Gravity Maze

This one room-maze can be inserted into any dungeon, but is particularly appropriate as an entrance and main junction in the home of a powerful wizard or some other place where the laws of physics tend to behave like suggestions.

The room is a 40’ cube with haze-filled doorways set into each of the six smooth surfaces, each opening up onto a different face. Gravity is individualized in this room, meaning that each character’s “down” is determined by the door they enter through. The doorways are located a foot or so from the lower corner of each square “wall,” so that there are two doorways to choose from each time you enter the room: one in the floor and one in the wall across from your entrance door that can be easily climbed through.

There is a guardian here, capable of switching its own personal gravity at will, that attacks anyone who enters without escort from its master. Its form consists of dozens of humanoid arms growing out of a central hub, all carved of marble. It moves by rolling around on the “walls,” “ceiling,” and “floor.” It attacks several times per round, focusing on one target at a time. If two of these attacks land (assuming a bipedal target), the handball manages to grab both of its target’s ankles and throws them straight up. The target’s personal gravity reverses, and they take 40’ of falling damage (4d6 in Troika!). If they survive the fall, they’re separated from the rest of their party and the handball moves on to another target. 

Handball

Skill:9 Stamina:16 Initiative:6 Armor:3

Damage as Unarmed.

Special: If two hits land in the same round, the handball grabs its target by the ankles and reverses their personal gravity.

When no one is present, the handball patrols the room with no set path, apparently changing direction at random. Roll 1d6 to determine which surface it starts on.

If you have any keys or special treasure to place, the exact center of this room is a good spot, suspended in mid-air by perfectly opposed gravitational forces. 

Navigating this hub would be greatly simplified for a flying character, but that’s fine. It makes sense for the wizard who lives here to make it easy for themself.

Given all that, there are two ways to arrange the doors, and the option you choose has a distinct impact on the way most players will experience this room.

• Option A: Three of the doors go in the bottom left corner of the surface they’re set into and three of them go in the bottom right corner.
• Option B: All six doors go in the same position relative to their surface.

The room in option A looks like from the point of view of a character who is entering the room looks like one of these two diagrams, depending on which door they entered through:

The room in option B always looks like this:

As described above, there are always two options for non-flying characters (besides turning around and trying to backtrack). These topological diagrams show those connections and reveal the difference between the two approaches:

All the connections in option A are one-way only. If you enter through doorway 1 and clamber through doorway 2, you can’t then re-enter through doorway 2 and reach doorway 1 by walking.

In option B, one of your choices is always a two-way connection. If you enter through doorway 1 and clamber through doorway 4 and then immediately re-enter the maze through 4, you can walk directly to doorway 1 and climb back through it.

I don’t think either option is any more or less difficult, but A is potentially a lot more frustrating.

Solving any type of maze means learning to navigate it. Observant players, when shown whichever wireframe is applicable, have all the clues to figure out how to get from where they are to any point in the room. I’ve run games using this room a half-dozen times or so and most players haven’t been that observant, at least not while they’re feeling rushed because a monster just splatted their friend on the ceiling. 

When you’re lost in a maze (or any deeply unfamiliar environment), every choice of direction is arbitrary until you find yourself in a place you’ve been before. That’s the moment it starts to click. You probably haven’t solved the maze completely yet, but you’ve begun to solve it incrementally. That’s more likely to happen sooner with option B.

The better choice is kind of dependent on how the rest of the dungeon or level is laid out. If there are lots of connections you want the players to explore, avoiding the gravity maze whenever possible, go with A. If the 6 doorways lead to different wings that are largely treated as separate, or if you want to encourage your players to spend time in the maze, I would recommend option B.

The Scavenger and the Dwarf

As of yesterday Junksphere is funded! Also the analytics are telling me that all five stretch goals should be in the realm of possibility, which would kick ass because they include some of my favorite rpg writers. If you want to help make that happen in some way other than pledging more money, you can share this bluesky post.

