Play It by Cheer! (100th Blog Post)

Ahoy, everyone! After nearly 7 years, the blog has finally reached its 100th post. This means that on average, there were 1.2 blog posts every month for you to read. On such a special occasion, I would like to make an announcement. I could talk about how I'm working on a Runehack: Fairy Heist update, or on an expansion and update for the D6 Feet Under, but there isn't much to be said on those topics until I'm done with them. So I'll keep the main announcement relatively short to get to the May's 200-word TTRPG quickly!

Youtube Channel

I'm starting a youtube channel that covers pretty much the same topics that I do on the blog: my personal musings on worldbuilding and game design. There are two major reasons why I want to do this. The first one is that audio content is easier to binge while doing other stuff, such as chores. The second reason is that I'd like more people to discover my content naturally. Unless I were to jam this blog with various Search Engine Optimizing keywords, it'd be hard to stumble upon it without being linked to it. And while I don't expect Youtube to be too kind to me by recommending my videos to thousands of people for no reason instantly, maybe the algorithm will someday give me a chance.

Now, I don't know how difficult this will be and whether I can keep it up. I find writing to be a lot easier than video-making. My main sources of inspiration are Worldbuilding Notes and Nakari Speardane, and there are likely plenty more sources of inspiration that I'm unaware of at the time of writing this. While my first reason is to make content that's audible, I'd still like to put some effort into it by providing at least some visuals. I'm not that good at drawing just yet, but hopefully, I'll work something out in time. And I'm afraid working out these visuals is going to take up the most time, along with editing.

The channel's name is Proph, the Prophecy Breaker. Those who are long-time readers might recognize the name. Those who know me on Discord know me by that name, so I figured I'll go with that. The PNGtuber avatar I'm using for it was drawn by my lovely girlfriend Arell.

So far it's just this video, but I'm happy because it's more than nothing. Now then, with the announcement out of the way, let's get to the game!

---

Play It by Cheer!

The music band is made up of each player's character. Their qualities start at 10's. Players can increase or decrease their musician's quality by one 12 times.

Low	Quality	High
Slow (Careful)	Tempo	Fast (Quick)
Calm (Subtle)	Intensity	Strong (Forceful)
Bright (Uplifting)	Authenticity	Dark (Empathetic)
Stock (Simple)	Creativity	Fresh (Unconventional)

The concert crowd has preferences for high or low qualities that the GM can generate randomly, or pick based on a musical genre. Players must discover the crowd's preferences while performing based on their reactions. The crowd doesn't need a preference for each quality.

Players take turns clockwise. Turn steps:

1. Announce a quality and if you're trying to roll higher or lower than your quality.
2. Roll d6+d12 and d8+d10, keeping the sum further from 10.
3. Three successful predictions across the group achieve the quality. Three failed predictions disallow achieving the quality.

The amount of crowd's preferred qualities achieved determines the concert's success. After sufficient success (determined by GM), the band members choose one upgrade (pedals, microtonality, etc.) that lets them add or subtract 1 to rolls on one specific quality.

The qualities can also be used when roleplaying outside of concerts. Use common sense.

I wasn't sure if I want to include the Pentakill or True Damage pic, so I figured I'll post both to highlight something about the game. It is setting agnostic, and it can work well for any world with music and audiences willing to listen to them, no matter if it's modern hip-hop, or fantasy heavy metal.
Both of these are skin lines in League of Legends, owned by Riot. The top one is Pentakill II, made by suqling (Kat C.K.Y).

---

Believe it or not, I've gone through at least two other ideas for music bands performing before getting to this one. The first one was more akin to D&D 5e combat, except the "damage" dealt was good quality notes and the goal was to add them up to some high number. The second idea was of just rolling a lot of dice, and finding "chords" (groups of identical numbers) and "riffs" (sequences of numbers that go in a row), and adding them up to get the quality of the music played. While those were okay, something felt off about them. It was just about gathering big numbers, and that was it.

The latest iteration started when an acquaintance of mine on a discord server I frequent wanted to make a crafting system. For a long while, I've theorized about making a crafting system that could also work for providing services. The premise was that to craft an item, one needs the materials, the tools, and the goal. The goal would be composed of several qualities that could be developed independently of each other. I created some ideas, kept working on them, and eventually made an entire crafting game. My plan originally was to make this crafting game my 200-word TTRPG for May, but it was delayed due to my Youtube channel preparation. I kept postponing the recording of the first two videos more and more, due to being busy and procrastinating on it. In the meantime, I started wondering how I could adapt the crafting game into a music one. My third attempt at a music-focused game however failed when I realized that I can't come up with any more than four pairs of qualities. I needed to pivot this.

On May 23rd, I woke up, thinking about how to do a dice graph with two bumps. I tried looking for one on the internet, but I couldn't find it. I was sure there has to be a way to do it, and yet my searches yielded none. Then, I remembered Brennan Lee Mulligan's houserule that I was told about recently, "Rolling with Emphasis". This method of his is meant to give the player an extreme result more often than the average one, being essentially an inverse of 2d10. I could feel it, I almost have the two-bump graph in my hands. And that's when... it clicked. "What if I roll 2d10 twice with emphasis?" That was it!

"Look at this braph!"
Look, why bother just pasting here just the straight results if I can have a little fun with it? So what if the meme is dead, I loved wasting 10 minutes of my time on this.

In fact, the secret to a two-bump graph is rolling multiple dice twice and taking the result further from their average. For Play It by Cheer!, I went experimental and decided that the rolls will be d6+d12 and d8+d10. Why? Because this way, the player can roll all four dice at the same time without getting confused about which d10 was paired with which. Another important reason is that both of these averaged 10, which is an easy-to-remember number (and hopefully easy to compare to).

If I had more than 200 words to spare, I would've added more stuff. Maybe how much money the players make, how many fans they have, maybe some way to classify instruments, definitely something about the kind of audience you attract when you get famous, and maybe more stuff. Maybe I'll include this in the big project I'm working on. Only time will tell.

