Design Journal Part 4: Variant Rule Subsystems

To this point, I've generally been tinkering with the specifics of the rules--what classes and races are eligible, how quickly spell acquisition works, how much money characters get, and so forth. That's all well and good; specific examples of how familiar rules work differently is a good way of making a campaign feel unique, while allowing players to still feel like they know the game.

But I don't want Umber to feel just like another flavor of D&D. Even back when I wrote the original synopsis, I imagined that Umber would include elements that set it apart from traditional campaign settings. That means new (or variant) rules subsystems, not just house rules.

In the synopsis, I described Umber as "post-apocalyptic Cthulhian medieval fantasy." That's quite a mouthful, and it sounds a bit like a Hollywood-style movie pitch. (I'm pretty sure you can't sell a movie in Hollywood these days without describing it as "a cross between X and Y;" for instance, I'd bet that League of Extraordinary Gentlemen was described at least once as "a cross between Sherlock Holmes and the X-Men," because studio execs can only imagine new things as combinations of familiar old things.) Since the campaign submission process was a lot like an anonymous script-pitch, I resorted to similar tactics, by combining elements familiar to those in the RPG industry into a single whole. I've already discussed some of the post-apocalyptic elements I'm bringing to the campaign, such as the low economy. The medieval fantasy is there to keep Umber in the realm of traditional D&D: this isn't a Stone Age or Industrial Age setting.

That leaves Cthulhian. By this I don't mean that the Great Old Ones of Lovecraft's stories are necessarily a part of the setting. Rather, I'm aiming to capture the feel of ancient, that-which-cannot-be-named evil, as well as the sometimes tenuous grip on reality enjoyed by those who fight against it. The classic RPG Call of Cthulhu accomplishes this by using a game mechanic called, simply enough, Sanity.

A character's Sanity score measures how tightly he grips to mental stability. The higher the character's rating, the better he is at resisting horrible events or revolting sights, such as rotting (or walking) corpses, unexplained phenomena, and 40-foot-tall tentacled horrors from the deep, and the more exposures to such events he can endure before losing his mind.

The characters of Umber will each have a Sanity score. I'll be using the rules from Wizards of the Coast's Call of Cthulhu RPG (written by Monte Cook and John Tynes) to guide me in incorporating this rule subsystem, including assigning sanity-loss values to the various horrible monsters that lurk in the Gloom.

As the campaign progresses, Sanity scores will slowly (or quickly) degrade as the characters engage in conflicts against the Gloom. At times, success may buoy their spirits, with Sanity increases to match. However, I fully expect that Sanity loss will claim a fair number of characters, perhaps even more than hit point loss. That's OK; both mind and body are cheap in Umber, and "character turnover" is one way of illustrating that in bold strokes.

Another variant rules subsystem I'd like to try out is the Taint system found in James Wyatt's Oriental Adventures (also published by Wizards of the Coast). I've never used this in campaign play, but it strikes me that it could capture the flavor I'm looking for with the encroaching Gloom. As darkness spreads across the land, it indelibly affects the land and its inhabitants, and that fits the concept of Taint to a T.

This will likely require more work than incorporating Sanity, as Taint is tied more heavily to the specific setting described in OA. I'll also have to figure out how Sanity and Taint interact, if at all. As you can see, I'm still in concept stage--the actual execution of these variants is still ahead. But the idea of Gloom-tainted sorcerers or other aberrant beings is simply too compelling to resist.

By now, I'm almost certainly scaring off any of my players who are reading this, so I should stop before I lose any chance of this campaign actually happening. Tune in next time, when I turn to a more mundane topic: geography.