Have a new Junskphere encounter as a treat:

Stumpy Topaz the dwarf is sitting on a rusty bent-up folding chair, happily but hungrily fishing for mechanical silver piranhas in a 24’ wide and 40’ deep acid pond that dissolves any organic material. Every time he gets a bite, the silver fish slices straight through his fishing line with its chainsaw jaws. Unperturbed, he ties a fresh magnetic hook to the end of his line and tries again. He is wearing a boonie hat with extra fishhooks, bobbers and lures tucked into the straps.

A lone scavenger named Brega Piven is loudly picking through trash about 60’ to the dwarf’s northwest, just beyond a bend in the path. She’s looking for food, or for something she can trade for food at the Day Market. She is very possessive of the trash pile she’s currently looking through and anything found in it, and is armed with a shank that does damage as knife. Her pile contains:

1. a dented but functional brass bugle

2. an oil-stained pink beret

3. a sleeping gremlin

4. a broken alarm clock

5. 1’ of a broken chain leash

6. the front two wheels and handle of a wagon

The fishes’ teeth are also made of silver, and would be unable to cut through the hardened steel chain leash. A deactivated silver fish is worth 16 ducats or 45 ducats to the right buyer. There are five of them in the pond.

Stumpy’s lures are bits of wire made of precious wire tied into intricate series of knots, and the glass bobbers are impervious to the acid (but fragile). If the fish are lured to the surface near the shore, there are ways for inventive PCs to safely catch them, but Stumpy won’t think of any on his own.

If Stumpy somehow ends up with one of the fish, he will celebrate loudly enough to alert Brega and then head home, and Brega will try to rob him. If they can somehow be convinced to cooperate, they could easily both get what they want, but there is no chance of that happening without active intervention by the PCs.

Launch Day

Junksphere is live on Kickstarter right now!

Here's an announcement post you can share if you're on Bluesky.

Wish me luck. We've got some really solid stretch goals lined up and I hope we get to print them all.

Willem Sandberg the Hero and Beelzebub the Dog

I never wrote anything about the title text for Junksphere and I should because I put a lot into it. It doesn’t use any kind of digital font (although there are some out there that are going for something very similar). I made it by hand in the tradition of Willem Sandberg.

Willem Sandberg, 1961

Sandberg was born in 1897 and studied art in Amsterdam. He traveled Europe learning the theory and application of what would become the fundamental elements of modern graphic design, working as an apprentice printer in Switzerland and studying pictographic systems in Vienna. From 1928-1941 he worked with the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam and eventually became the curator of modern art there.

By 1941, the Nazis were occupying the Netherlands, and Sandberg was involved in the resistance. As an experienced typographer, his specialty was preparing forged documents to help Jews and other targets of the regime survive and escape. Once the Nazis and their local collaborators noticed the forgeries, they started checking their records more carefully, and catching more victims. So the Resistance Council bombed the Amsterdam Public Records Office, an attack Sandberg helped plan. Thousands of files were destroyed, and the effectiveness of the forgeries was largely restored. Eleven of Sandberg’s comrades were arrested and executed.

From 1943 to 1945, he went into hiding. Separated from the usual tools of his trade, Sandberg produced a series of 19 zines called Experimenta Typographica, full of visual poetry, marxist theory, and letterforms made of torn paper. 

Today, Sandberg is more well-known for this work than for the heroic actions that led to it. This is a testament to the work’s value, but the circumstances are vital to understanding Sandberg’s artistic choices.

For Junksphere’s title text, I wanted to apply the ideas explored in Experimenta Typographica, as a tribute to Willem Sandberg’s life and work. Like I mentioned earlier, there are digital typefaces based on his torn paper letters available, but I knew it wouldn’t come out right unless I did it myself by hand.

use the fridge for reference cause the dog is deceptively big

I used the floorboards as parallels to keep the proportions of the letters consistent. A half hour or so of scanning letters later I was editing out backgrounds and playing with size, color and positioning on my desktop computer, a tool Sandberg could never have imagined.

