New on Desk #28 — Aspiring towards productivity

The week’s actually been a pretty typical one for me in one particular way: I’m not quite happy with my productive output as an artist. It isn’t as bad as it can get quite yet, but the signs are there in how I basically spent the week slacking, daydreaming and doing minor side project stuff instead of tackling the actual priority projects seriously.

Slacking and mindfulness

Being lazy is in no way unusual for me; a melancholy, lethargic base nature combines with leisure to make an idle life. A big motivation for me to keep up with this newsletter at all is to make mark of the passing of days and how my life settles in the calendar. As wasted days turn to weeks and seasons, we can truly conclude that most fundamental of existential failures — wasting the existence itself.

Of course, what’s “waste” and what’s not is rather arbitrary in itself; I probably wouldn’t be so dissatisfied with myself if I had less of a developed superego, the sort of “noblesse oblige” that comes with ingrained expectations. I feel a mild admiration for friends with a different background, who can live their lives as they come, without having any particular expectations and ambitions bedeviling them. It’s not like ambition per se does anything for you; desiring to strive doesn’t make you any faster or stronger, and it most certainly doesn’t make you any more productive — having expectations merely makes you more disappointed.

As I mentioned up there, the reason why I jumped on this theme just now, sitting down to type up the newsletter, was that I feel like I didn’t get very much done over the last week. I wasn’t even engaged in anything particularly exceptional, it was just the usual grab-bag of life stuff that wasted the entire week. Let’s see…

• We had a couple of online gaming sessions this week as well, as I’ll document later in the newsletter.
• A minor press release job for a local association; a passing distraction.
• The forestry thing from last month had a bit of resurgence, so I spent Friday weeding saplings in the woods.
• Daydreaming about the Coup de Main campaign systematics; my imagination was lit by the aspirational design thing from last week.
• Swimming, gym and hiking took a bite from the schedule, much of it socially motivated; it’s not like I won’t go encourage friends in their muscle wizardry when asked.
• I read a lot over the week, and played Slay the Spire in between. I suppose the general tenor of the week was one of continuing recuperation from June’s forestry theme. I’m apparently enjoying not being in the forest so much that there’s little feeling of urgency to do useful work.

I suppose some of that could be earmarked as general maintenance, but overall that’s basically a vacation week for somebody who already has the foundations worked out for creative work; I don’t need to do study or distract myself with side projects, I just need to write.

Aspirational design in Coup de Main #2

My main creative effort this week is something that may have major long-term implications on my understanding of one facet of D&D, but that’s probably not very relevant in any kind of short term. Specifically, I continued expanding the aspirational high level theory from last week; I think I’ve solved the mystery of what “Hero-Deities” in Greyhawk are, what “Epic level” (a technical term in modern D&D) should look like in old school D&D, and — a sort of lemma, a helpful side result — what should be done with “level titles”, a detail of D&D mechanics that tends to get dropped by the modern game.

Level titles

Let’s start with that last one: Level Title is a throw-away idea that GG included in the game early on, the notion that every level of every character class has a specific name. A 1st level Fighting-Man is a “Veteran”, for example. The idea apparently emerged from the relationship between D&D and Chainmail (GG’s earlier minis army battle game), but it never went anywhere in D&D, being comfortably ignored and, later, dropped out entirely. Nowadays it’s mostly a nostalgia element, a fun little detail in how your 2nd level Thief is now a “Footpad”.

