Author: Andrew Shields

I know, it is hard to come up with new and exciting drugs for that Hawker crew to cope with, or for those Smugglers to move. Here are a pile of magical drugs that can serve, some with a little adjustment. Which ones become canon at YOUR table?

http://monstermanualsewnfrompants.blogspot.co.nz/2017/07/too-many-if-any.html

Of course you like the clock mechanism. You want it to be more visual than noting “1/4” by the clock name. But maybe you don’t want to put the clock in a shape (like a circle or a square.) What else could you do to make it fun?

Hangman.

Four segments? Head, body, arms, legs. Six segments? Head, body, arm, arm, leg, leg. (You can put a number you’re aiming for by the top so everybody’s on the same page.)

And you can get even more creative! “Okay, that’s six segments for escaping, and that will be a coach.” So you draw the little goats pulling it, and then as the segments tick off you put a body, two wheels, a window, and the driver last of all.

Bring some art to your table! The players will remember your clocks for sure.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hangman_(game)

I had a thought, and then a BETTER thought, all of which ends up making no difference at all.

What if the GM could pay stress (returning it to characters) in exchange for adding flashbacks that were maybe not helpful to them? So like they bump into someone that they know who they wronged, or owe something, or who likes them and it isn’t mutual, etc. Or they were going to fix something and they didn’t. That sort of reverse-planning thing.

Then I realized that works EVEN BETTER if you consciously think of reverse flashbacks that are unhelpful as a way to make complications when the dice call for them.

In other words, when a player rolls a complication, one way to look at the ways a GM can respond is that the GM can put in a flashback that’s just now turning out to be unhelpful, just as players put in flashbacks that are helpful.

So you look at the sort of things players can do with flashbacks, and turn them inside out as complications. “Sure, you were going to bring your long gun, but didn’t Harvey borrow it? He did. Damn.”

This ends up having no impact on the rules as written, but it’s a fun mental exercise for the GM to have more creative complications.

The third option I was mulling over was a Whisper. Because I like them and they’re fun, but I hesitate because I don’t know how another group will interpret all this supernatural stuff, and I’d hate to crimp the style of one of the most fun types in the game.

Starting special ability MUST be “Compel.” And for a spirit mask, a ninja style lower face mask, only you grip it with your teeth to hold it on, and it has fierce teeth carvings around a bone eye on the other side, and if you flex your throat and think words the mask whispers them for you.

I’d give him a long tangled mass of dark hair, and make him always a little out of breath; his lungs caught in the Ghost Field when he was a baby, and he still has small curls of mist that come out on his panting breath sometimes. He wears an eyepatch just for fun, sometimes switching sides; he thinks it helps him filter the world made of dust and grit shoved together like sloppy particleboard, so he can see the real world beyond and beneath and through; the world of life and death and motion and dream, not tangled in the mess of veins and arteries that keep meat from rotting on the bone.

He grew up with a beautifully painted sign that said “PUPPETS” and he did marionette shows; as a sickly youth, he would bind ghosts to the dolls so they would perform while he held himself as upright as he could, twitching the control sticks randomly while the ghost puppets performed. He also used puppets to steal, and he made enough to live and to stay in medicine.

Now he’s angered someone strong enough to withstand intimidation, so he finally has to accept one of the offers of employment that drift around a man with his talents. He has experienced an odd surge in power lately, and he dreams of a ship on the side of a glassy wave of the Void Sea, sliding down the frictionless surface towards the gulf, surrounded by glassy beauty–water, filled with energy, risen up beyond its limits.

Some habits die hard, and he always has a number of hats with him–to adjust the mood, to collect the coins, and to provide the eye-catching and misleading detail.

I’m also thinking of playing a Spider. He would have a back office job in the Paving and Verge Department. An underclerk, really, immune to notice. Age has crept over his youth, infiltrating his eyes and tightening his mouth. He’s thin to the point of bleakness, fingers always stained with a bit of ink, so the quicks of his nails are gray.

He knows the bullies in the office, and he’s got a handle on them so he has but to mention a letter or date and they’ll do as he says and shut up about it, too. He uses them as spotlights to blind anyone looking too closely in his direction, their attention diverted by the much brighter lights.

In the meantime, before carefully choosing a nascent crew to support, he amused himself with contract work for some twenty years.

He comes with a gang that served him well through all that, well trained and efficient. No one knows his name, they all call him “Paving” because that’s who you call when you’ve got a problem to hide. Dead or alive, he can take your problem and bury it under the street. He has the permits, the sites. He can make your revenge exquisite if you wish to install certain corpses under your outdoor latrine, or under a crossroads, or mix their finely ground bone and ash into the mortar of your prayer shrine.

Oh, he has his contacts among the stoneworkers of the vast mortuary piles, and there are catacomb diggers that answer his call, and of course the many public servants who work on road maintenance have learned respect when they see his thatch of thick gray hair, his cold eyes, his tight mouth, and the amusement that sometimes colors the knobs of his cheeks.

Yeah. He knows where the bodies are buried. But he has tired of the hobby, and he’s ready to take a more active role in choosing who becomes a body.

First special ability, “Connected.”

I was thinking of a Cutter to play, but someone else in the group is probably making a Cutter and probably with the same starting ability I was going to take, “Ghost Fighter.”

I had this idea that the fighter was born hairless, taken in as a pet mascot for a cult. Crazy Tam was a tattoo artist who lovingly treated the boy as a canvas, and the tribal symbols give him the ability to sense shifting in the Ghost Field.

He got the name Thrice because he won the fights at the third exchange. He got into hollowboxing, where a fighter spirit gets into a hollow and the trick is to knock the spirit out of the supernaturally amped meat without killing the hollow. Thrice became an expert at attuning to the ghost, to strike precisely at its connection to the flesh and bang it loose.

The first advance I wanted was “Warded” from the Whisper; again, those mad tattoos and the way they twist his life up against the surface tension of the Mirror. I would build him along a Cutter/Whisper line from there, following the play of how the game unfolded.

That’s all, I didn’t want to put in too much detail because it should build in with the rest. But I was really fixing in my mind’s eye the way he would slowly grind a pivot on the ball of his foot, focus, breathe out into the Ghost Field, line up, and endure the throb of his heartbeat as it concussed him against the drifting stillness of the Mirror until it was time to strike.

Another mystery solved. How you can make leather–with mushrooms.

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https://www.facebook.com/CollectiveEvolutionPage/videos/10154382332773908/

https://www.facebook.com/Curbed/videos/1411866458863279/

https://www.facebook.com/Curbed/videos/1411866458863279/