Kitchen Sink Roleplaying

[Koumei]

Korrigans Goblins who can transform themselves while the sun is not shining. British.

So... a British thing that can transform when there's no sun? That's an awesome deal!

And I was going to add the Skogsrå/Tallemaja (Swedish), but it turns out that is also the Huldra, so it's "generally Norse".

[Lokathor]

The Lorax is public domain?

[Judging__Eagle]

Frank, would placing these different races in a setting that is earth, geographically, work?

[Mask_De_H]

Seeing as how all of these things are cultural creations of peoples that are ostensibly from Earth, then yes.

[A Man In Black]

Let's be vagualy racist and call them the Aleut.

Let's not, because the Aleut are real people and you might conceivably want Aleut or Aleut-like people in a game with walrus people. It isn't the racism that's the issue; it's the potential for confusion.

[Username17]

The Lorax is public domain?

No. Thank you, that should not have made the final cut. Lorax is Mickey Mouse Lawed, and will stay owned by Mr. Geisel's estate forever.

Let's be vagualy racist and call them the Aleut.

No.

-Username17

[fbmf]

Lorax is Mickey Mouse Lawed, and will stay owned by Mr. Geisel's estate forever.

Mickey Mouse Lawed?

Game on,
fbmf

[God_of_Awesome]

Let's not, because the Aleut are real people and you might conceivably want Aleut or Aleut-like people in a game with walrus people. It isn't the racism that's the issue; it's the potential for confusion.

No.

-Username17

Joking, joking.

[CatharzGodfoot]

Lorax is Mickey Mouse Lawed, and will stay owned by Mr. Geisel's estate forever.

Mickey Mouse Lawed?

Game on,
fbmf

The Micky Mouse Protection Act.

[Prak]

The Lorax is public domain?

No. Thank you, that should not have made the final cut. Lorax is Mickey Mouse Lawed, and will stay owned by Mr. Geisel's estate forever.

Let's be vagualy racist and call them the Aleut.

No.

-Username17

I don't know about forever, but certainly long enough for most of us to not give a shit anymore (2071). Though I don't know how "estates" work when this sort of thing is concerned. If we really wanted to use the Lorax, we could pull a halfling, renaming them to something that is public domain. But how much do we really care about little furry, bearded dudes who speak for the trees?

[CatharzGodfoot]

I don't know about forever, but certainly long enough for most of us to not give a shit anymore (2071). Though I don't know how "estates" work when this sort of thing is concerned. If we really wanted to use the Lorax, we could pull a halfling, renaming them to something that is public domain. But how much do we really care about little furry, bearded dudes who speak for the trees?

Not 2071. If the past 100 years are any indication, every time Micky Mouse is near falling into public domain, the time frame will be extended.

[Kaelik]

Yeah, the hilarious thing about the protection act(s) is not that the date is extended. It's that every 20 years, it's extended by 20 years.

So effectively everything made after Mikey Mouse is forever protected.

[Prak]

weird. Ok, I was going by Wiki's description of the current law, not by trends.

Do we really care about a little naked, furry dwarf who speaks for the trees? We can have awesome tree men and hot naked women who speak for the trees.

[TavishArtair]

Frank, would placing these different races in a setting that is earth, geographically, work?

Geographically? Maybe. It's pretty common for legends to pile onto legends and soon a place is teeming with demons if you assume all the legends are true and refer to different things. They'd probably fit more or less, though. Culturally? Noooot by a long shot.

[Gelare]

On the topic of allowing players creative control in kitchen sink settings:
Darths & Droids

Sally: My name is Dex! I'm a dinosaur alien with four arms!
GM: You were meant to be -
Sally: And a big belly!
GM: Oh, never mind.

[Username17]

Adding some Monstrous Humanoids. Those are things that are basically just like the other humanoids except that for whatever reason they show up in the Monster Manual. This is either because they are generally anti-civilization (and thus make better monsters than players), or because they are generally tougher than normal starting PCs (and nothing with a level minimum gets in the PHB). Often both.

