16 month Calendar and other time keeping

I saw a youtube video about the Human Calculator, and his 13th month Calendar and I thought.. Hmm, I wonder If I've mentioned it in my blog? my Calendar that is..

16 Month Calendar

Earth has a strange calendar, You can google hundreds of articles and videos about it, how to calculate it, ways to fix it, etc etc. I do like the idea of the 13 month calendar and how people in power have crushed all attempts to have it through history.. makes you wonder.. 

So I looked at my world(s) and thought.. Hmm, How many days/weeks/months etc would I have..How would people measure it?

Earth has 4 seasons, hot, warm but getting colder, cold, and cold but getting warmer, depending on where you are in the world. Unless you could think of anything else in such a binary system, It'll stay.

Then there is the moon cycle. Travels around the world, gives you a sense of when things should happen next.. 4rd moon this year? must be time to plant crops, 7th moon, animals will begin to breed. So there's that to consider too.

Moon cycles were divided into four, to make the week, giving us 7 days a week, luckily, would be havoc if it was 27 day cycles, we'd have some messed up calendars.. maybe that's why many civilizations don't get space travel, their clocks are so confusing, their lives so disordered, they can't get anything done efficiently, and why should they, the universe is obviously not consistent, so why should we?

So, that's Earth.

The Coyn.

Well At first it was earth like, and later I thought.. that's wrong, because of many reasons. So I had to do some math, lots of math, and figure out all the angles.

A brief reminder: The Coyn is a flat, disc shaped world, it has a sun, smaller than the disc (for reasons) which rises and sets on the same side of the world, but moves around it, 1 full rotation of the sun is a year, and takes, now, 515 days. Actually its 515.25258.. but more on that later

There are many ways to divide up 515, not. You have 5 and 103. So would the civilisations choose 5 months of 103 days each, or 103 weeks of 5 days? 103 doesn't divide easy, so, yay!

So, Ancient Civilizations might have 5 seasons, areas that are usually cold, might have, "the Great cold" as a season.. Russian Winter! Then a season for getting warmer, but its still cold, getting warmer and its nice, getting colder but its still nice and getting colder but its already cold, each season is 103 days long? 

Does it have to? We have leap years, where we add in an extra day every 4 years, so why not leap months? Maybe as time went by, they looked at the 103 days and figured.. you know, we could break it up into 51 days x 2 and a spare day... or 25 days and 3 spare days, or 3 sets of 26 days and 1 set of 25 days. Then 25 days can break into 5 days each, since 5 seems to be a dominant number here..

Viola.. its got some logic, but is broken, so I gave it to the Orc Tribes in the mountains (since they'd be watching the sun and figuring this stuff out), but broken enough to be a little chaotic, unruly and cause fights. 

"Midsday, the 3rd week of Forthmonth of old winter, I was reminded by my mother that there would be no end of month day celebration as it is the end of old winter and the next day would be Firstmonth of wintergone, war is coming as does the sun"

Of course races with a bit more aesthetic, would be insistent on declaring some days as seperate celebratory days, and having a nice clean set of numbers to work with. Humans, arriving at the world, remembering their earth calendar would be putting together a 30/31 day a month calendar, resulting in 17 months, 12 with 30 days, 5 with 31 days. But an offshoot of people would try to force a 12 month calendar of 43 days each, with 1 less day each year, except leap years.. 

What about leap years?

So, Earth, has 365 days, but we also have .24, so every 4 years we add a day (leap year), but thats .25, so that little..01 means that every 100 years we don't have a leap year, BUT theres a teeny tiny bit, so if the 100 year is also divisible by 4, then it is a leap year, except a miniscule little leftover, we'll add a day in the year 4909.. got that?

So, If I allow for leap years, every 4 years you add a day, and every 40 years you add an extra day and every 160 years you don't add either of those extra days.. thats the .25258 part.. 

So now, our offshoot humans have 43 days a month for 12 months, for 1 year, and then the other 3 years, December has 42 days (better to have 1 less day of winter, than 1 less day of summer)

The Elves

The Elven Homeworld is an eight sided octohedron, six gigantic mountain ranges that seperate the eight lifestyles of the elves. The aesthetic of the number 8 permiates their existance, and relates to their innate usage of magic. They quickly recognised that the world was not right and have attempted many times to get it right by speeding up the sun, slowing down one of the moons, their long term impression is that once its 'back to normal' the internal machine of the world will start back up and set things right. Their clocks have 80 second minutes and 80 minute hours, broken into four 8 hour chunks of the day for 32 hours, so it stands to reason they're try to force their calendars to a 8, and then when they realised they couldn't, force the world to conform to their system.. 