Play It by Cheer could, in theory, be played without a GM or other players, you just need to determine randomly what are the crowd's preferences, perhaps after the first roll. Of course, without friends who are there to support you in your weak points, you'll have a harder time.
Art by Guweiz

Thank you for reading, and have a nice day!

Runehack: Everling

I like augmented reality. Whether it's trying to grab one's attention all over the place like in the somewhat dystopian short movie Hyper-Reality, or removing parts of your worldview like in the Black Mirror's dystopian White Christmas episode. Strange how this technology for covering up reality with lies is prominently used in dystopias, I wonder why.

Well, now imagine if absolutely everything was digitally created. You might think that that's just something akin to the real world's VRChat, or some MMORPG played from the first person, but there's a reason why I started with augmented reality. In Runehack, illusions created by the runes are by default augmented reality. They are not bound to a surface unless they are defined by one. If you have sufficient computing power, you could run a whole city like this. In fact, you could even simulate its citizens if you have the technology for it. Welcome to Everling, the definitely-not-dystopian city which has a motto that goes "Where no one deserves to die!"

This was without a doubt the most difficult city to describe yet. In the time it took me to finish this article, I managed to make even a videogame demo of my TTRPG that takes place mainly in this city. The TTRPG is difficult to write too, and the video game needs a proper tutorial, so I really hope I'll be able to finish it all soon. Until then, may you enjoy reading this article, and have a nice day!

Edit: Some of this information is outdated, and yet to be updated.

Everling

After perfecting the technology that allowed machines to scan people's brains, Lifestock made a deal with Nixly Everglade to begin a large-scale experiment. South of the city of Moorwell that links the two continents, somewhere just above the ocean's floor, hovers an illusory city of immortals. Hundreds of thousands of people who signed up for brain scans are eternally simulated here, living out their lives as digital ghosts without any physiological needs however they wish.

Geography

Everling's image is located above the Southern Ocean's floor, directly south of the city of Moorwell which connects the Old World with the New World. The location of the actual computers that run the city is kept secret, but rumors have it they are located in some cavern that's not too far away. Otherwise, due to the depth of the city's location, and due to its illusory nature, there is no noteworthy physical geography.

The city's only import of note is amber, which is supplied during the maintenance hour in great amounts to keep the city's computers running. While the city doesn't produce anything physical, its intangible exports are all worth mentioning. Great amounts of research are done in Everling nearly every single day, speeding up the scientific progress for everyone. The entertainment industry of Everling is booming, with some exceptional concepts making their way to other cities. Finally, ever since the digital ghosts have proven to be relatively safe when near tangible sentients, sometimes they are taken out of the Everling and brought to other cities, running on their own privately owned piece of hardware.

History

When Nexuspace developed its first runebots, Lifestock needed something to compete with and developed its digital ghosts. Both of these creations were run by rather simple algorithms though, lacking anything that would resemble a soul or consciousness. Once Lifestock brought the inventor Nixly Everglade to Moorwell, they exchanged their knowledge and together standardized her brain scanning machine, letting the people she would scan be compatible with most modern runetech that has Mistweb access.

After perfecting their creation but before this technology could be publicly released, Nixly suggested to the President of Moorwell starting a city full of ghosts, with several phases of slowly opening it up to the public. The President agreed, and this is how Everling came to be.

During the first phase, the ghost was restricted to existing only within the city of Everling. This has proven to be mostly safe. Some ghosts have developed the ability to alter the code that runs them from inside, which resulted in some breaches of Everling's restrictions, the most significant of which was a ghost who was simulated during the maintenance, and a ghost who managed to leave Everling's boundaries. The developers tried to patch these mistakes, but the ghosts within always found another way to crack the code. After a lot of time and resources had been sunk into this fight, the developers gave up and began lying to their higher-ups, claiming everything is going fine.

The second phase was opening up the ghosts to the public in some restricted way. The city of Wineholm has been chosen as a testing site for this phase for several reasons, the most prominent of which was the fact that most of its population was arunic and thus completely unaware of the ghosts' presence. While this event had a significant impact on the culture of Wineholm, it was eventually considered safe to proceed with the next phase.

The current phase is a broader public presence. People whose mind scans are popular enough and don't regularly break Everling's programmed rules can pay extras to let their ghost access other cities and interact with regular people outside of Everling. In some extreme cases, ghosts who are allowed access to other cities are given their own hardware that simulates them, making them independent from Everling.

Structure

Before we dive into describing Everling's districts, it's worth mentioning the space it operates within. While our reality has three pairs of directions to travel in—up and down, left and right, forward and backward—the city of Everling is a digital construct not restricted by the physical laws of our reality. With enough ingenuity from the innovative bright minds of Lifestock, the city's capacity was greatly expanded by introducing two new spatial directions: charm and strange, and ana and kata. Everything simulated within Everling uses five coordinates instead of three and rune-powered sentient beings (runebots and digital ghosts, to be specific) have two extra variables that determine the last two coordinates of the simulated objects and people that they can see. Charm and strange are used for expanding the city by creating new districts, and they stretch further than other cardinal directions do. Ana and kata, meanwhile, are used for expanding the interiors of the buildings, by adding extra "floors". Everlingers are simulated in a way that disallows them from phasing through walls or leaving the city's nonexistent outside walls, the "bubble" it's inside of.

Everling is a sphere that's split into nine district groups: one for each cardinal direction (save for ana and kata), plus one for each direction's middle. However, each intersection of these districts results in a unique mixture. For example, the upper south-eastern charmern area of Everling is a mixture of Religious, Performance, Philosophy, and Noble districts. This results in 81 unique combinations of districts. For the sake of brevity, though, the list below describes only the nine ways to group them based on their directions.

Personal Districts. These districts are made up of a great multitude of apartments that each ghost can adjust to their whims. Some ghosts simply desire their own apartments, even if they do not need them for any external reasons, such as a need for sleep. Every district that's central in any of the directions belongs to this group.

