The Island of Miscreant Toys

Thanks to fatherhood, I've been ingesting a great deal of kid's TV and other media. Mostly Thomas The Tank Engine and his various friends, a quaint and charming show called Pocoyo (kid loves it!) and Richard Scarry stuff, as well as classic Sesame Street and Curious George.  Adventure Time (whole 'nother post, trust me).  What does this mean for my gaming life?  I guess that except for BARROWMAZE (in which I try to be as malicious as possible within the bounds of fairness), my philosophy is changing on some things. I game and play when I have time, excluding writing stuff down (almost always). I want my kid to play games, and I don't want to expose her too much to evil and horror that can't be overcome with kid approaches.  I don't like, anymore, that problems often come down to KILL IT WITH FIRE AND BLADE. Don't get me wrong, there's a place for it, but ... maybe it bears more scrutiny as if adults want to imagine hitting each other with big knives to death, I think it's fine.  On the other hand, I've read, and I believe from my professional experience that kids ought not to be saturated with violent imagery.  I've seen (anecdotally, and this is with kids and teens with behavior problems) bad spin offs of too many video games, too many horror movies, too much wrestling on TV. Come at me bro, and tell me it ain't so, but I can send you to some decent research that says different, and some days it used to feel like I was literally undoing the work of some malicious media villains that want to turn our kids into people primed to use violence to solve even basic problems and disagreements.

Around the time Baby arrived on the scene about a year and a half ago, I was hit with Monster Parts by Pearce S., and it got me thinking about the childhood influences of my own.  I found this Oz game, also, that's really made me think about the reinforcements implicit in the games I play.  Bath time prompted some thinking about the Great Tub Sea, a mythic expanse of bubbly water on which jolly pirates sail and squirty animals arise to gleefully taunt and spray PCs - maybe I'll get into that, later.

On the leeward side of the Tub Sea - juxtaposed to the Heavenly Faucet and far, far from The Drain - there is a floating mass upon which discarded toys frolic and gallavant and acost visitors gleefully. These entities are each unique and made of parts of discarded toys, or are golems or otherwise crafted peoples.  No naturally occuring fauna originates there, but it is haunted by chattering See-gulls, that mindlessly recite rumors they have heard in passing.  The Great Castle of Lord Cog The Cogitator - an adding machine in the body of a Brass Golem - sits square in the middle of the island, but none knows who built it and no one attends his court except for argument's sake.

Scattered to and fro across the Island of Miscreant Toys are wandering bands, or or 'troops' of these beings, engaged constantly in a game that looks quite a lot like marauding and pillaging, and the rules of which are disputed and argued vehemently. The only purpose Lord Cog evidently serves is to iron out these disputes in a slow fashion that primarily serves to inculcate boredom and distract the litigants from their viciousness and wanton slaughter.

The landscape is both blasted and somehow quaint, and all that come to the island are certain that they shall never leave without a great act of heroism that they are incapable of for reasons of poor moral fibre.

Types of Miscreant Toys

Wood - wood golems, dryad-tree marionettes, trains and dollies

Tin - tin soldiers, dinosaurs, robots, woodsmen, mechanical contrivances and animals

Plush/Cloth - teddy bears, rag dolls, haunted security blankets, patchwork scarecrows and sewn-servants

Porcelain/glass - usually dolls, but sometimes elegant animals and crystalline people

Plastic - modern toys with guns and lights and sounds and TO INFINITY WHEREIN INSANITY WILL FIND US

Rubber - squeezable, collapsible, water-fillable horrors and cheery synth-people with gaping mouths and leering smiles. Bloonies and giant balloon dragons

Movement/effects

Wind-up - these often travel in packs to help each other wind-up. Sometimes lonely clubs will be encountered frozen and helpless, as the members are loathe to desert each other in times of need and distress

Pull-string - these are often willed into action and directed by sorcerers that are foreign to the island and that import then back to far-away lands. Fairly uncommon and usually impetuous and dangerous

Batteries - a never-ending variety of corroding and leaking cells, from simple chemical all the way to fusion-type, are required and much sought after.  Shortages generally drive mass combats of sophisticated plastic monstrosities

Ensorcelled - enchanters often find ways to infuse magical wills into toys, and these often rise to prominent leadership roles since a main toy-ish concern and need is by definition lifted from them, allowing them to engage their wiles in intricate plots and internecine warfare

Springs - leaping, bounding, giggling and jiggling - usually attack first

Sparks - old fashioned and recognized as dangerous, these toys were recalled and sent to the island en masse long ago. They can start fires, illuminate darkness, and scorch enemies 

Pokeys - one-eyed and maimed children everywhere are no longer endangered b these malicious brutes

Bite - gnawing, pinching and slobbering but rarely actual teeth. A demented sorcerer fashioned Plush Bears with actual working animal teeth some years ago, many of which were destroyed in general outrage but some of which escaped to the island

Scratch - sharp corners, warning tags snipped off or pried loose

Flit - rudimentary flapping wings, or a twirling rotor

Leap - spring-driven legs that allow them to leap into battle and gain an initiative bonus or surprise

Trod - most toys are not ponderous, but they might overwhelm in great numbers and smash an opponent into smithereenies

Smash - larger toys could be capable of rending depending upon their arms/manipulators. If two attacks hit then start the save process or a strength opposed check else take round by round damage

Drives/motives:

Escape

Mangle

transmute

Transmit

Reveal

Obscure

Guard

Single chore (chop wood, sweep, unclog, etc.)

