20 More Things MD Could Be

 

 

With thanks to Sylvanas of The Red Lantern for asking what MD actually are. Sometimes you've just gotta make a list of things. 

The 6 I already posted in the GLOG server, for archival purposes:

1. Bits of your soul that you've shaped into gambling chips to wager for demonic abilities.
2. Witch organs that grow in your chest cavity as you progress as a MU, which can channel an unpredictable amount of power each day before succumbing to spiritual poison.
3. Generally-applicable magic formulae you prepare each day, like magic squares or ABRAXAS or whatever, that can interact unpredictably with each other or leak from your memory after being used too many times.
4. Magic knucklebones given to you by the first devil you made a pact with.
5. Imps hidden in your shadow, which return to hell when they get tired or bored.
6. Precautions you've taken to prevent the entities you deal with from eating you, like a protective amulet or really horrible-tasting herbs. There are {max possible MD} workable methods in the setting, and each time you gain an MD it represents getting the hang of a new one.

And 20 more for the road:

1. Clots of magic in your brain.
2. Stars smiling upon you.
3. False identities the universe unmakes in your place, when it catches up with you.
4. Wizardly devices you macgyver and hide about your person.
5. Mouths to speak incantations with (after the first they appear on your forehead, the backs of your hands, etc. If you expend all your MD you are silenced).
6. Inconsequential memories burnt as fuel; your max MD is the number of memories you can expend each day before giving yourself dementia.
7. Bottled mouse souls.
8. Lightning bolts bound to your staff. (Lightning is wily, and to do this you must outsmart it or bargain with it).
9. Toadstones you've swallowed.
10. Magically potent feathers/scales/etc from your familiar.
11. Birthmarks forming a constellation on your arm, which fade as you lose MD and reappear as you regenerate them.
12. Coupons snipped out of extradimensional junk mail. To become a wizard you have to reach a higher plane of consciousness just long enough for someone to sell your contact information.
13. Fireflies perched on your magic ring, which dim as you expend its power.
14. Higher-dimensional strings you pull taut when casting.
15. Distinct colors in your aura.
16. Shrines you've made a pilgrimage to.
17. Wishes purchased from a well.
18. Sealed boxes of pure quintessence.
19. Favors owed to you by beings of elemental air/earth/water/fire for performing the proper rites each dawn (but don't offend them by demanding too much at once).
20. Nightmares trapped in your dream catcher.

the blackness behind your eyes

  

Leonora Carrington

 

This game was, at one point, to be called Invisible Powers, though that no longer feels quite correct. The city is called Diomira, after the first of Calvino's invisible cities.

Diomira snares sleepers. When you dream of this place the dream goes on forever, and you're alone on a subway car that's just pulling into the station.

You emerge onto the platform (also empty), and then out into the street. The sky is dark but it ripples with orange-purple-green aurorae that give off a bit of light, and the rest of the illumination is provided by streetlights and neon signs and other such things. It might be raining, in which case the rain is black, like ink, but it fizzes and if you touch it it soaks into your skin.

Here are some facts about the place, in no particular order:

IMAGO

1. Nobody sleeps. If you dream you wander places stranger than Diomira, and who's to say you'll come back? Use these eyedrops instead, they're almost as good.
2. If someone does sleep, then to an outside observer their body will appear to transform into rose petals/a skeleton/shards of ice/etc and back several times over the course of the night.
3. You don't need to eat, though if you're sick or injured it might be necessary in order to heal. Nobody ages normally, because...
4. There are people with rows of shark teeth, people who stand seven feet tall, people with their pupils swollen large enough to fill their eyes. Everyone changes if they stay here long enough, and where else is there to go?
5. The city also warps and twists and grows over time. Very little of it was built. The buildings are not usually laid out in a way sensible to humans.
6. Diomira is encircled by black phosphene fog the same color as the sky. You can walk into it, but out there are the blind places where it's impossible to perceive anything, even your own thoughts.

PHOSPHENE

1. Lots of weird technology, guns that burrow into your stomach and motorcycles that run on liquid light.
2. The aurorae never go out and are never all that bright, but they have periods of intensity and dimness which are colloquially referred to as 'day' and 'night'.
3. Sometimes they form rings or blobs or little flickering dots.
4. Occasionally the aurorae reach down from the sky and touch something, leaving it blackened and burnt. Unlike lightning this happens in slow motion and makes no sound.
5. More diffuse traces come down with the rain, and this is what tends to be refined into fuel, neon gas, etc.

