Traverse Fantasy

A spectre is haunting society — the spectre of society! - The Joker? I made a stupid Twitter thread thinking about monsters. Copy/pasted: given that monsters usually represent social anxieties, i think there’s value in nevertheless representing monsters as supernatural beings rather than physical real creatures which live and breathe like, i think that’s the point where you get into suspicious territory OR you represent physical monsters as deflated or pitiful or cute, like something that doesn’t deserve violence or vitriol which you would rather find other solutions for their annoyances instead I don't necessarily mean anything moralist by it except as a matter of preference and appropriateness. I want to research more about this kind of shift in fantasy/ideology/whatever, where the image of social disorder is projected onto human subjects. Is this true? Does the fantasy of social disorder precede its projection onto people? Does the image of the zombie (modern sense), the vampir...

This is kind of building upon my dynamic reaction roll idea. Instead of a static 1-in-6 chance of a wandering encounter, keep track of Dread . Dread  represents the spirit of the dungeon catching onto the party as they explore. Think of a dungeon less as an ecosystem or stronghold, and more the domain of a territorial spirit who wants to keep intruders out. You might roll 2d6 for the dungeon's initial Dread , or you might just start at 2. Increase Dread  by 1 each turn, up to 12. Past certain thresholds, the dungeon's presence will become more noticeable and threatening. At 6, the party might hear echoes or hums. At 10, there might be footsteps or chanting. Anything that freaks people out, and even better if it's specific to the environment. Every three turns, roll 2d6. If you roll below or equal to Dread , a random encounter is triggered. A random encounter is guaranteed to be triggered when Dread  equals 12. When the party rests, roll d6 and reduce Dread  by that m...

Thought it would be cool if an encounter had an ongoing Reaction to keep track of, while negotiating with NPCs! You're going to want to roll based off of the dice your players are rolling to make checks. I use 2d6 so I'll roll 2d6, but for d20 you might want to use 3d6. We want a bell curve! Instead of Reaction, we'll call this Tension. High Tension means that the NPCs are less likely to want to level with you, and might even pick fights. The neutral zone will be 6-8 on a 2d6 scale, and maybe 9-12 on a 3d6 scale. Low Tension means that the NPCs are pretty chill, and maybe even excited to talk to you. Players can negotiate with NPCs to reduce Tension. If you have a roll-high system, you might want to have players roll + Charisma over the current Tension. You can give them advantage (reroll dice and take the better result) if they offer the NPCs something they want. Since 2d6 is a pretty small scale, on success you can just reduce Tension by 1. You might want to r...

I'm moving here from WordPress because it looks lighter-weight and more people in the RPG scene use it. WordPress also changed their text editor sometime in the last couple of years to use an awful widget-based editor. I like plaintext! Hopefully I'll be posting cool things here.