The Dwarves

The Dwarves are based on a 4 and 6 structure, 24 hours, broken into 4 sets of 6, 60 minutes, 60 seconds. All very logical, so their calendar too tries to split into 24 months, but that makes 21 days per month.. not very 24 like.. but 21/4 gives 5 days a week (one for each finger on the hand) for 4 weeks, and a day off at the end of the month.. very dwarf like.. very agreeable. oh and 11 days at the end of the year for a festival.

Of course, this is all for the major civilisations, all the minor groups have their own, and their neighbors influence, and then it all gets messed up by the spire.

The Spire

In the middle of the Coyn is a gigantic spire of ice, at its base, its 100km wide, rises 60 something km high, above the clouds of the clouds of the cloud cities, The very nature of a gigantic structure, causing a shadow across the land for miles and miles, the sub being blotted out for days or even weeks, will affect the psychology of the people and the weather of the area.. As a result, a sub-section of the calendar might also come up.

In my Dark Moscow campaign, there was 10 days of utter darkness in the winter where the sun was behind the spire, it was called Deep Winter, and was not recorded on calendars at all, for fear that acknowledging it would bring out demons, vice versa, during summer, autumn and spring, a few days of extreme warmth from the reflected rays of extra sunlight, caused a Mid Spring Summer, a mid Autumn Summer and a Very Hot Summer for a few days, So for them, there were almost 8 types of weather, the equinox of winter and summer marked by days of extreme cold and heat.

In roleplay, this happens for a few sessions, players are reminded of the natural course of events that their characters are fully aware of, and the players are always fascinated by. Before, I might explain it each time, later I had hand-outs and now.. I can reference this blog.

DD12 Cataclyzm Playtest Diary

I've been playtesting Cataclyzm to get a feel for how the game flows well, as its not a traditional roleplay and has moments where even I as GM get fazed and left wondering if I'm making a fun game or forcing an idea. So I decided to blog my thoughts..

DD12 Cataclyzm Playtest Diary #1

A Typical Afternoon in Cataclyzm.

Cataclyzm has alot of great ideas, but alot of crummy ones too, so I've decided to play test them out, and see what works and what sucks.

First Characteristics: Most games start with long sessions to create characters, but the draw back is, long character creation = far less desire for players to lose their character. Also, rolling vs choosing, both have their draw backs, but what about situational voting?

So what we do in Cataclyzm is give the group the choice.. Here is the situation.. who is going to volunteer to solve it, why are you volunteering, because you're the best at it, group votes if they should be "the best" or "just good", if they are "the best" they should also choose something their 'not so good at' to balance..

i.e. The Players awoke in darkness, tore the membrane/cloth that covered their face and looked around, the first thing they saw was some insane crossbred horse/turtle with a mouth of teeth. The first to get up and go towards it, would likely be the most courageous, the group votes him "most" courageous, a 21 is assigned as his courage score, and he steps forward to the beast.

As play progresses, We discover who our archer/ranger is because one of them decides he wants to throw a rock, and he wants to be good at it. We discover who our warriors are, because the grab rocks and start stabbing at the thing, one is a fast warrior, the other strong.. again, because the group voted yes to each of them being 'good' at it.

Imagine its dark, that head is twice as large and 7 ft tall!

When One of the group got bitten, the question was.. Do you have enough health to survive this? why? do you have any skills that might mitigate this situation?

As the turtles neck spun around in his direction, our warrior quickly turned his body away at an angle, the bite was harsh, but escaped being deadly as his bones halted the crushing jaws of the beast, just long enough for him to pull free.. a gaping wound, but one that could be survived.

Of course, We can't all be heroes in all ways possible. eventually most players had 3 defining stats of 21, 19 and 17, with 3 counter stats of 4, 5 and 6, while other players had more averaged 18, 16 and 14, with a 6, 7 and 8, the rest of the numbers were in the 10-11 range..

Play testing, I had allowed players to 'spend' the spare points to round out their characters, but they of course min-maxed a few stats, for the future I'll ensure the rule is 'average' out the remaining points.

Skills:

At first I was all "Oh you can be anything you want, are you a medieval peasant, or a caveman or a guy from present day earth or someone from star wars or warhammer 40k", the caveat is, they have to take skills relevant to their character, not the situation.. Also, their characters all have amnesia to begin with, "who am I" so their skill list is empty.. the problem is, they take skills as they need them anyway, not skills that are character relevant, but situationally useless, I'm going to have to bring in some kind of lists and have them roll or something, players could later invent their own lists and hand them to the GM.. they know what skills they 'might' get, but not when they will 'remember', or they could even not remember anything and just learn their skills from the GM never really knowing who they are until weeks into the campaign.