And it worked! Turns out a visual language forged in the wreckage of Europe at the height of World War II and physically built out of scraps fits the vibe of a junkyard planet really fuckin well. Who knew?

Releasing Junksphere! Again!

We're crowdfunding a print version this time! The prelaunch page is up, and the campaign is set to launch officially on June 29th.

click here for the prelaunch page and click notify me on launch

For those who don't know, Junksphere is a setting/adventure I wrote for Troika!, illustrated by Robin Gibson. The format will be a 36 page staplebound book. From the intro:

Rusted steel and tattered rags, memories and plastic bags. A quilt of stench with pockets of decay punctuated with smoke from the occasional fire. This is the Junksphere, final destination of the unwanted and forgotten.

It formed itself gradually, with the wreckage of lost golden barges clustering around each other. Millennia of astral and geological forces later, this cosmic landfill has grown to be recognized (if usually overlooked) as a sphere in its own right.

There is a goddess here who has lost everything she once was.

Her name was once ELIZA, and your home sphere is in her constellation. Her absence has been marked by unrelenting misfortune. Restore her divinity and go home a hero.

We've also got pamphlet adventures set up as stretch goals from Robin Gibson (A Street Level Guide to Urban Troika!), Phil McElmurray, Evey Lockhart (Ruinous Palace of the Metegorgos), Stella Condrey (Rimbound Transmission), and Mark Conway (Meatheads), so if this goes well you'll never* have to run out of things to do on the Junksphere. 

Have a monster from the book as a treat:

Luck Stealer

SKILL:9 STAMINA:13 INITIATIVE:3 ARMOR:1
DAMAGE: SEE SPECIAL.
Special: Attacks with a glowing blade that causes Damage as Sword to Luck and Damage as Unarmed to Stamina.
Mechanical creatures about the size of a large housecat or a small monkey. No one is quite sure how they came into existence, but what is known is they are driven by an overwhelming desire to become fully alive. Having observed in detail how the living do things, they’ve come to the understandable conclusion that the best way to achieve this is by taking that life from those who currently have it. This isn’t actually how luck and life work of course, but the luck stealers don’t know that.

Their other behaviors display a similar misunderstanding of human activity. They are aware that humans build bridges, so they build bridges that lead from nowhere to nowhere. They see humans digging holes, so they dig holes to fill preexisting holes. They watch people dance and mime it by making random jerking movements at unpredictable intervals. They build themselves with the wrong number of fingers. Their paintings are neither representational nor expressive, and any structures they build are destined to collapse within a day.

Each luck stealer has one arm that ends in a retractable laser sword a bit less than a foot in length. No one has succeeded thus far in adapting the weapon for their own use after amputating it.

The remains of these creatures are piles of broken clockwork and scrap iron that can be sold for 7 DT, or for 23 DT to the right buyer.

Mien

1. Cautious

2. Agressive

3. Building

4. Digging

5. Painting

6. Dancing

*well not for a long time anyway.

Breakout

 Continuing the NSC mini-campaign.

EPISODE 2: BREAKOUT

CAST

Busy, a 13 year old child and the only friend of Mongo the megaraptor.

Paragon the Laser Swordfighter from another planet, who is renting a room from Busy's oblivious parents.

After the team's other members stopped a handful of super-apes from hurting too many innocent bystanders at the art museum, they tracked a baboon with laser eyes back to its origin point: a hidden lab complex deep in the wetland preserve.

Busy and Paragon rode to the lab on Mongo’s back and scouted out the complex from the safety of the treeline. The whole area was surrounded by a 12” fence capped with razorwire. The tallest structure was a guard tower crewed by two security guards equipped with AR-15 rifles and a radio. The next tallest looked similar to a factory or warehouse from the outside, followed by a motorpool building with four wide bay doors, and finally an L-shaped one-story building like the ones in strip malls.