Religious Districts. All of the upper districts have some buildings and establishments that focus on theology and the practice of religion. This is mostly characterized by temples and religious communities that reside here. Most of the temples are dedicated to scorning the Pantheon of Misfortunes, but diarchy is sometimes practiced in Everling too.

Getaway Districts. If a ghost tries to find ways to escape Everling or to hack it, they have the best chances of finding ways to do that in the bottom districts.

Experiential Districts. Northern districts focus on non-interactive experiences, such as movies, literature, illustrations, musical performances, etc. This area is full of galleries and other such displays.

Performance Districts. The southern districts are where thins presented in the northern districts are shown. The artists and those who study art can be found here.

Interaction Districts. The western districts of Everling provide their citizens with various forms of interactive entertainment.

Philosophy Districts. Most of Everling's scientists and thinkers reside. in its eastern districts. Laboratories, debate chambers, and forums can be found here.

Weird Districts. The most dangerous and bizarre districts of Everling are found in the strangern areas. The further strangewards you go, the more odd people, glitches, and visible inconsistencies one can find.

Noble Districts. The districts located in the charmern parts of the city are the most elegant, organized, elaborate, and uniform. By traveling further charmwards, you may encounter stricter, steadier, more stable ghosts, with more and more rules of conduct to follow.

Culture

Digital ghosts' capabilities differ radically from those of organic beings. They can create and customize an avatar that's perceived by others (sight, sound, and other sensations). Due to this, they are assigned IDs for identification. The digital ghosts can communicate with each other nearly instantly using text-based communication that's within their minds. Since their appearance is completely illusory, they are intangible to the ordinary world, which means that phasing through solid walls is commonplace for them. To be able to use solid objects, they'd have to invest some of their simulation time into telekinetic powers.

The entire city of Everling and all its citizens, usually called Everlingers, are simulated by the hidden computers that run the city. But like any computer, they too have their limitations. While the computers have enough computing power to run all the citizens and the entire city at any given moment, a demand for higher fidelity arose among the citizens, leading to the restructuring of the system. Since some people would forgo being simulated all day long for being simulated at a higher quality, the city now runs on a processing power distribution scheme.

Each hour of simulation is nicknamed "hyre" in Everling, labeled with the time at which this hour ends. For example, hyre 14 is a period of time between 13:00 and 14:00 (or 01:00 and 02:00 in the afternoon). The city goes under regular maintenance during the last hour before midnight (23:00-00:00), in which it corrects any corruption and assigns all the citizens their hyres for the next day. During this hour, the ghosts are simulated at their minimal level, during which they get to only use their instant text-based communication to talk with each other and to organize their hyres for the next day.

A citizen of Everling is assigned 24 hyres. The first 12 hyres are randomly assigned to each person, so that no person gets the same hyre twice, and all the sums of hyres for the same periods of times assigned this way are equal. Afterward, each citizen gets to pick the rest of their 12 hyres, going in the order of their popularity. due to the fact that nothing is simulated at that time, this process takes an exceedingly small amount of time, despite it being done by hundreds of thousands of ghosts. However, since the city can only support so many people at any given time, there are upper limits on how many hyres can be given out for every hour. This combined with the fact that one can give their hyres to others results in a hierarchy, in which the latter hyres have a greater value. This is because an earlier hyre, such as hyre 4, is used up before a latter one, like hyre 22. Once a hyre starts being used, it can't be traded away, so on an ordinary day, higher hyres will run out of stock first before the less popular people get their turn to schedule their times.

What can one do in a city that has no use for money? The citizens of Everling sooner or later came up with three answers: Seeking new experiences through leisurely activities like games or media consumption; learning more about the world through examination, studying all and any areas of science; or performing for others through the exhibition, creating art to be preserved in others' memories forever. Some might find pursuits beyond these, but most of Everling's population falls into at least one of these three philosophies.

If there's something beyond IDs that makes the Everlingers distinct from one another, it's their Popularity. Popularity in Everling stands for a leaderboard that displays the order in which all ghosts are rated by each other, as well as the city's ruling AI. The Popularity is a whole number unique to each ghost. Popularity is updated at the end of Maintenance by asking the ghosts to rate up to 5 random Everlingers they've meaningfully interacted with on the previous day.

In Everling, phrases like those below can be heard, and traditions such as the following tend to be practiced:

• Everlingers have plenty of nicknames for the non-digital people of Runehack. Those who believe the digital ghosts to be superior use terms like "mortals", "temps", "craves", and "bygons". Those who would see them as equals would instead use terms like "souls", "antzes", and even "reals".
• Ghosts use the nickname "sorx" for those whose minds were scanned to create digital ghosts. Its pronunciation is identical to the word it was derived from—source. It came to be because of a temporary glitch that imposed a character limit on ghosts' messages for almost a week.
• Everling is a silent city. Most of the citizens use text-based chat for communication, since it's much faster and doesn't require spending hyres on sound-based illusions. Those who would make sounds in Everling are usually either performers, trying to get the attention of others, or unusual in some different way.
• An avatar of higher quality shows that a ghost has gotten their hands on many hyres to spend all at once. Most of the ghosts put on their high-quality avatars either when they have nothing better to spend their hyres on, or when they really want to impress someone else who's special to them. High-quality avatars appear less polygonal and more complex in their form. This is why many use words derived from "arch" such as arching, arched, or even archon to describe high-quality avatars.
• The slogan of Everling is "Because you don't deserve to die!".
• The ability to hack the city of Everling is referred to as asterism. Ghosts who can hack the city are based on this called asterists. Asterists can hack Everling to change it in a myriad of ways, including teleportation, corrupting other ghosts, accessing forbidden information, overcoming the city's filters, or even getting an avatar simulated during the maintenance time. Once the news of this has spread outside of the city, these terms have been used occasionally for non-ghost hackers who aren't necessarily hacking Everling too.
• Organizing performances (concerts for short) is complicated in Everling. The performer or performers (artist, for the sake of brevity) first determines the time in which they plan to perform. Usually, the artist has a group of 5-10 benefactors who are popular enough to snatch many of these hyres early for a minimum quality of the concert during the maintenance. Once the day begins, the artist announces their concert and hyre(s) during which it will take place. The ghosts who want to attend it must be able to contribute at least one hyre to the artist while keeping at least one for themselves for an avatar to attend the concert with. A concert can take anywhere from 1 to 4 hyres of time, though usually, it's just a single hyre since more than that can be very difficult to organize without lots of benefactors.

