Happy Farming Upgrade Dungeon

I've been playing Stardew Valley on my kid's Switch for the past few weeks. Let's be clear: I'm not new to SV - in fact I think I got into it when it was pretty new, but I gave it up after I put Stardew Extended on my computer and modded it up so my kid could play with anime portraits. I had beat it once before straight (i.e. no mods) and then after that I modded it up in order to see all the interesting cut scenes and secrets and such.

On the Switch, you can't mod so everything's got to be on the up-and-up. Every larger inventory bag, every house upgrade, every skill increase and heart event has to be earned. I'm used to playing this way from the C64 and many DOS games from back in the day, but earning my way through all the possible upgrades in Stardew Valley - even many of the 'late game" features made me do a lot of thinking and planning and strategizing and in some cases referring to the wikis out there!

I dreamt up an upgrade-path campaign! Start with the DnD5e Basic rules - the freebie document one. Everybody can choose to be a human or a halfling or maybe an animal person or a clockwork person/robot to start with. Go on an adventure in the dungeon and bring back some loot. THEN you can apply the GP to the village/setting, and for that you get bountiful XPs! If you're more into trad stuff (LAME!) then you can also get XP for dealing death to monsters etc. but you get a multiplier for XP spent on the village and villagers.

Want to play a druid? Upgrade the Old Witch's Hut - 200 GP (for which you receive 300 XP)

Want to play a cleric of some other domain besides Life/Healing? Pay for a little shrine, which can be upgraded to a chapel, to a temple, to a cathedral, etc...

Seems to me that it ought to have caps on level so as to encourage the development of variety and investments/purchases for the village/town/etc.. Maybe cap it at level 5 to start with, and those PCs go on to be managed and not necessarily USED at game time to explore dungeons. This'd give folks stuff to do with their PCs during downtime. This kinda meshes well with my old (unused) idea of a stable of tradeable characters usable by the whole group of players.

So your cute little piggy people are totally motivated to get into the dungeon and bring back gold coins, so that they can buy the parts to repair the water pump and improve the wells of the town, but also now they got elected pro-tempore mayor! OH NO!

Anyways, more later. I just found the games "Iron Valley" and "Cozy Village" on itch

People tell me that "The Nightmares Beneath" and "Errant" have good systems for managing this sort of thing but I havent followed up yet

Peace be upon you! 

Gongfarmers on Sea-Devil's Island

Inspired by this podcast - Christian B. has an entertaining and edifying and justice-aware view of the ways that business and corruption drive our lives.

So: the Dungeon Crawl Classics rulebook has a 0-level starting occupation that is a pretty interesting in that it's literally the shittiest job you ever heard of: Gongfarmer. What is a gongfarmer? well, it's someone who empties chamberpots and collects shit and piss for other things. I think historically speaking it was tanneries that used piss and shit in an economical way. Turning shit and piss into money is a special kind of alchemy, I guess. So - the job sucks, but within the framework of DCC you leave it (assuming you survive your first adventure) and become an adventurer. But like, a REAL adventurer who already knows how to muck around in the shit-soaked underground and bring out a living.

Thereafter, all your occupational rolls - anything involving the collection of shit and piss and underground exploration and survival - are at d20 rather than the lowly d10 that an unskilled check would involve. Pretty broad, because there's a lot of shit and piss in the world, and a lot of terrible places to fuck around in.

Brings me back to the aforementioned podcast - so in the mid 1800's in the US - around the world, really - it was discovered that nitrogen found in guano of birds (and later bats) could be reliably transformed into fertilizer. I think you would be surprised at what a big deal this is, and what having reliable crop fertilizer does for a population of humans. It's pretty transformative.

And so, inevitably, capitalists, indutrialists, colonialists, and all the other worst sorts of entrepreneurs seized upon the notion of finding sea-bird infested islands and stripping them bare of everything. Well, not everything, but all the birdshit which was the important part.

This really happened, and as I drove in a mindless lull, listening to this young woman relate the tale of desperate men on a blazing hot, shit-soaked island in the Pacific, struggling against weather and famine and oppression and rats, I got a sense of what a REAL Gongfarmer's Adventure would look like - something like trying to take on The Isle of Dread (X1) but instead of a sword all you have is a trowel at first and maybe some Kuo-Toa, and Cthulhu rising out of the cyclopean depths at the end...

Anyways, it's a decent podcast and Busted Business Bureau is totally worth a subscribe.

INSERT NEW TABLE FOR GONGFARMER EQUIPMENT (A work in progress)

1. Shit-and-piss-proof boots

2. Canary in a cage (for deadly gas detection)

3. Umbrella/Umbrella hat for staving off the evil sun's hateful rays

4. UV50 protection sunscreen/paste/mud

5. Rusty pick (d6) - may cause disease on a critical

6. Rusty shovel (d8) - see 5 above

7. Guano-bag

8. Rat-poison pellets

9. Mermaid-resistant earplugs

10. Thick-soled leather knobbly-lugged climbing shoes

11. A rope with a lot of knots tied in it

12. Makeshift crampons

13. Hardtack/biscuits in a water-and-shit proof container

14. The nightshift has non-flame electric torches because the gas is explosive

15. Natural immunity or resistance to several terrible illnesses

BRIEF ADVENTURE FRAMEWORK

Island/Nautical

Terrible "employers" (really slavers) just begging for an ass-whooping

Deep-Ones/Kuo-Toa cultists lurking around constantly

Mermaids - I mean what horned-up, broke-ass, desperate shit-miner wouldn't be tempted by mermaid song?

Pan-Lung water dragons, tired of eating seabirds and seals

Maybe a shit-encrusted temple underneath a couple of tons of/layers of rock-hard guano

Deep-One gold artifacts here and there (but the tyrannical slavers who run the place want it for themselves)

A well-guarded and ugly (but fast and seaworthy) ship to get away in when the guano hits the fan

Finally, and most-dreadfully, the imminent arrival of Dagon/Hydra/Evil Neptune/Nodens/Cthulhu telegraphed by weird astronomical and weather events, and freaked-out birds and rats