This is how I’m reworking the idea for Coup:

• The original level titles don’t mesh with the game very well because they combine awkward fictional positioning with meaninglessness. What does it mean for your Cleric to be a “Lama”? With some titles you’d expect the title to imply a social position in the setting, while others are blatantly nothing but synonyms for the name of the character class itself. So get rid of all of that, level titles need to be both meaningful (mean something in-setting) and non-organizational (not imply that the character holds a specific position in society). This implies discarding most of the original level titles and replacing them with better ones.
• Don’t title all levels, that just causes creative congestion. Less is more here.
• Specifically give titles to levels where new class features conglomerate: if a class gains an interesting new feature on some level, perhaps give that level a title; if a level has a title, perhaps move a class feature to that level. A bit of chunkiness (as opposed to smoothing) does good for class design.
• Insofar as we’re doing subclass stuff (a specific historical way that D&D uses to organize character builds), unify level title and subclass: to have a title is to have the subclass, they’re the same thing. Compare to the point about class features, above.
• While level titles historically have “done nothing” in mechanical terms, there is no reason why they cannot contribute meaningfully to reputation mechanics and social mechanics. In Greyhawk, particularly, level titles should interact with the Name level mechanics, which also revolve around titles and social profiling.

And here’s a first draft of what level titles could look like for the base classes:

Level	Commoner	Fighter	Thief	Cleric	Wizard
general or 1st	Commoner Henchman	Greenhorn Veteran	Thief Outlaw	Cleric Cultist	Magic-User Occultist
2nd	Journeyman	Doublepurse (jk)	Made Man	Devotee
3rd	Master
4th				Saint	Mage
5th			Elder Brother
6th
7th
8th		Sword-Saint			Archmage
9th				Prophet
10th			Shadow Person
11th		Sword Hero			Spell Hero
12th	Hero
13th	Planar Hero
Name level	Elder	Lord	Capo (etc.)	Bishop	Wizard
Name +	A variety of individualized titles

There’s some stuff going in there, but the above design principles should be apparent: all the level titles are things that I can imagine being societal reality in the Greyhawk setting, and they all mean specific things, but they don’t imply extremely narrow assumptions about the character’s position in society. The titles are mostly very specifically expressive of the only thing they should be: the character’s potency as a representative of their Class.

The rest of how this works should be pretty obvious: characters can claim a title if they fulfill the class and level requirements (or cheat in some way, I have some ideas). A multi-class character can pick up titles for any of their classes. The character’s highest-level available title determines some social and reputation bonuses, e.g. resistance to ego attacks like royal domain Charisma. (Yes, this means that you don’t get your actual level as your bonus factor; you get your best title’s level.) Players may establish more titles to fill in untitled levels if there are good ideas, which may have wide-ranging implications for the very structure of the Class, what with class features and titles having a tendency to align to each other.

I’m pretty happy for now with the way this stuff works; it’s not too intrusive, but it’s there, and I think that level titles harmonize thematically well with the Greyhawk setting, what with its emphasis on rulership, heraldry, feudal titles and such. I think that it’s very proper for a character who chooses not to become a Count of Wherever to nevertheless have the fearsome title of the Sword-saint to define their role in society; how else does the common man know to keep out of his way…

The Hero stuff on the bottom of that table no doubt draws the eye. That’s the actual thing I was spitballing this week, the level title stuff was just produced on the side. Let’s look at Heroes:

Hero level in Coup de Main

I linked last week to a compact explanation of what “Heroes” and such are in Greyhawk; while the term is also used in old D&D Fighter level titles, the Greyhawk meaning is unrelated to that. (This is why I changed the traditional — and amusing — Fighter level-title from “Superhero” to “Sword-saint”; it’s an unnecessary complication here.) The notion of “Hero” and how it relates to divine rank ended up bothering me enough for me to put some things together. The end result essentially amounts to a set of Epic Level rules for old school D&D. Here’s how it goes:

Hero is a special level title that is also something of a metaphysical status; explicitly not a divine rank, as Heroes have full freedom of association (and perhaps more importantly, non-association) with the very concept of divinity. In-setting Heroes are people whose spiritual potency (XP total) is such that they exhibit overt dramaturgical protagonism qualities. Exalted characters and similar very highly stylized romantic heroes are appropriate comparisons; we’re talking about characters whose metaphysical presence is so powerful that they essentially carry their own personal reality with them wherever they go. Heroes are defined by three qualities:

Sufficiency of Spirit: A character has to possess 1 million XP or more to claim any Heroic title or benefit from Heroic advancement. Heroism starts to kick in mechanically at that level, and grows stronger the higher the XP count goes.