• Monstrous Humanoids
• Egbere Tree dwelling dwarves who are big on poison and small on hospitality. Yoruba.
• Chiruwi Half Invisible and extremely violent humanoids. African.
• Blemmyes Headless humanoid maneaters with faces on their chest as described by Pliny the Elder. Supposedly from Africa somewhere. They appear in the Ultima games as “Headless.”
• Boggles Kind of like a Kobold, but with a smoother skin and a nastier disposition.
• Bogarts Like a Gnome, but totally flipped out on rage and blessed with sharp teeth and tusks.
• Hiisi Little, noisy Finnish monster men who dress in elk pelts and waylay travelers.
• Troglodytes Blind, tunnel dwelling cannibals. Appear in D&D as “Grimlocks”
• Dunters Also called Redcaps, these Scottish monster men weigh themselves down heavily with iron and go on murder rampages until brought down.
• Bugbears Larger relatives of Goblins and Hobs. The word “Bugbear” is an English one that means roughly the same thing as “Hobgoblin” but Dungeons & Dragons settled them as being specifically larger back when all the humanoid races were ranked by level equivalent. They are larger than Hobs, and at least as feral as Goblins, but they are clearly a related species. As disturbingly quiet as their kin.
• Gremlins All of the destructive habits of a Goblin, none of the table manners, and absolutely none of the quiet. Also, green.
• Sluagh Dirty, hungry creatures that smell death and follow it around in caravans just to watch. Creepy as hell. Scottish.
• Imilozi Shadowy creatures who only speak in whistles. Zulu.
• Intulo Wicked giant Kobolds with black scales. And we mean giant for Kobolds, so pretty much Human or Hob sized. Zulu.
• Kaka-Guie A race of cannibalistic slavers with buffalo heads that steal women and corpses. Ivory Coast.
• Nburu Monstrous people from the woods who wear animal parts as armor. Congo.
• Mujina Little fanged men with claws that do mischief. Japanese/Hawaiian.
• Bakemono A lot like Hobs, but generally nastier. Thus, they are best considered as a fellow Goblinoid in approximately the Bugbear weight class. Japanese.
• Gargoyles Hideous winged people who are made of stone. Pan-European.
• Doppelgangers Humanoids who can change their shape to appear as other humanoids and mimic specific other people. German.
• Ghouls Humanoids who eat corpses and generally make a nuisance of themselves.
• Ghasts Degenerate humanoids who hop around like kangaroos, tunnel like gophers, and eat humanoid corpses. Talk by “meeping.” Mythos.
• Tcho-Tcho Nasty, hairless Gnomes. They appear in D&D as Svirfneblin, and are from the Mythos material by H. P. Lovecraft.

[Username17]

Templates

One of the things that happens in the world of the kitchen sink is that creatures (usually humanoids, but whatever) get transformed into other things. Often these are things that happens after being killed and coming back from the dead to feast on the living. But they can also be gifted to someone either through personal advancement or curses.

