there's a GM-fiat heavy but canon way to appeal for superior healing) or trying to play another mission 1-2 hits away from death (in practice, this would usually mean you get to play 1-2 turns, then sit out for the next 3 hours of combat. Suffice it to say, GM lenience with getting new mechs was required for the sake of letting people actually play the game, which meant the threat of having ones mech destroyed could feel a bit of an empty threat.)

Now personally, I really like the idea of limping along with a heavily damaged mech and trying to make do with what remains... but due to the occasional swinginess of 'instant dead' or 'lol I'm fine' that middleground of desperation did not exist as much, especially due to the way losing weapons and systems works. Namely, when the player must mark something as destroyed, they get to choose what is lost... so what happens is typically that players will never lose their best gear, their gear supported by talents. They'll lose random smoke grenades, their backup missiles, but their tactics do not significantly change, they do not have to adapt, because they will almost certainly still have their main tactics undamaged until they are blown to pieces.

Players will also sometimes accumulate a great many horrible statuses like being pinned to the ground, slowed in goo, on fire, jammed and blinded, etc etc. These statuses accomplish to some degree the 'adapt your tactics' I wanted to see and I will praise, with the caveat that, especially in the later levels, the idea of 'dead is the best status effect' seemed to be the most accessible tactic for both players and NPCs.

Death
Lancer is not OSR- player death is rare. This allows for a healthy level of daredevil behavior, with the 'mech blows up from overheating' a good disincentive to push too hard, as that's one of the ways a player actually can die (the other, being shot at while outside their mech, an event that typically never happens due to honorable reasons, and is further reduced in likelihood by 0 pilot HP only meaning death 1-in-6 time.)

Furthermore, death is not really penalized- there are suggested options for playing a flash clone of the old character to carry on with the same ol skills and tactics, +clone angst, but an entirely new character does not start at LL0 again. The idea is that, for the tactical combat part of the game to continue next time, the narrative should move forward with that in mind. Similarly, if the players lose a sitrep against space pirates or whatever, they should probably just have a narrative time of jailbreaking, then getting in stolen pirate mechs of suspiciously convenient design and kicking ass. It's not a game about being kicked while you're down, basically.

This is interesting because while it's different from OSR games with level loss for raises and the like, I think it goes to show how very storygame-type thinking can serve the purpose of enabling something entirely different- in this case, the tactical wargame element. Anyway, this section became a bit of a tangent but I think it goes to show that you can think in genre and what's good for the game without actually running a storygame when it comes to adjudicating serious complications.

Sitreps
Lancer uses sitreps, where you have to escort targets, defend zone, and otherwise not just engage in grueling deathmatches. These sitreps really make things that aren't raw damage output shine, and while some of their rules feel very janky, the general concept is very good for spicing up combat in any system I think. A context for the violence, a stage upon which it plays out, a time limit applied quite arbitrarily to create tension and stakes and cut down on 'superior forces wipe out smaller forces.' While OSR games tend to already be good at this, ones that are doing combat heavy dungeon crawls could benefit from Lancer's practice of assigning arbitrary metagame restrictions like 'defend this area for 6 turns against a horde of enemies, any enemy inside this area means you are overrrun and captured.' I myself am reminded of a 'Dance Pentagon' I made up for a courtly ball in an osr game, in which there were very arbitrary rules for who could dance with whom, what the consequences of dancing were (HP damage from exhausting dances with mean nobles, recovered at the drinks bar, as an example.)

The Enemies
At last, the GM side of character building. Enemies in Lancer have very specific roles and are designed to work with each other in mixed groups, much like (I assume) 4e(Maybe 5e?) monsters were.

