Thoughts on my Nightmare Glog

After playtesting and getting neat ideas from other systems, I've decided my Nightmare Glog hack needs to burn in a dumpster fire

2/10

Failures
Having roll under stats was encouraging everyone to just rely on those skill and stat rolls. A classic character abilities overshadowing player skill situation, where rather than interact with the game world by, well, interacting with it, things got boiled down to rolls. Naturally some players already had 'player skill' and didn't succumb to this, but the mechanics need to actually inform gameplay or they need to be pitched. Similarly, using 'roll under stat' made stats actually pretty important- even MORE important than even 3.5, arguably. And stats are supposed to be a jumping off for conceptualizing your character, not the most important thing about 'em. Not to mention the whole 'how to roleplay mental stats without it meaning 'player skill must be gimped if you got a bad roll in character creation' As such I'm looking favorably at Maze Rats style stats.

Another thing I wanted to do was emphasize that rolling dice has consequences on failure as well as success, to prevent haphazard 'I sneak I search I speech' thrown out willy nilly, and that dice results stick until the situation changes. You don't roll to sneak past each guard, cuz that's called 'rolling to failure' and is a form of railroading, where the GM calls for rolls until you finally fail one. The opposite problem is 'Taking 20' where there's no consequence for failure or dilly dallying so rolls become pointless. Ideally, both are solved by the totally not butchered osr principle of 'rulings not rollings' and making time a resource. The powered-by-the-apocalypse style rolls I used in Monsterhearts where on 2d6, 0-6 makes things worse, 7-9 is mixed success, and 10+ is pure success was pretty nice and I might adopt it, but keep the d20 around for ease of stat conversion for attack rolls.


Character sheet wasn't simple enough. Skill slots, inventory slots, hp, ac, chosen traits, etc were numerous enough that it couldn't be edited onto blank online text document elegantly. Though I liked Notches, keeping track of them was also annoying (A player quickly found themselves keeping track of Notches for Fists, Daggers, Bow, Sword, and Torch in a handful of sessions) and the system encouraged fighting for the sake of fighting- especially fighting lots of weak foes. My tentative solution is to say that you only keep track of notches for ONE weapon class at a time, and to make it per HD slain rather than per enemy, and probably only for things with higher HD than you. Or maybe disregard the system and use my preferred 'secret technique' style of fighters learning cool stuff that I used in the BFRPG game. Probably that, yeah.

Too many class abilities that were too close to snoozeworthy mechanical bonuses and passive bonuses rather than abilities that made people say 'wow I can do THIS now?' Also, too forward-facing. Cavegirl mentioned using secret booklets to gradually introduce lore and character abilities and I think this could be great both to prevent character creation from being bogged down and to prevent players from obsessing over getting Cleave at level 3 and so roleplaying as a player wishing to upgrade their character rather than a character wishing to

Fighters did a bit too much damage with the 1d8 bonus auto damage from The Nightmares underneath. I think having them be the only class that gets bonuses to hit is sufficient, ala Lamentations of the Flame Princess.

One of the things I dislike most about D&D is 'scaling' and I think there was still too much of it going on. Ideally, I want players to genuinely not care if they are a few levels below another PC, and to definitely never view monsters as things that require level grinding to face. Dragons should be scary because they can smell metal and breathe fire and are hard to escape from and negotiate with, not because their maths are ten times bigger than your maths so you need to math yourself up x10 and then you can fight dragons fearlessly.

I also decided coins for XP is a great OSR idea that I just can't get to mesh up with how my games are set up with rotating character rosters. Player A comes to 5 sessions and obtains 5 oddball magic items but 0 coins, and player B goes on a solo to pick through an 'already looted' dungeon and finds a secret stash of platinum and can now gain 2 levels. Player A only has 2 hands and 1 action per round and limited creativity with those oddball items and really would just like to be level 3 because levels are a way progress is tracked and being knighted and having the favor of Duke Ekud and having a bunch of potions but still being level 1 cuz you didn't find gold in a hole rubs many the wrong way. Plus a lot of players seemed to like the 'alternate leveling systems' so a Maze Rat style where each session is worth 1xp, great success is 2xp, and success against odds thought overwhelming is 3xp would let play for the sake of play and pursuing player-set goals hold up, rather than mandatory loot-lust. Getting a fat pile of loot probably counts as great success so loot-lust is still viable, just not required.

tl;dr, I adopted the GLOG because I love its magic system, but should have thought about other things much more carefully before running away with 'em.