[*]Pennangalan Someone who can, with the power of evil magic, have their head and entrails detach from their body and fly around murdering people. This can be an external curse or the Pennangalan's own ace in the hole. South East Asian.
[*]Lich Someone who kills themselves in order to live forever as an animated corpse with vast evil magic powers. The term is actually coined as that concept by Gary Gygax, as the word Lich is just an archaic English term meaning “corpse.” But there's no reason that corpses can't be wizards, so it's public domain now.
[*]Lycanthrope A curse, special power, or disease where a humanoid transforms into a monstrous beast of some kind. May also have a beastman hybrid form. Popular forms are wolf, rat, tiger, boar, bear, and seal. Universal.
[*]Ghost Disembodied Spirits. Could go the D&D route and differentiate all the words that mean exactly the same thing as “Ghost” as separate creatures: Wraith, Spirit, Spectre, Shade, Apparition, Onryō, etc..
[*]Tlahuelpuchi The magical transformation that allows one to chop their own feet off and fly around (being no longer attached to the Earth). Generally involves drinking the blood of children. Aztec.
[*]Banshee Lost and Damned souls who run around screaming people to death. Celtic.
[*]Civetateo Women who die in childbirth and then come back to life as weeping, baby eating monsters. Aztec. Called “La Llorona” in modern Mexican Spanish.
[*]Vampire The one and only.
[*]Wendigo Granted great strength and magic powers (and white fur) by eating the flesh of humanoids, the Wendigo is now also cursed to keep eating more humanoids. North Western First Nations.
[*]Asema Someone who has gotten the ability to take their skin off like a suit of clothing, revealing a flying ball of blue fire. Kind of like across between Pennangalan and Willowisp. Surinam.
[*]Liderec Someone who has taken for themselves the power to transform themselves into a black chicken that steals hope and strength from other humanoids and creates bad dreams. Hungarian.
[*]Strigoi Someone who uses demonic magic to become insubstantial and curse people. Romanian.
[*]Kukuthi A multi-stage Saiyan Vampire Analog that can leave their graves for longer and longer periods of time and eventually super saiyan out and turn into genies. Albanian.
[*]Mummy A specially preserved corpse that comes back as a warrior or a magician or both. Egyptian, but also Chinese and Aztec.
[*]Zombie Slow Zombies. Also Fast Zombies. Basically a whole cloth creation of 20th century cinema.
[*]Skeleton There have been lots of animated Skeletons in lore. But they are a staple of modern fantasy because of the works of Ray Harryhausen.
[*]Obayifo A wizard who can spit their soul out in the form of discrete globes of solid darkness that fly around and steal the strength from victims and bring it back to the Obayifo. Also cause Coco blight. Ashanti.
[*]Cauldron Born Corpses that have been boiled into being mighty reanimate warriors. Irish.
[*]Bog Mummy Like regular mummy, but preserved by having been staked into a peat bog rather than pickled in a dusty tomb. Nordic, Celtic, and Russian.
[*]Goryo Basically the same thing as a Revenant. Someone gets murdered and they return from the grave to kick ass and take names. May be brought back by a crow. May or may not be played by Brandon Lee. Universal.
[*]Hupia The returned wicked spirits of badass mortals who steal children in order to reincarnate themselves by kicking the original spirit out of the child's body and living again that way. May have lived several lifetimes in this manner. Central American.
[*]Durahan Basically the headless horseman. Actually, exactly the headless horseman, since the monster in Sleepy Hollow is a Durahan.
[*]Mohan Someone who has mastered the ancient technique of kidnapping women and molesting them in order to take control of an army of animated trees. Columbian.
[*]Larva Like giant maggots made out of the souls of dead people that can subsequently hatch into awesome monsters. Roman.
[*]Kresnik Half dragon people with cute little dragon wings just behind their arm pits. Think Dragon Half. They have various powers, including the ability to spot vampires. Croatian.
[/list]

[Mask_De_H]

Awww yeah, that's the stuff.

Mythical Beasts are the only ones left right? Some off the top of my head:

Phoenix: Long lived colorful birds with scarlet, gold, or green tails. Explode in fire and are then reborn. Phoenician.
Tanuki: Raccoon dogs who are consummate tricksters and shapeshifters. Also have giant scrotums. Japanese.
Fenghuang: Proud birds that combine bird parts like Voltron. May or may not have fish tails and stag hindquarters. Rule all other birds. Chinese.
Peng: Giant birds that can fly 3000 li in one flap of their wings. Can also turn into large fish. Very lucky. Chinese.
Dragons: The big ones. Quadrupedal scaly firebreathing agents of Satan. Thanks to D&D, there's 32 flavors of colorful dragon cock, each with their own elemental and moral alignments. Those are probably copyrighted, so for the purposes of this experiment we're going with the classic smogbelchers of the German/Teutonic genus, which is what Tolkien co-opted. Slavic/Welsh/German.
Wyverns: Winged serpentine beings of general destruction. This is what Saint George slays and what matches the Italian, Roman, and some permutations of English dragons. English.
Quinlong: Asian dragons of rain and culture. The Japanese call them Shiryu, the Koreans call them Ryong. Long, scaled, furry-snouted and multilimbed. Incredibly intelligent and wise. Chinese.
Kirin: Also pronounced Quilin. Based off of a giraffe, they have the head of a dragon, the antlers of a deer, the body of a fish, the hooves of an ox and the tail of a lion. They punish the wicked and avoid bringing harm to any living being. Can walk on water, and walk over grass without trampling it. Chinese.
Roc: Giant white birds of prey that can carry off elephants in their clutches. Persian/Arabic by way of Marco Polo.
Pegasus: White horses with feathered wings. Used as trusty steeds. Greek.
Unicorn: White horses with horns, billy goat scruff and healing powers. Beloved by tween girls, for they are virginal and unicorns can only be tamed by virgins. English.
Re'em: Progenitors of the unicorns, strong ox-like beings that are untamed and unable to be tamed. Hebrew.
Chimera: Lionesses with snakes for tails and a goat head coming out of their backs. Spit fire and are generally violent. Greek.
Fenris: Large, viscous, supernatural wolves. Fenrir is the most well known and paragon of these creatures. Norse.
Freyback: Black ghost dogs that are the size of calves. Associated with Satan, accost travelers and are general douchebags. Used in Final Fantasy XI. Norfolk/British Isles.
Bhargest: Bigger, badder Freybacks. Haunt towns and can take the guise of man or other animals. D&D uses them under the same name, but make them goblinoids that turn into dogs. Yorkshire.