A Slurry of Good Things About Lancer Enemies
Enemies did things that required answers. Some enemies were almost always hidden and invisible. Some enemies walled off areas. Some enemies shelled the players from afar, punishing bunching up.
Enemies were annoying and dangerous, making targeting priority an interesting question. I think Lancer finally opened my eyes to the value of having 'mixed' monster encounters being far more engaging than simply multiple monsters of the same type, which current D&D encounter tables currently do not really encourage. Enemies also did flat damage instead of rolling (mostly) which I think is good for tactical games, but probably bad for OSR, where the swingy jankiness of combat is part of what makes it thrilling. Mostly "Hard" instead of "Soft" enemies, based on what the Into the Odd author wrote on the subject (ie, don't softball monster moves into having activation chances, saves against, only ending someone after 3 failed saves, hiding damage behind saves, etc etc). Having templates to apply to enemies like Veteran, Pirate, etc could be a good way to change monsters from all manner of games, though the work required to make these templates and the design behind them should not be understated (My favorite template, Spacer, has more to do with movement options than making something tougher or fire-themed, so similar OSR templates would need consideration on many levels to avoid being bloat).

The Bad, Slightly More Organized
As a general rule, I think enemies have too high a heatcap- I could probably count on one hand the number of enemies that overheated over the course of like 50 action-packed sessions. Hackers seemed to give up on hacking about halfway through both campaigns I was in.

Similarly, HP feels too high- it feels as if, in design, some players optimized damage output, so NPC HP was tweaked to match those players. But that leaves players who did not optimize for damage with very limited options for helping- trying to shoot down an enemy with 1 Armor and 18HP is not at all unusual, but it is extremely nonviable to try to do this with a 1d6 weapon and a 6 round time limit when you are outnumbered 2-to-1 (or more) by such enemies.
They were also, for the most part, far too accurate. They have built in ways to get accuracy via Lock ons and Ramming Prones, and reducing enemy accuracy significantly would encourage those actions more seriously. In the current paradigm, I took those actions mainly to make things easier on the players- NPCs who single-mindedly use their second action to Invade is generally agreed to be such an optimal action that the lancer community encourages GMs not to do this.

Rules Clarity And Density
It is VERY crunchy and not for players who do not enjoy lengthy tactical combat and charop.The rules, while mostly solid, are subject to a great deal of differing interpretation based on sentence structure and RAW vs RAI, and common sense rulings are not the intended style of rulings. This is because combat mechanics are non-diegetic, subject to reskinning for flavor, and intended to bring about mathematical outcomes. "Immobilized" does not mean what you might think it means based on the word, it is more akin to 'Unable to choose to voluntarily engage movement systems.' The difference between 'An Attack' and 'An Attack Roll' was a particular quibble that plagues me still after like 60 sessions, as there IS a difference, but it is often unclear which is meant. My interpretation of the meltdown rules is that most NPCs do indeed melt down if overheated following the usual rules, but the majority of the Lancer Community believes that they instead simply take double damage, being curiously immune to meltdown unlike their stronger variants. In an OSR game, ruling however you please will rarely cause issue, but in a game like this, ruling one way or another could completely alter a player's build, so there is rather more at stake, making rules discussion considerably more exhausting even when all parties involved are acting in good faith, and making the game more likely to burnout GMs.

Closing Thoughts
Despite my majority negative expression above, I really enjoyed Lancer as a big robot slugathon game as a change of pace from diplomatic OSR games. Of course, the narrative and character motivations and actions navigating the scene I created led to a bunch of intrigue anyway. It helped that I had great players (even if I had to separate them into two groups for the sake of social dynamics and time constraints) but I think Lancer as a system encourages good games to come about, rather than being an obstacle to that.

I don't know if I'll run Lancer again. While I had some houserules the first time, they were bubbly little houserules for fun. If I ran it again, I think there'd be seriously warped houserules like condensing talent trees into a single talent, damage to systems/weapons hitting random targets, 'direct hits' causing special damage like perma-immobilize or jammed cockpits instead of Destruction, changing to-hit into deterministic, no-roll events based on accuracy and difficulty, slamming NPCs with almost universal -6HP, -2Heat Cap, -1 Accuracy, and generally just making the thing an abomination that players with their precious characters built for regular Lancer have no place in. On top of that, I'd have to decide if I had the energy to prep that many maps and encounters again.

Of course, I'd PLAY lancer again with my own precious character builds. It's one of those games for making the players have a good time, after all.

On a less rules oriented note...