Subculture Showcase: Hoverboarders

Note: This section is not meant to imply that the presented subculture is in any way unique to or most represented within this city. It is just a subculture I chose to present because it felt most thematically fitting and it wasn't introduced yet.

Art Curiosities: Legally, all hovering vehicles are required to have glowing undersides. Shoes with glowing soles, such as those worn by the woman in the illustration above, represent the free spirit that allows them to metaphorically "fly". The elegance of geometric lines combined with torn clothes is characteristic of this subculture. Some extend the geometric lines to their body in the form of tattoos. Those who have long hair usually wear a bandana that lets them tie up their hair quickly before a ride. Their outfits usually take on the "flying colors"—yellow for the sun, blue for the day's sky, and white for the clouds. The "boarder jacket" is an iconic article of clothing that's been adapted from the hoverboarder subculture into casual wear over the decades. The woman is wearing a crop variant of the boarder jacket, and the man is wearing one tied around his waist. Gloves are must-have, protective elements like knee pads not so much. The armbands worn by both of the characters represent the specific group they belong to, and they can come in a variety of colors.

This artwork was kindly created by my wonderful girlfriend Arell.

Volerite is a material that revolutionized Runehack's modes of transportation thanks to its unique property of falling upward. This process took a long time though because people needed to develop a way to reliably gather it, as well as runetech that would apply sufficient telekinetic force depending on the number of passengers that the vehicle carries. Once humanity has achieved these two feats of ingenuity, the sky was the limit for them. Literally.

The first hovering vehicle prototypes were hoverboards, occasionally also called voleboards. Since they were usually used by a single person, they were calibrated specifically for this person's weight. While modern hoverboards have changed significantly since then, this early invention has set the foundation for the subculture of hoverboarders that has remained for decades ever since.

At first sight, the hoverboarder values appear contradictory. They believe one should be independent and free, yet loyal to their group, providing support to those they value. Truth is, they seek the balance between these things, for one can't ride a hoverboard long and well without keeping their balance. Hoverboarding isn't an easy feat, especially not when you go up to heights illegal for the sentients to fly at. The higher you fly, the harder you'll fall if an accident occurs. Learning how to hoverboard, and how to do it well, requires a group, but riding a hoverboard has to be done alone. Other boarders will applaud a well-executed stunt and encourage those who fail or fall to try again. However, mocking those who stop boarding is frowned upon within the community.

A group will only accept self-sufficient members who can keep up with the rest. To test the skill of those who wish to join a group, a race is organized. In this race, the newcomer must race the rest of the group, arriving at the finish line in a high enough place (traditionally 4th or better). Each group has its own quirks to this race that characterize its overall personality and/or goals. For example, if this group is interested in illegal activities, the race tests the newcomer's willingness to break the law by flying above the legal height limit, and sometimes even within private city zones. Groups that are made up of thrill-seekers tend to have a segment of the race that takes place outside of the city walls. If a newcomer manages to win this race and joins a group that's made up of ambitious hoverboarders, the newcomer takes the place of the group's slowest member, who is forced to leave the group. Many other specifics exist for the various groups.

Some phrases and expressions that came to be thanks to the hoverboarder subculture include:

• "Berjuice" is a slang that stands for the fuel that runetech devices require, derived from 'amber' since that is the substance's main ingredient, and 'juice' due to the color it tends to have.
• "Flying colors" describes the color scheme of yellow, blue, and white. Sometimes, it is accentuated by black or brown.
• "Off-boarder" is a stunt, in which the rider launches off the board, runs a distance while losing sight of the board due to the board flying underneath a surface, such as a bridge, and finished when the rider jumps back on the board.
• "Slick" is a slang adjective or adverb used for well-executed stunts. The term has found its way outside of the boarder subculture too, generally describing a job well done. It's generally considered awkward when public speakers or workers in an office environment use it.
• "Turv up" is a verb used to describe the moment when an inexperienced hoverboarder ends up upside down. It's difficult to recover from this state without a specialized board, and thus the turved up rider is forced to stop their flight to correct themselves. Riders do not assist turved up riders, unless it is a group's leader (or someone close to that position in groups without an explicit leader) who sees potential in the turved up rider.
• "Waller" or "wallie" is a stunt, in which the rider flies vertically up on a board, parallel to a tall wall, such as the side of a building, or a city wall. While it sounds easy in theory, it actually requires a specialized hoverboard that can telekinetically hold up the rider in this vertical position. Without one, the rider who attempts to execute this trick will most likely turv up, unless they have huge amounts of skill.

Relations

The three major cities Everling has relations to are Wineholm, Moorwell, and the rest of Lifestock-owned city-states.

The first appearance of Everlingers in Wineholm has caused a great cultural shift there. The isolated culture there is largely incapable of interacting with the digital ghosts. The few people who can, called mediums by the locals, serve as the mediators between the illusory tourists and the locals.

Moorwell is the city that conceived of Everling as it is, and it is the city that remotely manages it to this day. However, this management has to be discussed with RXLNC. While Lifestock is responsible for Everling's maintenance and it still technically owns it, RXLNC tries to propose her own suggestions as to how the city should be updated. If it had the tools to do so, she would make the city independent of outside influences.

All cities owned by Lifestock are possible tourist destinations for the Everlingers nowadays, and they welcome this opportunity. Other cities welcome with open arms the strange creations created by the digital ghosts who have all the time in the world just to be creative or enjoy their lives.