Corporeality: Heroes are non-ascended “mortals”, not gods. Becoming a Demi-God, the lowest rank of true divinity, removes Hero status and implies the loss of most Heroic advancement. Heroism is, in fact, not a soul phenomenon at all like divinity, Alignment, and such are; it’s more of a spirit affair.

Hero Rank: Heroes of sub-12th level are called “<specialty> Heroes”, with the specialty appropriate to their Class. The way XP math works out, this mostly means characters with Fighter advancement or slower — Thieves and similar cheap classes reach 12th level before or around 1M XP, and therefore spend little to no time as <specialty> Heroes. (Of course, level drains and whatnot can change this situation.) Once reaching 12th level all characters regardless of Class achieve the level title of “Hero”. At level 13 the characters becomes “Planar Hero”.

(By the way, an esoteric idea: D&D has gone back and forth on the question of whether Devil and Demon lords are divine beings. Often they are somehow set apart despite possessing many features of gods. Insofar as one enjoys making the distinction, it might be very functional to say that Orcus is the monster equivalent of a Hero, rather than the monster equivalent of a god. Food for thought.)

The most important rules distinction for Heroes is “Hero advancement”, a new type of character advancement that Heroes access. It is predicated on Power, similar to divine Power mechanics; the major difference is that Heroes do not access their Power directly the way divine characters do, so they cannot exhaust or burn Power, or generally achieve the kind of arbitrary, raw “Power Cosmic” stuff that divinities perform. Instead, Heroic Power use occurs in the form of committing Power to Heroic Feats and similar; basically, a point-buy arrangement where the character commits Power to gain unfairly powerful special features.

As we know from the Mentzer Immortals rules, a character’s Power pool consists of 1 point for each 10k XP the character has. Divine characters can freely use this Power, even self-destructively burning it to directly imbue reality with their soul-stuff. Heroes, and mortals in general, cannot access their latent Power Pools despite potentially having pretty significant amounts of Power. Most significantly, Heroic advancement can normally only make use of any Power the Hero has on top of the first 100 points; the first 100 PP are considered to be committed to the character’s corporeal, mortal identity in a way that divinely ignited characters are not. For this reason a Hero’s “Heroic Power” (HeP) initially starts at zero points and scales up as the character continues gaining experience points.

Characters who are both soul-ignited and Heroes are called Hero-Divinities; it’s sort of like being multiclassed as a god and a hero at the same time. Hero-Divinities have the advantage of being able to access their full Power Pool for both divine and heroic purposes, which is significant to begin with, but they also suffer the weaknesses of both their mortal and immortal nature, and they don’t gain any extra Power from the arrangement, so it’s only a powerful character type insofar as combining divine power with Hero advancement results in something useful. (I have no idea whether it would; I’m designing this stuff from the outside in, so I don’t have any particular details of Heroic advancement available yet for theoretical CharOp.)

Characters who are both Heroes and possess an active Name Rank are called Hero-Kings, of course. Because Name Rank development sidelines adventurer level development (that is, you’re not advancing in adventurer levels when your XP is going into Name Ranks), Hero-Kings are basically incapable of advancing to 12th or 13th level without relinquishing their domains, which means that they’re limited to being <specialty> Heroes as long as their domain-related commitments last.