World of the Wolf Moons, Painted In Broad Strokes

https://docs.google.com/document/d/1Yx1_Mw3o4Xv5L9a7ZY49Hqlo55becgL6MWbZiZvyUr4
edit from the future- That there link is to the nightmare glog, which pretty much unabashedly sucks.You can go here if you want an even bigger-picture view of the setting, though.

Stuff to Do The thematic elements of the game are somewhat divided by geographic location. As
players this is good to read to get an idea of what sounds nifty and where you'd like to adventure.

Noonlands

The Noonlands, King's Point and Queen's Coast are where you'd go for political scheming between rival kings and queens and their Lords and Ladies in their castles scattered throughout the land. Overt violence is rare, but not at all unheard of, and there's plenty of fleeing to mountain monasteries to hide from wicked knights and plots to steal the pope and similar nonsense. People are the interesting part of this landscape. King's Point is where the seedy criminal business and stupid plans come to fruition, whereas Queen's Coast tries to hold itself to higher standards of refinement and upstandingness.

Heliologos is where you'd go to have wizard-school shenanigans among a bunch of wine and sun-drenched islanders, with new entertainments coming in monthly from the Beast Islands and stranger things coming from the Astral Gate, if you can get access to it. Good if the entire party is wizards, or if the party wants to blow off some steam with a weird cross-world adventure.

Geth is in the Noonlands and has a lot of politicking between the offspring of the Caliph. And within the old city below, it also has a heavy criminal and 'heist' element in the underclass- rooftop runnings and sewer crawlings alike. And below the city that is below the city, is a Megadungeon, a layer cake of the Geths of old, buried but not dead. The entire campaign could take place within Geth, if a citycrawl is what was wanted.

Daylands
Roads lead to established setpieces, generally villages and fortresses. Going offroad leads to strangeness. These are frontier regions, with warring barons in keeps and castles every 10 miles or so claiming land for King, Queen, Prince, or even themselves.
Vint- A port city that the Blood Moon has never risen over directly. Doesn't believe in the Scourge, attributing it to peasant superstition and baronial mismanagement. Vint is a city of sea merchants who build boats and sell boats and use their many boats to extend military power down the coast. Vint is a city in denial, blind to the creeping scourge rats in the sewers and the serial killer nobles in their ranks, and you should go here if you want to be a street-sweeping vigilante out to either clean up the city and wake up the ignorant populace, or to do dirty deeds that must be done and let the city stay blissfully ignorant of its own problems.

Savoth is a foresting city, and while they see the Blood Moon every so often, their Scourge incidence is pretty low and they do not fear their forests from which they get their wood. Savoth is a craftsmans city, producing goods so Vint can trade them. Foresters who aren't from small villages are generally from Savoth, and it's a good frontier outpost for adventure. Go here to boast about slain beasts and make boisterous friends in taverns, and to meet people too radical for Vint.

Prince's Spit has masked knights and swashbucklering duels and 2nd-story streets over swamp canals and foreign embassies and parties constantly and lots of romantic intrigue and all in all it's a good place for upper-class drama queens and poets and lower class gossips and rumormongers. Go here if you wanna be fancy and political, but don't want to leave your rapier and history of wrongs at the door like you would in Queen's Coast.

The Canal of The Bog- A line of castles watching over a crumbling canal across the Daylit kingdoms, ruled by lords fair and foul, in a terrain that even the rustic swampfolk admit is a little unpleasant. Feudalism and swamp banjos- come here if you've been reading the feudalism posts at coins and scrolls and want some of that, and/or if you want to go on swamp adventures and roll for diseases and rusty armor all while trying to retrieve a prize pig from probably a witch or something. It's like redneck king Arthur.