The first-arc villain, fighting a futile war against the KRX, No Sirrah. The dictator clone of notable Lancer setting space fascist Harrison. The government he led was taken over by a PC, Sir Richard Keynes, in a coup and repurposed to properly prioritize saving lives over making glorious war martyr propaganda. The main lesson learned from him is that spelling an established villains name backwards is a 10/10 stupid gm trick

The Sunset Realms IN SPAAAAAAACE
Converting my fantasy realm to correspond to a Lancer Future was ridiculous. But, it was fun, mumbling about 'well, maybe it's magic, maybe it's just DNA recognition giving you access to command terraforming nanites.' Themes of the game were deception, (the main antagonists, the KRX, not being aliens but biomechs made by a human cult of Lumar trying to isolate or destroy the world to contain a memetic entity, as well as the good guys of Union trying to keep things Not Meant To Be Known under wraps), and probably the power of friendship, exemplified both in the party splitting, then learning to work together again, as well as recruiting cyberdogs, off-planet hackers, local factions, and even allying with the 'enemy' faction against the murderous AI/God that had orchestrated the event. It also definitely had that classic superhero 'with great power comes great responsibility' going on too, with the players having to decide not just if they can do something, but if they should. Finally, maybe a theme of 'everyone has their own story' might play out based on the different factions and rival mech teams the party faced, which ranged from simple misunderstanding, to alternate narratives, to meta shenanigans about arguing over who the actual protagonists of the campaign were.

The party split early on into those folks who were 100% on board with the 'careful investigation and handling of an event to avoid potential misunderstandings with a new culture' and those who were like "YOU DON'T TELL ME WHAT TO DO SPACE GOVMT" and ended up unleashing some ancient evils in an attempt to discover the truth. In the end, they both had the interests of saving people at heart, so this wasn't a pvp scenario, just a 'having two playergroups to account for different preferred playstyles and campaign expectations.' Also, us not dropping dead after an 8 person, 12 hour combat sessions was a perk.

This splitting of groups was, I think, a lesson I didn't realize I should've learned. While future splits would be better done with more thought given to scheduling, or some kind of 'pick your own team' player focused thing, even if I CAN run games for 9 players in simpler systems (like my current Esoteric Enterprises game), running 1 campaign with 2 groups isn't as brain-bending as I had feared, and allows for more character-focused moments with smaller groups (as well as allowing hirelings- there's not much call for Jobbo the Torchbearer in a party of 9, after all).

Another thing the players reacted well to was recurring villains who were reactive to the players. First-time opposition usually wouldn't play as well against the players, but if they got away they'd adapt and improve and the second encounter would be even more memorable. There were several minor recurring villains who were just nameless enemies who came back as Veterans, several recurring conflicts with teams who were intended to showcase the ideology of the faction they represented and fall along with their faction, a true 'rival adventuring team' that was basically weird parallels of the party to serve as a dark mirror, and finally, a Dragon (not a literal dragon, though there was one of them too) in the form of the High Anathemant, a mad cultist of the lancer entity RA(who would not condone this guy at all) who was tricked into serving Lumar. Like my favored use of actual Dragons in fantasy games, the High Anathemant showed up early where he was very overpowered and left an impression and gave the party someone to strive against for vengeance (they scattered him across space and time via portal, and defeated Lumar shapeshifted into his mech for some mechanical closure to see if they could've defeated him in regular combat too once they were properly prepared. The answer was very yes, but now thanks to the portal shenanigans I may have to battle Ultra-Mecha-Lolth in combination AD&D/Lancer in another campaign. But I'm getting off topic- suffice it to say the FLAILSNAIL protocols on my server have gotten out of hand)

 Memetic Infection rate of Kind-As-Night estimated 33% from this transmission method. Compliance noted in 3 new player hosts.

 I hesitate to call this a lesson learned, more like a lesson well executed, since past campaigns I've run on the advice of Champions rulebooks were what really told me the value of recurring villains, and I've used them before. Basically, there are several lines to avoid crossing when it comes to recurring villains- they can't recur too often, since they'll become stale and it is frustrating to the players to capture someone and then have the capturing not 'stick.' Players may wish to just murder the bastards if the annoyance grows too high, which either is at odds with campaign tones for heroic campaigns, or a simple end to the 'recurrent' part of the villain.

Very tl;dr, but this campaign retrospective wasn't going to fit into the usual OSR posts, so, yeah.