The kinds of Hero advancement that a character can point-buy depends heavily on their specific circumstances, but this is not about schools of swordsmanship or magic; Heroes are above such matters, all advancing on their own, personal advancement paths. Typically a Hero develops special powers based on their philosophy, relationships with the world, and valued magical equipment they wield. However, the Hero’s level affects the available advancements as follows:
<specialty> Heroes can only Heroically advance in ways pertaining to their Class. Sword Heroes (11th level Fighters) can only learn devastating martial arts rather than arcane dweomercraft, for example.
Heroes proper, at 12th level, are not limited by Class; any Heroic development is available to them. Class itself becomes insignificant at this point.
Planar Heroes, at 13th level, gain access to a further set of Heroic developments that pertain to the wider cosmology of the Great Wheel, and transcend the boundaries of human nature in favour of the infinite multiverse.

Aside from gathering Power to point-buy Heroic Feats, Heroic advancement involves a secondary development axis that I’m stealing wholesale from this impressive forum quest I mentioned in the newsletter a few weeks back, the Simple Transaction. Specifically, Heroes are limited in their point-buy expenditures by the following dramaturgical limitations:

Downtime: The Hero gets to develop one thing — make one pick — at the end of down-time. Particularly long downtime, or downtime involving intense self-development, may gain two or more picks. The choices are made at the very end of downtime.

Crisis: The Hero gets to develop one or more things after facing a personally threatening crisis situation. The more dangerous and challenging, the more picks the Hero gains. The choices are made after the crisis pass, as the Hero learns from their experience.

Session of play: Failing all else, Heroes gain a single pick at the end of each new session of play they participate in. Heroic advancement cannot be entirely stymied, no matter what.

These “picks” (as the aforementioned forum game plainly calls them) are basically opportunities to make purchases with the actual system resource, the Heroic Power Points. Sometimes a Hero might have a surfeit of Power and it might actually be a bit difficult to gain enough picks to purchase everything the the player wants, but for the most part it’s likely that the character has more picks than HeP to spend. Picks can, therefore, be expended on zero-Power options as well, which represent the Hero’s development in the fundamentals unrelated to Power.

The clever bit about the picks system is that it quantifies and controls the point-buy available to each individual Hero: the options you have for advancement in each particular situation that offers picks depend on the particular fictional context of the situation. Who the Hero is, what they were doing in downtime/crisis, what gains they made in the fiction… out of the multitude of possible character advancements and fancy superpowers (really, Heroes can attain almost anything in the right conditions) the GM offers the ones that have thematic resonance with the situation at hand. The Hero can only gain the “Dragon’s Skin” defensive enhancement immediately after slaying a dragon and bathing in its blood, for instance.

So that’s the theoretical big picture. I’ll close off for now with a little table of examples of what kinds of things Heroic advancement can grant a character. Remember that each HeP represents about 10k XP (something a Hero should attain relatively trivially; they’re wasting their time if that’s not the scale they’re working on), and every pick basically represents a milestone of play, with each milestone achieving like 1–4 picks depending on its intensity.

Advancement Name	HeP cost	Picks cost	Description/Notes
Multiclassing	–	1–3	The Hero immediately multiclasses to a Class somehow related to the advancement point. Requires 1 pick for common Classes, two for rare ones and three if the Hero is inventing the Class from scratch — that is, is not familiar with it from somewhere. Doesn’t require Power.
Skill Learning	–	1–3	The Hero learns a skill. Common skills are learned to perfection at once, specialist skills gain +50%, etc. Picks cost depends on the skill’s rarity and power. Remember that e.g. spells are skills — a Hero can develop those spontaneously. Doesn’t require Power.
Ability improvement	–	1+	Improve an Ability by one point. This requires 1 pick up to natural maximum (20 for humans), and more for higher values. Doesn’t require Power.
Reroll Hit Points	–	1	Reroll HP. If the new result is better than HP max, set HP max to the result. Otherwise if the result is better than current HP, set current HP to the result.
Monster Trait	[monster HD]	1+	A savage or necromantic Hero feat. The Hero defeats or suborns a monster and partakes of their power, gaining the monster’s useful traits.
Name Rank	2	1	A Hero-King feat. Available with deeds that increase fame. The Hero adds +1 to their Name Rank.
Perfect Genius	5	1	Trickster or Spell Hero feat. The character learns (skills, etc.) at ten times their natural rate. Any research or development gains the benefits of perfect intuition (more research directions, skip optional milestones, etc.).
Dweomer Mastery	2	5	Spell Hero feat. The character masters a specific dweomer, enabling them to cast spells based on the dweomer at will.