[Manxome]

Hupia The returned wicked spirits of badass mortals who steal children in order to reincarnate themselves by kicking the original spirit out of the child's body and living again that way. May have lived several lifetimes in this manner. Central American.

I recognize Hasufin Heltain, from C.J. Cherryh's Fortress series, in this description.

[Prak]

Hell, you could use that kind of thing as backstory in WW's Demon the Fallen.

[*]Mohan Someone who has mastered the ancient technique of kidnapping women and molesting them in order to take control of an army of animated trees. Columbian.

WTF?

[Username17]

Yes. Actual myths are weird. There are a lot of creatures out there that get mystic powers by raping people. That's an incredibly common trope all over the world. And it's not just "the devil" that pulls that shit, nature spirits of various types and inclinations (and wizards associated with same) do it all the time.

I think now is as good a time as any to talk about things you can't throw to the Kitchen Sink and have that make any sense. I am talking of course, of physics. It's fine to hand out Authorial control to players to add things into the world, but you have to retain Editorial control somewhere so that things stay within the list of things that could be in the world.

Having one more type of serpent man or specifying some historical or biological fact about the serpent people you happen to be talking to won't hurt anything. Busting out Melusines or Intulos is fine. The problems begin when you start adding capabilities to the world. That is, maybe Melusines have poison fangs and maybe they don't, but there are already Ophidians who do have poison fangs, so it won't change what is available. But imagine if instead you had introduced a race or group that melted iron just by looking at it? Suddenly, all the iron walls in the setting would retroactively have some explaining to do.

In short, ever introducing easy iron destruction into world has serious impacts on any floating iron fortresses and shit you ever put into the world. The social and physical relationships that you establish for your own game imply that other social and physical relationships don't and can't exist. But while the placement of the Serpent Kingdom of C'tiss at the source of Naktu River is trivially easy to predict in how and why it precludes the Naktu River being sourced at the Yetti Glacier of Yorg - other preclusions are less obvious. And less obvious stop codons need to be handled at the rules level.

Simply, you have to do a rundown on what magic can and cannot do in very explicit terms before people can do much of anything or everything they do will end up tearing something apart. If you pull in a new kind of psionics that detects falsehoods really easily, all of your mysteries are going to be destabilized, and all of your old mysteries will retroactively not make any sense. The reason that Comic Books can get away with this sort of thing, is because they have editorial control. That is, sometimes Wolverine's Adamantium is magnetic and sometimes it is not, depending on whether Wolverine is supposed to be a threat to Magneto today or not. And that's what you have to do if you want to keep telling stories and keep adding new kinds of powers - and you can't do that in a cooperative storytelling game. At least, not without really pissing people off.