Curiosities

Everling might be illusory in its nature, but that doesn't mean it has no points of interest. Some of them include:

• The Bazaar of Oddities is a marketplace found in the bottom stranger areas of Everling (Getaway and Weird districts' overlap). In it, Everlingers pretend to be selling illusory keepsakes of things from the world living above the ocean's surface. However, it's more often a place where one can seek information regarding matters illegal within the city, such as asterism or escaping Everling.
• The Coralside is one of the few beautiful natural sights of Everling. It's a natural coral reef growing on the ocean floor in the bottom north-eastern districts (Getaway, Experiential, and Philosophy districts' overlap). Usually, it would be too dark down there, but thanks to Everling's illusory nature, the Everlingers who look upon it see a myriad of colors this coral possesses.
• Death's Auditorium is a massive temple in the upper parts of Everling (Religious district), stretching from the charm to strange (Noble to Weird district). This is the world's greatest temple dedicated to scorning the deity of death.
• Escapist's Tower is found in the Getaway-Interaction district on the bottom west of Everling. It's a challenging experience, in which ghosts are tasked with leaving the tower before their time runs out. (Think sort of like if an escape room was an MMORPG.)
• The Grandhall is a building in which the biggest performances are traditionally held. It's apparently capable of housing one hundred thousand people without being crowded thanks to the four-dimensional seating system. This theatre is located in the Noble, Getaway, and Experiential districts' overlap, in the bottom north-charmern areas of Everling.
• The Kolloseum is a massive battle arena in the overlap of Experiential and Weird districts' overlap (north-strangern Everling). Its participants emulate battles with each other through the weapons that are made to specifically corrupt the ghosts struck with them.
• The Lucky Gem is a casino in the central Interaction district on the west of the city. It's the largest gambling house visited by many ghosts on a daily basis to win or lose numerous hyres, both by spending them there, but also by betting them in hopes of winning better ones.
• Sunken Repository of Sciences is a library in the Philosophy Noble district, in the east-charmern side of Everling. While this place is usually called a library, it's actually closer to a museum—proper books would be extremely complicated for ghosts to simulate, so instead the information retained in this building is displayed on the walls of various rooms. Every empty room of this building is akin to a book, and ghosts flip its pages by traveling anawards and katawards.
• The Workshop Deluge is named after the organization that owns it. This is a "company" that produces video games and sells them outside of Everling. All of its proceeds go to RXLNC, which is used for keeping Everling afloat, financially speaking. Thanks to its staff being digital, they produce high-quality games at a stunning speed. It's located in the north of Everling (Experiential district), despite the fact one would expect it to be located in the Interaction district on the west.

The first depiction of Everling as seen above was commissioned from Katechaste nearly two years ago. This was before I knew about its districts, extra dimensions, hyres, or many other details I introduced in this article. The whale isn't a permanent part of it, it's just swimming through the illusion.

Important People

A few examples of the important people from Everling:

• 4T5R (Fortifier), ghost, male; seeks and reports exploits, glitches, and hacks to RXLNC, and once they are fixed he creates content for the public to lampshade them. Other ghosts find the tales of his exploits entertaining.
• 9DC8 (Naindy), ghost, female; scientist researching the history of Runehack before the era of monsters began.
• Mister 0FIR (Ofir, originally Nullifier), ghost, male; the master asterist. He's known for making offers that are difficult to turn down.
• RXLNC (Our Excellency), ghost, female; the ruler of Everling.
• Shark1 (Shark Anne), ghost, either; a performer who usually flies around the city in the evening hyres, taking shape of a giant snake-like lizard with tiny legs, a catfish-like mustache, and big expressive eyes.
• X8R (Excitor), ghost, either; one of the most well-known ghost artists who's keeping up several illusory art pieces in Wineholm's capital city.

Inventing Musical Instruments in Worldbuilding

I've pondered for years about inventions within worldbuilding. Whenever I saw a piano in a fantasy world, I thought to myself "What are the odds that theirs would look exactly like ours?" Well, I've set out on this journey and found out. But first, I would like to outline the reason why I thought about this.

Different Worlds, Different Histories

Our world has a specific sequence of inventions and discoveries in its history. Language, fire, farming, wheel, written language, printing press, firearms, the industrial revolution, radio wave-transmitting devices, computers, the internet, and many things in between, as well as before and after. Some of these would be difficult to swap the order of, for example, inventing computers before inventing written language is something I'd personally consider highly unlikely. But some other things we could swap around to make for something quite interesting. This is what the Alternate Techline trope refers to.

So the question I pose is this: What are the chances that the history of a fictional world would follow the exact same sequence as ours? Some inventions are quite complicated in their nature, requiring many previous inventions before. Others, such as the flute, for example, are so simple that it would be strange if they weren't invented.

Let's take a look at a piano to see what I mean.

Look at how otherworldly that piano appears. Different material, different layout of keys, ... do the keys even play the same notes as our pianos?
Piano, by WLOP.

Regarding the Piano

I'm not a historian, and I am hardly a musician, so I'll try to keep this simple. I've done some surface-level research, and while I can't guarantee everything I'll write here is correct, at least it will illustrate my point.

The history of the piano begins in Ancient Greece and Ancient Rome, with the invention of the water organ. This is a wind musical instrument that uses a tank of water to push air out through the pipes. The water is first pumped out of the smaller tank into a bigger one, compressing the air inside. The air will then flow out of the pipes that are opened by the musician using an array of keys. So think of it as a couple of whistles that will play their tones when open. According to my short research on this topic, after pumping the water out of the tank, the water organ could be played for roughly 30 minutes before you'd have to pump the water out again. I could go on with how this turns into a pipe organ with bellows etc., but we're inventing a piano, and that's a string instrument. What this invention gave us though is something we'd take for granted: the idea that you could play music by pressing down keys.