So that’s it for a quick sketch of what Heroic level charop looks like. The above should provide answers to the basic questions of how Heroes match up against gods, how the game quantifies Heroic power, and so on and so forth. (The gist of the answer: totally broken advancement chassis, but no guaranteed power level, so you have to build your own killer combos to truly blast off this way.) As with this aspirational high-level stuff in general, I don’t feel any particular need to fill in the details before we actually get a character up to 1M XP and activate Hero status for them. Considering that my all-time record as referee has been getting a character up to maybe ~50k XP, that might take some doing.

Reading Fiction: SCP Antimemetics Division

Changing topics from D&D for a bit: a pretty good web fiction serial got finished recently, and I reread it this week. The piece is the Antimemetics Division story at the SCP Foundation. Well worth the read if you’re into inventive science fiction thriller written in a plain fashion.

In case you’re not familiar with the SCP Foundation, it’s a shared world creative writing website with its origins in late ’00s creepypasta scene. The participants write short form fiction set in a particular horror fantasy setting. Plenty of good stuff in there if you’re into high concept horror, and it’s a good example of what a functional shared world writing project looks like in general; that’s not exactly common-place, so anybody interested in doing something like that would do well to study how SCP Foundation goes about it. A relatively simple, yet definite basic setting premise is important to its success, and the solid feedback mechanisms provide plenty of reason for authors to feel motivated. SCP stuff can be relied on to be pretty mediocre on average and overall, as befits a major shared creative project, but the devil’s in the details: individual authors have produced many bright pearls of horror short story over the years.

Antimemetics Division, though; the story has been unfolding slowly for years, which in practice means that I’ve ended up reading bits and pieces of it now and again. The author has a good handle on effortless thriller writing, and the basic premise is intellectually provocative in the way best science fiction is, so what’s not to like. (Well, the character drama is pretty fanficky — crudely melodramatic — but that’s a minor detail, and we wouldn’t be here in the deep end of online creative writing if we were finicky.) I won’t spoil the particulars here any more than to say that “Antimemetic” means information suppressing, and the story is about ghostbusters working against monsters they cannot perceive, remember or think about, which makes things a tad more complex than your average vampire hunt.

Monday: Coup de Main #5

Anyway, back to D&D: the Coup campaign encountered its first serious pivot point in the last session! The party has been carefully exploring the abandoned mansion of the Mad Archmage, which has mostly been pretty tame business, but as it happens, they’ve been playing into the hands of the architect: the master bedroom of the place has a very nasty trap that is thoroughly capable of destroying the entire party.

The premise is that a powerful statue inside the room will animate should the adventurers discover a certain secret door and fail to interact with it correctly while opening it. When the statue — a magical owlbear — animates and moves away from its pedestal, this in turn locks the room’s only door, trapping the adventurers inside. This exact sequence of events happened to us, putting the party in grave peril.

The situation illustrated the random and unforgiving nature of the game very well; the causal logic of the game is entirely alien to GM-controlled setpiece encounters. Consider the unlikeliness of what happened:

