[GLOG/Buckets of Blood Class] Archdrude

It's been a while since I posted about Buckets of Blood; I've been quietly working on the boring parts of writing the game and some IRL things have slowed down my working pace. It's still coming along. Here's a class to remind you that it still exists. 

Archdrude

You must have used marijuana in the last 24 hours to activate your Archdrude templates. Fortunately, you are also very skilled in every aspect of growing and using marijuana. Start with 10 high-quality pot brownies.

A) Candlemass

B) Sweet Leaf

C) Highway Star

D) Dragon Time

Candlemass: You have an additional stat called Wisdom, which starts at zero. Whenever you observe something thought-provoking and formulate a sufficiently blissed-out pronunciation of stoner wisdom, write down what you're pondering and add 1 to your stat.  After spending at least an hour in contemplation- preferably in a dark room full of tie-dye tapestries and scented candles-, you can roll 1d6. If the roll is less than your Wisdom score, reduce it by that much and get insight into the odd thing. This insight helps you to use that knowledge yourself.

Sweet Leaf: You can smoke a leaf from any plant to control it magically. You can only control one plant at a time. The plant cannot do anything overtly impossible, but here are a few ideas for what you can do:

• shift the roots of trees to trip your foes
• cause flowers to release clouds of allergy-triggering pollen
• accelerate a plant's growth (from a seed to full maturity in a day for small plants, and slower growth- perhaps an extra foot or two- for larger ones)
• shift a bush to hide you within its leaves
• smack somebody with a falling vine

Highway Star: After your first random encounter in a region, you understand the the local ecosystem because all things are connected, maaaan. The Director will share the encounter table with you, though some descriptions may be vague or consist of omens ('footprints of a huge humanoid' rather than flat-out earning Bigfoot lives in the area, for example). You always receive an omen of your next encounter before it appears, no matter your encounter roll.

Dragon Time: You can talk to animals anytime, plants while controlling them with Sweet Leaf (they're very laid-back and only mind about being controlled if you end up getting them hurt), and occasionally wilderness spirits (they appear at the Director's discretion as ultra-powerful, yet contemptuous and inhumane, protectors of untamed expanses of wilderness; they look like dragons and only you and people who you have recently shared pot with can see them). Most plants and animals are not very smart. Wilderness spirits are much, much smarter than you.

If you build a strong bond with an animal (or a wilderness spirit, if you're REALLY badass), it might join you as a companion. It can anticipate your actions and act without explicit orders, and will generally act well-behaved.

Starsailor: Port Reports and Domain Play

 Port Reports

Starsailor is a game based on exploration. The player characters spend much of their time hopping from one planet to the next, detouring at strange locales throughout the galaxy. Each location in Starsailor is modeled as a Port, and each Port is described in a standard format. Starsailors are encouraged to write their own Port Report for each location they visit. They can be useful for keeping track of previously-visited locations, planning trade routes and mapping resources, and discovering new adventure opportunities. Player-created Port Reports can also be sold or bartered to interested buyers.

GLOGtober: Six Awful Books for Buckets of Blood

I'm doing GLOGtober out of order. For Day 3 I rolled a magical book. Here's six of them.

How to Use These Books

• Build a character class around them, or hack an existing one. The Dabbler Cultist could always use more reading material.
• They make perfect McGuffins. The player characters must race their rivals to claim the book before it falls into the wrong hands! They player characters were hired to transport one of these books across the country!
• Give a copy to an NPC and you've got a villainous cult leader.
• Hand them out as loot. They're worth a fortune to the right buyer.
• Have an NPC use one to accidentally unleash something ancient and awful.
• Just one of them unleashed upon the world would be a nightmare. What if all six go missing? It's up to the player characters to unravel the secrets of these tomes before Doomsday arrives....

10 cheap DM tricks

 I blame Phlox, for many things but especially this post. I've used all these tricks in my games at some point or another and I think they all work well.

1. Give the PCs a pet with a twist. The baby dragonling is ill and needs a rare herb that only grows somewhere dangerous. The goofy talking ferret is a secret agent spying on the party.

2. Give the PCs a ridiculously powerful single-use magical effect right at the start of the campaign. Once they use it, let it accomplish exactly what they hoped for, but also create unforeseen consequences.

3. Let players describe their hirelings when they're hiring them- "so before you stands a crowd of misfits and swords-for-hire, what kind of scoundrel are you looking to hire?" Then make sure the hirelings are funny.

4. When given a chance to humiliate a dickhead authority figure, the PCs will go to incredible lengths to do so.

5. Every city needs a magic tattoo parlor.

6. Have a list of fantastical foods and drinks on hand, and describe them on equal terms as mundane ones. Players go crazy for cocktails that turn their PC blue or whatever, and it adds texture to the world. The Gourmet Street zine is great for this.

7. Low-stakes contests are irresistible sidequests.

8. Every encounter table should include representatives of every local factions, as well as rarer encounters with wider-scale factions. And every place has at least three local factions.

9. Remind PCs of their reputations as often as possible.

10. If you need a unique NPC with absolutely no prep, just imagine them being played by a cool actor you like. A generic wizard is a lot easier to characterize when you decide she's being played by Pam Grier.

Buckets of Blood Masterpost

There's a Chainsaw Wizard and a Re-Animator. Locheil wrote a Loser Assassin, Sundered wrote a Hot Rod from Hell, and PurpleCthulhu wrote an ingenious framework for stringing the whole thing together. By now, the sensitive reader will surely have picked up on the hot new craze that's undeniably sweeping the GLOGosphere.

We're calling it Buckets of Blood and it fucking rules.

THAT IS NOT DEAD WHICH CAN ETERNAL LIE (GLOG Class: Re-Animator)

 A member of the same adventuring party as the Chainsaw Wizard. The Re-Animator knows that a human is a machine of meat and chemicals, and that the best way to fix a broken machine is by switching it off and then on again.

In other words, this is a necromancer-as-healer for a Weird psychedelic grindhouse setting.

The King in Yellow

This is all there is. You tried to argue against that. You picked up a job as a starsailor, or you fell in love, or stood for a cause, but at the end of the day, it doesn't add up to much. You're a lowly little human incapable of dedicating yourself fully to whatever narrative you've picked out to keep yourself fulfilled, because your identity is muddled and confused. Your love is poisoned with doubt and ennui, your revolution strangled by logistics, and starsailing- well, that's a job for people who are already one bad day away from realizing that absolutely none of this bullshit matters.

When you realize this, the Queen of Apathy laughs and whispers "right on!" in your ear. The Khatun-in-Dreams offers you a place far away from it all, among Her court of dreamers. They pull you towards cowardice. They want you to think that nothing mattering is an immunable fact of your life. You're lucky that the King in Yellow finds you, too, to keep you from turning your back on reality entirely. After all, it can still be repaired. Just needs a bit more glamour.

(The King in Yellow is one of Starsailor's Seven Sovereigns.)