Mosaic Loose: a personal anticanon of crunch for dungeon fantasy

Here's a bunch of modular shit you can paste together for Yon Dungeon Fantasy. There's too much of it to be proper FKR, the forms aren't signed to make it Mosaic Strict, and there's no GLOG base to make it GL∆G, but the ethos is very much in that space - everything is meant to be modular, diegetic, and (though I'm presenting this as a bunch of rules) "rules-light procedure-heavy."

Only break into any of these procedures when it's called for. For most things the player describes actions → GM describes consequences → player describes actions cycle functions perfectly well.

Obviously, I’m curious what others’ procedure anticanons would look like, and figure I’ll keep fiddling around with this.

 Collaborative Worldbuilding

  1. Load up Azgaar's. No rerolls, what you see is what you get (make sure to download the .map file so you can consult it later). Player newest to RPGs picks an a starting area they find interesting.
  2. Going clockwise around the table (starting with that newest player) until everyone gets bored, everyone except the GM (whose job is to collate notes) something "everybody knows," or at any rate 95% of people believe, to be true. (If you're playing online, instead of having an order, anybody can go in any order as long as two other people have posted since they last did.)
  3. GM secretly decides what's actually true.

Character Creation, Advancement, and Magic

Equipment

  • obviously use whatever list makes sense for your setting but ktrey's chart is convenient for listing weight and slots and even coins, per your preference
  • children and frail people can carry 6 slots, the average healthy person 10, people with athletic builds maybe more (or in some cases less) per their type

Exploration

  • the travel time tables from Justin's Hexcrawl procedures. NB since it's giving diegetic inputs you can plug it into a hexmap, or use the route function on Azgaar's). Add other parts of Justin's system as you find them interesting or they become relevant
  • John's procedure for wandering monsters; roll every other watch (8-hour period per above), but use a d10 with 7-10 being nothing much
  • spelunking per Downcrawl rules when you want to get elaborate; also you can probably adapt those to sea travel without too much difficulty. Roll wandering monsters per above with d6 each day.

Interpersonal Interaction

Combat

Domain management

General Task Resolution options

  • Dreaming Dragonslayer's stopwatch resolution, which is like flipping a coin but with more anxiety!
  • success and safety, for when those are to be orthogonal to each other and you want to have a little math setup

6 comments:

  1. Good list! I'll be going through this and giving it all a closer look soon, or maybe even making my own anticanon. "Optional Rules Only" might be a way to describe it?

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    Replies
    1. > Good list! I'll be going through this and giving it all a closer look soon, or maybe even making my own anticanon.

      Looking forward to it!

      > "Optional Rules Only" might be a way to describe it?

      Yeah!

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  2. This is amazing! Thank you so much for doing this blog.

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  3. Took the day to binge your blog. Great stuff! Love the FKR ideas, chess battles, and the deadly initiative systems.

    Azgaar's was also a new tool for me. :)

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  4. The Zouava page doesn't actually list achievements (at least not now). I've seen something somewhere about achievement based advancement but was wondering if you'd like to update to clarify your vision.

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  5. Works for me! The achievements are listed like:

    Cross the Deserts Bare
    Δ: complete a month-long (or longer) journey through a desert (hot or cold) without footwear, proper warm- or cold-weather clothing, or socks of any variety.
    You and the party travel at full speed over rough terrain.

    Breathe the Mountain Air
    Δ: spend at least a month at an elevation higher than one mile, survive at least three rockslides or avalanches, and travel at least 100 miles off-trail.
    You and your party travel over impassable terrain as if it were merely rough.

    Travel Every Road
    Δ: visit at least 10 cities, 15 distinct regions, 20 villages, and pass through 30 different cross-roads. To count as visiting, you have to spend at least a night there.
    You can read road-signs in any language, and you and your party move 1.5x as fast when on actual roads. You know how to say "hello," "good-bye," "where is the privy," "hands up," and "fuck your mother" in a dozen languages.

    So the idea is that specific actions in-game will achieve specific powers in-game.

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