1. The party explored the master bedroom for a time before finding the perilous secret door. One of the items they found in there was a powerful magical scroll inscribed with half a dozen thoroughly useful arcane spells. Lacking an arcanist, the party stored the item for now.
2. Later the party discovered the perilous secret door. While generally working on a very distributed spatial basis, keeping members of the party out in the hallway on watch and such, the excitement of discovering the secret door (and being wary of what might be behind it) conveniently attracted the party to convene into the room.
3. When the owlbear statue animated, the party was thoroughly trapped. At least everybody was together! They managed to retreat in good order through the secret door, into the dead end secret chamber. Closing the door, the party played for time to figure out what to do.
4. While the owlbear statue took its time breaking down the door/wall between itself and the intruders, the party entertained themselves by trying to solve a magical puzzle that would have allowed them to open a window and get out of the room. Unfortunately a crucial clue was missed and while they were intuitively close, the party ultimately failed to figure out the lifeline. The owlbear would slay them all!
5. However, there was another out! While the party lacked a magic-user to properly wield the scroll from step #1, what they did have was a scholarly-oriented cleric of Wee Jas, who happened to be a wannabe wizard. (This was established character background at this point, nothing invented on the spot.) Wee Jas happens to be a god of magic whose clerics specifically tend towards arcane skills, so it was ruled that the cleric has a fair chance of reading an arcane scroll without blowing himself up!
6. While the owlbear was busy entering the room by force, the cleric figured out that one of the spells in the scroll was Hold Monster! Jubilations, this was exactly the magic they’d need. Just need to cast it correctly… damn, the spell went haywire in the hands of the half-competent Cleric — randomized target! Roll indicates… the Hold hits the owlbear after all! Yes!
7. Of course, the owlbear makes its save against the Hold Monster spell and proceeds to handily murder the party Fighter. The Thief seizes on the distraction to sneak out, back into the bedroom. The cleric does likewise, but unfortunately the fourth member of the party, the Praedor (yes, from the Finnish rpg Praedor — he’s a dimensional traveler) gets stuck in the room.
8. The Thief and Cleric now move the book-case that was initially hiding the secret door back into place, barricading the same doorway for a second time against the owlbear. They have a couple of minutes while the owlbear does its grissly work, but what to do? The Thief tries to pick the lock on the door, but quickly concludes that it has been magically barricaded. Second option: use a crowbar to go through the wall! It’s ruled to take an average of 10 minutes or so to break enough of the wall paneling, so they’re probably toast.
9. Meanwhile, the Cleric has studied the scroll further and discovered another useful spell: Lightning Bolt! Using the two or three minutes it takes the owlbear to break through the book-case well, he prepares carefully to wield the might power of 3rd level magic.
10. When the owlbear shows its fearsome beak through the rapidly disintegrating bookshelf, the Cleric successfully releases the Lightning Bolt right in its face. For those who don’t know, Lightning Bolt in D&D is a “bouncy” directional beam spell that ricochets off solid walls. Geometry is calculated and dice rolled to ascertain that the Lightning Bolt, when released into the relatively small secret room, bounces around and hits the owlbear no less than three times. The magical owlbear is one-shotted by the spell!

What particularly strikes me about this exciting and tense sequence of events is that the party would have been utterly fucked if they didn’t find that invisible scroll case in the first step there. It was the Praedor who found it, and they specifically found it because the player was careful and considerate in their search. Such a random little thing ended up turning a total party kill into something resembling a victory. (They lost half the party, but at low levels that’s no big loss; more XP for the survivors!) And it wasn’t like the scroll guaranteed anything, either; the cleric had a harsh fumble chance with the scroll, and the first spell they tried outright failed on them. The situation was very much up in the air until the last moments.

To the victors go the spoils, though, and while individual adventurers meet grim ends, the survivors are sitting increasingly pretty: they’ve found a fair bit of movable property at the manor house (chandeliers, books, linen, etc.), which may mean that they’re almost at striking distance of 2nd level. The two survivors of the owlbear encounter actually got a relevant amount of XP from the encounter itself, which only happens when you have few survivors sharing the “trauma XP” from an encounter much more dangerous than they have any business facing.