TIMECHANGER

1. Much of the tech is made in hell-realms, which are...
2. Nested places inside Diomira, where time runs faster like in Inception. Unlike in Inception they exist outside anyone's head. You might get into one by walking an odd number of circles around a cracked fountain, or by descending into a building's many consecutive basements.
3. Hell-realms can be nested inside other hell-realms. As the layers of recursion accumulate, time runs ever-faster and escape becomes ever-more-difficult. Go deep enough and sleep is safe (albeit dreamless), but you can't leave even by dying, you just wake up the next morning with your slit throat still gushing blood.
4. Hell-realm populations are eclectic. Some are humans changed beyond recognition by accelerated time, or living products of neon tech.
5. There are also gallwasps - sapient wasps/centipedes/etc, often coiled up inside fleshy puppet bodies, supposed to be immigrants from elsewhere.

FEVER

1. Drugs are widespread. At minimum everyone takes something to stay up, even if it's just eyedrops made of distilled rain. 
2. These're magic Diomiran drugs and most of them play into the 'change you over time' dynamic rather than the 'addiction overdose and death' dynamic.
3. Which doesn't mean they're safe.
4. They do things like, letting you see in the dark, rendering your bones cartilaginous and flexible, making it possible to remember everything you've ever experienced.
5. Hallucinogens are more dangerous than sleep. If you took LSD you'd probably turn into dust and dry leaves and never return.

SCRIMSHAW

1. All the wildlife is really really strange.
2. Mammals ('furred beasts') have 6+ legs and lots of teeth and mostly appear in dreams.
3. Tar octopi live in the black fog outside the city where nothing else can think.
4. Lots of big insects, likely associated with the gallwasps.
5. Giant lizards. Not dinosaurs or crocodiles, more... frilled geckos grown to prodigious size, gargoyle-dragon-ish things, knotted snakes.
6. What people refer to as 'crows' are actually wingéd little blobs of darkness with a sharp metallic bit for a beak. They are not kind.

WORMKIN

1. The plants are all greyish viney things, with fruit or nodules that glow the same colors as the sky. They're all edible, though not necessarily palatable.
2. There are worms from out in the blind places that are compatible with everything.
3. (such as the city. if you pull a telephone off the wall, the cord will be a long long worm)
4. (such as your digestive system. you can eat one if you kill it thoroughly enough, even though its biology is like nothing on earth. this is the only convenient source of meat. well, not exactly meat. protein).
5. (such as your brain, if you didn't kill it thoroughly enough. or if they get in your body by other means).

SHIVERGLASS

1. there are magicians, who are intensely secretive and distrustful even (especially) of each other. they dream without sleeping and know a little bit about how to navigate the blind places (which is where dreams are, and where the dead go).
2. a cabal of magicians is supposed to have created or maybe found Diomira, shortly before they all succumbed to paranoia and killed each other or went into hiding.
3. The founders' symbol is a moth bounded in a circle, which is a thing that sometimes appears on old buildings or in dreams.

EIGENGRAU

1. Dreaming is not well-understood, but is feared for good reason. You can dream of hunting or being hunted and be grievously wounded when you wake up. You can dream of worms and carry them back with you.
2. Unusual ways of making art or staring into mirrors are also not very safe.
3. Not everyone who came here, came from Earth.
4. (Most people are second-gen or third-gen or sometimes time-dilated-hell-realm-hundredth-gen residents, so this may not immediately be obvious).
5. It's impossible to use the subway. The trains don't depart when anyone is looking.

The Forum Game Encyclical

In response to Hilander's Analog Online Play Manifesto

  

Parallel Construction
I came to the OSR/GLOG honestly, but by a weird route. It went something like, freeform roleplaying on Scratch -> Text Based Games forum -> Bay12 Roll to Dodge -> Discord -> link to Goblin Punch.

I've played 5e a couple times, but have never been into any edition of D&D. I might try GLOG at some point and I expect that would probably be neat.

(Yes, this means I wrote a ?glog class? without any real experience of glog. Let it be known that I am a liar and a fake).

Anyway, I have some peculiar ideas about TTRPGs that are shaped by my having known them as "forum games" for most of my time with the hobby. In that frame, online games aren't a poor substitute for in-person play, they're a different and independent thing.

How to
I've already written about how to PbP, but you don't have to read that, because I'm going to one-up Whisperling from February 2024 and summarize it in three bullets:

1. Follow a turn structure: Each player submits an action -> GM rolls dice, responds to all actions simultaneously as a batch -> Repeat. The exception is talking with NPCs, you can respond to that unbatched and as frequently as you like.
   