Again, this is to get the game flowing fast, decisions in character creation slow people down, take away the choice and direct their agency into interpreting the situation, gives players creative freedom with creative barriers, often best used when you're not sure whats best.

As the character settled down for the night, lost as to their place in the universe, the pondered their existence. They chewed on their uncooked turtle-horse leg meat, tended their acid wounds, and kept watch.. for the endless night sky and vague silhouettes in the lichen-glow suggested any manner of nasties, ready to devour them.

Ok, so lose the trees, the sunset, the glowing tents, pretty much all light.. so.. nothing like this photo.

Vancian and Moorcockian Magic

Inspired by Pitsperilous, I started thinking about how Vancian of magic fits into Dungeonworld.

Other Kinds of Magic

My Three Power Systems seperate into power from without, power from without and power from divine. yet really the last one could be power from other.

Magic, is power from without. Harnessing Elemental forces via code words, gestures, material effects and runes to force the laws of reality to shift momentarily, so you can perform magical effects. You need to understand these rules to be able to alter the rules.

At its basic level, though, magic is just pre-scripted sets of these code words and gestures, understood by ancient magicians and taught down the lineage to newer magicians, without any thought as to 'how' that rule does what it does.

Material Component for Fireball!

How does someone cast a fireball? what is going on to create that fireball? for the most part, players don't care and so its understood that the magic user has less care, he knows that if he moves his fingers thus, speaks the command word just so and has a pouch of sulfer in his hands as he does so, a ball of fire will appear from his gesture, and move at haste towards the target.

Its only when a mage reaches some greater understanding of magic, that he might question the very art he practices and delve deeper into its mechanics enough to adjust the fireball to become hotter, faster, invisible, or appear at the target instead of thrown towards them.

When this happens, the system needs to already have all those parameters worked out to allow the mage to attempt to adjust and create new varieties of spells..

Which is probably why my spell system has taken 20 years to develop.

Yet since 99% of players will never care, there is no need to have those rules in the core books. just list the spells and what they do.

The Same could be said for all the arts.

So, Vancian and Moorcockian systems might simply plug directly in. Since the above fireball cost to cast has a material component, then maybe instead all spells have a memory slot component, or in the case of Moorcock, the spell requires the knowledge of a being that reduces the magic point cost..

Except we've crossed the line into Priestly abilities.

When developing the system, I decided that the process of Vancian Magic made sense if instead of a memory slot, it was goodwill of a god.

When a young priest begins his journey, he has very little sway with his god, so he asks of his god a prayer, and given than he is indeed a pious priest, the god will award him with that prayer, but if he asks too much of his god, a second prayer or third, he risks the gods ire, or at least is ignored.

This works almost directly with the D&D Vancian style. Priests have X number of slots, based on their relationship with their god. A level 10 priest, might have 1 level 4 prayer, 2 level 3 prayers and so on, allowing the priest to perform a daily ritual, to 'stock up' his prayers, then uses them during the course of the day, if he is strapped for a specific prayer he might ask in abnormal times according to his god, but maybe, godwilling (or GM willing if it makes story sense) the god says yes and the power is bestowed upon the priest, but maybe at some extra cost.. ("don't ask again for a week!")

Vincent Muhr, god of wind!

So, Moorcockian Magic would instead be a external power from others, If you need to cast calm, you pray to Muhr in a windy shaft, and he brings you the power of calm, to be used within 48 hours.

Of course, you'd have to know Muhr, or at least his name and his environmental rules, and have some clout in the elemental realms, akin to belief in the priestly area.

This creates a whole subclass of 'powered' which seems akin to the classic warlock or a neolithic shaman. Its a mage, but uses the priest lifestyle and deals with spirits, demons and elementals instead of gods. It seems cheaper, and easier, like priest powers, but likely with time has terrible after affects. 