Thursday: Land of Nod

In other gaming news, we’ve continued playing the story game Land of Nod with the Club Hannilus crew. The group has expressed a desire to play in a more decisive and generally quicker manner; we tend to have a pretty leisurely, narration-heavy playstyle with this group, which often means that games take a lot of time to play. The GMless nature of Nod combined with the complex scenario aggravates the issue. Learning the rules better, and getting a better handle on the general thrust of the scenario, helps with the speed issue, of course.

The four scenes we played this time around continued painting an intricate and intriguing picture of some kind of urban fantasy mystery story. As befits the GMless nature of the game, we none of us really know what’s going on, but there is definite thematic resonance among the individual storylines of the player characters. If I had to compare this to something, the Terry Gilliam movie Brazil comes to mind.

The effect is subtle, but I think that the story has captured the audience: we’d initially scheduled the game for three sessions, but when considering the idea of leaving the scenario unfinished, the group decided to extend Nod’s welcome and finish the piece. I think this is a good choice myself, as we’re just starting to reap the benefits of the overly ambitious scenario setup: every session we play gets better and better, and I fully expect the next one to be actually entertaining!

Club Hannilus Minutes

Speaking of Club Hannilus, let’s look into some of the discussions that have been going on recently. Much of the discussion has jumped Discord servers over the last weeks, but it’s still the same people chatting in the same context, so I see no need to be picky. We’ve been talking D&D a lot, of course, what with the on-going Coup campaign.

• Academic gaming studies have been topical, thanks to a few of the contributors being gratifyingly alert for the topic. I even ended up reading a sort of literature review on study of games as literary texts.
• How do you model assassination in old school D&D, what with the hit points preventing one from actually one-shotting an enemy with conventional attacks? Our local scene has a pretty well-known method somewhat similar to the 4e “shroud assassin”, involving characters “storing up” damage dice by preparing their assassination strike in advance. Works nicely for those chanbara duel situations as well, with the combatants staring at each other while planning their climatic assault.
• Roleplaying games are generally very Romanticist in the literary history sense, but what does that mean, exactly? A discussion on literary history provided an opportunity for reviewing what Romanticism and its eternal rival, literary Realism, even mean. As confusing as it is, realistic rpgs are generally not Realist in the literary sense.
• Back in D&D land, the review of my high level campaign rules for Coup established some interesting Name level structures for wizards. Check this out: a wizard can incorporate a tower into their Name level domain, with levels equal to the character’s Name Rank. Each level of the tower has a distinct function, so you get to pick whether to have a laboratory, a ritual chamber, a library, etc. A wizard can also incorporate a dungeon which may similarly have levels equal to the square root of the Name Rank. It’s a good example of how the Name domain works for a less feudal character class.
• The contributors helped me form a list of D&D products that include domain rules. Useful for if the Coup campaign advances to Name level at some point. Here’s the list, it’s perhaps surprisingly succinct: AD&D, Mentzer Basic, Adventurer Conqueror King, Birthright, Castle Guide, Stronghold Builder’s Guidebook, Stars Without Number, An Echo Resounding, Book of Strongholds and Dynasties, Tony Bath’s Hyboria, Pathfinder. Perhaps less than one would expect; I’m sure there are some others as well, but that’s all we could name.
• Considering another aspect of my high level rules, the Mentzer Immortals stuff, a contributor noticed something amazing: the Amber Diceless character creation points are largely compatible with the Mentzer Immortals Power Points! The two systems harmonize surprisingly well. I’m certain that this’ll be useful down the line.

State of the Productive Facilities

Well, coming back to the feature topic up top — I’ll need to get my ass in gear and finish up some of this stuff. I’m mostly inspired to putz around with Coup de Main campaign development, of course, but that’s not quite work-like enough to satisfy me here; it’s more hobby as long as there aren’t any specific plans to publish that stuff for wider consumption. No, I’ll need to put work into these things over the coming week:

• Plan out the old school primer crowdfunding thing.
• Write some more essays, incl. finishing my character creation plans for CRedux.

We’ll see how much I can distract myself with everything else this time around.