   
2. Consider what counts as a reasonable timeframe in which to post and skip players who are too slow. Be a bit ruthless, because momentum is everything. PbP games die super easily and they do not speed up after they slow down.
   
   
3. Keep the system simple. It should fit in the first post of your forum thread (or in a #rules channel on discord). Absolutely nothing that requires multiple rounds of back-and-forth between player and GM per turn.

If you want to see how it looks in practice you could skim threads from the Bay12 Roll to Dodge Hall of Fame, which is ancient but should provide decent examples. Discord works the same, just make separate channels for IC / OOC / reference documents.

Why to
You're thirteen and you've stumbled upon places where there are interesting things happening, where people are doing stuff like Perplexicon or Our Salvation or Roll to Magic (beloved, long-gone). Some is silly fun; lots of it is unique and compelling and inventive. There's an entire life to be lived here and you want in on it.

The thing I love about forum games is really, just, how unmoored they are as an artistic tradition. Sure, there's cross-pollination with D&D, but the roots aren't the same. There are different premises, different worlds, totally unlimited by questions like "is there a system published for this?" or "would people meet in real life to play it out?"

Here are some more examples, if you don't believe me. They're doing wildly varied stuff and doing it with aplomb, just by using very basic dice systems and hewing closely to the GM's view of the world.

The Warrens of Oric the Awesome - Dungeon crawler with deep lore and a class/soul star system that's... sort of reminiscient of homestuck? if I had to draw a comparison?

Roll to Create a Supersoldier - Extremely well-run scientific marvels and horrors, nominally in pursuit of superhuman combat potential.

RTD Horrors - You are one of several eldritch horrors competing with one another to complete a summoning ritual and conquer the earth.

Various things by Weirdsound - Gnolls, wizards who do magic by expending their memories, an academy for young gods.

You are a Monster RTD - Players are monsters that evolve into stronger forms by overcoming adversity and absorbing the life force of other creatures.

Necromechanic - Necromantic crafting epic, still lives as a long series of games on discord.

Titans of Creation - Deities expend all their power and eventually die in the process of creating a world.

I like the OSR blogging scene, but sometimes its rigidity makes me weep. Lots of treading the same ground of classes and spell lists and encumbrance rules when there's so much else out there to be explored.

So what does this have to do with running games in text specifically?
You don't have to run these kinds of games on a forum. It's theoretically possible to meet up in person or over voice to play them. But you probably won't.

Without the pressure of having dedicated sessions to play this specific game, it's easier to pitch weird premises that don't have much system to support them. Plus, there's a forum's worth of people who might be interested.

As demonstrated by Necromechanic or Roll to Create a Supersoldier, you can also play with more complicated ideas than you otherwise might, because everyone has more time to think and occasionally to draw pictures. 

Voice in the Void
I also just have a personal fondness for text. I like reading. I like being the person behind your phone screen, without any attached characteristics. I like being named Whisper and dipping in and out of conversations and finding communities that are monomaniacally focused on the stuff I'm interested in. I've met most of my favorite people this way.

The Discordance
There's an elephant in the room, which is that Discord has done enormous violence to the forum ecosystem.

Discord is great in its own way; there's a lot you can do with real-time chat that's much harder at the speed of forum discussion. For one, making friends, real-time chat is great for that.

But it also means finding new people is harder. These days I mostly recruit from a stable of players I know, and I can't see what games are on offer just by looking at the front page of a subforum. I guess my old haunts are still out there, albeit quieter, and SB and SV do, uh, exist. But something has definitely been lost.

Whisperling's Arbitrary Forum Game Principles
~ Use a bespoke setting. It doesn't have to be worldbuilt, you can use a two-sentence elevator pitch, just have fun with it. Try radically different premises.

~ Play worlds not rules! I was really hyped when I found out about the FKR, but they turned out to be kinda boring. This is a good principle though. Bespoke system, keep it simple, pick a die size and maybe some stats.

~ Forum games die a lot, don't feel too bad about that.

~ I read this post which advocates limiting turns to the size of a bluesky post, and honestly that might be a good idea. Smaller and more freely-flowing turns tend to be better than the opposite, even if writing a big chunk of text can be tempting sometimes.

~ Run something weird and complicated at least once. Minimalism can get weird and complicated if it continues for long enough.

~ Don't pay money for RPGs? It really isn't necessary.

~ Things to try: Organize a conspiracy over DMs. Participate in a PvP deathmatch. Start an elaborate feud. Try a minimalist game like Roll to Spend Points. Come up with multi-paragraph conditional plans. GM for people who've run games for you.