Source

So what's next? Well, clavichord and harpsichord. Clavichord is a string instrument played with keys that strike its strings with tiny blades. Meanwhile, a harpsichord is a string instrument played with keys that are used to move a plectrum, plucking the strings (sort of like when one plays the guitar). In their designs, they already resemble a piano, but you might be wondering... why are the key colors reversed? Well, I'll let this fellow explain it to you, and instead move on to the question of the keys' arrangement.

Clavichord (left) and harpsichord (right)

Why are the keys on the clavichord, harpsichord, and piano arranged the way they are? I'm sure you know what I mean, it's one of the most iconic aspects of a piano: an array of 7 repeating white keys, with black keys in between the first two pairs and the last three pairs of keys. Let's begin with the fact that each note is a soundwave, with its pitch being determined by the frequency of the wave (measured in Hertz). The notes with frequencies that are halves or doubles of each other sound similar, which is why we tend to label them as the same note, like C for example. This is wonderfully displayed on this website's table, and it's also interactive so you can hear what I mean.

Why did we choose these 12 notes specifically? This video explains it nicely, I'd sum it up as a set of cultural preferences combined with a need for some regularity between the sounds used, and some strong tone combinations that we really wanted in our music: perfect fourth, perfect fifth, minor third, major third, and then some. Of course, that's not the only way to lay out the tones used. There are scales with 5 tones, and there are scales with 43 tones, or perhaps even more. As for why they are laid out the way they are, ... I can only guess it's because arranged as they are, the white notes can flawlessly play C major and A minor scales. Or because the black keys cover the pentatonic scale. Or because it lets the pianist do a tone slide called glissando. And maybe the black keys are higher than the others to let you do a pentatonic glissando.

Let's get back to the piano. How do we get from harpsichord and clavichord to piano? Well, all of them are string instruments, but they move their strings in different ways. The clavichord strikes them with tiny blades, harpsichord plucks them. Piano uses small hammers to strike the notes. I'd imagine it's similar to what Cimbalom does, but a professional will probably explain to me how those are very different in a way I couldn't figure out during my minor research into the topic.

I'm gonna omit the pedals for now, because I don't feel like researching those.

To Invent an Instrument

So to summarize, in order to explain the existence of a piano in a fictional world, we needed an explanation for the invention of:

• The keys (water organ),
• The strings in a box played with small hammers (cimbalom, or harpsichord and clavichord if we count other methods of striking the strings),
• The preference for composing in a 12-tone scale,
• The need to distinguish the major/minor scale keys from each other (results in lightly colored piano keys)
• The need to play these in quick succession for a glissando,
• The need to play the pentatonic scale as well, and the possibility of playing it as a glissando (sets the black keys apart by making them shorter than the white keys, and placing them higher than the white keys for easier glissando).

There could be more factors, but now you probably see what I mean. Meanwhile, here's what you need to invent a drum:

• A surface that can be hit to produce a distinct sound,
• And something to strike this surface with, such as a stick, a metal rod, a grainy material like sand, or even a hand. 

I feel like I'm overtly reductive here, but what I wanted to say with this final statement is that a piano is harder to invent than a drum. There could be a fictional world where a piano is invented before drums are, of course, but it's highly unlikely.

I'm gonna choose to believe that what we've seen in The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom's trailer #3 is Zelda sitting in front of a magical piano. It's unclear, but the pose suggests that's the fact to me, and I liked this shot.

The reason why I am writing this article is to sort of summarize my attempt at reinventing a piano for my worldbuilding. While it is possible to change some parameters, making a piano that's "my own" feels like it's not worth the hassle.That's about it for today. Thank you for reading my somewhat disorganized and under-researched notes, and I wish you all a wonderful day!

Gon' Click

So there's apparently a movie in the cinemas right now. No, not the one about honorable thieves of Faerun. No, not the one about plumbers in the Mushroom Kingdom. Yeah, the one about a professional assassin. I have yet to watch it, but on one of the Discord servers I frequent, Steve Fidler of Vorpal Dice Press wanted to write a minimal game about it. Instead of giving each enemy their own turn, he figured that they should all have one turn. That's when I came forth with a suggestion... what if the enemies didn't get a turn at all?

After refining, shortening, and adding some more choices to the game, I think I can show you my next 200-word TTRPG for any number of players, no GM required! This one was a tough nut to fit into 200 words. I hope you'll enjoy it, and I wish you a nice day!

Those poor fools didn't know that surrounding you gives you the upper hand.
I couldn't find the source of this art, so if you know who made it, please let me know and I'll credit them!

Gon' Click

A team of badasses pursues justice, money, or something else. Each player's badass starts with a d10 Die representing their power that can Increase (max d12), or Decrease (min d6).

d6—d8—d10—d12

Battle begins. Everyone rolls their Die and sums it to get the Number that represents the number of enemies present. Players take turns clockwise, starting with the one whose roll was highest. On their turn, a player chooses to slaughter or recover. 

Slaughter: Roll the Die. Decrease if you rolled more than the Number, otherwise, reduce the Number by the rolled amount. When your Die is a d6 and it Decreases, you are incapacitated. Your turns are skipped until it Increases.

Recover: Increase or Decrease your Die.

If the Number didn't change, roll a d6, and add the result to it. If the Number is 0 or all badasses are incapacitated, Increase each player's Die and proceed to the next scene.

Variant: Target Acquired. When all players say so, or if all badasses were incapacitated, they face a single masterful combatant. The Number represents the target's power. Skip the d6 rolls that would raise it normally. Incapacitated badasses die. Killing the target gets you one reward Coin.

Sparktech

Initially, I wanted to write an article about why I'm leaving D&D for good, showcasing my goodbye homebrew. But I realized that I already did talk about why I'm done with it in my 2022 Review blog post. So with my final creation, I wanted to publish finally being out, it's time for me to move back to my favorite stuff to do: Runehack, and other worlds in my magitech multiverse.