So you can add Orange Magic to game if it does stuff that could basically be done with the other previous magic. To use a M:tG reference, it would be fine to add a new color that did direct damage and gained life points - because those are things that exist in the game and people are supposed to have plans to deal with those sorts of things. It would not be OK to bring in a new color that could change the victory conditions to be that of reducing your own life points to zero instead of that of your opponent - because that shit doesn't exist and most decks don't have any special way of killing themselves or forcing their opponents to kill them. Adding new capabilities to the game can only happen thus, if they do not significantly affect the meta game. In the case of a cooperative storytelling game, the meta game is stuff like "why do buildings stand up?" and "why does the king live in a castle?" and "why is the ancient hero of Zorflax buried with his gear in an ancient tomb full of giant spiders?"

-Username17

[Username17]

Fantastic Tactics

At its core, tactics in a sword fight are not terribly complicated. The pointy end goes in the other man, and victory has been achieved if your pointy ends go into their men before their pointy ends go into your men. Everything else pretty well boils down to making sure that neither your bellies nor the pointy ends of your sword are where your opponents expect them to be. But in a fantasy adventure game, it is expected that there will be more to it than that. Because while a real world sword fight has all the athleticism and split second reactions of a basketball game, actually planning a single character's actions in such a scenario has all the gripping suspense of designing a basketball play. So players have substantially deeper options than a choice of where to stand followed by their characters trying their best to stick their swords into their opponents while blocking or avoiding any blows coming the other way.

The player is not actually running in and stabbing their opponents or using their twitch reflexes in any way. They are more akin to the coach of a basketball game than any of the players. And while the head coach has all kinds of stuff to do, a player in a cooperative storytelling game is only coaching one participant, so they need to have more and deeper options than yelling “Shoot the ball! Shoot it with your arms! Try to get it in the basket and score points!” And that is why characters in a fantasy tactical minigame need to have deeper options available to them – like as many as Pikachu seems to have in the Pokemon cartoon (which is a lot more than the four an electric mouse would get in the video game).

So what is it that characters do in a swordfight? Well, unlike the inhabitants of the city of old in the next valley over, or the cultural specifics of the serpent people that are showing up this week, tactical options really do have to be fairly well standardized in advance of actually playing the game. This is because players are making tactical choices and planning several moves in advance, which means that the information on whether an individual action is high or low risk has to exist. Otherwise the players don't really have a game to play. They just get to make random selections in a Humian Hellscape where past events do not inform future ones. So there has to be a firm set of rules about what can and can't happen in response to certain events. For example: no one is going to respond to any combat action by setting off a nuclear bomb or firing off an AK-47, but that's just a question of genre conventions. Far more important is the raw accounting of the process: if a target is “fire vulnerable” then a fire-based attack should have enhanced effect against them. If a target is “cold resistant” then it should have a reduced effect from a cold-based attack against them. The back end of the combat system needs to be fairly transparent and the available options need to be fairly available.

So what are the available options?