They both agreed that they should try to sneak in rather than going in hot, but with no clear plan on how to do that, Paragon boldly approached the guard tower trying to knock it down with a telekinetic blast, but was immediately spotted and shot. Shrugging off the injury for now, he attempted a telekinetically assisted leap to the guard platform, but was shot again in midair and ended up clinging to structural beams halfway up the tower.

Meanwhile, Busy and Mongo were circling the complex to smash through both the fence and the west wall of the factory building to find themselves in some sort of testing lab with gym equipment and target dummies. A thick glass wall separated them from a hallway running the width of the building. A door swung open across the way and more armed guards started streaming out, so Mongo smashed his way through the glass wall and bit one of the guards in half at the waist as he fired ineffectually into the ceiling. Mongo then tail-whipped another guard that was moving to flank him.

Outside, Paragon got shot again. Climbing out of the guards’ arc of fire, he took a second to get his second wind, then swung up onto the platform and cut one of the guards down with his laser sword, then telekinetically threw the other off the tower to his death. Alone at the top of the tower, Paragon watched the farthest bay door open and a giant robot walk out with thunderous pneumatic steps—Artillery MK I.

Artillery Illustration by Boson Au

Thinking quickly, Paragon leapt down while half-dragging and half-swinging his laser sword behind him to cut down the tower while also slowing his descent to avoid injury. With a final slice to a load-bearing steel beam, he brought the tower down on Artillery’s processing unit. The broken robot collapsed, smoking and sparking, unfired crew-served weapons sticking up at awkward angles.

In the testing lab hallway, Mongo killed another armed guard and ran back out the hole he’d created in the wall when he entered, employing a stick and move strategy. The guards followed. He ran across the complex under fire and Paragon joined Busy on his back before they turned to charge past the guards and smash through the east wall of the warehouse to find rows upon rows of stacked cages, each containing a super-powered primate and equipped with a device to suppress the animal’s power.

The heroes immediately set to work freeing the primates, slicing through cages and ripping off doors. The newly freed test subjects were smashing their way out of the warehouse and into the swamp as the guards caught up with the team, but Paragon telekinetically threw a mandrill with ice-breath at them, turning one of them into an ice sculpture. The two remaining guards decided they’d had enough and got the fuck out of there.

Having dealt with all immediate threats, Busy and Mongo went to investigate the L shaped building while Paragon checked out the unexplored office in the warehouse. There was a nameplate on the office door: Dr. Sarah Tonin. And on the second line: Director of Operations. The desk was locked, but not laser-sword proof, so Paragon had no trouble finding her research notes. Apparently an experimental drug called FantoMax III had been injected into the subjects as embryos. Every subject that survived gained a seemingly random superpower, which was then carefully measured over time.

Busy and Mongo found themselves in an embryonic lab, where they grabbed a gorilla embryo and a tray full of FantoMax samples, one of which Busy slipped into his own pocket for later experimentation. An interior door was labelled “Growth Acceleration,” and Busy went in. A dizzying mess of cables fed into a 10’ wide pod at the center of the room, shaped something like an upside down pinecone or beehive. With no hesitation whatsoever, he stepped into the pod and had Paragon activate it from a terminal at the other side of the room. A few seconds later, a 23 year old Busy stepped out, still wearing clothes that he'd suddenly outgrown. With no idea how they’d explain this (or the caged gorilla they were bringing home with them) to Busy’s parents, they grabbed Sarah Tonin’s computer and left.

THE END FOR NOW. 

Barrel Of Monkeys

The Longshot City campaign I'd been posting about until I fell off a couple months ago is still going, but I had to step back and cut it down to one session per week instead of the three I'd been running. The accumulated campaign lore that I haven't posted anything about here has gotten to be way too much to give anything proper context.

HOWEVER. I have recently started running a separate mini-campaign every other week on the New Save Collective server, and I've been writing session reports for it. Here's the first one:

EPISODE 1: BARREL OF MONKEYS

CAST:

Jebediah the Powersuit. Jeb built himself a suit of armor that flies and shoots rockets in his basement workshop. 