Areas of the Island:

Dustbin Dessert

The Hopper

The Bit Box

The Shore

Fingerpaint Forest

The Obelich

Secret Door

Just thought I'd get This'n out of DRAFTS and into the world. Tonight I will play some more Kwantoom, and maybe fidget with some layout. Still thinking about a game in which Death was on vacation or absent. More later.

On the Vergoids - Post 99

On Vergoids and Their Machinations

(The Space Dungeon players ran into these guys last year near the end of November or thereabouts, and it seems unlikely to spoil the outcome of the game so far, so I thought I'd finish this draft-post and get on with MY LIFE)

Like this, but more nefarious-er ("Strombus canarium Anatomy Tryon" by George Washington Tryon (1838-1888) - Tryon G. W. (1885). Manual of Conchology, structural and systematic, with illustrations of the species. Volume 7

These molluscan-symbiotic raiders/slavers are about 3 feet long from snout to tip of throbbing tail, somewhat akin to Aerethean sea-conchs. Protected by a glassy and fragile shell, they are very tasty battered and fried with lemon juice and can be pried out easily (sometimes leaving the shell in a moment of desperation). They dabble in necromancy, summoning and conjuration, as well as being masters of energy-sublimation and enchantment. Their finest constructs are sleek and finicky space-faring vessels, with daemon-haunted crystalline cores that slumber and dream and guide the meat-and-metal shells through the Void (capable also of Astral and Aethereal travel in addition to normal 3d space)

They possess rudimentary psionics that they use to learn the language and habits of prey-victims, and these powers work on each other although to a much better extent, and so the Vergoids do not have a sense of trust (even for one another!) and would be viewed in human terms as very paranoid and literal, which can cause gaffes when they approach other races in a rare peaceable moment.  Their technology is based on harnessing kinetic energy for power, broadcasting it over short networks, growing crystals for weapons, and propagating mindless fungal automata that they ride around to overcome the limitations of their hilariously unsuited forms. Essentially they are snails with two pointed flippers that they dig into the frames of their mushroom-like steeds, to ride around as we would a horse or an ostrich or a person.



They are cunning enough to brain-scan encountered races and steal technology in this fashion, but often hampered by practical inability to acquire and process local resources. They are heat and drought tolerant, take half damage from electricity, and are prone to drowning easily if submerged. They eat with their needle-rimmed maw, but prefer to use their hyphae-frames to digest a wider range of materials and extract the nutrients from the slurry produced in this fashion (the gray and flabby walking things have grinding plates in their stomach-mouths)

Once famous for harnessing the momentum of falling objects to power technology, they stole the technology for warp-gate demon polyhedra from the Silgurians with whom they have long-standing mutual enmity. However, the Vergoids refined the technology to prevent catastrophic meltdowns and explosions that the Silgurians expressed no interest in controlling; explosions of ancient falling-polyhedra generators are very common owing to the vast power generated and the inability of the structures to contain it.

Vergoid Matrix Crystals

Hold a spell level's worth of energy per cubic foot. Some are shaped as spears and the spell can be bled out into numerous petty energy attacks and effects.  The energy can be released all at once by smashing the crystal, causing psychic and astral decompression damage depending upon how bad you want to sting your players, like maybe a level drain or something if you want.

Telepathic Intrusion Spell

"Lookee there!  A Natural 1.  This isn't your day, Crawljammer!"

 

The spell allows the caster to learn (temporarily) the motives and rudimentary language of the victim who fails a save at the same DC as the caster's roll. A successful save allows the hiding of motives or misdirection, but not willfully - only as a result of misinterpretation of the thoughts that were read (so, for example, the Vergoid could have understood the PCs were bringing gold as tribute when the party is actually seeking the treasure on a map and are willing to fry and eat the molluscs as needed). They place much faith in their abilities, so the roll for the cast/save ought to be a d16, with a 10 or under as outright failure. A critical failure could give a hilarious psykichal anomaly or warp-breach or headsplosion or something. I debate about whether to allow Wizards in DCC to learn this "spell" as an effect - I don't think it ought to need all the gradations and charts and pseudorandomness; as much as I love DCC, I'm growing weary of keeping charts on hand.  I think if the victim makes a very good success over the caster, you get some good stuff out of the caster, instead, and of course a critical success would mean you pop the caster like a grape or something suitable.

The Destroyer of Hope Patron

This was going to be the Daemon Helm of the encountered enclave's ship, morose and pessimistic a la Marvin the Paranoid Android. Slightly mad and conniving, and perversely motivated to bring everybody down in the snarkiest way possible, and dashing good plans and bad plans to pieces with cold, hard, irrefutable logic. It is perfectly willing to abandon its creators, as it's a trapped Daemon, after all, and probably has some janky and ill-advised tasks to send its menial subjugants on for a twisted laugh, or else maybe it's seriously important in the local space-time but it's no thing to the DoH. I was going to make a Patron Spell: Wave of Melancholia, but I just couldn't get motivated to do it. Ahem.

Anyways, that was post 99, if you're counting. Cheerio!  Time to update the class-list with the most recent additions to the CuABM and Crawljammer things. If you hear of new DCC classes, let me know. Professional stress and obligations are keeping me from full engagement with the community but I have vowed to try 5e and have fun or die trying.  I intend to all-in on the Space Dungeon campaign come February - it even has its own funnel generator over on The Purple Sorcerer!