• Move Just as happens in the real world's sword fights, characters have the option of holding their ground, walking around, jumping, swimming and running. But there is more than that in a fantasy setting, as seen below.
• Flight Birds fly, but a fantasy setting has horses and humans with wings on their back or their feet than can fly. It's important that flight be treated coherently and consistently, so that players can react sensibly to their characters either flying or being menaced by flying enemies. Flight also needs to have weaknesses and limitations or ground based terrain will cease to have any meaning as everyone and everything takes to the air.
• Teleportation Creatures in a fantasy setting can change their location without moving through intervening space. Like Flight, this is potentially incredibly destabilizing, and it needs to have consistent rules on how it works, what it can and cannot do, and most importantly of all: its limitations. Partly this is important in combat, in that if enemies and allies can teleport in and out of every location without restriction, then locational choices cease to matter. But also it's important for the world at large. Players need to know whether areas can be teleported into, and they need to know whether and how enemies can teleport ambush them and also how to stop enemies from escaping by those means.
• Tunneling Sand worms and mole machines may not be terribly common in fantasy, but they exist at all, which is a bit more than they do in the real world. Tunneling has to have rules on how it works, otherwise it becomes a very real question as to how “things” stay standing. The classic of course is Dune, in which the conceit was that tunneling sandworms could tunnel through sand, but not stone, and thus buildings were built on stone and the sand was left empty.
• Phase In a fantasy setting, some creatures have the ability to one degree or another become non-corporeal. Perhaps they turn into a gas, or become some kind of spiritual essence. Whatever the special effect, it is important that the methods that one would use to keep an incorporeal creature out of a room, to fight against it, to spot it, and track it all be relatively explicable. It's no good if a single incorporeal monster can defeat entire armies.
• Attack Enemies Ultimately, the goal of battle is to put the pointy end of the blade into the other man. And that still holds true in a fantasy game. But there are more options on how to go about doing that than to simply “do your best.”
• Area Attacks Fantasy worlds may or may not have actual explosives in them, but they generally have magical effects that do something similar, which just like in the real world act as a strong incentive to avoid close formations on the battlefield by assaulting all targets in any area.
• Mental Attacks Fantasy worlds have access to attacks that really select a specific opponent rather than throwing a force through space. It's important to have guidelines for how these attacks work. Do they require visual identification? Empty space between the attacker and the target? Can they be fooled into hitting a different target? If so, how? This kind of information really needs to be well established so that battles can be fair.
• Loyalty Attacks It is possible in a fantasy setting to temporarily (or permanently) cause one opponent or another to attack their own erstwhile allies. These attacks are very powerful, and need to be balanced against the most deadly of attacks. Because an enemy that has stopped trying to stick his sword into your allies is a defeated enemy. That they are attacking your enemies now is a cherry on top. And likely a substantial one. It is important to note that these sorts of thing have no true parallel in the real world, and it is hard to overestimate their effectiveness. The real world has confusion and fog of war, but it's really not the same.
• Visibility Attacks Just as the real world has smoke clouds and bright lights, so too does the world of fantasy adventure. But fantasy has shapeshifting and realistic holograms. That's... different. And it needs rules that the players can understand, because if there's no rhyme or reason to whether anything they see is really there, the game is basically unplayable. Remember that the players aren't actually there, so the descriptive text they hear is all they get to help them imagine the world. If they can't rely on that, the game kind of grinds to a halt.
• Battlefield Control Characters can do things that change the battlefield. Sometimes this is as direct as cutting rope bridges and the like, but it can be quite a bit more elaborate than that. Whole walls and brambles can be conjured. There need to be limits to these sorts of activities, so that tactics can have consistent meaning.
• Healing In the real world, people basically don't perform medical operations in the middle of swordfights, because the timeframe involved just doesn't leave that as a practical action. But in a fantasy setting, it is generally considered traditional that characters do exactly that. This is a tradition basically created by Dungeons and Dragons. But it's pretty firmly ingrained. And Healing is pretty problematic. It doesn't make you win, but it does keep your from losing, and that's mostly the same thing. Healing can lead to battles that do not end (which is boring) and they can lead to battles that have no long term consequences (which is unengaging). On the other hand, the availability of magical healing helps explain why characters can be involved in action sequences one after another without being crippled and destroyed. Still, it genuinely needs time-related limitations to keep it from unraveling the game.
• Curses and Buffs Characters in a fantasy setting can perform actions that do not directly contribute to victory but which make further actions contribute more towards victory. In principal this is no different from taking time to move to a more advantageous position, but like doing that there is substantial question about fairness. Remember that time spent staking out a good position does not have an equal cost if it is taken when the enemy is already on the field firing arrows vs. taking it before the enemy arrives. Limits need to be in place thus, to keep the benefits of ambushes from being too great. Not because it is necessarily unrealistic or an ambusher to get a large benefit, but because it makes the game unfair.
• Summoning Characters in a fantasy world can often do things that bring extra units onto the battle on their side. This is sometimes analogous to training a pack of hunting dogs or hiring mercenaries to fight on your behalf. The economy of actions is something that needs to be considered, although this is not by itself sufficient to discount the idea of fielding summoned troops (or even large numbers of summoned troops). The key is that tactical decisions made about individual summoned units should be simple decisions so that the game doesn't drag on.

[Crissa]

Battles that don't end need a solution.

I mean, not that they need to end: Characters need to be able to walk away from a fight that they cannot win, without 'losing' being 'the game ends here'.

-Crissa

[ggroy]

[DeadlyReed]

Dave hates vampires. That's why the cleric came to be.