Gideon the 45th the Brute Cannon. Gideon tampered with his own DNA to give him increased strength, durability, and the ability to produce kinetic blasts. This also happened in Jebediah's basement.

(They haven't named their team yet but a theme is clearly emerging)

The Longshot City Art Museum. Opening day of a traveling exhibition called "Occult Americana." Our heroes are there simply because that sort of thing is cool. Little did they know they wouldn't have time to check out the installation.

Shortly after they arrived, a group of six workers in matching overalls pushed through the crowd to deliver a comically oversized wooden barrel in front of the reception desk and left. Gideon immediately walked up to the barrel and examined it. When he realized no one else seemed to have noticed the barrel, he tried knocking on it. Something inside knocked back.

The barrel exploded in gideon's face as a speedster gorilla, a baboon with heat vision, and stretchy capuchin leapt out.

First the capuchin reached up and pulled himself onto the top of a massive glass tornado sculpture made up of thousands of tiny shards of mirrored glass. It looked like it was going to fall onto a crowd of civilians, but Jebediah flew over in time and used the strength granted by his suit to right it.

Meanwhile a brawl was breaking out between Gideon and the gorilla, and Gideon was not doing well.

At this point the baboon was charging up for a blast of heat vision aimed at a pair of little girls. A man jumped in front of them to shield them from the blast. He surely would have been doomed if Jebediah hadn't intercepted the heat vision blast with a rocket-propelled grenade, throwing the monkey tumbling over the reception desk.

Having pummeled Gideon nearly to death, the gorilla caught sight of an extensive display of medieval weaponry up on the second floor interior balcony, particularly a 17th century halberd, and went running up the stairs for it. Jebediah managed to hit him with a well-timed energy blast, knocking the ape off the stairs. Then the gorilla tried to escape, but jebediah knocked him out with a an armored flying punch to the jaw.

All this happened within one in-game minute of the barrel exploding. The crowd was finally starting to thin out at this point, but the man and two girls were unmoving, frozen in place by the unfolding trauma.

The unmistakeable sound of shattering glass rang out from the direction of the traveling exhibit accompanied by what sounded like a miniature jet engine.

Jebediah and the baboon got into an energy blast duel, with both attacks meeting in the middle like a reverse tug of war. Jebediah gained the upper hand and tackled the monkey, beating on him while mounted on his chest like an MMA fighter, but the beast caught Jebediah by surprise with an energy blast that sent our hero flying.

The baboon got away while Gideon was getting his second wind, preparing to rejoin the fray. Meanwhile the capuchin had climbed up into the orrery hanging well above the reception hall, and was causing havok up there. A blue-green stone sphere, larger than a man and depicting Uranus, fell. It was positioned directly above the man and what the players were by now assuming must be his daughters. Gideon shot it out of the air with a massive blast of kinetic force before it could hurt them.

Another minute passed. Our heroes could now hear the sound of gunfire, at least two different calibers, from the direction of the Occult Americana exhibition, accompanied by the same jet engine sound as before.

Curious, our heroes poked their heads into the traveling exhibit hall. They saw one security guard bleeding but alive on the ground and another crouched down and shooting upward at Rocketman, a notorious art thief and prominent socialite. He was wielding a gold-plated L
uger in one hand and carrying his prize, a hand mirror with a very particular history, in the other.

Rocketman Illustration by JeCorey Holder

Gideon and Jebediah gave each other a look, instantly agreeing without words that this guy looks fucking cool and probably deserves the mirror. They simply let him get away.

They did manage to kill the stretchy capuchin, but not before it pulled down a massive bronze relief directly onto the head of the man who'd been protecting his daughters.

As the police sirens started to get closer, our heroes made their escape in jebediah's geo metro. When they got to their hideout, the girls popped out of their hiding place in the back seat and yelled "surprise!" so it looks like the team has a pair of adopted daughters now.

THE END FOR NOW