I didn't have too much time to think through this one, so... uh, you'll have to deal with surface-level thought-through magitech here. Also please forgive my limited explanations of physics here, it's a fantasy world after all.

Sparktech

The lightnings are chaotic. The lightnings are unpredictable. The lightnings are powerful. In the darkest of storms, bolts of lightning can surprise and startle us by striking something really tall. But... lightnings do seem to like metal. What if there was a way to trap it in a prison of metal? Let's just assume that there is a device for that, called "captor" for now. Now if we connect the captor to some very thin lines of metal (think like wires), we could perhaps find a use for them!

If you're lucky enough to see a metal struck by lightning, you'll probably notice that it's got hot. That's something we might want to limit if we want our wires to last very long. What if there was a magical device, one that we could attach the wire to restrict how much spark (lightning in wire, I'm getting tired of writing lightning over and over) gets to course through a wire at a given moment. Let's call it "limiter".

If we have a wire loop with a captor and maybe a limiter on it, we'll notice that in time, the spark does escape. We want to avoid that. Perhaps this process could be slowed down if we make it so bits of wire can be detached or attached with a manual human-activated motion. Like a button or something similar. Let's call it "flip".

What if there was a way to make it so that a wire works as a limiter only in one direction? And like a very effective limiter at that. I'm not sure what this could be useful for just yet, but it could perhaps force the spark to travel in a deterministic direction within the wires. Let's call such a limiter "director" because it directs which way the spark flows.

There's one more important part of this puzzle that should be discussed. You can create a magical device out of silicon that has two inputs and one output (don't feel like figuring out how). One of the inputs is a source, and the other input is a control. The spark travels from the source to the output wire only if the control doesn't have a spark. I'm imagining it sort of like a portcullis, which is held down if there's someone who can pull it down at its lever or whatever those used to be controlled with. That's why I'm gonna call it "gate".

Now, let's say that I connect three wires together, attaching directors to two of them arranged so that the spark would flow towards the meeting point. If either of the directed wires has a spark in it, the one without a director gets it too. Maybe attach a limiter to it too just to make sure the wire will be fine. We got ourselves a way to detect the presence of a spark on any of multiple inputs!

How about this. If you attach a captor to the gate's source input, and attach some wire that can but doesn't have to have a spark in it to the controller, the gate will let a spark through to the other side only if the control is off. And that's how we got ourselves a way to negate the spark!

Since we can negate signals, as well as combine them, we could work out support for the rest of the logic from there. I'm pretty sure that the gates could somehow also be built so that information can be stored in them, probably through a complicated combination of gates. But I think this can go further.

The legends speak of an arcane ritual that involves weaving a wire around a rod into a spiral. When you let spark into such wire, it will magically draw closer objects made out of metal. I'm gonna call this "spool", and its applications are obvious. You could use this to move metal objects around, thus letting us convert spark into mechanical movement!

I believe I could keep on making more and more technology for this purely hypothetical world in the future. Perhaps the heat from the wires could be useful for something, like heating devices. Maybe I could even find a way to redirect the heat somewhere else involving special liquids and making cooling devices. Heated metals glow, so they could be used for producing light. There could of course be other ways to make light as well. Maybe there could even be a way to communicate between two wires without them being connected through some sort of spark-related invisible energy. And if I were to learn more about lightnings, maybe I could come up with further applications for this new kind of technology. But I'll cut it here for now.

The countryside is lined with crosses that carry the sparks to those who need them.
... what? No one ever said that these sparks can move about outside of wires.
... well, maybe for short distances. But that's beside the point.
Imagine how bizarre it would be to see these things everywhere. What kinds of shapes they could have depending on the nations, and how these massive wires could become parts of buildings, perhaps even integrated into them. Wouldn't that be wild?
Utility Poles, by RegusMartin

But for now, I think I'm gonna stick to runes because they require less explaining. Besides, I do believe many authors have already utilized sparktech in their own creations, though they tend to label it "electronics" for some reason beyond me. Etymology tells me that that word is derived from amber, and frankly I don't know what that has to do with any of this.

I hope you've enjoyed reading my article. It's nice to get into writing again, and I hope I'll be able to post more good things to the blog soon. Thank you for reading, and have a nice April Fools!

Clues and Hunches

Guess who made another 200-word RPG as yet another proof of concept? That's right, it was me. This time, it happened because I was talking with a bunch of other game designers a while back about modifying who gets to know what in the game. Gumshoe's way of solving it is fine, but I figured maybe there should be something more to it, so I suggested "secret tokens" that the players could spend to find some secret they think is in the present scene. Smoooze took that idea and improved upon it, both by naming it "Hunch", and by letting the player regain it upon a correct guess. This would make for a cool game mechanic in a mystery game, so yesterday I gave it a go.

Clues and Hunches

The GM defines the Domains their clues fall into. Players create one detective each that has:

• a name
• a quirk
• Domains from GM's list (minimum 1) and Hunches (minimum 1), the sum of both numbers is 6.

A detective gains a new Domain or Hunch (player's choice) after every third successfully solved case. The GM can come up with new domains as the games go on.

The GM must give a detective all clues in their general vicinity that belong to their Domain. Some information must be discovered through Hunches. When a detective suspects something is true, they can spend one Hunch by stating publicly "I have a hunch that...", following it with their assumed fact. The GM gives the detective their spent Hunch back if it's true. Spent Hunches are otherwise regained after the case.

If the GM allows it, a detective could possess supernatural abilities like speaking with the dead or lie detection. Such abilities count as two domains each.

GM guidelines:

• Come up with a seemingly impossible hook, and its logical explanation.
• Give at least 3 clues in detectives' domains for everything they need to know (including motive).
• Play the suspects and other NPCs.
• Avoid red herrings. 