Comparing Systems for Completeness

I saw a post about comparing their games break-away dice system, to show it off.. Though I might use the template and see if my system would do the same:

Heres the Link

Will your game system deal nicely with this:

Charter Authority (CA): You have received a gilded envelope with very flowery writing.
Beatrix: Does this look like the last envelope sent by the House of Celebration?
CA: It does, the handwriting is also recognizable to you.
Beatrix: I want to check if the envelope is rigged like the last one and, if so, open it safely. No mess this time!
CA: What skills do you wish to employ?
Beatrix: I have a 12 in Insight, I'll roll to boost: rolled a 6 and 3, success +2.
CA: Ok, If there is any rigged gear, lets see if you notice (GM rolls for stealth vs player perception+2) a 1 and a 3.. doubtful
Beatrix: So that's a failed roll.
CA: You open the envelope, trying to take great care with it until, suddenly, you're covered in glitter. It's all up in your feathers.
Beatrix: Curses!
Kace: Can I try to get a sneaky picture of her covered in glitter?
CA: Roll your Stealth against her Perception.
Beatrix: Aw, you can't just leave my poor character in peace? Does insight help.
Kace: Ooo a Setback! I rolled a pass, but with an 11.
CA: That's a mixed success! You both have a success and a failure. I think I'll let you decide what Beatrix's fumble should be, Kace.
Beatrix: Don't you dare, Kace!
Kace: I think...my character uploads the picture to my holoprofile and shows it to Beatrix.
Beatrix: My character runs at him!
Kace: He runs away! There's no way he's getting covered in glitter too!
Jackson: While this is going on, I get a picture of the chase and upload it with the tag #DD12.
CA: It gets 135 Hearts and you have 10 new followers.
Jackson: Indeed.

Its something I do from time to time, when I see people posting about their game rules. If I come across an issue, I ask myself, do my rules cover this? Can my players do this? and more often, do I want my players to be able to do this, or will it spoil their experience if they assume other rulesets.

In the above example, its the player asking to engage in a perception action.. Us humans, we assume that we're just not engaged with the world, and we need to 'enact' our engagement. 'be aware'. Having been in several life threatening situations, I can attest that your body does this for you automatically. Your awareness heightens, and the only thing you get to choose is where to focus that attention.

For DW, Its assumed that you are in 3 possible states of awareness, Asleep, Awake and Alert. the GM is instructed to give characters the benefit of the doubt and assume that they are in the most appropriate state for the situation. If a person was asleep, and you start describing some sound, then they are awake.

There are of course situational modifiers, lack of sleep, drugs, alcohol, blows to the head, etc, but the base score is Asleep = 0, Awake = half, and Alert = full.

When Beatrix asks to check if the envelope is rigged, its because she has previous experience with such things. So she automatically gains her insight bonus, and can roll to gain it again. (players love to roll) by being cautious and looking for the trigger.

The GM rolled a 4, with a 1, so, unless Beatrix has amazing perception + skills, its doubtful that a 4 would ever fail, so we don't even check if the roll was success or not, that 1 pretty much says it will be.

When Kace tries to stealth against Beatrix, we know the scores, Kace passes the roll, but rolls a fumble (10, 11 or 12) on one of the dice. Having players choose their own fumble is far more entertaining.

Once again, I am relieved. While I had to 'fudge' the text for the Insight roll, I'm just aware that I have to double up on the rules text about how opposed rolls work.

p.s. I have friends who glitter bomb their invites.. vacuuming for weeks!

p.p.s. OMG As Google+ goes down, all their related sites just fail. Appologies, I only now noticed that the text above was forced a white background for certain browsers, AND I can't comment to the fact, as Google+ is now blacklisted by DNS blockers from commenting.. ??

World Build October Part 29

Its World-Build-Tober: 

Monday the 29th - World-build-tober

"Draw (or describe) a ceremonial object"

In A time long gone, The Angels who flew the world left the 'candleholders'. They were collected and distributed amongst the churches of the Holy order of the Tree and are used in ceremonies to celebrate the festivals.

They are light weight, have a heavy pointed end and a hollow end. When placed in the ground or on a wooden table, they balance easily and the weight of the candle usually has no bearing on the balance.

When lit, they give off a glow toward the ground, some show special symbols and patterns, some a generic circle.

Some have been told, hold the bones of the angels and are regarded as holy relics, stored in ancient vaults beneath great churches.









unrelated..

The light weighted bird race invented a spear, that could be segregated into 6-8 parts, and carried on a belt at the waist, connectable in times of need as a dagger, or short bladed sword, a polearm or a full spear. 

World Build October Part 28

Its World-Build-Tober: 

Sunday the 28th - World-build-tober

"Draw (or describe) a common pet or companion animal"

I'm going to go with this from Players.

Typically you'd expect that players would go with a familiar or pet that matches something either easily accessable, OR something rare and exotic.. now while thats true for most players, a larger majority decided that declaring their horse as their pet/companion, was the best choice.

In that line of thread, it seems fair that at least amongst the more common folk, a riding beast or beast of burdern would be most likely as the commonest..

Which brings me to the Yakult. A six legged Oxen/beast of burden, quite friendly, mildly magical, and very strong when it comes to pulling heavy loads. They have tough skinned hands instead of hooves and have been known to grip trees and stones to pull themselves forward.