Neth- The closest thing to vanilla 'The Nightmares Underneath' style play. Invest in institutions, gain in social class and advance through the 3 walls of wood, stone, and iron to the mountain court of the New Caliph, maybe do light wilderness exploration and town roleplaying, and make most of your money retrieving anchors from nightmare realms and selling them to sketchy dudes while patting yourself on the back for vanquishing a nightmare. Meet weird desert cults, little oasis villages, exotic nomads, but rest assured that so long as the nightmares do not grow unchecked, you can protect the Law from the onslaughts of chaos

Random Villages and Random Beast Islands of the Daylit Kingdoms- Each village has a few interesting NPCs, a few interesting bits of local history, maybe a dungeon, maybe a monster, maybe a cruel overlord, maybe a poisoned well, maybe this, maybe that. Go muck about in the towns and villages if you like 'a stranger comes to town' style plots and exploration without it being a grueling expedition through empty wastes.
Around Vint and Savoth, it's more 'Grimm's Fairy Tales'
Around Saresare it's more 'Arabian Nights'
Naturally the beast islands are more 'gulliver's travels' with a bit of Pirates of The Caribbean , on account of the necessity for boats.

The Moonlands
Wilderness crawling with very few established areas. Charts and random rolls determine what is over the next hilltop, and the ruling forces are Moons and Monsters, not Men. Beware!

It's scary out here. In the daylands, villages are notable if they have a monster nearby. In the moonlands, monsters are everywhere. No one knows what all is out there in the moonlands, because nobody with a lick of sense takes one more step away from their place of safety than they have to. The Moons hang, low and leering, not for hours, but for weeks- Helios isn't coming to chase them off, they only leave when they're good and ready. And without the moons, there are only the stars, and you need a torch to see- and the dim light of Helios chasing off a Moon in the nearby Daylands only does you any good if the moon was vaguely in your direction- you can go to sleep 4 times without seeing even indirect sunlight, some times.

Vint-Savoth- Scourged nobles, twisted and strange, in castles long forgotten by the wars of men. Villages swallowed by the woods, or turned to moon-worship and druidry. Primordial Wolf-Spirits that have never seen a man, and aren't impressed. Foresters too experienced for their own good patrolling a frontier overrun by monsters. And the Blood Moon, never too far away. Come here if you seek darkness and the beast within man, but stay away if you fear the forest.

Wurderlands.
War. Wonder. Murder. Wander. Weirder. Border. Etymology unclear. There are grim fortresses, some still manned by men and guarding villages, others lost to the dark and lying in wait. There are roving barbarians, disciples of Demurge, the cruelest god of man, but still one of men's gods. Those turning foolishly to the gods of the outer dark will find the torments of Demurge soft-handed indeed. The moon of Winter hangs heavy in this realm, and sources of flame are essential. The Worderlands are a vast wilderness of strangeness and pockets of civilization too far apart to be said to be of any united civilization.Come here if you have grown weary of civilized men, their lies and laws, and seek strangeness and solitude, and perhaps if you seek something that can be found nowhere else.

Black Dunes-Though the sand is not actually black, this desert lies in perpetual shadow- the dim light of Helios in Saresare is blocked by the mountains. It is said this is the land of Death, and those seeking death are sure to find it. Come here if you have business in the underworld, otherwise stay away- your time in the lands of shade will come soon enough, mortal.

Legless Jungle- An abominable and otherworldly place known only by the ramblings of madmen and the unlawful depravities of strange cults that claim asociation. Lurid and fleshy fictions of that place are spun by transgressive storytellers, and occasionally strange golden worm-idols are sold in markets, allegedly from that place, but it is beyond the realm of conventional knowledge. If even one in a hundred stories are true, there is no sane reason to go here.

Auroral Reaches-Strange heights indeed, locked behind a frozen sea. These mountains have few clouds, just shimmering lights, and are tall enough to reach the drifting moons, and perhaps the sky beyond, if one is mad and skilled enough to make the climb and leave the realms of Man behind. Come here if you seek audience with the celestial and divine.

Deep Islands- Beast Islands locked in sheets of ice far from the light of helios, or simply dark and treacherous places where luminescent fish are kept in water-filled jars in the absence of oil to burn for light. Those who dare the black sea are brave indeed, but it is not a place without a certain morbid charm, and the islands, dotted like stars, range from monster-haunted spits of rock to thriving whaling towns- though the term is inept, for it is not whales that swim in the black sea. Come here if you have a stalwart crew and a need to find what is not only unmapped, but so far off the edge of the map that you may as well have sailed off the face of the sea.

BEYOND
Old Empire- The emperor being Ice, or Darkness, or the King of Moons, depending on who you ask. The ice was there before, and it will be there after. Perhaps there's something out there, Beyond.