Never had a chance to make these lengthy convoluted noir monologues that detectives give just before they get into describing how they got the case. But when she came knocking on my door, I knew that was about to change.
Commission: Detective, by chirun

• Example Quirks: neat freak, amnesia, never talks in first person, ...
• Example Domains: chemistry, history, geography, forensics, ...
• Example Hunches: "I have a hunch that there's a way to get from the living room to the garden without using the doors or windows obvious to everyone.", "I have a hunch that the victim was bludgeoned to death with a thing I've already encountered.", ...

I've had multiple arguments with folk on Discord about why I avoid putting Charisma into my games. With this Hunch mechanic, I think it would be fine to remove Wisdom (especially Perception and Insight, Investigation too to an extent) equivalents too. It's a statement Gumshoe makes already by showing that someone shouldn't have to roll to learn something crucial to the game's story.

Hunches go one step beyond, boiling these situations down to their core: The player thinks there's something hidden or off here, so they want to see if their suspicion is correct. In a game where one rolls for these, and the player's suspicion is surprisingly accurate, what is the GM supposed to do? Do they punish the player with a chance of not learning what they should be able to learn? Do they let the player skip the roll completely? What if a player with low Wisdom makes these correct guesses way too much?

Drop the Wisdom (maybe even Intelligence), and give the players tools for learning information. Drop the Charisma, and give the players tools for controlling the conversation they have with the NPCs. And if someone brings up Strength to me again, saying "should I ask the player to lift a boulder in order to prove their barbarian can crash through the door?", I'll direct them to my response. Mental attributes are tricky, which is why I see their removal as more acceptable. That being said, I can see some scenarios where a mental attribute could still be viable.

Thank you for reading, and I wish you all a wonderful day!

Game Mechanic: Negative Damage is Healing

I just had an interesting discussion with a bunch of 3rd party D&D writers. One wanted "heal" to be a keyword, and honestly, that's sensible. But I wanted to take a whack approach to this demand. This should work for any game that revolves around damage types, such as D&D, though it could also work with other systems that deal with numeric amounts of damage. To keep things simple, though, I'll use D&D 5e as an example system where this would apply.

Negative Damage

Damage can be reduced below 0, unless it is because of a negative ability score modifier added to the attack. When you take negative amount of damage, you regain that amount of hit points. Other modifications to the damage apply.

What does this achieve? You can flavor your healing spells in various ways, giving the imagery of how the healing works.

• The fire that cauterizes the wounds.
• Piercing damage applied straight to an acupuncture pressure point or something.
• The divine radiance that just heals because it's divine or something.

Not only that, but it suddenly matters also how you want to heal others. What if your group's warlock is resistant to fire damage? A spell that would deal -11 fire damage suddenly deals them only -6 damage (remember, it's rounded down, not just to zero!). Frankly, though, I assume healing spells would just let you choose what damage type the healing goes with.

Damage reduction would also be a lot better. A goblin hits you for a measly single point of bludgeoning damage, and your Heavy Armor Master feat reduces it to -2. Thus, you suddenly heal 2 hit points.

Of course, some adjustments would be necessary here, like solidifying the idea in players' minds that the hit points are not always just wounds. They can stand for stamina, luck, or some other things that PHB mentions.

Finally, absorption could become a proper game keyword. Immunity reduces damage to 0, vulnerability doubles it, resistance halves it, and absorption... negates it. Simple as that, AND it's already a thing in the game (see flesh golem).

Negative psychic damage is placebo, change my mind.
Xetorath Healer, by TSRodriguez (at least according to Pinterest, the original DeviantArt page for it seems to be down)

Anyway, time for me to get ready for my session, just wanted to write this up real quick before I forget the idea. Have a great day, everyone!

Double the Zombies

Lately I've been pondering spicing up the core of most TTRPGs: the conflict resolution. Most of the time, it's a simple success or failure. Sometimes, a partial success and/or partial failure is added inbetween. Could there be anything more though? Well, through my weeks of passively mulling this over, I came up with one idea: every dice roll could influence something that's not related directly to your success or failure, instead perhaps influencing the situation you're in. It will be difficult to come up with something that could work this way for any setting generally, so I started by writing up another 200 word RPG as an example. It's supposed to be setting agnostic, despite relying on a term like "ammo".

Double the Zombies

Your characters are zombie outbreak survivors. Everyone describes their character and gives them 4 mundane items (10 of ammo counts as 1 item). You can only carry 4 items. Distribute 10 points across the stats: forcefully, subtly, quickly, carefully, boldly, cleverly. No stat can have 4 or more in it.

Roll 2d6 when trying to do something significant. Reroll one die and choose either result if a piece of equipment can help you. You succeed if the sum of your relevant stat and the rolled numbers is greater than the difficulty, or if you sacrifice an item in a relevant way, destroying it permanently.

Difficulties: 5 (easy), 7 (moderate), 9 (difficult).

If both numbers on the rolled dice are identical or players stall too long:

• A single zombie appears if there were none previously and it can reach the current location.
• The zombies overcome an obstacle that prevented them from threatening you.
• The number of zombies doubles if they were a threat already.

Roll 1d6 if zombies are too close to someone. On a roll less or equal to their amount, you get hurt that many times. You die if you get hurt 3 times.

 

What's worse than being surrounded by zombies? These zombies attracting more with their attention aimed at you.
Z, by iayetta83.

Is it a good game? Probably not, it's very minimal. in the scope of its rules and a ton of stuff is left out, like turn order or recovery from wounds. But my goal wasn't to write an exceptional game, it was to test my idea for a conflict resolution beyond success or failure with a written example. Honestly, if anything, the format of 200 word RPG is awesome at that: it allows the game designer to see if their idea could work in practice, assuming they're willing to cut some corners when making the idea into a Minimum Viable Product. Writing short games isn't easy to most, which is why I'd recommend giving this a try to anyone interested in game design. Whether it's a 200 word RPG, or a TTRPG that will take up exactly 1 page (and maybe 1 extra with optional+GM rules), it's worth a try. Or at least it works for me.

Either way, I look forward to seeking more unique conflict resolution mechanics. Until then...

Thank you for reading, and have a nice day!