Since the wild Steppe of the Ashigaru plains have many nomdaic races, which use the Yakult for many reasons, statistically speaking, the Yakult is the most common animal companion.

World Build October Part 27

Its World-Build-Tober: 

Saturday the 27th - World-build-tober

"Draw (or describe) an average citizens home"

Average? for where? The houses of the medieval European cities are single roomed, sometimes built upon a structure to keep above the dirt, which affords the owner a cooler storage place. Colder climates need a hearth of sorts, while warmer climes can do without.

Being a generic, from all worlds, fantasy trope place, its not hard for any gamesmaster to throw any kind of house into the world and it being fairly normal.

Wood Elves live in forests, high up in treehouses. Dwarves carve their places into the stone of hills and mountains. Deep Dwarves live completely underground. Caitshee tend to be nomads or live in moving tribes and Dryads live inside of trees.

An Average citizen of a High Elven city, might live in a 4 roomed, 2 story building, perched on the side of a cliff, while the average halfling lives in a communal hall with his brothers, sisters, aunts, uncles, cousins and grandparents.

The People of Rel'Whenderfel live on house boats, and the people of the lands of the Water God Innusi live on mounds of dried dirt, in a land of perpetual swamp.

World Build October Part 26

Its World-Build-Tober: 

Friday the 26th - World-build-tober

"Draw (or describe) a predatory animal from your world"

Ok, so since dangerous, roleplay worlds are pretty much filled to the brim with predatory animals, who have yet to starve themselves out of the food chain. I'll have to roll on my chart of animals, and pick one that isn't standard trope, already in any other rpg...

here goes.. 

The Mortubus.

Most likely a demon-dog hybrid? The few who have encountered the Mortubus have described it as either a dog with tusks, or a warthog with a lithe body, but the most unpleasant thing that has always been said about it is that it has the hindquarters of a human, even though it runs on the ground. As a result, its end is raised in the rear.

None have been killed and brought in for study by any mage schools or monster hunter guilds, so it can only be thought of as one of the many gorgons that inhabit the world. i.e. the variety of creatures that seem to be made by warped gods who stitch random creatures together.

It is a deadly creature, possessing some semblance of intelligence. It fights with crazed fevour and uses some mildly clever tactics to corner its victim. The tusks are sharp and long, penetrating armour easily and doing some severe damage, often also infecting the wound, causing the victim to die days later and their organs seeping from the wound.

Its suggested that the Mortubus cannot properly chew, and needs to poison the victim into a more slush like food to be lapped up.

Its hind quarters are its vulnerable location, being human-like, cuts easy, yet any strike to the latter half will result in the creature retreating and fleeing from combat.

World Build October Part 25

Its World-Build-Tober: 

Thursday the 25th - World-build-tober

"Draw (or describe) a prey animal from your world"

Besides all the standard earth world predator-prey examples that you can google, and all the ones that match, i.e. any animal that tries to catch and eat another, and this can include alot of ones that might be world-buildy.. i.e.

the plant that captures other plant/animals and eats them?

or the animal that captures sentient plants that walk around?

or the rock elemental that chases down dust-bunnies?

How about this one:

Living coins.

For some strange reason, magic tends to give everyday objects sentience and purpose, without any reason. The weirder variety of these are living coins.

They can cause themselves to roll, if they manage to fall from a shelf or high enough surface, in order to move themselves around the world. They tend to 'park' themselves upright against walls or furniture so they can move off at a later point, because if they ever end up flat on the ground, they are immobile.

They tend to want to be picked up by humanoids, placing themselves in places to get noticed. If they get into an empty bag of coins, they escape. Working their way up the sides with each jostle until they jump out. Sometimes, its noted that they take other coins hostage?

But they are, for the most part, trying to escape the dungeon they are located in, because eventually the mimic will find them and eat them. 

World Build October Part 24

Its World-Build-Tober: 

Sunday the 24th - World-build-tober

"Draw (or describe) an extreme form of weather that exists in your world"

You'd think a cyclone of sharks, or an earthquake that has sentience would be bad enough.. but what about blood rain that causes all living things to become undead.

In the most recent times, the queen of death, from another dimension, decided to target the coyn world, and the whole that she came through ripped the fabric of reality, causes rain to become blood and within it a disease which caused living tissue to suffer and dead tissue to attempt to live once more.. in other words.. zombies.

The whole continent is now under heavy rain of blood, heroes everywhere are seeking out the source in an attempt to 'save the world'.

Meanwhile in sunny Archronite, there is a sentient cup of tea having a heated argument with an air- water sprite.